Homes4People

The web’s ‘most combative conservative impresario’ cannot be dismissed as a rightwing crank

Andrew Breitbart, the rightwing stirrer-in-chief, certainly created a furore over Shirley Sherrod, although perhaps not in the way he intended.

Sherrod, a black, mid-level official at the department of agriculture was sacked after a video was aired on Breitbart’s website Big Government.

The video – edited to be economical with the facts – gave the impression that Sherrod had refused to help a white farmer 24 years ago, whereas in fact she had helped save his farm as the full video makes clear (17mins in).

Breitbart had seized on the edited video for some point scoring against the NAACP, America’s largest civil rights organisation, which had accused the Tea Party, the movement of disaffected rightwingers, of tolerating bigotry.

Sherrod has been reinstated amid red faces at the White House and the agriculture department. If anything, their haste in sacking Sherrod has eclipsed Breitbart’s gaffe.

Breitbart – who says he feels badly about how Sherrod has been treated – may have come a cropper on the Sherrod tape, raising questions over his credibility. However, Patrick Coolican on LA Weekly doubts that Breitbart has done himself any harm, on the basis that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

In a recent profile in the New Yorker magazine, Breitbart – maybe tongue-in-cheek, maybe not – expressed a belief that President Barack Obama’s election was the culmination of a plot, set in place in the 1930s by émigré members of the Frankfurt School – dissident Marxists – to take over Hollywood, the media, academia, and the government, with the aim of imposing socialism.

“He’s a Marxist,” Breitbart told the magazine. “His life work, his life experience, his life writings, and now his legislative legacy speak to his ideological point of view.”

Breitbart, however, cannot simply be dismissed as a run-of the-mill rightwing crank.

In the words of Time magazine, Breitbart is the web’s most combative conservative impresario, out-frothing those other shock jocks, Glenn Beck at Fox News and Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report.

In 2005, he founded Breitbart.com, which aggregates news from the Associated Press, Reuters, and other wire services.

Last year he expanded his media constellation by setting up the Big Government website, with companion sites Big Hollywood and Big Journalism. Unpaid bloggers supply the content and the sites wield their rhetorical cudgels against what Breitbart believes is the leftist bias in American institutions.

Big Government made an impact early on, when it aired videos that appeared to show workers at Acorn, a liberal organisation that lobbies for affordable housing, offering tips on how to open a brothel. That the filmmakers were accused of entrapping their subjects and editing in footage of one of the undercover filmmakers dressed as a pimp got lost in the furore.

Breitbart, who grew up in the posh neighbourhood of Brentwood in Los Angeles, cut his media teeth by working with Drudge in the mid-1990s, when the web was starting to take off.

Breitbart spent 15 years putting together news items for databases and news agencies, and just as importantly, imbibed Drudge’s anti-liberal worldview.

He went on to work for Arianna Huffington, once described as the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus, during her rightwing phase. Breitbart helped launch the Huffington Post in 2005, but they parted company when Huffington lurched to the left. Breitbart has said that he wants his sites to be conservative versions of the Huffington Post.

“Most conservatives are individualists,” he told Time. “For years, they’ve been pummelled by the collectivists who run the American media, Hollywood and Washington. The underground conservative movement that is now awakening is the ecosystem I’ve designed my sites to tap into.”

Originally published here

As the World Cup organisers relish having proved their critics wrong, David Smith looks at what the media are saying now

The bunting hangs limp, the balloons sag with wrinkles, the used paper cups and plates drift to the floor on a chilly breeze. The football World Cup – greatest show on earth, most watched sporting spectacle ever, defining moment for the African renaissance – is over.

South Africa is now living inside the after-echo of the Big Bang. A giant football still hangs at OR Tambo International airport, month-old matches are replayed endlessly on ghostly TV screens and advertising billboards still welcome visitors who have long since departed. But flags are disappearing from cars and the vuvuzelas have fallen silent. The attentions of a fickle world have moved on. South Africa is already Gordon Brown.

Was it all a dream? Newspapers and television have returned to more familiar territory. An unarmed man shot dead by police when he failed to stop his car. Foreign nationals on the run from xenophobic attacks. Bitter power struggles inside Julius Malema’s African National Congress youth league. Nelson Mandela’s 92nd birthday.

