The racist right and the Chumph are on the same page…
But they have miscalculated exactly how badly they are outnumbered.
Tag Archives: numbers
March Against the Chumph!
Trump Coronation crowd
The crowd protesting the Chumph just in DC is now over 600,000, and possibly could be 800,000!
2,500,000 to 5 million people marched today in over 600 cities in the US and around the world to reject the Chumph’s illegitimate presidency.
Metro reported 470,000 came by the Subway.
More than 470,000 people had taken Metro by 1 p.m., a weekend ridership record. (By 11 a.m. on Inauguration Day, 193,000 trips had been taken.)
The City has about 3,000 parking spaces for buses, including those in close in Northern Virginia (You can walk across the bridges).
A month ago, city officials said they were expecting around 1,500 buses. But as of Tuesday, just 435 charter buses have permits to park on Friday (Inauguration), about half of them in the sea of asphalt around RFK Stadium and the other half in lots and spaces around the city (Only about 250 actually showed up), according to the District’s Department of Transportation. At least a dozen of them are coming to shuttle people to protests organized by DisruptJ20, the ANSWER Coalition, and other groups.
Meanwhile, on Saturday, there a total of 2,066 buses registered to bring rally-goers for the Women’s March on Washington, according to figures collected by DDOT. EventsDC, which is handling permits at RFK for the day, said they filled all 1,200 spots available at the stadium by last Tuesday. WMATA, U Street Parking, and other private companies are also providing parking elsewhere in and around the city.
Predicting crowd sizes is a deeply imperfect science, but buses offer one of the few concrete measurements to gauge participation.
For President Barack Obama’s record-breaking first inauguration, more than 3,000 chartered buses were registered and officials estimated attendance at around 1.8 million people.
At 50 per bus, that means an additional 103,000.
There is no count of the number of people who came in on the “Chinatown” buses which normally operate hourly between DC and NYC, Phila, Boston, Richmond, and Atlanta.
Greyhound is reportedly sold out
Many came in on the Amtrak train Union Station, which is a block from the Capitol Building. Amtrak reported being sold out today.
So the numbers look like 600,000 to 800,000 in DC
Wow!
Women’s March Begins to Fill Mall about 10 AM – They are flooding in from Independence Avenue (on the right), and Constitution on the left
New York City Women’s March – est 250,000
Women’s March Denver estimated 65,000
250,000 March the Loop in Chicago
500,000 March in LA
150,000 in Boston
60,000 in Atlanta
Philadelphia had @ 50,000
Seattle @ 120,000
North Texas – @ 100,000
Austin – $@ 50,000
150,000 in London
65,000 in Paris
And almost every major city (outside of Russia) around the world.
And most noteworthy –
30 Protesters in Anartica!
10 Times More People to Protest the Chumph Today Than At The ‘coronation”
Looking at the number of bus parking permits applied for (1200), and the hour long waits to get on the suburban DC METRO Subway stations to get into the city…The crowd is shaping up to be 500,000 – 600,000 so far. Two to tree times larger than the Chumph supporter crowd at the coronation yesterday. Metro has not published fare data yet and won’t until tomorrow, but looking at public information on the wait times at various stations indicates this may well be a huge crowd. It is shaping up to be much bigger than the 200,000 forecast.
With protests around the world in other cities, the anticipated number of protesters could well be above 2 million – over 10 times the inauguration’s pitiful crowd.
Crowds protesting the coronation of the illegitimate Trump presidency could exceed 5 million. There are actually over 300 Groups protesting today…Just in DC.
This is one of the Metro Stations – Shady Grove. This tunnel goes under the highway and into the Station at the top right. An 8 car consist Metro Train can carry 200 passengers per car – or 1600 per train. On a maximum run done for major events – there is a train every 2 minutes (actually 28 in each direction per hour). An hour’s wait means there are @ 48,000 people in front of you. There are about 50 Suburban Stations. In a situation like this, it would not be unusual for the trains to skip the stations further out so that the closer in station’s passenger get service.
Enormous Crowds Expected at Women’s Marches Around the World
From Washington, DC, to Riyadh, more than 2 million women are set to protest the inauguration of President Donald Trump.
On Saturday, January 21, more than 200,000 women are expected to march in Washington, DC, to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump. The organizerspredict that they’ll be joined by more than 2 million women in more than 600 marches worldwide. Want to find a march near you? Use this tool.
Mother Jones reporters are on the scene at the marches. Check back here for rolling updates.
