Working conditions for migrants in German slaughterhouses are under the spotlight after more than 200 workers tested positive for COVID-19 at a factory in Coesfeld, in the west of the country.

Coronavirus outbreaks have also been identified in at least two other meat processing plants in Germany. The majority of those infected were from Romania and Bulgaria.

Officials say the virus most likely spread through shared staff housing, and the outbreaks are drawing attention to the industrys difficult working conditions.

"Workers in the German meat industry work very often through subcontractors, not for the slaughterhouses themselves, and the working conditions at these subcontractors are often very, very bad," said Szabolcs Sepsi, a counsellor at DGB Fair Mobility, which defends migrant workers rights in Germany.

These workers contend with "extremely long working hours" insecure jobs and often squalid housing, Sepsi told Euronews in a live interview, adding that they typically share their bedroom with two or three other people and are shuttled to work together.

"Their living conditions simply do not allow social distancing measures," he said.

German broadcaster Deutsche Welle spoke to meat workers crammed in decrepit homes, writing that the outbreaks exposed "modern slavery" in the industry.

There have been outbreaks of COVID-19 at slaughterhouses in a number of countries in recent weeks, mostly in the United States but also in the UK, Ireland, Australia and Spain.

The trend is starting to expose an uncomfortable reality: much of the cheap meat on Western supermarket shelves is slaughtered by migrant workers who earn low wages, often live together in dorms and operate in crowded working conditions even in the midst of a pandemic.

"Its mostly the workers in the meat industry and other food industries who are actually paying the price for this cheap meat and for the cheap food," Sepsi said.

After years of debate and controversy, Germany introduced a minimum wage in 2015. It stands at around 1,500 per month gross for full-time workers.

But Sepsi says the various laws introduced over the past decade to improve the lives of migrant workers in the German meatpacking industry only address the symptoms and not the root of the problem: the fact that most slaughterhouse workers are hired by subcontractors that try to undercut each other.

"We believe the slaughtering companies have to hire people directly and give them direct jobs," he said, adding this would help workers afford their own apartments instead of having to live together in dormitories during a pandemic.

You can watch the interview in the video player above.

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COVID-19 outbreaks in German slaughterhouses expose grim working conditions in meat industry - Euronews

(Kenan Kitchen, Unsplash)

This article is brought to you thanks to the collaboration ofThe European Stingwith theWorld Economic Forum.

As COVID-19 upturns supply chains around the world, consumers are increasingly conscious of where their food comes from.

Shoppers in the developed world, used to supermarkets stocking seasonal food all year round, faced empty shelves in late March as retailers grappled with a spike in demand and uneven supply from producers struggling under new lockdown rules.

At the same time, dairy farmers saw prices collapse as restaurants and cafes closed their doors indefinitely, causing a 70% drop in demand from the food sector. Many were left with no option but to dump unsold milk. Now there are fears that fruit and vegetables will be left to rot in fields, as travel bans to curb the spread of COVID-19 have left farms across western Europe short of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers.

In the UK, some 70,000-80,000 seasonal pickers are usually needed, but travel restrictions mean migrant workers cant fill the vacancies. So the government has launched a Pick for Britain scheme to redeploy students and furloughed workers on farms across the country. There are concerns however, over how sustainable this will be if lockdown is lifted in June and many are able to return to their jobs.

Spain, the EUs biggest exporter of fruit and vegetables, faces similar shortages. Its government has said it will allow illegal immigrants to take farm jobs alongside the unemployed, an idea also being aired in Italy. Italys agriculture minister, Teresa Bellanova, said: For those who do not have legal documents, but who have perhaps worked in the fields, they should become legalized.

Germany and France have launched job-matching schemes, appealing for people who have lost work during the pandemic to plug the gap. The German government launched a website called The Land Helps to link farmers with the millions of people whose workplaces have closed, and with students whose exams have been cancelled.

Around 70 people from migrant and asylum seeker shelters in Seine-et-Marne, east of Paris, responded to calls to harvest berries and asparagus. The Guardian reports that they will receive contracts and at least the minimum wage. But the scheme is fraught with difficulties, with refugee advocates worried about modern slavery.

In the US, many farms are responding to the crisis by selling direct to consumers, a trend some small-scale producers hope will outlast the pandemic. Simon Huntley, founder of Harvie, a company that helps farmers market and sell their products online, told Reuters: I think we are getting a lot of new people into local food that have never tried buying from their local farmer before.

Many are adopting a community-supported agriculture (CSA) programme. One CSA in Wisconsin is using Harvie to offer customers in the area a selection of 95 products, from vegetables to honey and meat. Chris Duke, one of the farmers, said the farms made about $7,000 between them over one week in April, which is huge for a season when not much is growing.

In India, there is growing interest in a decades-old programme for farmers to supply fresh produce directly to consumers. Back in 2000, the government in Maharashtra State created smaller, less congested weekly markets in urban areas where growers can sell their produce, rather than going through large wholesalers.

During the pandemic, most producers are minimizing contact by selling pre-packed, customized packets of vegetables. In several areas of Pune and Mumbai, these decentralized markets have given way to growers delivering directly to the gates of housing societies. Elsewhere in Maharashtra, the Paani Foundation is collecting surplus produce from farmers for distribution, in order to reduce crowds at vegetable markets and ensure almost door-to-door delivery.

What is the World Economic Forum doing about the coronavirus outbreak?

A new strain of Coronavirus, COVID 19, is spreading around the world, causing deaths and major disruption to the global economy.

Responding to this crisis requires global cooperation among governments, international organizations and the business community, which is at the centre of the World Economic Forums mission as the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation.

The Forum has created the COVID Action Platform, a global platform to convene the business community for collective action, protect peoples livelihoods and facilitate business continuity, and mobilize support for the COVID-19 response. The platform is created with the support of the World Health Organization and is open to all businesses and industry groups, as well as other stakeholders, aiming to integrate and inform joint action.

As an organization, the Forum has a track record of supporting efforts to contain epidemics. In 2017, at our Annual Meeting, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was launched bringing together experts from government, business, health, academia and civil society to accelerate the development of vaccines. CEPI is currently supporting the race to develop a vaccine against this strand of the coronavirus.

3. Living the good life, vicariously

Meanwhile in France, city-dwellers who have been locked down for two months are being offered a taste of the good life via a new television service. Cultivons Nous.tv is styled as a Netflix for farming. It streams news, documentaries and clips filmed by farmers, to give a true picture of the hard work that goes into feeding the nation.

The subscription platform has been set up by Edouard Bergeon, a farmer and film director, and Guillaume Canet, a French film star, with the aim of educating the urban population.

Read more from the original source:

How farms are getting closer to consumers in the pandemic - The European Sting

Covid-19 is ravaging vulnerable communities, and can be prevented if the root causes of inequality are addressed.

'Inequality' is an insurgent word pervading popular and policy discourse since the 2008 financial crisis. From discussions surrounding Occupy Wall Street to Thomas Pikettys widely acclaimed book Capital (centered around income inequality), the concept of social, economic and political inequality rears its head in several contexts.

While someBritish politicians have implied and the New York governor has referred to the virus as the great equaliser, others have called it the inequality virus revealing the sharp equity gradient in societies globally.