There has also been much ruminating on what the World Cup jamboree meant for the country and whether the legacy will last. Nearly everyone has marvelled at a triumph that surpassed even the dreamers’ expectations, disrupted a centuries-old narrative of Africa as passive and incompetent, and raised the bar for politicians to now deliver housing, jobs and schools.

Some have relished cocking a snook at the British media and what was seen as its unrelenting negativity about South Africa’s ability to play host. Political cartoons have depicted tabloid journalists being forced to eat humble pie.

Mninawa Ntloko, the sports editor of Business Day newspaper, branded them “tiresome vultures”, a “mob” and “mean-spirited schmucks” who’d “all gotten it into their thick craniums that SA would make a mess of the World Cup”. He grumbled last week: “The worst of these hyenas would assemble outside press conference rooms in packs and discuss ways to unsettle the panel after organising committee board meetings.”

But I wonder if it’s such a simple case of “I told you so”. Those who complained about the British media always tended to cite three of its stories in particular: the mortal threat posed to fans by “machete race gangs”; fears that South Africa would be devastated by an earthquake; the ominous presence of killer snakes near England’s training camp.

The first two of these appeared in the Daily Star, not exactly the inflight journal of Air Force One; the third was in the Sun. The stories rampaged across the web and went global within minutes. But the vast middle ground of British media coverage was less sensational, more moderate and often more positive and therefore eminently less tweetable, so disappeared under most South Africans’ radar.

It could also be said that, not for the first time, a sceptical media kept those in power on their toes. In defence of South Africa’s own press coverage, a leader in Business Day argued: “In fact, there is a credible argument to be made that one of the key motivators behind SA’s successful organisation of the World Cup was the knowledge that there were plenty of critics who were convinced we would fail.”

But many commentators gave credit where it was due, while pondering what next. Here are some other World Cup reflections from here and abroad that stood out for me:

“I’ve been to watch loads of games at the stadiums, but by far the best memory I take away from the World Cup was the atmosphere at Melrose Arch, in Joburg, during the South Africa-France game. From what I saw there, and from the reports of friends and fellow journalists who have taken part in joyous events of this kind up and down the country, I’d like to ask a question: ‘If South Africa is not a united country, then what country is?’”

– John Carlin, Saturday Star

“As host of the most-watched sporting event on earth, South Africa set out to reinvent itself in the eyes of the world, casting off its reputation as a place defined by violent crime, poverty and Aids. To a remarkable degree, it succeeded. But as the World Cup ended Sunday, what most surprised South Africans was how much the month-long sporting extravaganza had changed the way they see themselves.

“‘This World Cup brought out South Africa’s better angels,’ said Shaun Johnson, a writer who leads a charitable foundation that Nelson Mandela helped establish. ‘In this country, so riven racially, it’s unbelievable how much this World Cup has brought us together.’”

– Celia Dugger, New York Times

“And so the burning question in South Africa at the moment is this: Why, if the state can build stadiums on time and deliver a World Cup to Fifa, can it not treat its citizens with similar respect and efficiency? Unfortunately, it is far harder to restructure the economy to provide jobs, or to solve the crime crisis, than it is to build a stadium or an airport. The World Cup is a bit like a wartime economy: the skills acquired and the capital invested might indeed boost the economy, but they are not necessarily transferable to a peacetime environment.”

– Mark Gevisser, The Guardian

“The Soviet Union, 1917 to 1990, was a miserable failure that condemned its own people to poverty and humiliation. But it did send the first man into space and produced the world’s best ballet. On certain occasions it could concentrate all of its energy into a few projects of high status, sacrificing everything else.

“Is South Africa like that? As our education, public safety and public health fails for our own people, are we as a country happy to make great sacrifices for the success of an international sporting event to impress other people?”

– Andrew Kenny, The Citizen

“Pride and confidence are hard things to measure. But in recent years, South Africa seems to have been running low on both. The magic of the Mandela era has been wearing off.

“But over the past month, the change I’ve seen has been remarkable.

“White families – faces painted with the national flag – have ventured on to buses and into black townships for the very first time – giddy with the sense of discovering their own country.

“Immigrants from around the continent have rubbed shoulders in crowded bars. Sharp-dressed Congolese, laid-back Zimbabweans, rowdy Ghanaians with their drums and body paint. All united by a rare, but tangible sense of pan-African unity.

