|[ Der Oberst hat niemand, der ihm schreibt ]|

Parenthood in the United States has become much more demanding than it used to be.

Over just a couple of generations, parents have greatly increased the amount of time, attention and money they put into raising children. Mothers who juggle jobs outside the home spend just as much time tending their children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s.

The amount of money parents spend on children, which used to peak when they were in high school, is now highest when they are under 6 and over 18 and into their mid-20s.

Renée Sentilles enrolled her son Isaac in lessons beginning when he was an infant. Even now that he’s 12, she rarely has him out of sight when he is home.

“I read all the child-care books,” said Ms. Sentilles, a professor in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. “I enrolled him in piano at 5. I took him to soccer practices at 4. We tried track; we did all the swimming lessons, martial arts. I did everything. Of course I did.”

While this kind of intensive parenting — constantly teaching and monitoring children — has been the norm for upper-middle-class parents since the 1990s, new research shows that people across class divides now consider it the best way to raise children, even if they don’t have the resources to enact it.

There are signs of a backlash, led by so-called free-range parents, but social scientists say the relentlessness of modern-day parenting has a powerful motivation: economic anxiety. For the first time, it’s as likely as not that American children will be less prosperous than their parents. For parents, giving children the best start in life has come to mean doing everything they can to ensure that their children can climb to a higher class, or at least not fall out of the one they were born into.

“As the gap between rich and poor increases, the cost of screwing up increases,” said Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland who studies families and inequality. “The fear is they’ll end up on the other side of the divide.”

But it also stokes economic anxiety, because even as more parents say they want to raise children this way, it’s the richest ones who are most able to do so.

“Intensive parenting is a way for especially affluent white mothers to make sure their children are maintaining their advantaged position in society,” said Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at Indiana University and author of “Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School.”

Stacey Jones raised her two sons, now in their 20s, as a single mother in a working-class, mostly black neighborhood in Stone Mountain, Ga. She said she and other parents tried hard to give their children opportunities by finding affordable options: municipal sports leagues instead of traveling club teams and school band instead of private music lessons.

“I think most people have this craving for their children to do better and know more than they do,” said Ms. Jones, who works in university communications. “But a lot of these opportunities were closed off because they do cost money.”

ART BY DIANA OFOSU

This California man is unemployed and homeless, but instead of asking for money he asked people driving by to take his resume! He’s now received more than 200 job offers in just three days! #Hungry4Success #NeverGiveUp #7News pic.twitter.com/qRZticZqHz

— Kris Anderson (@KrisAndersonTV) July 30, 2018

How about this one, from Good Morning America: “The new trend is to give a pregnant coworker some of your own vacation time to add days to her maternity leave.”

We don’t have federally-mandated maternity leave in the United States, making us one of the only nations on the face of the Earth to deny our citizens this basic and vital thing.

But that is not the focus here.

The point is not the broken system that created the need for this collective, self-sacrificing workaround. The point is that a woman’s colleagues are so, so generous. The point is that Kansas City’s Angela Hughes did not take off a single day of her entire pregnancy just to save her own vacation time for after her baby was born. Then her boss was like, “…what the hell are we making this woman do?” (paraphrasing here) and donated 80 hours of her vacation time, and then Hughes’ coworkers followed suit, until Hughes amassed a grand total of eight weeks of paid leave.

“It really, really meant a lot to me… I was extremely appreciative and very humbled.”

Donating vacation time to new moms is a trendy – and generous – co-worker baby shower gift: https://t.co/EeaQMNX425 pic.twitter.com/FWwyl6kPb6

— Good Morning America (@GMA) July 18, 2018

Stories like this keep popping up on Twitter like zits on a prepubescent forehead: The sunshiney announcement about the GoFundMe for the guy with leukemia who can’t pay for his own medical costs. (He is employed by an organization whose owner has a net worth of $5.2 billion.) The dad who works three jobs to support his family saving up to buy his 14-year-old daughter a dress for an eighth grade dance. The college student who ran 20 miles to work after his car broke down and whose boss rewarded him for this effort by giving him his own car.

Do you get a sinking feeling when you read these stories? This feeling like, while of course you are impressed by the tenacity and generosity on display, you still want to vomit?

Behold, the rise of the feel-good feel-bad story.

In life, Dennis Hof claimed many titles: “America’s pimp” and “the P.T. Barnum of Booty,” based on his notoriety as an outspoken brothel owner in Nevada. He called himself the “Trump of Pahrump,” nodding to his political style and the town he called home.

In death, Mr. Hof earned a new title: Nevada state assemblyman.

On Tuesday, in one of the more unusual developments of the midterm elections, Nevada voters resoundingly elected Mr. Hof, a Republican, to represent the state’s 36th Assembly District just weeks after he was found dead in a brothel he owned in Crystal, Nev., at the age of 72.

His election means that county commissioners from his district will pick a replacement, who must be a Republican and live there. That will most likely play out in the coming weeks after the election results are confirmed on Friday, said Arnold Knightly, a spokesman for Nye County, the main county in Mr. Hof’s district.

Mr. Hof’s victory seemed inevitable in the heavily conservative region. President Trump carried Nye County with nearly 68 percent of the vote.