While income inequality alone is a definite fault-line through which the coronavirus is expressing its devastation, a nuanced narrative is emerging through the statistics coming out of countries with marginalised ethnic minorities like the United Kingdom and the United States.

These stories are diverse but share some core themes which point to disparities in survival which follow racial or ethnic lines.

Available statistics are often rudimentary but aggregated data from some US states which have accounted for race and ethnicity are gradually emerging. These (as of April 30th) reveal a disturbing picture that black Americans across most states are experiencing coronavirus related deaths at elevated rates, relative to their population, in 31 of the 39 jurisdictions as analysed by the APM research lab.

Interestingly, a similar trend is noted in the UK. A recent analysis of four datasets reveal that the black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities have experienced disproportionately higher deaths among NHS staff as well as hospital and community deaths from the coronavirus.

Remarkably, the first 10 doctors to die from the coronavirus in the UK were all from minority communities.

These statistics are jarring, but come as no surprise. Racial and ethnic minority groupings face increased risk from coronavirus related death and illness (morbidity and mortality) through three major downstream pathways: increased direct exposure to the virus, poorer baseline health status including increased chronic conditions and finally through less accessible and lower quality healthcare.

As decontextualised risk factors it may seem logical that interventions at these levels would lead to health improvements and hopefully lower overall risk when faced with a future pandemic.

The problem though, is that these risks, like the coronavirus, are not neutral functions of nature or inevitable biology. They are a consequence of upstream determinants which are very much influenced by human intent.

It could be argued that these poor health outcomes in ethnic minority groupings could be accounted for by a lower socioeconomic status - since a poorer health status and lower income levels have well established associations.

However, US studies around the racial opportunity gap show us that when each income level is analysed, health disparities between black Americans and white racial groupings persist. Many of the upstream factors accounting for this are related to spatial issues linked to segregation.

Health inequalities have been proven to follow racial lines through various, and often interlinked pathways both at an individual level - through the individual experience of racial discrimination having a proven direct effect on health - as well as at the structural level.

Structural rot

Structural racism that perpetuates health inequalities have some similarities when looking at the US and the UK. These root issues include education, employment, income, housing, and proximity to pollution.

These factors place disadvantaged populations at greater risk of chronic and underlying health conditions which may allow for greater morbidity and mortality from the coronavirus.

BAME groupings, both in the US and the UK face increased exposure to the coronavirus as a result of the areas in which they live. In urban areas, these are often densely populatedspaces with overcrowded housing which may face multiple environmental risks.

These areas face chronic underinvestment from both government and the private sector leading to poorer educational opportunities and weaker health systems, especially in the US where citizens dont have the benefit of an National Health Service like the UK.

We see that black Americans and BAME populations in the UK are more likely to hold jobs which put them at greater risk to coronavirus exposure.

In the UK, "Pakistanis, black Africans and black Caribbeans are overrepresentedamong key workers overall," placing them at greater risk of "contact with contagious individuals."

Intriguingly, trends in the US are comparable to the UK where, "Black workers are about 50% more likely to work in the healthcare and social assistance industry and 40% more likely to work in hospitals, compared with white workers."

In the US, where income is tied to access to healthcare and health outcomes, there is still a wide household incomedifferential between black American and white households.

Individual income is also linked to food security and safe housing which are some of the underlying determinants of chronic conditions which then prove to be risk factors for coronavirus related morbidity and mortality.

As of 2018 (even after the Affordable Care Act), African Americans had an uninsured rateof 9.7 percent compared to 5.4 percent among whites. This translates to less health-seeking behaviour and less control of chronic conditions which may predispose these individuals to severe illness as a result of the coronavirus infection.

Among the uninsured, there may also be a reluctance to seek treatment for symptoms of the coronavirus infection because of the threat of out of pocket payments. These payments impact already-strained household budgets with resultant secondary adverse health impacts from decreased household financial reserves.

It's not theory

How we chose to explain these factors which place ethnic minorities at greater risk matters, because it has a bearing on outcomes.

Failing to recognise the root causes of health inequalities which follow ethnic lines means that interventions aimed at secondary measures will simply allow inequalities to persevere through other pathways.

Tying factors like education, occupation and housing to individual effort and choice erroneously misses the root cause of these issues.

The reality is that these inequalities need to be considered through the paradigm of structural, cultural and individual-level racism.

The individual experience of racism is well known to have direct effects on health, with emotional distress leading to physiological consequences including hypertension.

Centering risk factors for morbidity and mortality from the coronavirus around discussions ofVitamin D deficiency or explaining that unhealthy lifestyle choices places blame at the level of the individual.

By holding individual choice and cultural factors responsible for health differentials, broader entrenched prejudices and discrimination are obfuscated.

Here, the legacy of federal policies which have entrenched segregation or redlining and mortgage discrimination can be overlooked becuse inequalities in death and illness from the coronavirus are then tied to and bound within the bodies of ethnic minorities.

In the US, the argument around innate biological differences being responsible for health differentials dates back to slavery where there was a need to justify enslavement of Africans.

We see this same pattern playing out with some science attempting to sidestep issues of socioeconomic stratification along racial and ethnic lines with the vitamin D discussion as well as the provision of culturally bound reasons for certain groupings having a greater prevalence of chronic health conditions.

Are African Americans and BAME groupings destined to be low wage, front-line, high exposure jobs because of biological predisposition or would the legacy of racial segregation, redlining and chronic underinvestment in health, environmental and educational services be a more plausible rationale for higher coronavirus related mortality rates within certain communities?

These questions require evidence-based, theoretical probing and morally driven answers. As society conducts a collective post-mortem, an honest body of evidence needs to emerge so that the tragedy unfolding before us is not repeated.

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT World.

We welcome all pitches and submissions to TRT World Opinion please send them via email, to opinion.editorial@trtworld.com

Link:

What race and deprivation tell us about the pandemic - TRT World

Paul R. Carr, Universit du Qubec en Outaouais (UQO)

The world is enmeshed in a significant health crisis that stretches to all levels of society. Containing, controlling and remedying COVID-19 will require concerted efforts, and, importantly, significant social solidarity.

The daily briefings, quantitative graphs, projections, regulations, guidelines, datasets and profiles of those on the front lines, fighting the metaphorical enemy, implore us to consider what we might do after the coronavirus.

Although were still trying to make it through this pandemic, we should also be concerned about how much we really want to get back to what we regard as normal.

COVID-19 has shown us that there is an abundance of good will, harmony, humanity and solidarity in our society. And, conversely, there are also examples in this critically vulnerable time of violence against women, racist attacks against those of Asian origin, the hoarding of limited resources, the corrosive usage of stock-market gambling, unloading and profiteering and some other recalcitrant forces at work, including musings about testing the vaccine in Africa.

Doctors, nurses and many other health professionals and workers are providing exceptional public health services. At the same time, its heart-wrenching to be confronted with the sad reality that many of the people providing essential services are compensated poorly notably people working in seniors residences, daycares and grocery stores.

Within this context, I think it may be helpful to underscore three problems that have laid the groundwork for the present crisis and what I what refer to as societal fault lines: social inequalities, environmental intransigence and economic avarice.

My starting point is what preceded COVID-19 should not be considered normal. A vastly re-imagined society post-pandemic is not only desirable but necessary.

Social inequalities include generational poverty, racism, violence against women, homophobia, xenophobia and discrimination of all sorts.