“Then there are the fans from further afield – shocked to find, as one columnist put it here, that they’re more likely to be killed by kindness than by criminals in South Africa.”

– Andrew Harding, BBC

Originally published here

At times a byword for street violence and social problems, Manningham in Bradford has been chosen by English Heritage for the latest book in its Informed Conservation series

A northern suburb whose name was a byword for street violence and social problems just 10 years ago has been praised today for its exuberant community life, and a landscape which stands in comparison to Bath.

Manningham in Bradford, which suffered two serious disturbances after policing problems in 1995 and an extreme rightwing rally in 2001, has been chosen by English Heritage for the latest book in its Informed Conservation series of guides.

Architects and historians combine to admire the squares and crescents of honey-coloured stone which spill down the hillside from Lister’s velvet and silk mill, one of the largest monuments to Britain’s textile trade. They also dissect a history of immigration and diversity stretching far back beyond the South Asian community, the latest to stamp its mark on the area.

Previous residents include prosperous and talented German Jews, among them the families of the composer Frederick Delius and the poet Humbert Wolfe. Their influence was so strong that the Lord’s Prayer at Oak Lane school was recited every morning in German.

The book, Character and Diversity in a Bradford Suburb, accepts that textile decline and “white flight” led to decay from the 1960s, with half-hearted council demolition leaving parts of Manningham rundown. It also analyses how the exceptional mix of housing, with back-to-back terraces alongside the handsome squares and villas with large gardens, has always caused tensions, including the Lister’s mill strike in 1890 which led to the formation of the Independent Labour party.

“I can remember the noise of hundreds of feet going over pavements to the mill. And when the hooter went for closing – you could hardly cross the road without being run over,” says Betty Hurd, 80, whose memories form part of a DVD, Tales and Trails of Manningham, issued with the book.

“The mill was such a part of Manningham and it was very sad when production stopped,” she adds.

Closure in 1992 led to dereliction but the mill is now being converted into flats by the Manchester developers Urban Splash. Lister Park, Manningham’s biggest green space, meanwhile won £3.2m from the Heritage Lottery Fund in 1997 to restore its Victorian boating lake and build a South Asian Mughal water garden.

The guide takes visitors to these sights, but also includes lesser-known parts of the suburb, including a surviving 17th century manor house and a grid of terraces with a largely overlooked importance in the growth of British democracy. They were built with the help of the Liberal MP Sir Titus Salt, better-known for his model village Saltaire near Bradford (now a UN world heritage site), to allow workers to own property and thus qualify for a vote.

“Manningham has a reputation as a run down area with problems and true enough it has had its share of ups and downs,” says Trevor Mitchell, Yorkshire and the Humber’s regional director for English Heritage, at the book’s launch in Lister’s Mill. “But things are on the up. Look behind the occasional neglect and what you have is one of England’s greatest Victorian suburbs. Bradford is one of England’s greatest stone cities and Manningham perhaps its finest district, bearing comparison – as the book says – to that better-known architectural gem, Bath.”

Mitchell drew the comparison between today’s diverse community and the past, highlighting Manningham’s “stunning” synagogue built in 1880 to an Arabic design, and quoting the writer, J. B. Priestley, whose father introduced Britain’s first school meals at the local Green Lane school. Priestley said of the immigrants in his English Journey, published in 1934: “They were different, and brought more to the city than bank drafts and lists of customers. They acted as a leaven, just as a colony of typical West Riding folk would act as a leaven in Munich or Moscow. These exchanges are good for everybody.”

The new book has been welcomed by local people, who cite high demand for housing, very few empty properties and easy walking distance to Bradford city centre as attractions of what the book calls “an established, well-loved community”. Manningham has been notably exempt from the problems which led to the last government’s housing market renewal initiative, which has seen controversial demolitions in Manchester, Liverpool and a number of Lancashire towns.

“Bradford is the best city in the world and England is the best country in the world and Manningham is the best place in Bradford,” said Khadam Hussain, chair of Victor Street mosque. The look of relief on the faces of city councillors, who fight a constant battle against persistent, unhappier images left by the violence of the past, was manifest.

My life in Manningham

I bought a four-storey house in a Manningham Square for £1800 in 1974 and lived there for one of the happiest years of my life. The buildings were threatened with imminent demolition – hence the price – but neighbours from ten different countries of origin put paid to that with a spirited campaign.

