This is the time in April we traditionally fund our nations priorities. There is nothing traditional this year. In the midst of the international COVID-19 pandemic, tax day has been placed on hold just as much of the world has. It is also the time of year that we fund our greatest existential man-madethreat nuclear weapons.

While dealing with the surreal impact of the current COVID-19 health crisis, the nuclear arms race forges ahead, spiraling out of control, as the U.S. pushes to lead the way in building a nuclear arsenal whose sole purpose if it ever were to be used is threatening to end life as we know it on our planet. Climate change is the second human-caused existential threat and is also connected to the threat of recurring pandemics and nuclear war.

The COVID-19 pandemic demands that we reassess our priorities through the lens of caring for one another and our basic human needs addressing income, health and environmental inequities across the nation that are so apparent at this time.

As the planet warms, habitat for animals, bacteria, parasites and viruses change bringing the health of animals, humans and the planet into anew reality. In addition, climate changes human migration and resource availability, causing conflict which under the right circumstances can leadultimatelyto war. We need to rethink how we spend our financial resources to address these interconnected issues.

Each year,Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angelespublishes ourNuclear Weapons Community Costs Program. Now in its 32nd year, the program is used around the country to highlight the fiscal disparities in our communities and build support fornuclear weapons abolition work and for divestment from nuclear weapons similar to what was done in South Africa to end apartheid.

As our nation grapples with the health and economic impacts of COVID-19, we continue to fund nuclear weapons programs by our calculation in the amount of$67.6 billionfor fiscal year 2020.

These wasted expenditures deprive cities, counties and states across the nation of critical funds in the midst of this pandemic, compounding our ongoing daily health crisis dealing with nearly 90 million Americans without any, or with inadequate health insurance. The expenditures vary by community, as do each communitys financial needs.

Our nations capital will contribute in excess of $236 million for FY 2020 toward nuclear weapons programs. Large states like New York, and New Jersey grappling with the devastation of COVID-19 and the inadequate resources to handle it are spending in excess of $4.5 billion and $2.2 billion respectively, while California is spending over $8.7 billion on nuclear weapons programs, robbing their treasuries of critical funds necessary at this time. This is immoral, insane and wrong.

As physicians and health practitioners, we just like our local elected officials are first responders. The current pandemic with all of its global devastation pales by comparison with any nuclear conflict. Cities are being paralyzed as they try to deal with the crisis at hand. In a nuclear attack, there would be no adequate medical or public health response. The outcome is predictable and must be prevented.

The only way to prevent nuclear war is by the complete and verifiable abolition of nuclear weapons.

As with COVID-19, we must prevent that which we cannot cure.

The world is moving to abolish nuclear weapons through theTreaty on The Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons,adopted at the U.N. in July 2017 and already ratified by 36 nations on its way to the 50 nations necessary to enter into force, like treaties dealing with all other weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. must take a leadership role to support this treaty and abide by our 50-year commitment underArticle VI of the NPT Treatyto work in good faith to eliminate nuclear weapons. The rest of the world has grown weary and skeptical of the hollow promises of the U.S. and other nuclear nations to this obligation and are refusing to be held hostage any longer.

Shame on our legislative leaders for the continued funding of these weapons of mass destruction that have no utility and threaten our continued survival. There are no winners of nuclear war.

In the words of our last great military General, President Dwight Eisenhower, Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

We are one interconnected human family in this nation and on this planet and at long last, it is time to recognize this fact. COVID-19 has made this imminently apparent. It is time to come together to abolish nuclear weapons and to direct the dollars wasted on them to address the economic, environmental and health inequities in our communities. We must all make our voices heard to prevent nuclear war, which would be the last epidemic.

Robert Dodge, M.D., is a family physician practicing in Ventura, Calif. He is the President of Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles (www.psr-la.org), and sits on the National Board serving as the Co-Chair of the Committee to Abolish Nuclear Weapons of National Physicians for Social Responsibility (www.psr.org). Physicians for Social Responsibility received the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize and is a partner organization ofICAN, recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Price.

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Taxes, COVID-19 and nuclear weapons funding our nation's priorities | TheHill - The Hill

The idea of family abolition may invoke visions of violent interventions into the loving and caring homes that some of us are lucky enough to have. Where its proponents are really coming from, however, is to argue for a society where mutual nurturance and support are not dependent on a genetic lottery. This is not merely about pointing out that a disconcerting number of homes are not actually safe places but hold acute threats of violence particularly to the women who live there. Instead, if we can learn anything from the experiences that Covid-19 has unleashed, it is that the linked ideologies of the home, the nuclear family and neoliberal individual responsibility are ill-equipped to provide the care that we are all dependent on.

In Women and the Politics of Class, Johanna Brenner and Nancy Holmstrom put this point concisely. We all want kinship, love, and good things to eat. Its just that the family as we currently know it is not necessarily the best way to satisfy those desires. More importantly, the family assumes central responsibility to provide for these needs in a society that fails to do so. Specifically, various authors such as Agnes Heller have argued that capitalism explicitly produces needs it cannot satisfy. Rather than disparaging the things that people who defend the family in its current form want to preserve, Brenner and Holmstrom want to build political momentum to extend the values now located exclusively in family life solidarity, respect, and commitment to others development across a society [which] requires the elimination of the family in its meaning as a special place for those values.