To examine the life conditions, opportunities, health and education indicators and discrimination related to First Nations Peoples in Canada means acknowledging that, in 2020, the actions, behaviours and beliefs of the Canadian state and Canadian citizens have been highly destructive.

Although not often interwoven into mainstream narratives of societal development, subjects like femicide, suicide (including, notably, among military personnel and veterans) and homelessness must also be addressed.

There must be consideration of a range of potential explanations for why society doesnt fully examine and address these conditions and problems, including negligence, bad faith, ignorance, poor policy decisions, planned marginalization or even cultural genocide in the case of the First Nations.

The clock is ticking toward environmental destruction and catastrophe. We can see and feel the planet change as the climate heats up, oceans reach unforeseen levels, forests are destroyed, shorelines dissipate, islands disappear and ice caps melt into once-frozen waters.

Were losing species, land and Indigenous cultures and languages, smoothing the way for environmental refugees, conflicts and famines.

Read more: Understanding the human side of climate change relocation

Favouring economic development, warfare and unsustainable power structures over serious inclusive engagement and participation with all those who inhabit and share our planet has left us extremely vulnerable. It has also pit people, countries and regions against one another.

The mythology of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps works best when society is designed to break down class differentiations and inequities and is indifferent to dominant power structures.

But the data around social class mobility shows we need to seriously question the belief that capitalism can and will work for everyone.

If were really all in this together, wealth accumulation through nefarious means, slavery, colonialism, imperialism and elitist collusion must be wiped out. Diversity in writing the rules and producing the media to bring about widespread social inclusion is essential.

Who benefits from off-shore banks? Who pays taxes and who accrues benefits from tax deferrals and credits? Why do bailouts systematically support banks, investors and speculators instead of those struggling to provide for their basic needs? Who goes to prison, who is over-policed and why is corruption so infrequently monitored and punished?

At least the fact that the minimum wage is inhumane, especially when considering the near-limitless wealth, privilege and control of the one per cent, has been brought to light through this pandemic.

In the midst of the pandemic, many people in Canada and around the world seem to have an appetite for a transformed social organization and society and a new world order.

That could mean a re-imagined human civilization that no longer prioritizes militarization, conflict, concentrated wealth in the hands of the few, massive social inequalities, environmental catastrophe, delusions of empire and colonization and fictitious notions of democratic freedom, engagement and participation.

The coronavirus is far from being the great leveller, as some have suggested.

Read more: Coronavirus discriminates against Black lives through surveillance, policing and the absence of health data

Its more like the great imbalancer that feeds off social and environmental injustice, exacerbating the wounds, scars and illnesses that existed prior to this pandemic.

Thats why the lessons learned during the pandemic must be used to reconsider and re-imagine social solidarity, one thats hinged on education, democracy and social equality. Returning to normal is no longer a viable option.

Paul R. Carr, Full Professor, Dpartement des sciences de l'ducation & Chair-holder, UNESCO Chair in Democracy, Global Citizenship and Transformative Education (DCMT), Universit du Qubec en Outaouais (UQO)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Link:

Returning to 'normal' post-coronavirus would be inhumane - SaltWire Network

On April 14, to no ones surprise, Barack Obama endorsed Joe Biden for president of the United States. The former president came off as eloquent and calming throughout a 12-minute videoalso unsurprising, as he clearly wishes to fill a Donald Trump-sized chasm in the hearts of worried Americans. Obama emphasized Bidens role in helping the U.S. recover from the last recessionmore predictable praise, given the looming post-COVID-19 economy.

Then, six minutes in, Obama said something that took many off guard. After praising Bernie Sanders, the democratic-socialist senator and erstwhile Biden rival, he claimed that Biden already has what is the most progressive platform of any major party nominee in history.

Really? How could Obama claim that Joe Bidena man who argued repeatedly for the governments right to cut Social Security over his years in the Senate, who voted against busing for desegregation decades ago, who has fundraised millions of Wall Street dollars for his current campaign, who infamously backed the Iraq Warhow could this guy helm the most progressive platform in American history?

There is some merit to the claimalbeit the kind that plays best in debating societies. PolitiFact, a fact-checking site run by the non-profit Poynter Institute for Media Studies, calls it half-true, noting that Biden wants to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, erase past marijuana convictions, shut down private prisons, abolish the death penalty, create a national firearm registry and implement a study into reparations for slavery. He also loudly committed to naming a woman as his running mate, and a Black woman to the Supreme Court. Objectively, these are the most progressive policies Americans have seen in their countrys 243-year history.

READ:Can Joe Biden win the presidency from his living room couch?

The counter-argument: The definition of progressive in 2020 isnt what it was 243 years ago, or even 10 years ago. The title of most progressive can only be examined contemporaneously, not retrospectively. George McGovern, who suffered a huge loss to Richard Nixon in 1972 (fun fact: the same year Biden was first elected to the Senate), pushed an aggressively liberal agenda for his time, including withdrawal from the Vietnam War, amnesty for draft dodgers, a 37 per cent reduction in defence spending over three years, and other environmental and crime policies that, while status quo today, were deemed radical in their day. The question, then, isnt whether Joe Biden is more liberal than any of his predecessors, but whether hes more liberal than any of his contemporaries. That answer is obviously no.

Neither interpretation is wrong. According to David Barker, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University in Washington, D.C., Bidens progressive promises are less about social progress than frank popularity. That is how Biden has always operated; he modulates his positions based on where the median American voter is, Barker told Macleans in an email. In that way, he has always been squarely in the centre of the Democratic party ideologically, wherever that centre has beennever a lefty and never a true centrist.

That delicate spot, squarely in the middle of a never-ending tug of war between moderates and progressives, is precisely where Biden finds himself trapped right now, as he draws up his platform in the run-up to the November election. Appease the frustrated far left, and he risks alienating the middle; pander too much to the middle, and progressives may simply stay home. For Democrats, this decades-long conundrumhow to advance a liberal agenda without scaring off middle-of-the-road votershas taken on existential implications. Three and a half years ago, a moderately progressive agenda led by the first-ever female nominee pushed middle-of-the-road voters in key swing states into Trumps arms. Has anything changed?

The greatest flashpoint between progressive and moderate Democrats has been Medicare for All, the health-care overhaul pushed by Sanders that would abolish private insurance companies and bring all Americans into a single-payer system. A recent countrywide poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent non-profit health-care organization, found support among 56 per cent of respondents for Medicare for All, but fully 68 per cent for a so-called public option, which is what Biden is proposing. That would allow anyone to buy into Medicare, an affordable program currently available only to seniors.

Bidens more liberal policies might be better received by conservative voters because of COVID-19 (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Still, despite the support, Biden has not etched his health-care plan in stone. Shortly after Sanders dropped out on April 8, crowning Biden the presumptive nominee, Bidens camp shot out two policy proposals ostensibly targeting the Berniesphere: He would lower the age of Medicare from 65 to 60 and forgive student debt for low-income and middle-class individuals who attended public post-secondary institutions and historically Black colleges. In the media, this twofer was widely construed as an overture to the left, which sounded odd, since virtually every other presidential candidate, after clinching the nomination, shifts toward the centre. (The theory is that party members on the extremes will vote for you anyway, so you need to start working on undecided centrists and independents.)