It was partly conservation – I had moved from Bath and made the same comparison as English Heritage does in the new book – but more that Southfield Square was an ideal of urban life. We each had a garden in the middle but work and the city centre was a walk away. The cultural mix had everybody learning from everyone else.

Nancy Boychuk from the Ukraine scolded her Bangladeshi neighbours into growing flowers as well as vegetables. Iqbal and Razir Ansari invited you in for samosas while Dorothea Foster, a distant relation of the Black Dyke Mills family, advised on Yorkshire pudding.

Karin Parbus continued her family’s tradition in 1930s Tallinn of using actual candles on her Christmas tree. The two Wright sisters told illuminating stories of the prejudice they suffered as Anglo-Indians before coming to Yorkshire from India.

The most interesting lesson, however, was the contrast between this reality and outsiders’ perceptions, especially in the media. Our campaign was set back, for instance, when the celebrated photographer Don McCullin ran a classic Northern cobbles-and-litter-in-the-rain series in the Sunday Times colour magazine.

Fortuitously, the same paper’s distinguished critic Ian Nairn arrived shortly afterwards and wrote a piece on the Southfield Square campaign which anticipated today’s English Heritage book in its optimism and warmth. It caught the eye of the national Civic Trust, which was looking for a Northern conservation project to back. They chose us, the council changed tack and the square survives – handsomely illustrated in the new book. MW

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Manningham: Character and Diversity in a Bradford Suburb, Simon Taylor and Kathryn Gibson, £9.99

Originally published here

The Prince of Wales was named at the High Court yesterday as having been instrumental in the collapse of Britain’s most expensive housing project. The Prince’s “notorious opposition” to modern architecture led to the derailment of a £3 billion enterprise at the site of Chelsea Barracks, according to lawyers representing the developers.

Originally published here

• Study finds gaping racial divide in household assets
• Economic policies blamed for growing inequality

A huge wealth gap has opened up between black and white people in the US over the past quarter of a century – a difference sufficient to put two children through university – because of racial discrimination and economic policies that favour the affluent.

A typical white family is now five times richer than its African-American counterpart of the same class, according to a report released today by Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

White families typically have assets worth $100,000 (£69,000), up from $22,000 in the mid-1980s. African-American families’ assets stand at just $5,000, up from around $2,000.

A quarter of black families have no assets at all. The study monitored more than 2,000 families since 1984.

“We walk that through essentially a generation and what we see is that the racial wealth gap has galloped, it’s escalated to $95,000,” said Tom Shapiro, one of the authors of the report by the university’s Institute on Assets and Social Policy.

“That’s primarily because the whites in the sample were able to accumulate financial assets from their $22,000 all the way to $100,000 and the African-Americans’ wealth essentially flatlined.”

The survey does not include housing equity, because it is not readily accessible and is rarely realised as cash. But if property were included it would further widen the wealth divide.

Shapiro says the gap remains wide even between blacks and whites of similar classes and with similar jobs and incomes.

“How do we explain the wealth gap among equally-achieving African-American and white families? The same ratio holds up even among low income groups. Finding ways to accumulate financial resources for all low and moderate income families in the United States has been a huge challenge and that challenge keeps getting steeper and steeper.

“But there are greater opportunities and less challenges for low and moderate income families if they’re white in comparison to if they’re African-American or Hispanic,” he said.

America has long lived with vast inequality, although 40 years ago the disparity was lower than in Britain.

Today, the richest 1% of the US population owns close to 40% of its wealth. The top 25% of US households own 87%.

The rest is divided up among middle and low income Americans. In that competition white people come out far ahead.

Only one in 10 African-Americans owns any shares. A third do not have a pension plan, and among those who do the value is on average a fifth of plans held by whites.

Shapiro says one of the most disturbing aspects of the study is that wealth among the highest-income African-Americans has actually fallen in recent years, dropping from a peak of $25,000 to about $18,000, while among white counterparts of similar class and income it has surged to around $240,000.

In 1984, high-income black Americans had more assets than middle-income whites. That is no longer true.

“I’m a pretty jaded and cynical researcher in some way, but this was shocking, quite frankly, a really important dynamic,” said Shapiro. “This represents a broken chain of achievement. In the United States context, when we are thinking about racial equality and the economy we have focused for a long time on equal opportunity.