Shady Grove Train for Inauguration
Shady Grove Train today for protest marches,
Funny Numbers Down to The Wire
The line promoted by the polls the last week or so is that the Chumph is closing in on Hillary in the race for President.
Even the famous pollster Nate Silver, upset by what he calls “inaccurate polling systems” is caught up in the fever and has artificially begun balancing polls on what he believes the “real” numbers are – which favor the Chumph by 1 1/2 to 3 points. That “balancing” seemingly is making the polls much closer that they really are.
The big very ugly hole in all of this is the same reason so many polls got President Obama’s election in 2009 and 2012 wrong. If you will remember there were a number of polls out there which showed Romney winning in 2012. Gallup actually had Romney winning.
This autopsy performed by Silver after the election of 2012, showed a heavy bias in the majority polls for the Republican candidate –
That bias really hasn’t changes, nor has it changed to support Hillary.
According to an analysis firm, Targetsmart.com, about 40,000,000 people voted early this year. Among that number…Clinton has a 9 point lead.
The damning fact is this –
In Florida – “turnout among Hispanics is up about 103% from where it was at this point in 2008, according to a CNN analysis of early voting data from Catalist.”
Early, in-person voting numbers among Latinos are “off the charts” in Florida, according to Daniel Smith, a University of Florida political science professor who runs the blog ElectionSmith. So far, 429,000 have voted in person — a 152% surge from this time in 2012.
The Austin American-Statesman reported a 26.6 increase as of last Wednesday over 2012 in early voting by Latinos with Spanish surnames in the state’s 20 biggest counties, based on an analysis by a political consultant and former researcher with the Republican Party of Texas.
Black folks…Not so much. black voter turnout in Florida so far has only been 13% above normal, vs 25% when voting for Obama.
Polls in America don’t count black and brown people.
Guess some of the house Negroes want to go back to being “happy darkies under JIm Crow” or finding out what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany.
Because that is what this election is really about.
Maybe the Mexicans will save your black ass.
Battling the Bigots and the New FBI Crime Stats
Here we go again with the annual battle of the “Crime statistics”…
Some good counters here for the right wing’s race baiting.
Beware the murder stats: Why the right will use them to smear Black Lives Matter and how the left can fight back
Forthcoming FBI statistics will likely reveal a murder uptick in 2015, but it wasn’t caused by Black Lives Matter
It is a fact that murder rates in many cities rose last year. The full nationwide picture, however, will only become clear on Sept. 26, when the FBI publishes its 2015 crime data. As it turns out, that’s the same day as the first presidential debate, as Lois Beckett observed at The Guardian. The data will convey a lot of information, and a fast-moving political circus will likely engulf it in confusion.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, running a hysterical law-and-order campaign, will likely point to a rare fact to bolster his case. Other conservatives, who since last year have blamed urban bloodshed and the murders of police officers on Black Lives Matter, will no doubt claim vindication. But reporters shouldn’t let anyone get away with such quick inferences. The overall murder rate is still way down from the worst years of the early 1990s, and the current spike is being driven by a small number of cities.
A recent New York Times analysis found that the murder rate rose sharply in 25 of the nation’s 100 largest cities, confirming a trend identified in a June report for the National Institute of Justice conducted by criminologist Richard Rosenfeld. Experts estimate that the FBI will report a nationwide increase of between 6 percent and 13 percent, according to Beckett. Numbers, however, don’t speak for themselves.
Many conservatives have been peddling a theory known as the “Ferguson effect,” which posits that Black Lives Matter protests are causing the police to pull back from doing their jobs, leading to increased crime. Such commentators and some credulous reporters will claim that this data proves their case. But the Ferguson effect theory, aimed at delegitimizing the movement against police violence, remains as unsubstantiated and implausible as ever. What follows is a handy guide for fighting politically motivated disinformation in the weeks and months to come.
The Ferguson effect doesn’t make any sense
The Ferguson effect theory, as I wrote in June, doesn’t make sense because it lacks a plausible causal theory as to how so-called de-policing (to the extent that it has taken place) leads to more people shooting one another to death. Much gun violence is the result of personal and intergroup disputes, and purveyors of the theory don’t explain how decreased police enforcement would lead to more shooting. Notably, gun seizures — which criminologist David Kennedy called “the one kind of day-to-day policing that one might expect would have the most direct impact on homicide and gun violence” — have been high in Baltimore and Chicago, two of the bloodiest cities.
In regard to a causal mechanism, Kennedy told me, “none of the people claiming there is a Ferguson effect have any idea” what it might be. “Most of the people behind that have essentially said, ‘Violence is up. People are mad at the police. Therefore people being mad at the police is driving violence up,’ and then left people to challenge them about why that might make sense.”