In reality, diehard Sanders supporters were not impressed by those policies. Biden struggles with younger voters, says Luke Savage, a Canadian staff writer at Jacobin, a democratic-socialist magazine based in Brooklyn. He doesnt struggle with older votersthats his base. Lowering the Medicare age eligibility by five years isnt really courting Sanders supporters. (Young progressivesespecially womenmay be even more skeptical of Biden after a former aide, Tara Reade, accused him of sexually assaulting and harassing her in the early 1990s. Biden has denied the allegations and prominent Democrat women seem to be rallying around the candidate rather than his accuser.)

READ:Joe Biden:For those that have been knocked down, counted out, left behind, this is your campaign

Optimistic progressive Democrats have portrayed this as merely a first step in a years-long battle. Theyre hopeful about six joint task forces established by Biden and Sanders in Aprilon climate change, health care, criminal justice, immigration, the economy and educationthat comprise members of both camps, which could lead to further leftward policy shifts.

Even if Biden adjusts his messaging, however, those platforms are unlikely to replace any of his current ones, becauseas with his health-care strategytheyre poll-tested and popular. According to Ryan Pougiales, a senior political analyst at Third Way, a centrist Washington-based think tank, Biden was merely throwing a bone to the left with his Medicare age-lowering compromise. Bidens health-care plan, essentially, is a Medicare public option. So literally anyone has the option of buying into Medicare. Any adjustments he makes between now and November will not substantially change that.

Still, the outreach is meaningful, and it extends beyond Sanders. In mid-March, Biden absorbed Elizabeth Warrens progressive proposal on bankruptcy reform, which would help middle-class Americans move on with their lives more quickly after declaring bankruptcy by waiving fees and protecting them from looming debts.

Democrats across the spectrum point to this consolidation as proof of a quality unknown in todays White House: the candidates ability to listen. While critics blast it as flip-flopping, others hail it as open-mindedness crucial to building a strong coalition. Against Donald Trumps authoritarian tendencies, it may be Democrats greatest weapon. Say what you will about Joe Bidenand hell hear you out.

***

Hours after Sanders dropped out, eight progressive youth organizations signed a public letter addressed to Biden, and published it on the website of Tom Steyers climate organization, NextGen. The letter is a blueprint for the program that Gen Z, democratic socialists and their progressive allies are hoping Biden will adopt: support Medicare for All, cancel all student debt, legalize marijuana. Biden will almost certainly not do any of that.

But some requests overlap with what he has already promised. For example, the NextGen authors want him to repeal the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits Medicaid dollars being used for abortions; Biden formerly supported the amendment, but openly changed his mind last June. They want greater accountability and transparency for border patrol guards while expanding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program; his website promises he will do both. The letter makes no mention of a $15 minimum wagea moot request, since Biden (following Sanderss lead) is already on board.

One could envision the former veep shifting left on other files. His website sketches plansalbeit watered-down versions of what the NextGen authors wantfor investing US$20 billion in crime prevention over incarceration, and laying out a framework for the Green New Deal. Around the same time Biden adopted Warrens bankruptcy proposal, he picked up a 2017 Senate bill, led by Sanders, which would make public colleges and universities tuition-free for students coming from a household with an income less than $125,000.

Promises, however, are one thing; actions are another. Progressives cried out when Biden named Larry Summers, the former president of Obamas National Economic Council, who enjoys close ties with Wall Street executives, as his economic adviser. Serious progressives care as much about appointments as they do about policy. Weve encouraged the Biden campaign to bring on personnel in the campaign, transition and presidency that are committed to fighting for people, not corporations or Wall Street, Chris Torres, a political director at the progressive organization MoveOn, told Macleans in an email.

By including establishment Democrats in his cohort, Biden will never win over all Sanders supporters. But looking at the data, one has to ask: Why bother trying? A Morning Consult poll of 2,300 Sanders fans found that 80 per cent would vote for Biden in November. And while democratic socialists often point to Bidens weakness among younger Americans, who skew progressive, multiple polls from March all showed Biden beating Trump among millennials by at least 10 percentage points. Even if those predictions dont come to pass, younger voters are statistically less likely to vote than older ones, who skew conservative. Crunching the numbers in Vox, the journalist Matthew Yglesias summarized it mathematically: Every voter on the margin between Democrats and Republicans is worth twice as much as every voter on the margin between Democrats and the Green Party.

Yet Biden cannot ignore young Americans, for fear that they might actually vote Green, or not at all, and spoil the outcome in critical states. The delicate political calculation he has to make is how far he can go to mollify the progressive wing, says Matthew Dickinson, a political science professor at Middlebury College in Vermont. He points to Bidens electability argument, that he can win back the disenchanted middle- and working-class white voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania who swung to Trump in 2016 after decades of supporting Democrats. The issue that really divides those Trump supporters is a sense of fairness. They think that the rules have been stacked against them. And anything that smacks of favouritism or elitism, or elevating one group over the concerns of other groups, they tend not to support. For Biden to win back the Rust Belt, hell need to convince voters that a $15 minimum wage, public option and criminal-justice reform are in fact equitable policies.

Luckily for him, that argument may be easier to make in 2020 than it was in 2016, due to the seismic shift brought about by COVID-19. Terry Moe, a political science professor at Stanford University, believes weve been living in a post-Reagan world for decades, where conservative politicians successfully run on anti-government policies, promising retrenchment, lower taxes and less red tape. In the same way the Great Depression led to Roosevelts New Deal in the 1930s, he says, the current pandemic proves how badly we rely on well-funded, effective government. This could be the beginning of a new political era in which politicians run on agendas that promote government capacity and government action in solving social problems, Moe says. That is the progressive agenda.

Democrats will likely link the concept of a strong and equitable government to everything Trump opposes, harkening in some ways to the anything-but-Trump campaign of 2016. The message may sound more convincing after a devastated economy compounds the chaos of Trumps last four years. With a pragmatic, fair, progressive-lite platform, they might be able to convince enough voters to join the blue team.

Policies this early have never been about affecting real change, anyway. Theyre about hope. And at this point, with no standard-bearer left to fight for them, hope is all progressives have.

This article appears in print in the June 2020 issue of Macleans magazine with the headline, Whats left to Biden. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

Read more:

In his bid for the presidency, Joe Biden is stuck in the middle - Maclean's

On February 24, Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of a criminal sexual act in the first degree and rape in the third degree. On Wednesday, March 11, he was sentenced to 23 years in prison. On Thursday, March 19, California issued a stay at home order, the first statewide measure in the United States, and New York followed suit on March 20. On Sunday, March 22, Weinstein tested positive for the coronavirus.

The impact of the Weinstein verdict is not as simple as a win for the #MeToo movement. His sentencing, by a jury that included six men, is good news for women who hope to be successful in court and thus may encourage women to come forward and bring charges against their assailants. But the conviction does not change the culture in which women live, especially women of color and working-class women. These women still live in a world where sexual assault is common, and resources to bring charges are scarce.

This victory for the #MeToo movement will not have the same impact on women and feminism now that the coronavirus crisis has all out attention. Shelter-in-place orders, which are clearly necessary during this crisis, have several unintended effects that will impact #MeToo and other social movements.

First on a long list of these unintended consequences is the fact that women (and children) are forced to stay at home with their abusers. Domestic abuse is on the increase across the world during the lockdowns. The UN has asked governments to take this into account in the ways they address this pandemic.

