DL Open Thread: Thursday, May 19, 2022

Georgia County Booms, Dispelling ‘Great Replacement’ Theory. A century after whites drove prospering Black farmers out of the county, and kept them out:

CUMMING, Ga. — In October 1912, after the raped and brutalized body of Mae Crow, a white 18-year-old, was laid to rest beside the Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, the white men of Forsyth County went on a rampage, driving its 1,098 Black citizens — about 10 percent of the population — from Forsyth’s borders.

But the citizens of this county north of Atlanta were not done. For much of the 20th century, they would guard Forsyth’s borders as the city to the south encroached, through violence, intimidation and a menacing understanding in Greater Atlanta that this county was to remain for whites only.

If those who carried out mass shootings in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, El Paso and Christchurch, New Zealand, showed how deadly such beliefs could be in the hands of a single, well-armed killer, the Forsyth County of 1912 showed what a more organized operation of terror could accomplish.

But a century later, Forsyth County also refutes white supremacists who believe that, as Payton Gendron, the charged Buffalo gunman, put it: “Diversity is not a strength.” The county’s whites-only century was one of stagnation and isolation. Only after the sprawl of Greater Atlanta eventually overwhelmed Forsyth’s defenses in the late 1990s and 2000s did this county boom.

Forsyth’s progress and its remarkable prosperity may be proof that white supremacy is a hindrance, he said, but the county should not be credited with the epiphany. Atlanta’s sprawl spread steadily northward until the wave “finally broke over Forsyth County,” he said.

“What you would like to believe,” Mr. Phillips said, “is that there was some moral change, that people saw the error of their ways, and a light switch clicked.”

But that, he said, isn’t what happened.

Encouraging, but cautionary.

Elon Musk Labels Democratic Party As The Party Of ‘Hate And Division’.  Didn’t Trump once vote for Democrats?

Crypto’s Massive Energy Suck.  I don’t pretend to understand crypto.  Except it sucks a whole lot of energy that wasn’t sucked pre-crypto.

Air Monitors In ‘Sacrifice Zones’ Don’t Matter If Nobody Does Anything:

One summer night last year, air began flowing into a steel canister across the street from the Little Bo Peep Child Development Center in Calvert City, Kentucky. The pollution monitor hummed into the morning as parents dropped off their toddlers and later into the day as the kids played outside. Within a month, a lab analysis would reveal that the canister had captured a troubling concentration of ethylene dichloride, which has been linked to pancreatic and stomach cancers and leukemia.

No one, however, raced in to warn parents or alert nearby residents that the air they sucked in with every breath was laced with a poisonous chemical. No one took immediate steps to stop the stream or sue the offending polluter into compliance.

In fact, that Calvert City monitor had been running all year, along with two others around town. Each of them had registered more ethylene dichloride than any of the 123 other monitors nationwide designed to detect the chemical. The results had been logged by Kentucky regulators and uploaded to a database managed by the Environmental Protection Agency.

It’s examples like Calvert City, experts say, that expose an infuriating conundrum with the U.S. systems for protecting citizens from dangerous pollution: Regulators install air monitors to flag hazardous emissions from local companies, then pull their punches in taking action against the offenders.

Must-read reporting from Pro Publica.

Global Food System About To Collapse Like 2008 Banks?  Similar concentration of power and absence of regulation:

Many people assume that the food crisis was caused by a combination of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. While these are important factors, they aggravate an underlying problem. For years, it looked as if hunger was heading for extinction. The number of undernourished people fell from 811 million in 2005 to 607 million in 2014. But in 2015, the trend began to turn. Hunger has been rising ever since: to 650 million in 2019, and back to 811 million in 2020. This year is likely to be much worse.

Now brace yourself for the really bad news: this has happened at a time of great abundance. Global food production has been rising steadily for more than half a century, comfortably beating population growth. Last year, the global wheat harvest was bigger than ever. Astoundingly, the number of undernourished people began to rise just as world food prices began to fall. In 2014, when fewer people were hungry than at any time since, the global food price index stood at 115 points. In 2015, it fell to 93, and remained below 100 until 2021.

So here’s what sends cold fear through those who study the global food system. In recent years, just as in finance during the 2000s, key nodes in the food system have swollen, their links have become stronger, business strategies have converged and synchronised, and the features that might impede systemic collapse (“redundancy”, “modularity”, “circuit breakers” and “backup systems”) have been stripped away, exposing the system to “globally contagious” shocks.

On one estimate, just four corporations control 90% of the global grain trade. The same corporations have been buying into seed, chemicals, processing, packing, distribution and retail. In the course of 18 years, the number of trade connections between the exporters and importers of wheat and rice doubled. Nations are now polarising into super-importers and super-exporters. Much of this trade passes through vulnerable chokepoints, such as the Turkish Straits (now obstructed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), the Suez and Panama canals and the Straits of Hormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb and Malacca.

Read the whole damn thing.  Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Wilmington Providing Legal Help For Displaced Residents Of Adams Street.  Somewhere, Stephanie Bolden is unavailable for comment, Buccini/Pollin is raising campaign funds for her.  Here is the kind of landlord Bolden seeks to protect from legal representation for renters.  Where is her primary opponent?

Wilmington, DELDOT Play Rope-A-Dope On Red-Light Cameras.  Information being withheld from the public for no apparent reason.

What do you want to talk about?