The nuclear family does not just hold the promise of fulfilling needs of love and kinship, but as an institution it is built on intersecting racism, sexism, and homophobia. As Melinda Cooper points out, for example, welfare restructuring in the United States explicitly enforced a particular model of the married nuclear family that would exclude African-American single mothers from receiving benefits. Defending the monogamous, heterosexual, many-children family is therefore not a neutral act of defending the right to a safe and cozy home but is more often than not tied up in other conservative political goals. Thinking about organizing intimacy and care beyond the family is less about taking away safety and coziness than it is about extending those very same conditions to everyone regardless of how they live and love.

If the family is supposed to be a haven in a heartless world, what kind of world would be so heartless as to require it? It is here that we need to start thinking about the family in the context of the individualism and precarity that neoliberalism is exacerbating. In their manifesto, Feminism for the 99%, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Battacharya, and Nancy Fraser point towards the imperative of individual responsibility on the back of which many states have carried out neoliberal privatization and deregulation of welfare and care services. In some cases, they argue, it has marketized public services, turning them into direct profit streams: in others, it has shunted them back to individual families, forcing them and especially the women within them to bear the entire burden of care.

Societies which rely on the fact that the family has to be the only site of loving and caring relationships are inherently unequal and undermine solidarity. The family then becomes oppressive because leaving it is made harder and harder which undermines the formal equalities that Western democracies pride themselves on. At the same time, precariously employed migrant workers bear the brunt of the material and cultural devaluing of caring labor beyond the family.

Thinking about family abolition in the time of a global health crisis puts its finger in exactly this wound carved out by our need for care and neoliberal precarity. In the Netherlands, for example, the Dutch prime minister has called on his citizens to act like responsible grown-ups as we all participate in what he has dubbed an intelligent lockdown. This rhetoric references a particular kind of citizen who is able-bodied and invulnerable. This is the person who in normal times would show up to work even if they have a cold, because to be responsible in this context is really to be unable to afford staying home from work when sick because bills keep piling up and children need to be fed. Now when showing up to work is not possible at all, this potentially challenges business as usual. However, this is disavowed, for example when all the government does is to suggest compensating loss of income through the closing of the service sector merely by taking out more loans, which has been the official recommendation has been for students.

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Family abolition isn't about ending love and care. It's about extending it to everyone - Open Democracy

ByJubin Katiraie

Contrary to Iranian officials claims, the rate of infection with the novel coronavirus among Iranian families has increased. The authorized representative of the Health Ministry in Gilan Province Mohammad Hossein Ghorbani acknowledged 700 new cases in the province over four days.

Abolition of traffic restrictions between the provinces was a strategic mistake, Ghorbani said.

After the normalization of traffic, most of the new patients are in the family area. In fact, citizens have taken part in family gatherings and meetings as normal situations, which led to an increase of the infection with the coronavirus among families, the spokesman added.

He also stated that Given the normalizing of traffic and participating in tourists, the coronas second wave is more likely to emerge. Ghorbani blamed the National Counter Coronavirus Task Force for reopening cities gate on April 19. Reopening provinces gates persuaded the people that the situation has become normal, which caused a peak of infection in several cities like Loushan, Astara, and Roudsar, he continued.

New infections, of course, are not limited to Gilan province alone. Massoud Younesian, a member of the science committee of Tehrans Medical Science University, criticized authorities secrecy. The actual number of the coronavirus victims in Iran is about 20 times more than what is reported [by officials], Setareh-e Sobh daily quoted Yousefian as saying on April 25.

I believe that [official] statistics are systematically much less than the reality [Coronavirus test kits] are not sensitive enough and diagnose only half of the cases. Also, [hospitals] are testing half of the bedridden people. It can be said that the real statistics are about 20 times more than official reports, if we accepted that only 20 percent of patients have been hospitalized and half of them are tested and a half of tested are positive, Younesian added.

On March 9, Hadi Mirhashemi, member of the science committee of Beheshtis Medical Science University, announced that only 20 percent of infected people with the COVID-19 are bedridden in hospitals.

Additionally, Dr. Mohammad Reza Nikbakht, head of the Medical Science University in Lorestan province, blamed the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) and the Health Ministrys security sector for concealing the real figures about the coronavirus.

In our country, everything is ordered from above. The SNSC and the security of the Health Ministry ordered us not to announce the corona casualties. Now, all provinces do not announce stats, said Nikbakht on April 25.

In this respect, Ali Reza Zali, the head of the counter coronavirus task force in Tehran, realized that the number of new corona patients is increasing in Tehran. Reopening the parks has sent a wrong message to the people while citizens imagined that Tehrans pandemic situations have changed, Zali said on April 25.

On April 19, the head of Tehrans Council Mohsen Hashemi described the Health Ministrys stats about the coronavirus outbreak as fictional in a pubic session of the council. Members of the council are concerned that these stats create the impression of normalization and pave the way for making decisions for removing restrictions, Hashemi said.

Earlier, on April 13, the Social Studies Office of the Parliament Research Center released a report about countering the coronavirus outbreak in the country. At the time, the office estimated the real number of the COVID-19 fatalities at more than 8,600 people, around two times more than the Ministrys stats.