READ MORE

Second, feminism, womens advances in work and pay, as well as hard-won cultural changes of the past 50 years in the US and abroad, will take a hit. In families with two working parents and children, telework will most often result in women having a triple or at times a quadruple burden: paid work, unpaid housework, childcare (which will now include home-schooling for some) and, at times, elderly care. There will be places where men help or take up an equal share of this burden, but more often than not this will fall on women. In single-mom households, of which many women are low-wage workers who unlikely to telework or who have lost their jobs due to layoffs, survival, not feminism, will be the priority.

Then there is the fact that no one is paying attention to the Weinstein verdict during the coronavirus crisis. This is partly due to so many other pressing concerns and partly to the primacy of the story in the news. This reduces its potential to fuel the movement. To compound the problem, no one can protest or march, or even go to court in some places during a lockdown. Many legal practices have been suspended.

Finally, a recession is imminent. This will mean that fewer people have money to give to organizing efforts and nonprofits will have to lay off staff. Many nonprofits are already feeling the impact.

How will all of this impact the future of the #MeToo movement? While we cannot answer this question, we can look for clues in past crises that led feminist movements to refocus their efforts, and the #MeToo movement can look for guidance and hope in their strategies. Of particular relevance is the womens suffrage movement. During its lifetime, it survived three major crises the American Civil War, World War I and the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 as well as economic recessions, including the panics of 1857 and 1873. What can the current #MeToo movement learn from their reaction to these crises?

First of all, it needs to focus attention on the crisis because the crisis requires it and deserves it. During the Civil War, the womens rights movement directed its energy toward assisting with the war effort. This was a strategic choice as well as a practical one there was really no other choice. The crisis required all hands on deck and did not allow for other issues to take primacy.

The #MeToo movement needs all its organizational strength to assist with the crisis, thereby maintaining member involvement and positive relations with political allies, the press and kindred movements. During the Civil War, the womens rights movement worked with or created groups dedicated to abolition. The womens movement viewed the two issues as related and hoped that after slavery was ended, their allies would assist them in gaining the vote and other womens rights.

The focus on abolition kept women involved, politically savvy and ready to take up the cause again once the war was over. When the United States joined the First World War, many women from various American suffrage organizations assisted with the war effort and with the Spanish pandemic that followed. There is evidence to suggest that they were rewarded in some states for their work during both crises.

Finally, #MeToo needs to look for ways in which its issue and the crisis are interconnected and frame the movement narrative around that. But it must choose carefully. The womens suffrage movement sought to connect the plight of women with that of slaves. This tactic met with mixed reactions. Women were legally chattel at the time, but the reality of life for many white women in the movement was not identical to the reality of life for slave women. Thus, this tactic harmed some of their relations with abolitionists and didnt resonate with the public. But later in the movement, during World War I, women did successfully make the case to President Woodrow Wilson and other political leaders that it was ironic that the US was fighting for democracy abroad when it wasnt truly a democracy at home. So: Connect, but choose wisely and thoughtfully.

How can these lessons be put into in practice? During the current COVID-19 pandemic, the group Women Deliver has highlighted the interconnectedness of this virus and womens issues, thereby maintaining their work on womens issues while simultaneously showing their commitment to ending the pandemic. The frame is thoughtful and relevant. Many womens groups could adopt a similar approach, as we know this virus will have a disproportionate impacton low-wage workers and people of color, but in particular women in both groups.

The #MeToo movement could organize around ways to help women who are stuck at home with an abuser during lockdown orders. While the #MeToo movement has been focused around sexual harassment at work, domestic violence is a close cousin. And the movement certainly could continue to organize around the sexual harassment that female low-wage workers continue to face as essential workers. This is as pressing as ever.

Crafting ways for those active in the movement to remain relevant at this time will help everyone. It will help the movement survive this time when attention is rightly directed elsewhere, it will help women in abusive relationships, and it will help women who continue to be sexually harassed in the workplace and have no recourse during this crisis. Given the roots of the movement, it is a logical step.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observers editorial policy.

Link:

Keeping the #MeToo Movement Relevant During the Pandemic - Fair Observer

Contributing Author: Katie Howell

While COVID-19 is exposing fundamental flaws in the global food and agriculture system, it is creating the opportunity to reimagine honoring farmers and food workers and producing healthy, nutritious food.The virus is forcing people to press pause on their daily lives, so Food Tank has compiled a list of 34 movies and series to watch from home that remind us of the power of food.

This list may serve as a guide to help you learn about large- and small-scale agriculture, the relationship between diet and health, and the social and cultural implications of the food system. But these movies and series also offer hope. They show how individual choices can foster connections between people, and they may even inspire you to advocate for a more equitable food system during and after the pandemic.

1. 10 Billion Whats on Your Plate? (2015)

By 2050, the global population is expected to hit 10 billion. This documentary from German film director Valentin Thurn looks at how we could feed that world. The film explores food production and distribution, analyzing potential solutions to meet the enormous demand on the global agriculture system. The most-viewed film in German cinemas in 2015, 10 Billion Whats on Your Plate? provides a broad look into the issues in current food production and offers a glimpse of hope through innovation.

Where to watch it: Amazon Video, YouTube

2. Always Be My Maybe (2019)

Always Be My Maybe is a romantic comedy that follows a successful chef named Sasha as she reunites with her childhood best friend as an adult. During her stay in San Francisco to open a new restaurant, Sasha, played by Ali Wong, and her old friend rediscover their connection though eating, and she remembers the influence her friends family had on her love of cooking. Always Be My Maybe shows Sashas journey as she falls in love and reconnects to her Asian American culture.

Where to watch it: Netflix

3. A Tale of Two Kitchens (2019)

A Tale of Two Kitchens is about two restaurantsCala in San Francisco and Contramar in Mexico Cityowned and operated by acclaimed Mexican chef Gabriela Cmara. The film tells the stories of the restaurants staff, alternating between personal accounts and shots of employees interacting with customers and preparing meals. A Tale of Two Kitchens offers an inspiring look into how people find personal and professional growth in the restaurant industry and how restaurants can become second homes for those that work in them.

Where to watch it: Netflix

4. Barbecue (2017)

Embarking on a journey across 12 countries, Barbecue tells a story of the culture behind grilling meat and how it brings people together. The film offers a portrait of those who stoke the flames, showing that barbecue is not just about the meat, but about the rituals, stories, and traditions that surround the process. Barbecue won the James Beard Award for Best Documentary in 2018.

Where to watch it: Netflix, Amazon Video, YouTube, Google Play

5. Before the Plate (2018)

Filmmaker Sagi Kahane-Rapport documents John Horne, Canadian chef and owner of the prestigious Toronto restaurant Canoe, as he follows each ingredient from one dish back to the farm they came from. Before the Plate offers a look into what it takes to grow and distribute food and the issues farmers face in todays food system.

Where to watch it: YouTube, Google Play, Amazon Video

6. Caffeinated (2015)

Working with coffee connoisseur Geoff Watts, this film explores the life cycle of a coffee seed, following the process from bean to mug. The film focuses on the social and cultural landscape around coffee and how it shapes the lives of thousands of individuals worldwide. Caffeinated filmmakers interview coffee farmers, roasters, and baristas to provide a comprehensive idea of all that goes into a cup of coffee.