Kennedy, director of John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s National Network for Safe Communities and a leading gun violence expert, added, “But there isn’t much of a story, and there’s certainly next to nothing in terms of real facts or analysis that says, ‘This is what’s going on in the streets, and these are the ways it’s leading to increased violence.’ It’s really not an analysis. It’s more a position.”
The murder spike is not a nationwide phenomenon
According to the Times, just seven cities— Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Milwaukee, Nashville and Washington — were responsible for half of the murder rate increase. In five cities, murder rates actually decreased significantly. In 70, they were mostly stable. The real story is thus embedded in a series of local circumstances and cannot be explained by easy recourse to the national debate over policing.
In Baltimore, for example, the murder rate is particularly out of control. In fact, it’s horrific: Last year’s was the city’s highest rate on record. But as the Times noted, “Some experts attribute the sudden spike in violence largely to a flood of black-market opiates looted from pharmacies during riots in April 2015.” It’s possible that decreased police enforcement played some role. It could also be that the riots caused a lot of young men already involved in gun violence to encounter one another in the streets, leading to more violence. The correlation that researchers have found between decreased enforcement in Chicago and Baltimore and rising murder, as Iexplained at length in June, does not demonstrate causation.
Three of the cities that drove the upsurge — Baltimore, Chicago and Cleveland — have been centers of widespread protests. Yet all seven have poverty rates above the national average. And cities like Baltimore, Chicago and Cleveland also contain something else: large, geographically contiguous segregated concentrations of black poverty. More reporting and research is necessary to discover why murder is spiking in certain cities—and also why it is dropping or holding steady in others.
Murder rates continued to decline in the nation’s two largest cities, Los Angeles and New York. In New York, crime has continued to fall even after it implemented one of the largest de-policing measures in history under massive public and legal pressure: ending mass stop-and-frisk practices. Contrary to the New York Post, the sky did not fall.
Beware of headlines that blare, “Murder rate increase highest since 1990.” Beckett wrote that “overall murders would have to spike 73 percent, not 6 percent, to actually put the U.S. back at the record-breaking murder totals of the early 1990s.”
What Happens When The Last Black Teacher Leaves?
Have had a few discussions over the years about the impact of integrating schools.
The US School System has been in freefall for a number of years – indeed since Raygun. How an entire political class dedicated t hatred of the Public School system and dedicated to destroying Teachers Union could do anything but fail is beyond me. We are about 17th or 18th in the world now behind almost every one of the “socialist” developed nations.
In Philadelphia, the number of black teachers fell 18.5 percent between 2001 and 2012. In Chicago, it dropped 40 percent.
BLACK TEACHERS MATTER
America’s schools desperately need educators like Darlene Lomax. So why are we driving them away?
One spring morning this year, Darlene Lomax was driving to her father’s house in northwest Philadelphia. She took a right onto Germantown Avenue, one of the city’s oldest streets, and pulled up to Germantown High School, a stately brick-and-stone building. Empty whiskey bottles and candy cartons were piled around the benches in the school’s front yard. Posters of the mascot, a green and white bear, had browned and curled. In what was once the teachers’ parking lot, spindly weeds shot up through the concrete. Across the street, above the front door of the also-shuttered Robert Fulton Elementary School, a banner read, “Welcome, President Barack Obama, October 10, 2010.”
It had been almost three years since the Philadelphia school district closed Germantown High, and 35 years since Lomax was a student there. But the sight of the dead building, stretching over an entire city block, still pained her. She looked at her old classroom windows, tinted in greasy brown dust, and thought about Dr. Grabert, the philosophy teacher who pushed her to think critically and consider becoming the first in her family to go to college. She thought of Ms. Stoeckle, the English teacher, whose red-pen corrections and encouraging comments convinced her to enroll in a program for gifted students. Lomax remembers the predominantly black school—she had only one white and one Asian American classmate—as a rigorous place, with college preparatory honors courses and arts and sports programs. Ten years after taking Ms. Stoeckle’s class, Lomax had dropped by Germantown High to tell her that she was planning to become a teacher herself.
A historic Georgian Revival building, Germantown High opened its doors in 1915 as a vocational training ground for the industrial era, with the children of blue-collar European immigrants populating its classrooms. In the late 1950s, the district added a wing to provide capacity for the growing population of a rapidly integrating neighborhood.