Notably, on the same day, the Iranian opposition group, Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), announced, Over 27,000 people have died of the coronavirus in 267 cities checkered across all of Irans 31 provinces.

The number of cases reported could represent only about a fifth of the real numbers, said Dr. Rick Brennan, Director of Emergency Operations in the World Health Organizations (WHO) on March 17, after returning from a mission to Iran.

Also, on April 24, a medical worker from Mashhad city, northwestern Iran, reported that the rate of the positive test has soared since last week. The source said, Only in one day, 90 persons tested positive of the COVID-19 among 120 suspect clients.

However, Iranian officials downplayed real figures to send millions of people to work and resume financial activities. In reality, the ayatollahs and their appointees failed to manage quarantine policies and other precautionary measures to contain the coronavirus.

Therefore, they pushed the people to dangerous workplaces and factories and lifted social distancing by making hollow claims. The Iranian government that faces the public ire against its irresponsible policies and wasting national resources on adventurism factually prompted more hatred by the people. Truly, the ayatollahs have ignited a new round of protests and uprisings by resuming their bankrupt economic activities.

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Iran: 30,000 People at Risk of Contracting Coronavirus After Easing of Social Distancing Rules

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Increase in Coronavirus Infections Among Iranian Families - Iran Focus

SUMMARY

This reality of our current existence has lured rogue employers into taking advantage when our attention is elsewhere.

So, while we are trying to protect ourselves from COVID-19, employees are equally vulnerable to unfair termination.

Rogue employers dont mind if they kick us when we are down. Thats precisely what we have seen them do as Covid-19 continues to wreck havoc on the employment relationship in the country. Organizations of all sizes have been forced to rearrange their operations and even allow employees to work from home in order to keep some level of business operation.

This reality of our current existence has lured rogue employers into taking advantage when our attention is elsewhere. So, while we are trying to protect ourselves from COVID-19, employees are equally vulnerable to unfair termination. Before the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in the country, employees were already faced with a significant threat to loss of employment through redundancy. For this reason, it is important to know whether your employer is following the law.

Although a significant number of employers have resorted to redundancy, few, if any, are willing to follow the strict procedures provided under the employment laws. But what is redundancy? Simply put, redundancy occurs when an employer reduces the workforce because a position is no longer required.

However, Section 2 of the Employment Act defines redundancy as The loss of employment, occupation, job or career by involuntarily means through no fault of the employee involving termination of employment at the initiative of the employer, where the services of an employee are superfluous and the practices commonly known as the abolition of office, job or occupation and loss of employment.

In Kenya, the basic statutory right of every employee who has been dismissed by reason of redundancy is to a redundancy payment from the employer. However, the employee must prove that there was redundancy, and he or she is eligible to bring a claim for the same. Section 40 of the Employment Act, 2007 provides the procedure for termination of employment on account of redundancy.

Section 40(1) provides that an employer shall not terminate a contract of service of a unionized employee on account of redundancy unless the employer has notified the trade union to which the employee is a member, of the impending redundancy followed by another notice to the labor officer in charge of the area where the employee is employed. The notice must state the reasons for, and the extend of the intended redundancy.

The two notices must be given not less than a month prior to the date of the intended termination on account of redundancy. Further, where an employee is not a member of a trade union, the employer must notify the employee personally in writing and the labor office.

It only becomes redundancy when that particular position disappears. Where an employee is dismissed, and the position is filled by another person, it becomes a dismissal for purposes of unfair termination. An employee who is rendered redundant has a right to a redundancy payment. The payment is not necessarily to give the employee a financial cushion until he or she finds another job but simply to compensate him for a loss of right he had in the job, which has now disappeared.

The employer is also required to have due regard to the seniority in time and skill, ability, and reliability of each employee in the selection of employees to be declared redundant. Seniority here speaks to the length of time served and the age of the employee to be rendered redundant. It is also important to prepare the employee psychologically so as to mitigate the ramification of unplanned loss of income.

The employer must equally take care not to place an employee at a disadvantage for being or not being a member of a trade union. Where there is in existence a collective agreement between an employer and a trade union setting out terminal benefits payable upon redundancy, the employer is obliged to abide by that.

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Unlike normal termination, the procedure under section 40 of the employment is mandatory. Payment cannot be used as a substitute for the procedures provided under section 40. Employers who flaunt this procedure are simply setting the company up for action for unfair termination and or discrimination claims.

By Oscar Onyango

Simiyu Wekesa Advocates

Email: [emailprotected]

Tel:0700578660

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Employee redundancy: Why employers must follow the law even in the time of COVID-19 - The Standard

Economy April 27, 2020 Dimitris Fasfalis

What should we think of the recent praise of the welfare state and public services coming from different voices among the ruling classes in the world? Their conversion is as sudden as miraculous; they recall much better the holy history of the apostles than the secular history of societies.

The Financial Times editorial of April 3rd, entitled Virus lays bare the frailty of the social contract, offers an exemplary case. It says:

Radical reforms reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades will need to be put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments rather than liabilities, and look for ways to make labour markets less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.

Here are words and expressions which had been tabooed over the past thirty years by neoliberal dogma and which have been, and still are, part of the common repertoire of trade unions and social movements: public services, redistribution, privileges () in question, basic income, wealth taxes. Written in the Financial Times, they astonish the reader.