“Equal opportunity assumes that some people who have that opportunity are going to have pretty high achievements in terms of their jobs, their work, their income, their home ownership.

“The assumption in a democracy is that merit and achievement are going to be rewarded and the rewards here are financial assets. We should see some rough parity and we don’t.”

The report attributes part of the cause to the “powerful role of persistent discrimination in housing, credit and labour markets. African-Americans and Hispanics were at least twice as likely to receive high-cost home mortgages as whites with similar incomes,” the report says.

Although many black families have moved up to better-paying jobs, they begin with fewer assets, such as inheritance, on which to build wealth. They are also more likely to have gone into debt to pay for university loans.

“African-Americans, before the 1960s, first by law and then by custom, were not really allowed to own businesses. They had very little access to credit. There was a very low artificial ceiling on the wealth that could be accumulated. Hence there was very little, if anything, that could be passed along to help their children get to college, to help their children buy their first homes, or as an inheritance when they die,” said Shapiro.

Since the 1980s, US administrations have also geared the tax system to the advantage of the better off. Taxes on unearned income, such as shares and inheritance, fell sharply and are much lower than taxes on pay.

“The more income and wealth people had, the less it was taxable,” said Shapiro.

There were also social factors, the study found. “In African-American families there is a much larger extended network of kin as well as other obligations. From other work we’ve done we know that there’s more call on the resources of relatively well-off African-American families; that they lend money that’s not given back; they help cousins go to school. They help brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, with all kinds of legal and family problems,” said Shapiro.

Originally published here

The BNP leader seems to have abandoned the people of the North West for a bigger goal – the parliamentary seat of Barking

Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, has decided to run for a parliamentary seat in Barking. Too many puns, not enough time.

But my first thought is: what about the people of the North West region he wanted to represent in Europe? They’ve already been ditched in favour of Griffin’s bigger dreams, exposing him as the power-hungry politico that he accuses members of the Westminster establishment of being.

My second thought is: what about poor Richard Barnbrook?

The BNP’s sole London assembly member came third in Barking at the last general election and had fancied running again. In fact he even unveiled massive posters claiming “Barnbrook for Barking” only weeks ago, with one picture in the style of Superman.

Bizarrely, there’s no mention of the fact that the leader of the BNP has decided the area would suit his own plans to represent the people of Britain, and pushed out Barnbrook. The latter will now run for leader of the council in Barking instead.

And what will the election be about? Barnbrook said he would fight to clean our streets of knife crime, a nice but unfortunate sentiment given he was recently caught lying about murder claims in the area.

Griffin, on the other hand, wants to fight on the bread and butter issues: housing and education. Last time, they circulated a leaflet in the area called “Africans for Essex”, claiming that the council leader was paying £50,000 to Africans to move into the area to buy votes. It was a blatant lie.

On the surface, Griffin’s decision looks like a good once since that part of east London is seen as a stronghold for the BNP. But there are good reasons why the BNP will be even less successful this time.

First, Griffin is clearly banking on his increased media profile to give the BNP a boost. At the press conference he said “people vote for someone they recognise … and respect”. But his last media appearance, which brought a tonne of coverage, brought no bounce to the BNP.

Second, BNP councillors elected in the area since 2005 have received tonnes of bad press. That alone should depress some enthusiasm for their claims to improve the local area.

Third, the Conservatives are widely expected to win the next election. Given the party’s hardline immigration stance – voters passionate about that issue are likely to vote Tory or not at all.

Fourth, the area has since 2005 become more racially mixed, which usually depresses BNP votes. Most BNP votes come from areas that have very low percentages of ethnic minorities.

A factor in favour of Griffin, however, is the local Labour MP Margaret Hodge. Her voting record was in favour of the war in Iraq, student top-up fees, ID cards, foundation hospitals and a range of issues that traditional Labour voters oppose. A percentage of them will stay at home. Her record for claiming expenses brings her down further and will be used by Griffin.

But worst of all she has repeatedly pandered to the BNP’s talking points, once claiming the political class was not engaging on the issue of race (unless of course you read the entire rightwing press), and another time blaming new migrants for housing shortages (which also turned out to be untrue). With his narrative of white victimhood already legitimised by the sitting Labour MP, Griffin only has to repeat her words to point out that the only obvious solution is the BNP.

Either way, Griffin is looking ahead. The people who elected him as an MEP can get stuffed, clearly.

Originally published here