By 1972, Lomax’s father, a factory worker, had saved up enough to move his family of eight from a two-bedroom apartment in one of the poorest parts of Philadelphia into a four-bedroom brick house in Germantown. Each month, Darlene and her younger sister would walk 15 blocks to the mortgage company’s gray stucco building, climb up to the second floor, and press a big envelope with money orders into the receptionist’s hand. The new house had a dining room and a living room, sparkling glass doorknobs, French doors that opened into a large sunroom, an herb garden, and a backyard with soft grass and big trees. Darlene and her father planted tomatoes and made salads with the sweet, juicy fruit every Friday, all summer long.
To the Lomax children, the fenceless backyard was ripe for exploration, and it funneled them right to the yards of their neighbors. One yard belonged to two sisters who worked as special-education teachers—the first black people Darlene had met who had college degrees. As Lomax got to know these sisters, she began to think that perhaps her philosophy teacher was right: She, too, could go to college and someday buy a house of her own with glass doorknobs and a garden. She graduated from Rosemont College in 1985, and after a stint as a social worker, she enrolled at Temple University and got her teaching credential.
On February 19, 2013, Lomax was in the weekly faculty leadership meeting at Fairhill Elementary, a 126-year-old school in a historic Puerto Rican neighborhood of Philadelphia where she served as principal. A counselor was giving his report, but Lomax couldn’t hear what he said. She just stared at her computer screen, frozen, as she read a letter from the school superintendent. She read it again and again to make sure she understood what it said.
Then, slowly, she turned to Robert Harris, Fairhill’s special-education teacher for 20 years, and his wife, the counselor and gym teacher. “They are closing our school,” she said quietly. They all broke down weeping. Then they walked to the front of the building in silence and unlocked the doors to open the school for the day.
Five miles away, as Germantown High School prepared for its 100th anniversary, its principal was digesting the same letter. In all, 24 Philadelphia schools would be closed that year. These days, when Lomax visits her father in the house with the glass doorknobs, she drives by four shuttered school buildings, each with a “Property Available for Sale” sign.
Back when Lomax was a student in Philadelphia in the 1970s, local, state, and federal governments poured extra resources into these racially isolated schools—grand, elegant buildings that might look like palaces or city halls—to compensate for a long history of segregation. And they invested in the staff inside those schools, pushing to expand the teaching workforce and bring in more black and Latino teachers with roots in the community. Teaching was an essential path into the middle class, especially for African American women; it was also a nexus of organizing. During the civil rights movement, black educators were leaders in fighting for increased opportunity, including more equitable school funding and a greater voice for communities in running schools and districts.
But today, as buildings like Germantown High stand shuttered, these changes are slowly being rolled back. In Philadelphia and across the country, scores of schools have been closed, radically restructured, or replaced by charter schools. And in the process, the face of the teaching workforce has changed. In one of the most far-reaching consequences of the past decade’s wave of education reform, the nation has lost tens of thousands of experienced black teachers and principals.
According to the Albert Shanker Institute, which is funded in part by the American Federation of Teachers, the number of black educators has declined sharply in some of the largest urban school districts in the nation. In Philadelphia, the number of black teachers declined by 18.5 percent between 2001 and 2012. In Chicago, the black teacher population dropped by nearly 40 percent. And in New Orleans, there was a 62 percent drop in the number of black teachers.
Percentage Change in Teacher Population by Race and Ethnicity, 2002-2012
Many of these departures came as part of mass layoffs and closings in schools…Read More Here…
Bernie Wins Michigan
Big upset last night. Despite the MSM Polls showing Hillary with a huge lead, by the time the votes were counted, the Bern won by a small majority. Even 538 got it wrong, projecting that Hillary had a 90% chance of winning in Michigan. Bernie also chipped into Hillary’s lead in black voters with his best showing so far. The math behind that is fairly simple. Economic issues in an area devastated by loss of jobs mean more to black voters than in the South where some companies have relocated due to cheap labor. As such, folks in the industrial heartland are more likely to resonate with Bernie’s economic platform, than folks living in the Republican red zone South where race is the predominant issue.
Bernie’s speech last night –
The next group of states favor Bernie – so the number of delegates is going to be a lot closer. If Bernie wins in Ohio, then things may well turn on their head. He has at least an outside chance of winning more delegates to the Democrat Convention. The downside for Bernie is Hillary owns the super-delegates, who are made up of party insiders and luminaries. So Hillary still has the inside track.