Rates of sexual abuse and harassment in academic science are second only to the military. It's estimated that at least half of women faculty and staff face harassment and abuse and that 20 to 50 percent of women students in science, engineering, and medicine are abused by faculty. Those numbers are generally based on surveys, which are an important way of getting a handle on the problem and how it changes women’s career trajectories.

But when it comes to holding institutions accountable and making meaningful changes, naming perpetrators may be even more powerful.

Julie Libarkin has taken on the challenge of creating a database of harassers. She’s a professor at Michigan State University and she heads the Geocognition Research Laboratory. She’s compiled a list of some 700 cases of sexual misconduct in academia.

Libarkin has made the database publicly available and it's sparking specific calls for funding agencies and professional organizations to stop supporting and promoting sexual abusers.

“I think one of the biggest problems with sexual misconduct is that there's no way to know if anyone experienced that before you,” Libarkin told Living Lab Radio. “There's there's really no way to find out this information. I want people to be able to look at these names.”

The database only includes cases in which there is “an institutional finding of some sort of sexual misconduct,” Libarkin said. She finds the cases in news reports and by combing through Freedom of Information Act results from media outlets, among other sources.

The most surprising case? The man who hired a hitman to kill the woman who accused him of sexual misconduct. Luckily, the man was caught before the murder was carried out, Libarkin said.

Unfortunately, that doesn't always happen.

“I'm also surprised at how institutions... were unable to act to protect students or junior faculty,” she said. “There are multiple cases of people who murdered the people that they were harassing.”

Another startling finding was that about 30 percent of the harassers have been investigated on more than one occasion. The fact of being investigated did not deter them from harassing again. One of the goals of the online database is to reduce the cases in which a known harasser is passed from one university to another.

Libarkin said there are signs that scientific communities are taking notice of the calls to stop hiring and promoting abusers.

“I'll shout out to one of mine—the American Geophysical Union,” Libarkin said, saying that the group has responded eloquently and rapidly to the issue of sexual misconduct at professional meetings.

“They have what many people consider one of the best policies out there, and they're always willing to discuss it and change. So that's fabulous.”

After 18 months of Trump in the White House, American politics finds itself at a crossroads. The United States has moved unmistakably toward a novel form of fascism that serves corporate interests and the military, while promoting at the same time a highly reactionary social agenda infused with religious and crude nationalistic overtones, all with an uncanny touch of political showmanship. In this exclusive Truthout interview, world-renowned linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky analyzes some of the latest developments in Trumpland and their consequences for democracy and world order.

C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, I want to start by asking for your reading of what took place at the Singapore summit, and the way this event was covered in the US media.

Noam Chomsky: It’s reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes and the dog that didn’t bark. What was important was what didn’t happen. Unlike his predecessors, Trump did not undermine the prospects for moving forward. Specifically, he did not disrupt the process initiated by the two Koreas in their historic April 27 [Panmunjom] Declaration, in which they “affirmed the principle of determining the destiny of the Korean nation on their own accord” (repeat: on their own accord), and for the first time presented a detailed program as to how to proceed. It is to Trump’s credit that he did not undermine these efforts, and in fact made a move toward facilitating them by cancelling the US-South Korean war games, which, as he correctly said, are “very provocative.” We would certainly not tolerate anything of the sort on our borders – or anywhere on the planet – even if they were not run by a superpower which not long before had utterly devastated our country with the flimsiest of pretexts after the war was effectively over, glorying in the major war crimes it had committed, like bombing major dams, after there was nothing else to bomb.

Beyond the achievement of letting matters proceed, which was not slight, no “diplomatic skills” were involved in Trump’s triumph.

The coverage has been quite instructive, in part because of the efforts of the Democrats to outflank Trump from the right. Beyond that, the coverage across the spectrum illustrates quite well two distinct kinds of deceit: lying and not telling relevant truths. Each merits comment.

Trump is famous for the former, and his echo chamber is as well. Liberal commentators exult in totting up and refuting Trump’s innumerable lies and distortions, much to his satisfaction since it provides the opportunity for him to fire up his loyal — by now almost worshipful — base with more evidence of how the hated “Establishment” is using every possible underhanded means to prevent their heroic leader from working tirelessly to defend them from a host of enemies.

A canny politician, Trump surely understands well that the base on which he relies, by now almost the entire Republican Party, has drifted to a surreal world, in part under his influence. Take the major Trump-Ryan legislative achievement, the tax scam — “The US Donor Relief Act of 2017,” as Joseph Stiglitz termed it. It had two transparent aims: to enrich the very wealthy and the corporate sector while slamming everyone else, and to create a huge deficit. The latter achievement — as the main architect of the scam Paul Ryan helpfully explained — provides the opportunity to realize the cherished goal of reducing benefits that serve the general population, already very weak by comparative standards, but still an unacceptable infringement on the prerogatives of the 1%. The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the law will add $1 trillion to deficits over the next decade. Virtually every economist generally agrees. But not 80 percent of Republican voters, of whom half believe that the deficit will be reduced by the gift their leader has lavished upon them.