As much as French president Emmanuel Macron surprised French public opinion during his intervention on March 12, 2020, especially when he explained: What this pandemic is already revealing is that free healthcare without income conditions, career or profession, our welfare state, are not costs or burdens but precious goods, essential assets when fate strikes. What this pandemic reveals is that some goods and services must be placed outside the laws of the market.

In the same manner, the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, has called for the cancellation of poor countries debts. Bill Gates and Emmanuel Macron did likewise, more specifically, for poor African states for the latter.

How should we interpret these ideological reversals beyond condemning their hypocrisy?

First, an initial critical reflex consists in not remaining prisoners of ruling-class discourse. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. This means confronting these ruling-class discourses with the exercise of power and the policies implemented. In his time, Nicolas Sarkozy also said he was in favor of a refounding of capitalism, of regulating finance and of a new balance between the market and the state. It was in September 2008 in his speech in Toulon.

Then, a second critical axis of current ruling-class reformism is to reveal its partial, inconsistent and, in reality, profoundly conservative character. Marx and Engels offer an important critical resource in this sense when he describes the features of conservative or bourgeois socialism in The Communist Manifesto (1848):

A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.

To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.

We may cite Proudhons Philosophie de la Misre as an example of this form.

The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government.

The context today is, of course, not the same. The current world is indeed profoundly different from the world in which this text of Marx and Engels is inscribed. However, it is important to remember the following common point which allows us to grasp the news of the excerpt quoted above: today, as in the late 1840s, individuals and groups of the ruling classes are trying to find solutions to the most manifest social dysfunctions which endanger the social body as a whole. Unlike the reforms put forward by the class struggles from below, the reforms proposed by the ruling classes their socialism aim to make temporary concessions and to intervene in social relations in favor of the greatest number in order to save themselves and consolidate the established order and the domination of the possessing classes. Marxs criticism offers the possibility of understanding the blind spots of dominant reformist discourses in order, precisely, to emancipate ourselves from them, and thus, thwart the traps of domination.

Dimitris Fasfalis is a history teacher. He currently lives in Paris and has written for a number of left publications, including Socialist Voice, Links, Presse-toi gauche, Z Mag and Europe solidaire sans frontires.

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Here Comes Bourgeois Socialism Again - The Bullet - Socialist Project

Of course, selective enforcement of the Constitution was not exactly new in the 1920s. The 11 states in the old Confederacy had essentially voided the 14th and 15th amendments through Jim Crow laws and state-sanctioned terrorism by white supremacists. The 14th Amendments right to equal protection under the law and the 15th Amendments abolition of whites-only voting laws were little more than cruel jokes in the South and in other states as well.

But Smiths defiance of the 18th Amendment was of another order, in part because there was greater national support for Prohibition than there was for equal rights for African Americans, and in part because of who he wasa child of the city, a Roman Catholic, and the grandson of immigrants at a time when the country was about to close the country to most immigrants. A newspaper in upstate Auburn said of Smiths flouting of federal law, The opening gun at Fort Sumter did not echo a more outright defiance.

Smiths decision to flout a government order he despised transformed him from a regional curiosity to a national figure just as he was beginning to prepare for the 1924 presidential campaign. He would seek the White House three timesin 1924, 1928 and 1932and while he never won the prize, he became a beloved symbol of the new America that was taking shape in the nations cities as the children of Ellis Island came of age, politically and culturally, in the 1920s. Breaking the rules worked for Smith.

***

The 18th Amendment, which outlawed the manufacture, transportation and salebut not consumptionof intoxicating spirits, was ratified in January 1919 and took effect the following January. Congress then passed the federal Volstead Act, which gave Washington the power to enforce the amendment and set penalties for those caught in the act, and it defined intoxicating spirits as any beverage containing more than 0.5 percent alcohol by volume. It became law over Woodrow Wilsons veto in October 1919.

After Republicans took control of Albany in the Warren Harding landslide of 1920, they passed several bills that mimicked most aspects of the federal Volstead Act, empowering police in New York to enforce Prohibition. Many considered the statute unnecessary, but the dry forces in New York were intent on making a statement, and indeed included even tougher language than the federal law. For example, the New York enforcement bills, known collectively at the Mullan-Gage Act, declared that possession of a hip flask containing booze was the equivalent of carrying an unlicensed handgun.

The legislation pleased the powerful Anti-Saloon League and rural portions of upstate New York, where evangelical voters and the Ku Klux Klan looked askance (to put it mildly) at the growing power of Catholics and Jews in the states urban areas, particularly New York City. The dry forces associated drinking with foreign cultures. Prohibition, they argued, would help Americanize these alien peoples.

Suffice it to say, this didnt sit well with people like Al Smith, who embraced city life and all its racial, ethnic and religious complexities. He recaptured the governors office in 1922 after losing reelection two years earlier, and his fellow Democratsmany of whom were Catholics and Jews from the citieswon control of the Legislature, thanks in part to urban opposition to Prohibition.

Lawmakers did not waste time. A bill to repeal Mullan-Gage was introduced on January 3, 1923, as the new session was beginning and on the same day that the newly elected governor of Connecticut, Charles Templeton, declared that Prohibition was one of the greatest sociological experiments ever undertaken by any nation.