Where to watch it: Amazon Video, Google Play

7. Cesar Chavez (2014)

Cesar Chavez is a biographical film that reconstructs the emergence of the United Farm Workers (UFW) in the 1960s. The film focuses on Chavez, co-founder of the UFW, whose commitment to secure a living wage for farm workers ignited social justice movements across America. The film inspired a Follow Your Food series by Participant Media and the Equitable Food Initiative as well as won an ALMA Award for Special Achievement in Film.

Where to watch it: Amazon Video, YouTube, Google Play

8. Chef Flynn (2018)

Chef Flynn tells the story of Flynn McGarry, who became famous after running a fully functional kitchen in his bedroom at age 10. The film chronicles McGarry as he outgrows his bedroom kitchen and sets out to join New York Citys innovative culinary scene. With a focus on the relationship McGarry has with his mother, Chef Flynn shows how far McGarry was able to go with the support and dedication of his family.

Where to watch it: Amazon Video, Hulu, Google Play, YouTube

9. Chefs Table (2015- )

From David Gelb, the filmmaker that created Jiro Dreams of Sushi, comes Chefs Table, a series that profiles professional chefs around the world. Each episode of Chefs Table spotlights a different chef as they share the personal stories that have inspired their culinary ventures. The series has won a variety of awards, including a James Beard Foundation Award and an International Documentary Association Award.

Where to watch it: Netflix

10. Cooked (2016- )

Cooked is a series based on Michael Pollans book by the same name. In each episode, Pollan focuses on a different natural elementfire, water, air, and earthand its relationship to cooking methods throughout history. Cooked brings together different aspects of cooking to show its ability to connect us all as human beings.

Where to watch it: Netflix

11. Dolores (2017)

Dolores documents the life of Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the first farm workers union, United Farm Workers (UFW). Filmmaker Peter Bratt chronicles Huertas life from her childhood in Stockton, California, to her work with UFW and becoming a leading figure in the feminist movement. Huerta has often not been credited for her equal role in establishing UFW; Dolores argues this is because Huerta is a woman, and the film strives to spotlight her heroic efforts in the fight for social justice.

Where to watch it: Amazon Video, Google Play, YouTube

12. Eating Animals (2017)

Based on the 2009 book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, filmmaker Christopher Quinn examines factory farming and its associated negative environmental and public health effects. Eating Animals spotlights farmers, activists, and innovators who are raising awareness about where our meat comes from and standing up to big companies to tell their stories.

Where to watch it: Amazon Video, YouTube, Google Play, Hulu

13. Ella Brennan: Commanding the Table (2017)

In the 1940s, New Orleans food and drink business generated less than US$1 million a year; today it is a billion-dollar industry that attracts tourists from around the world to the city. Many credit the transformation to the Brennan family, guided by Ella Brennan. Ella Brennan: Commanding the Table tells the story of Ella Brennan and how she revolutionized creole cuisine and helped push it into American mainstream dining culture.

Where to watch it: Apple TV, Commanderspalace.com

14. El Susto! (2020)

El Susto! tells the story of a sugar tax in Mexico, implemented in an attempt to curb the prevalence of diabetes. The film documents the battle between public health activists and the corporate wealth of the Big Soda industry, offering a look into the reality of challenging powerful industries. The film premiers this May as part of the virtual Vermont International Film Festival.

Where to watch it: VIFF virtual cinema

15. Farmsteaders (2018)

Farmsteaders follows Nick Nolan and his family as they try to resurrect his grandfathers dairy farm in Ohio. Once a thriving agriculture economy, Nolans rural community has given way to the pressures of agribusiness and corporate farmingleft with unused fertile farmland, abandoned buildings, and skyrocketing health issues. Farmsteaders gives a voice to a new generation of family farmers, showing the hardships those who grow our food are having to endure.

Where to watch it: POV link through movie website

16. Fed Up (2014)

Filmmaker Stephanie Soechtig and journalist Katie Couric investigate the role of the American food industry in rising obesity rates and diet-related diseases. Fed Up uncovers the sugar industrys influence on American dietary guidelines and argues that hidden sugar in processed foods is the root of the problem. With the tagline Congress says pizza is a vegetable, the film shows how interactions between industry and government can directly affect the health of the nation.

Where to watch it: Amazon Video, YouTube, Tubi, Google Play

17. Food Chains (2014)

Supermarkets buying power and farm contracts often set the substandard wages and conditions farm workers face. To improve their livelihood, The Coalition of Immokalee Workers demanded a penny more per pound of tomatoes picked. But Publix, Floridas largest grocery chain, refused. Food Chains follows farm workers in Immokalee, Florida, as they prepare for and launch the resulting hunger strike at Publix headquarters. The documentary aims to expose the exploitation of farm laborers and the complicity of corporations in the creation of conditions the filmmakers liken to modern-day slavery.

Where to watch it: Amazon Video, Tubi, YouTube

18. For Grace (2015)

For Grace tells the story of renowned chef Curtis Duffy as he builds his dream restaurant, Grace, at a difficult time in his personal life. Filmmakers Kevin Pang and Mark Helenowski offer a look into each step in opening the luxury dining spot, Duffys troubled past, and how he came to seek refuge in the kitchen. For Grace gives a bittersweet look into the restaurant industry and the sacrifice it requires.

Where to watch it: Amazon Video, Google Play, YouTube, Apple TV

19. From Scratch (2020)

From Scratch follows chef, actor, and producer David Moscow as he travels worldwide making meals from scratch. Each episode begins with a chef presenting a dish that Moscow then has to hunt, gather, forage, and grow each ingredient to recreate. From Scratch reveals the overwhelming amount of work that brings each part of a meal into the kitchen.

Where to watch it: FYI

20. In Our Hands (2017)

This one-hour documentary takes viewers on a journey across the fields and farms of Britain. In Our Hands discusses diversity of the land, the importance of generational knowledge, and the need for innovation to create a more sustainable food system. A project by Black Bark Films and the Landworkers Alliance, the film advocates for sustainable methods and the rights of small producers through a feminist lens.

Where to watch it: Vimeo

21. Just Eat It (2014)

Just Eat It explores the enormous amount of food waste that exists in the supply chain from farms and retail to an individuals home. The filmmakers pledge to quit grocery shopping and survive only on discarded food for six months. Featuring interviews with food waste experts and food writers, Just Eat It exposes the systematic obsession with perfect produce and confusing expiry dates that has ultimately cost billions of dollars in wasted food each year. The film has received multiple awards from film festivals across North America.

Where to watch it: Amazon Video, YouTube, Tubi, Google Play

22. Maacher Jhol (2017)

A Bengali film directed by Pratim D. Gupta, Maacher Jhol tells the story of a Paris-based chef returning to his home in Kolkata after 13 years. Challenged to cook a bowl of fish curry, a quintessential Bengali dish, the film shows the master-chef return to his roots and reconnect with his family.

Where to watch it: Netflix

23. Polyfaces: A World of Many Choices (2015)

Polyfaces documents the Salatins, a fourth-generation farming family, who moved from Australia to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in the United States to practice regenerative farming. The film follows the family for four years as they operate Polyface Farm without chemicals and provide food to 6,000 families within a three-hour radius. Polyfaces shows how working with nature, not against it, is a way to reconnect to the land and to the community.