Native American Enslavement – “2-4 million” Shipped to the West Indes
One of the ways that the English Colonists enforced slavery was to ship the slaves to a different country or island where there was no possibility of escape. The Southern Myth that Native Americans were not enslaved because it was too easy for them to escape…Turns out not to be true. The Genocide of Native American has an even uglier turn, as Historians find evidence that millions were shipped overseas in bondage.
America’s Other Original Sin
Europeans didn’t just displace Native Americans—they enslaved them, and encouraged tribes to participate in the slave trade, on a scale historians are only beginning to fathom.
Here are three scenes from the history of slavery in North America. In 1637, a group of Pequot Indians, men and boys, having risen up against English colonists in Connecticut and been defeated, were sold to plantations in the West Indies in exchange for African slaves, allowing the colonists to remove a resistant element from their midst. (The tribe’s women were pressed into service in white homes in New England, where domestic workers were sorely lacking.) In 1741, an 800-foot-long coffle of recently enslaved Sioux Indians, procured by a group of Cree, Assiniboine, and Monsoni warriors, arrived in Montreal, ready for sale to French colonists hungry for domestic and agricultural labor. And in 1837, Cherokee Joseph Vann, expelled from his land in Georgia during the era of Indian removal, took at least 48 enslaved black people along with him to Indian Territory. By the 1840s, Vann was said to have owned hundreds of enslaved black laborers, as well as racehorses and a side-wheeler steamboat.
A reductive view of the American past might note two major, centuries-long historical sins: the enslavement of stolen Africans and the displacement of Native Americans. In recent years, a new wave of historians of American slavery has been directing attention to the ways these sins overlapped. The stories they have uncovered throw African slavery—still the narrative that dominates our national memory—into a different light, revealing that the seeds of that system were sown in earlier attempts to exploit Native labor. The record of Native enslavement also shows how the white desire to put workers in bondage intensified the chaos of contact, disrupting intertribal politics and creating uncertainty and instability among people already struggling to adapt to a radically new balance of power.
Before looking at the way Native enslavement happened on the local level (really the only way to approach a history this fragmented and various), it helps to appreciate the sweep of the phenomenon. How common was it for Indians to be enslaved by Euro-Americans? Counting can be difficult, because many instances of Native enslavement in the Colonial period were illegal or ad hoc and left no paper trail. But historians have tried. A few of their estimates: Thousands of Indians were enslaved in Colonial New England, according to Margaret Ellen Newell. Alan Gallay writes that between 1670 and 1715, more Indians were exported into slavery through Charles Town (now Charleston, South Carolina) than Africans were imported. Brett Rushforth recently attempted a tally of the total numbers of enslaved, and he told me that he thinks 2 million to 4 million indigenous people in the Americas, North and South, may have been enslaved over the centuries that the practice prevailed—a much larger number than had previously been thought. “It’s not on the level of the African slave trade,” which brought 10 million people to the Americas, but the earliest history of the European colonies in the Americas is marked by Native bondage. “If you go up to about 1680 or 1690 there still, by that period, had been more enslaved Indians than enslaved Africans in the Americas.”
The practice dates back to the earliest history of the European colonies in the future United States. Take the example of the Pequot who were enslaved in 1637 after clashing with the English. As Newell writes in a new book, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery, by the time the ship Desiretransported the defeated Pequot men and boys to the Caribbean, colonists in New England, desperate for bodies and hands to supplement their own meager workforce, had spent years trying out various strategies of binding Native labor.
During the Pequot War, which was initially instigated by struggles over trade and land among the Europeans, the Pequot, and rival tribes, colonists explicitly named the procurement of captives as one of their goals. Soldiers sent groups of captured Pequot to Boston and other cities for distribution, while claiming particular captured people as their own. Soldier Israel Stoughton wrote to John Winthrop, having sent “48 or 50 women and Children” to the governor to distribute as he pleased:
Ther is one … that is the fairest and largest that I saw amongst them to whome I have given a coate to cloath her: It is my desire to have her for a servant … There is a little Squa that Stewart Calaot desireth … Lifetennant Davenport allso desireth one, to witt a tall one that hath 3 stroakes upon her stummach …
A few years after the conclusion of the war, in 1641, the colonists of Massachusetts Bay passed the first formal law regulating slavery in English America, in a section of the longer document known as the Body of Liberties. The section’s language allowed enslavement of “those lawfull Captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly selle themselves or are sold to us,” and left room for legal bondage of others the authorities might deem enslaved in the future. The Body of Liberties codified the colonists’ possession of Native workers and opened the door for the expansion of African enslavement. …Read The Rest Here…
Btx3's Blog 