The repeal bill passed the Legislature in early Maythe Senates back-slapping majority leader, Jimmy Walker, helped win over some crucial but wavering votes in his chamberand was dispatched to Smiths desk. And thats when the eyes of the nation turned to the governors second-floor office in New Yorks state Capitol.

Smith despised Prohibitionhe continued to serve cocktails in his office in the state Capitoland resented the self-righteousness of its advocates. Passage of the Mullan-Gage repeal would have sent a signal far and wide that New York would no longer enforce laws it detested.

But thats precisely what worried Smith. Smith was a consensus-seeker who, as governor, found ways to work with Republican majorities in the Legislature. But there was no room for splitting the difference now. A Tennessee newspaper compared New Yorks attitude toward Prohibition to South Carolinas assertion in the early 1830s that it could void federal lawsmore specifically, tariffsit didnt like. The bitter nullification crisis was a precursor to South Carolina secession in 1860, and most Americans knew how that ended. While nobody was predicting that Smiths decision would lead to civil war, some feared repeal of Mullan-Gage would lead to more widespread defiance of the Volstead Act, leading to the kinds of bitter divisions Smith preferred to bridge rather than exacerbate.

There was another complication as well. Smith intended to run for president in 1924, and he would need support from the Democratic Partys dry-as-dust factions in the South and West to win the nomination. Then again, his base in the cities of the Northeast and the Midwest expected him to sign the repeal. If he failed to stand up for those who saw him as their champion, theyd be unlikely to stand up for him at the convention.

There was little question that he wanted to sign, but hed have to think it over.

During a month of deliberation, the national press focused intently on the looming rebellion in Albany, and some of the countrys leading political figures warned Smith of the stakes in play.

This disposition of the Mullan-Gage repeal bill will show the mettle of the man, Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter wrote to Smiths closest political adviser, Belle Moskowitz. If he vetoes the repeal, he will be damned for a comparatively brief time if he signs it, he would be damned for good.

Franklin Roosevelt, who would one day succeed Smith as governor and would, as president, appoint Frankfurter to the Supreme Court, was more sympathetic to Smiths dilemma. He wrote: Frankly, it is going to hurt you nationally a whole lot to sign the Repealer Bill. On the other hand I well realize that the vote in all the cities of this state will shriek to heaven if you were to veto the Bill.

Ultimately, Smith took the advice of his political mentor, Tammany Hall boss Charles Francis Murphy, a saloonkeeper by tradebefore, that is, his trade was declared illegal. Al, Murphy said at a summit meeting with the governor on Long Island, you must sign this bill. Murphy was a taciturn sorthe saw no reason to explain his reasoning because it was obvious. The people who put Smith back in the governors office knew they were voting for the wettest of the wet, and they expected him to act accordingly, the presidency be damned.

Smith went through the motions of holding a public hearing in the state Assembly chamber in Albany. The dry forces packed the house, some of them bringing along sandwiches and beveragessoft, of courseas they settled in for the political equivalent of a revival meeting. One of the many anti-liquor speakers said the governor had to choose between the Star-Spangled Banner and The Sidewalks of New Yorka song celebrating New York City that was long associated with Smith.

Toward the end, though, a prominent Republican, Thomas Douglas Robinson, a nephew of Theodore Roosevelt, delivered an impassioned speech denouncing the Prohibitionists as bigots who claimed to have a 100 percent mortgage on law and order and Americanism. He had voted in favor of repeal, Robinson said, and did so as an American. Robinsons rebuke was noteworthy given his lineage, for he was saying that the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who dominated the dry movement had no monopoly on the countrys values and culture.

Less than 24 hours later, on June 1, 1923, Al Smith signed the repeal bill. It contained the caveat that New York police would cooperate with federal agents if requested to do so, but officers would no longer enforce Prohibition on their own. In cities across the state, drinkers tripped the light fantastic long into the night. In the heartland, however, New Yorks defiance inspired fear and resentmentlaw, order and the very foundations of what made America great were breaking down in the nations immigrant-filled cities. Smith, thundered the Kansas City Star, had done an anarchistic thing.

William Jennings Bryan, the spiritual leader of the Democratic Partys influential evangelical faction, took to the pages of the New York Times to pronounce his judgment of Smith and his ilk in the cities he had made a career denouncing. Smith, Bryan said, should expect resistance from the defenders of the home, the school and the Church.

Smith had been uncharacteristically silent in the face of the onslaught from beyond the Hudson River, but he couldnt resist taking Bryans bait. He issued a statement condemning the narrow and bigoted dry agenda, and then took note of Bryans three failed attempts at the presidency. Whenever the so-called Great Commoner presented himself to voters, Smith wrote, a wise and discriminating electorate usually takes care to see that Mr. Bryan stays at home.

Frankfurters bleak assessment of Smiths future proved incorrectfor the most part anyway. While Smith did not become the Democratic Partys presidential nominee in 1924, he was reelected as governor in a landslide over Theodore Roosevelt Jr. that year. And four years later, he won the prize that eluded him in 1924, becoming the first Catholic to win a major partys presidential nomination. Herbert Hoover trounced him in the general election, but it was Smiths religion more than his position on Mullan-Gage that became a defining issue of the campaign. Then again, urban Catholicism and defiance of the 18th Amendment were considered variations on the same un-American theme, at least in some portions of the country.