Where to watch it: Amazon Video

24. Rotten (2018- )

Zero Point Zero and Netflix combined to produce Rotten, a series that highlights the problems in the process of supplying food. With a human-centered narrative approach, each episode focuses on one food product, interviewing manufacturers, distributers, and others involved in the process. Rotten reveals the corruption, waste, and dangers involved with eating certain foods.

Where to watch it: Netflix

25. Salt Fat Acid Heat (2018)

Salt Fat Acid Heat follows chef and food writer Samin Nosrat as she travels the world to explore the core principles of cooking. Based on Nosrats New York Times bestselling book of the same name, Nosrat uses each episode to travel to Italy, Japan, Mexico, and the United States, where she began her culinary career. Salt Fat Acid Heat helps the audience learn about each element of cooking and how to incorporate them into their own recipes.

Where to watch it: Netflix

26. SEED: The Untold Story (2016)

A winner of 18 film festival awards, SEED: The Unknown Story follows the story of farmers, scientists, lawyers, and indigenous seed keepers in their fight to defend seeds from the control of biotech companies. The film highlights the importance of the seed in the future of our food and presents a heartening story about the efforts to reintegrate an appreciation of seeds into ourculture. SEED features Vandana Shiva, Dr. Jane Goodall, Andrew Kimbrell, Winona Laduke, and Raj Patel.

Where to watch it: Amazon Video, YouTube, Google Play

27. Soul of a Banquet (2014)

Soul of a Banquet shows the journey of Cecilia Chiang and how she introduced America to authentic Chinese food. Chiang opened The Mandarin, her internationally renowned restaurant in San Francisco, in 1961 and has since greatly influenced the culinary scene in the United States. Through interviews with Chiang as well as Alice Waters and Ruth Reichl, the film documents Chiangs life in Beijing, her move to the United States, and how she became a restaurateur.

Where to watch it: Hulu, Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Video

28. Sustainable (2016)

Sustainable investigates the economic and environmental instability of the current agriculture system and the actors in the food system who are working to change this. The film presents the leadership and knowledge of some prominent sustainable farmers around the United States, like Bill Niman, Klaas Martens and John Kempf, who are challenging the country to build a more ethical agriculture system. The film offers a story of hope, with a promise that our food system can be transformed into one that is sustainable for future generations.

Where to watch it: Amazon Video, YouTube

29. That Sugar Film (2014)

That Sugar Film looks at the impact of high-sugar diets on an Aboriginal community in Australia and travels to the United States to interview the worlds sugar experts. When director Damon Gameau decides to test the effects of sugar on his own health, he consumes foods commonly perceived as healthy, revealing the prevalence of sugar in each item. The film documents how sugar has become the most dominant food in the world, infiltrating both our diets and culture.

Where to watch it: Amazon Video, Documentary Mania

30. The Biggest Little Farm (2018)

The Biggest Little Farm follows John and Molly Chester for eight years as they transition from city living to a 200-acre farm. Directed by John Chester, the film shows the couple start Apricot Lane Farms and follows the farms expansion to include multiple animals and fruit and vegetable varieties. Through their work, the Chesters find that the importance of biodiversity extends far beyond the farm.

Where to watch it: YouTube, Google Play

31. The Heat: A Kitchen (R)evolution (2018)

Director Maya Gallus profiles seven female chefs as they face obstacles in a profession dominated by men. The Heat: A Kitchen (R)evolution shows how the culture of restaurant kitchens has bred toxic working conditions and how women are working to change it. Through the womens stories, the film documents the greater challenges female chefs face as they attempt to rise to the top of the restaurant industry.

Where to watch it: Tubi, YouTube, Google Play, Amazon Video

32. The Lunchbox (2013)

The Lunchbox tells the story of an unlikely friendship between a lonely housewife and a widower. The housewife, played by Nimrat Kaur, decides to prepare her husband creative, elaborate lunches, sending them along with a note through the famously complicated Mumbai lunch delivery system. The lunchbox ends up with the wrong man, played by the late Irrfan Khan. The housewife recognizes her mistake and sends Khan another note to apologize, starting a conversation between the two and sparking a relationship as they discuss lifes joys and sorrows over the exchange of delicious meals.

Where to watch it: Amazon Video, YouTube, Google Play

33. Ugly Delicious (2018- )

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34 Movies, Docs, and Series to Educate and Inspire During COVID-19 - Food Tank

NewsOpinionColumnistsKansas has strong radical traditions but, neglected by the Democrats, it is now a Republican stronghold and the SNP must learn the lessons of how this happened, writes Kenny MacAskill

Thursday, 7th May 2020, 7:30 am

My friend Henry McLeish, whos very knowledgeable about American politics, recommended a book called Whats the Matter with Kansas?, a fascinating account by the author Thomas Franks, explaining the political sea change thats swept across America.

Now seen as red-neck country and a Trump heartland, Id forgotten that Kansas had radical roots. It was formed, after all, by northern abolitionists, eager to block the westward march of slavery. Inspiring the likes of John Brown, they were prepared to fight for their cause long before the Civil War erupted.

In later generations, as poverty became the issue, the mantle passed to political radicals in the Farmer Labor cause before and during the dustbowl and the depression. A county in Kansas even voted for Eugene Debs, the great American socialist, in the presidential election of 1912. The only other three that he won were also in the Mid-West, whichs hard to imagine now in an area thats deepest red American political colours being the inverse of our own, red for Republican and blue for Democrat.

Despite the obvious failings of the Trump administration, the state is a banker to vote for him in the election later this year. Its never been a wealthy state, and it certainly isnt now. Firstly, small farmers and then industrial workers have been put to the sword, replaced by a low-wage economy and welfare. Corporate tax cuts have been matched by cuts to public services, the rich are getting richer and the poor are being left behind.

Yet, its lapped up by many and most especially in former blue-collar areas where generations ago the cause of Labor was supported. As Franks so vividly writes its like a French Revolution in reverse one in which the sans-culottes pour down the streets demanding more power for the aristocracy.

Christians voting for Caesar

So how did it come to pass? Well theres not one simple answer but its as much down to Democrat failures as Republican actions. The supposed glory days of Bill Clinton accelerated many of the underlying economic problems. Rather than seeking to support the workers, the Democrats sought to triangulate as was the buzzword stealing the centre-ground but also marginalising their former core support.

A failure to give political hope saw many seek solace elsewhere. As orthodox class politics disappeared, it was replaced in many poorer areas by cultural issues of abortion, gun control and same-sex marriage. As again Franks poignantly details, the followers of Christ have ended up voting for Caesar, as representatives of the self-proclaimed moral majority, in order to deliver a corporate rather than a Christian dream.

It wasnt simply whipped up by Christian zealots or Fox News but was added to by the Democrats behaviour. Not only did they appear alien in their views, but they were condescending in manner, or so it appeared to those by now dispossessed. Joe Biden isnt going to turn them, and itll be a long way back for the radical cause in the Mid-West.

Neither American society nor American politics are directly transferable across the Atlantic but there are some similarities. The New Labour years werent golden for many who were forgotten. Class politics was abandoned and replaced by a British equivalent, albeit more nihilistic than moral. The Brexit vote in Sunderland, with the self-inflicted harm of Nissans likely departure, was a cri de coeur from the left-behinds.