Smith is remembered today not only through the annual charity dinner in his name, but as one of the great governors of the 20th century, never mind that he was assailed as a virtual secessionist in 1923. The current governor, more than most of his predecessors, has kept Smiths memory aliveand not just through a virtual shrine in his inner office.

During his decade in Albany, Andrew Cuomo has overhauled New Yorks archaic restrictions on alcohol sales and production, leading to a tripling in the number of wineries, cideries, breweries and distilleries in the state.

And when he issued his stay-at-home orders last month, Cuomo not only declared liquor stores an essential business, but he allowed bars to serve drinks to go.

Al Smith would have signed that one, too.

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The Time a New York Governor Disobeyed the Federal Government - POLITICO

The national drive to reduce jail and prison populations is getting an unexpected nudge from the coronavirus pandemic, as many cities and counties across the country try to reduce exposure to the virus in crammed, unsanitary jails. One of their first targets: bail.

In New Orleans, some city judges are reducing some bail amounts to one-tenth of what they would otherwise be to let some people out. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the jails occupancy has reached a record low as people deemed non-threatening are being released without bail.

To bail-reform advocates across America, this change is a no-brainer: Why incarcerate anyone, pandemic or no, just because they cant post a cash bond? Their movement looked like a national wave just a couple of years ago, as states from Vermont and New Jersey to Alaska and Georgia rolled out new bail policies to reduce the number of people in jail. These ideas ranged from minor tweaks for only the lowest-level crimes to blanket eliminations of cash bail.

But just a few months ago, before the outbreak, that momentum hit a major roadblock. One of the most high-profile tests of bail reform, in New York state, sparked a political backlash and sent advocates into damage-control mode. In 2019, the New York legislature passed one of the most progressive bail-reform packages in the United States, abolishing bail for many misdemeanors and nonviolent crimes. Soon after the law went into effect, in January 2020, the New York Police Department released figures showing a spike in crime, and pointed the finger at the new, looser bail rules.

The crime figures have been disputed, but tabloid headlines and anti-reform voices in law enforcement jumped at the chance to fan the flames, and the new bail policies instantly lost popularity. The percentage of New Yorkers saying the changes would be good for the state dropped from 55 percent last year to 37 percent in January. Prominent politicians, including Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, backed a new bill to roll back many of the changes, which passed April 3.

Bail reformers across the country have been paying close attention. New York is certainly a cautionary tale, said Alec Karakatsanis, a reform advocate and executive director of the Civil Rights Corps, a criminal justice non-profit that has filed lawsuits challenging bail in several states.

Now many reformers across the country have begun regrouping and tweaking their plans in an effort to learn from past mistakes in bail reform packages, and looking hard at how to keep potential opponents in the fold. Even if you win a great legislative battle against them, said Karakatsanis, its not like they'll just go away.

In Illinois and Colorado, where legislators are working onbut havent passedbail-reform bills, proponents have zeroed in on new political tactics like getting more buy-in from police and prosecutors and building in time to educate the courts and the general public to try to stem some of the pushback. Importantly, lawmakers elsewhere are also betting that a quirk unique to New Yorks bail system made the state singularly vulnerable to a blowbackand theyre moving ahead in their own states undeterred.

Now, after the debate spurred by COVID-19, they might get their chance to deploy that new and improved playbook. It was a needed disruption to the direction that we were going in, and further evidence that having so many people in jails, in New York or anywhere, is a threat to public health, said Scott Roberts, senior criminal justice campaign director at the civil rights advocacy organization Color of Change. Thats true under normal circumstances, and we see how that can really heighten at a moment's notice.

Heres how bail works in most jurisdictions across the country today: Most people who are arrested and charged with crimes must put down a refundable deposit to ensure theyll show up for their court date instead of skipping town. This means either putting up their own cash, or paying a fee to a commercial bond company that posts bail on their behalf. People who cant pay bail or a bail bondsman remain in jail.

The commercial side has turned bail into a policy with its own lobby, adding friction to any reform efforts. This is nearly unique to the American legal system: Although the concept of bail has been around for centuries, and is expressly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, the first commercial bail companies in the United States did not emerge until the late 1800s. Today, though many countries continue to use cash bail, the United States, minus four states, and the Philippines are the only ones with a commercial bail industry.

Reform advocates say this creates unequal justice for rich and pooreffectively jailing un-convicted people simply because they dont have access to money at the right time. Staying in jail has cascading effects: While people are in jail awaiting trial, they cant work or spend time with their families; they face pressure to plead guilty just to avoid the misery of being locked up. Jailed defendants also often lose their jobs and suffer physical and emotional trauma.

From a public policy perspective, research suggests that the economic and emotional consequences of being jailed for bail leave people more desperate and unstable than they would have otherwise been, and may actually lead to more, not less crime.

Chicago native Flo, who asked to be identified by his abbreviated name out of concern about finding work, knows those consequences well. After a 2016 arrest for a burglary he attributed to a gambling addiction, he spent about two months in jail, unable to come up with the $7,500 in cash for his bail. He was released after the Chicago Community Bond Fund (CCBF), a non-profit that raises money to pay bail for defendants, tossed him a lifeline and paid his.

Jail takes a toll, Flo said. The turnout of your case can be dramatically different because you're under pressure. And when you go to court, youre ready to jump out of the window as they say, and take any plea deal just to go free.

If Flo hadnt gotten that bail, he wouldnt have been able to help his wife move when the couple was kicked out of their home; he would have been forced to make court appearances in an orange jumpsuit and shackles rather than a suit and tie. He kept working odd jobs in warehouses and construction, rather than staying in jail and costing taxpayers money. He eventually took a plea deal and served two years after credit for good behavior. If Flo had remained in jail awaiting trial, the data suggests he might also have received a longer sentence: Researchers have found that pretrial detainees have a lot less leverage in bargaining with prosecutors when they are in custody versus out of it.

When it comes to the number of people in local jails, bail isnt just a side issue: Its the main driver. There are typically more than 700,000 people in U.S. jails, and about two-thirds of them have not yet been convicted of a crime and are there mostly because they couldnt make bail. Its an expensive policy: According to a 2014 Brookings Institution study, local corrections systems cost taxpayers at least $22 billion a year. And these numbers are completely separate from people serving sentences in prisons.

On these moral and public policy grounds, activist groups and legislators in many parts of the country have been pushing to eliminate cash bail entirely. Some seek to replace it with algorithmic risk assessments, electronic monitoring and other technical innovations. Many just want to see as many people released pretrial as possible, and think the criminal justice system shouldnt try to predict what people who are presumed innocent are or are not likely to do if released. Virtually all reform advocates seek to release defendants on the least restrictive possible means that ensure they show up for courtsometimes simply a signed promise that they will. Dozens of nonprofits have popped up to pay money bonds on behalf of pretrial defendants in a push to empty jails.

Few efforts represented as sweeping a change as New Yorks reform. The law, which passed in April 2019, limited the number of crimes for which judges could set bail, mostly to violent felonies. Almost everyone elsethose who make up 90 percent of arrests in the statecould walk free while they waited for their trial date, though judges could impose strict monitoring conditions. For the first three months the law was in effect, from January through March, New Yorks jail population dropped sharply: At the end of 2019, the jail population across the state was close to 20,000; for the first three months of 2020, it was around 15,000 and continuing to shrink.

And then came news of a crime spike. A number of hate crimes had shaken New York over the holidays, including a woman who was arrested three times for assaulting Orthodox Jewish women in one week in Brooklyn; outlets noted that she had been released from jail under the states new bail reform laws. In early March, the NYPD released a report showing that crime in February 2020 was up 22.5 percent compared to February 2019. In the report, the department explicitly blamed the uptick on criminal justice reforms, including the bail reform law. According to the department, in the first two months of the year, 482 people who had been arrested on charges where cash bail was prohibited went on to commit 846 new crimes.

The reported spike got wall-to-wall coverage in New Yorks tabloids, with headlines like No Bail Madness and Revolving Door Lunacy. Legal aid groups disputed those numbers, pointing out that arraignmentsthe court appearances where bail is generally setwere down 20 percent at the same time, and suggested that perhaps officers were making bad arrests to make the stats look bad and that prosecutors had to ultimately toss out those charges.

Politically, though, the damage was done. Prosecutors joined the police in blaming bail reform, and the governor, who had supported the measure, vowed not to sign any 2020 budget that didnt reform the reforms. Dermot Shea, the New York City police commissioner, took to the New York Times with an op-ed headlined New Yorks New Bail Laws Harm Public Safety. The Senate minority leader in New York, John J. Flanagan of Long Island, issued frequent press releases, connecting grisly crimes to recent reforms.

Bail advocates were furious. As they saw it, the policy hadnt been in place long enough to know what the impact on crimeor anything elsemight be. If we had been able to give those changes time and space to take hold, Im very confident that we would have seen how right we were, said Scott Hechinger, a New York bail reform advocate. The problem was, we didnt have patience. Instead, by Hechingers read, fearmongering took over. Under the old system those same individuals could, and sometimes did make bail, get out and commit a new crimebut news reports did not routinely highlight such cases. According to an analysis by a pair of city councilmembers in Queens, people released under the new law made up, at most, 7 percent of the increase in the crime rate. A group of 45 law professors signed a letter to the New York Press Club calling on the citys media to provide accurate and objective context in coverage of criminal justice reforms, saying the stories were designed to stoke panic and calling them Willie Horton-like claims.

But these advocates couldnt stop the rollback. In early April, the legislature amended the bail reform law with a number of changes set to take effect in July. The changes expand the number of crimes for which judges can set bail to include burglary, vehicular assault and sex trafficking, among others, and crimes committed by a persistent felony offender. And while advocates were crushed by the setback, the move was still insufficient for the most fervent opponents of the law. This approach does not come close to addressing the problems w/ the law. What about serious offenses that didn't make the cut? the Police Benevolent Association, a union for NYPD officers, tweeted in response to the changes in early April.

In other states, some of which had seen years of groundwork on new bail laws, reform advocates watched this backlash and snapped to attention.

Colorado is one state where the lessons of New York could reshape the bail debate. Gov. Jared Polis recently told a justice-system forum that he would like to see Colorado lead the nation in criminal-justice reform, and in 2019, state lawmakers considered dozens of crime and justice billsmore than some lawmakers said theyd seen in any single legislative session.

One bill that failed during that session, though, would have eliminated cash bail for low-level crimes: It passed the state House but died without a vote in the Senate. Lawmakers there are hopeful about reviving the bill this year and see lessons in the way the reforms played out in New York.

Were trying to avoid the pendulum effect, said Colorado Democratic state Sen. Mike Weissman, who was helping draft the law. If youre making a reform change for a year or two, and then, you have that revert when political winds change, then you're not really doing what you wanted. So I think most people around here are trying to dig in deeper and harder, get it right the first time and not have it swing back.

Essays by people in prison and others who have experience with the criminal justice system

Supporters there are also quick to note that, in a state with less than one-third the population of New York, many of the main actors in the justice system know each other, which, some hope, might make the road to reform a little smoother. Several Colorado lawmakers pointed to the broad coalition assembled to help guide the bail reform proposal, including high ranking judges, prosecutors, police chiefs and sheriffs. While their support is far from unanimous, its more buy-in than existed in New York.

Matt Soper, a Republican state representative in Colorado and sponsor of the bill last year, pointed to the defeat last session as an opportunity to fine-tune the proposal, adding concessions that could appease some of those powerful judicial system actors. Soper highlighted tweaks in the 2020 version of the legislation that include making it a crime for a defendant released before trial to miss a court date. Theres a lot of those little moving parts here that you don't see in New York or California, Soper said. California passed a law abolishing all cash bail in 2018, but its implementation has been delayed pending the outcome of a state referendum on the changes in the fall.

In many ways you make a bill a lot better by having it fail several times, by being forced to work on it. You get to see what it is that causes everyone the most pain, Soper said. He added that the Colorado package will also set aside time and money for training judges and other members of the courts on the new law, something critics have said the New York reform did not sufficiently account for.

I think that New York situation highlights the extreme importance of allowing time for implementation, said Amber Widgery, a policy analyst at the National Conference of State Legislatures. She pointed to New Jersey as an example of how to make reforms last. The state virtually eliminated cash bail in 2017, has seen jail populations drop by about 30 percent and hasnt seen nearly the same backlash as in New York.

The rollout in New Jersey included training for judges and their staff on the technical aspects of the new law, like how to use new computerized risk assessment tools, and on the changes to state court rules. The state also built a new pretrial services department to orchestrate and track pre-trial release. Widgery said those efforts across a two-and-a-half-year span before the new law went into effect helped to create a culture change within the state judiciary. That is something that legislators who are eyeing reforms in this coming year are paying a lot of attention to, Widgery said.

But in general, lawmakers in Illinois and Colorado are feeling confident that they wont face the same kind of backlash, arguing that New York has a unique legal environment that contributed to the blowback. Thanks to a 1971 law, New York is the only state in the country where judges dont have the authority to consider a persons possible dangerousness in determining the conditions of their release before trial. When reform negotiations in the state began and the door was opened to modifying that system, some lawmakers wanted to add dangerousness as a sanctioned factor for pre-trial release, in exchange for the total abolition of bail in the state. Progressive reformers bristledarguing that too often, judges ascribe dangerousness in ways that amplify the racial discrimination that pervades the justice system. Ultimately, they pursued a compromise that did not add dangerousness but preserved bail only for the most serious crimes.

This made it easy for reform opponents in New York to argue that dangerous criminals were being let out of jail along with the nonviolent ones, and that the reforms had served to hamstring judges ability to keep the public safe.

In states like Colorado and Illinois, where judges have long had the discretion to consider dangerousness, the starting point for reform negotiations looks different. The Illinois Coalition to End Money Bond, for instance, of which the Chicago bail fund is a member, accepts the possibility of preventative detention on a case-by-case basis to ensure community safety and the defendants appearance in court as a last resort.

Sharlyn Grace, executive director of the Chicago bail fund and an advocate of bail reform in that state, said shes not at all discouraged by the experiment in New York. With the support of Illinois Gov. J.B. Prizker and legislators like state Sen. Robert Peters, she expects the state to pass substantial bail reforms this year, or whenever the legislature returns to business after the coronavirus crisis.

These differences from New York, and the more successful test cases like New Jersey, had advocates pushing forward with bail reform changes with confidence in their own states in recent weeks. And now, those seeking the maximum possible relief for poor pretrial detainees may just have a new wind at their back, one blowing a lot harder than the chill of New Yorks backlash. When I asked Stan Hilkey, executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Safety, if COVID-19 might change the bail reform debate, he said recently released inmates could make a good case.

If they show up for court and dont commit any more crime or victimize people, he said, the data in the coming months and years could write a very supportive story for Colorados efforts to reduce crime and incarceration.

Peters, the Illinois state senator, said the coronavirus pandemic, and the threat to people in jails, strengthens the case for ending cash bond. In his Cook County district, nearly 400 people in jail have tested positive for the virus as of Sunday, out of a population around 5,500, far outpacing the rate of infection in the city. Six detainees so far have died after testing positive.

When we come back in session, advocates can look at how many people died in the jail who should have never been in there.

An earlier version of this story misspelled Stan Hilkey's first name.

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New York Rolled Back Bail Reform. What Will The Rest Of The Country Do? - The Marshall Project