Then the collapse of the Red Wall in the December general election, by people and in areas whove suffered most through inequality. Places where once Tories feared to tread instead viewed Labour as the alien beast failing to speak for them and condescending in their attitude towards them. It wasnt just Brexit but on a swathe of issues where Labour seemed out of kilter, almost a metropolitan elite out of touch with former working people.

So far, this has passed Scotland by as the constitution remains the central issue. But remembering your core vote remains essential. Opinion polls are staggering for the SNP now but once the same applied both to the Clinton Democratic machine and New Labour hegemony. But as the economy falters post-Covid-19, the areas that were the bedrock of the Yes vote will be worst affected.

Supporting them must be a priority. Its difficult within current powers which is why downplaying a second referendums foolish. It was about hope in 2014 and itll remain so now, a belief that a better world can come must be fundamental. Which is why indyref2 matters.

But its also about respect and understanding. An agenda that seems dominated by gender and sexual identity is an anathema to many, socially conservative with a small c but nationalist with a capital N. Ramming that down their throats is as damaging as ignoring their financial plight. The crude lesson from Kansas is dont crap on your own support.

Kenny MacAskill is SNP MP for East Lothian

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Originally posted here:

SNP should beware 'French Revolution in reverse' that swept Democrats out of Kansas Kenny MacAskill - The Scotsman

The plague is real. The death, suffering, pain and loss it brings are real. The loss of a parent or grandparent is real. The loss of a mother or father is real. The loss of a child is real. The loss of a friend is real. Many have lost jobs, income and a sense of future. Many, isolated at home, have lost the close, warm connection with family, friends and the world outside their front door.

Plagues bring death to humans, as they have to the millions who died in the Black Death of the middle ages and the Flu Pandemic of 1918. And as we face and reflect on the terrible reality of this current plague, we can in our time of waiting think about the plague in a different way, as well, think of the plague as a metaphor.

During this difficult, hermetic time, I have reread Albert Camus The Plague. A novel, written in 1947, it describes what happens when a deadly plague strikes the French Algerian town of Oran and how various people react to it, especially when the whole town is quarantined and shut off from the rest of the country. Many think Camus saw the plague in this novel as a metaphor for fascism, how it infects people with its deadly ideas.

As I, like many of you, have adjusted to this hermit way of living, I have also thought about the plague as a metaphor, a metaphor for human existence: how humans cause the death of things like tolerance, love, truth, wisdom, natures beauty and authentic pleasure. And, of course, how we cause death through the plague of war.

Wars and rumors of wars. I cant think of a time without wars. Especially now when we are so connected globally and daily hear about wars in other lands. Of course the last century saw millions die through World Wars I and II. And we almost obliterated ourselves in nuclear war, which might still be a possibility. And not only do we die, but we have killed off many other living species through our reckless exploitation of lands and oceans. Even the planet is in danger through climate change.

And while we are free, many live under totalitarian regimes that forbid the freedom of thought and religion. When will that plague end?

Intolerance and hatred drive wars and their devastation. Political divisions and religious differences are but a few of the plagues of hatred that still rage in our midst.

Oh, those others, they are so evil. Although we have eliminated the plague of slavery, we still spread the plagues of racism, sexism, homophobia and more.

This current plague has once again exposed the plague of inequality. I grew up in Detroit where now many of those who have died are black and/or poor. We have not eliminated economic insecurity for many of those who work hard at minimum wage jobs, and who have no health insurance. We have not provided the homeless with shelter, food and care.

We cherish our freedom, yet we live our ordinary, normal lives in the plague of consumerism, where we are infected with the need and desire to buy, buy, buy whatever is new, whatever promises us a fleeting, superficial glory and joy of the beads of success. We shine outwardly and diminish inwardly.

What, then, can this plague teach us as we reflect in our stay-at-home time? Certainly, we must be even more conscious of our love of family and friends, our love of their voices and hugs. We must care for those who suffer from want and indifference. We must see the plagues we bring upon ourselves and others. To do this we must be aware of the carriers of our human plagues. In Camus The Plague, the carriers are first rats, then people. For us the rats are too often those who use social media to spread hatred and untruth. We must, through reflection and spiritual growth, become immune to the hatred they spread.

Yes, we must grow our compassion for all of us, in our community, our nation, and our world. We must stop our plagues. As the poet W.H. Auden said in his poem September 1, 1939, We must love one another or die.

Jack Hernandez is a retired director of the Norman Levan Center of the Humanities at Bakersfield College.

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COMMUNITY VOICES: Reflections on the plague - The Bakersfield Californian

May Day, or International Workers Day, is celebrated with marches and rallies every May 1 to lift up the working people and their demands for freedom, equality, and justice. That is the Red tradition of May Day. But there is also an older Green tradition in which cultures the world over celebrate as Spring arrives in temperate and arctic climates or the wet season arrives in tropical climates. This Green tradition of May Day celebrates all that is free and life-giving on the green Earth that is our commonwealth and heritage. These Red and Green May Day traditions are complementary.

Historian Peter Linebaugh, in hisThe Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of May Day, provides an evocative description of the Green tradition of May Day:

Once upon a time, long before Weinberger bombed north Africans before the Bank of Boston laundered money, or Reagan honored the Nazi war dead, the earth was blanketed by a broad mantle of forests. As late as Caesars time a person might travel through the woods for two months without gaining an unobstructed view of the sky. The immense forests of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America provided the atmosphere with oxygen and the earth with nutrients. Within the woodland ecology, our ancestors did not have to work the graveyard shift, or to deal with flextime, or work from Nine to Five. Indeed, the native Americans whom Captain John Smith encountered in 1606 only worked four hours a week. The origin of May Day is to be found in the Woodland Epoch of History.

Everywhere people went a-Maying by going into the woods and bringing back leaf, bough, and blossom to decorate their persons, homes, and loved ones with green garlands. Outside theater was performed with characters like Jack-in-the-Green and the Queen of the May. Trees were planted. Maypoles were erected. Dances were danced. Music was played. Drinks were drunk, and love was made. Winter was over, spring had sprung.

The Red tradition of May Day developed in response to the rise of capitalism, which undermined the Green tradition of May Day that people the world over had celebrated for millennia. Beginning in the 1500s in a process that continues to this day, landlords and capitalists have increasingly dispossessed working people from their land, their tools of production, and thus control over their means to life.

In the 1500s, rich landowners, with the support of the state, began to appropriate and take exclusive ownership of ancient public lands and forests, enclosing them for their own private profit-seeking purposes. Peasant communities lost their communal use of common fields and forests for grazing animals, hunting game, and gathering food and wood. This process continues today in many parts of the world.

The next stage of dispossession developed with the rise of the factories of industrial capitalism, which underpriced the handcrafted products of artisans, who then became dependent on capitalists for employment in the factories. In the U.S., the American ideal of republican liberty grounded in the economic independence of a free citizenry of small farmers and artisans gave way to a more inequitable class society of many workers and increasingly fewer capitalists, alongside a moderately-sized middle class of professionals and managers. The working people no longer had their freedom grounded in the economic independence provided by their own land and tools. They were now dependent on capitalists for their means of livelihood. When they crossed the threshold of the workplace, they entered a dictatorship where they had to work as directed and surrender their political rights to free speech, press, and assembly in the workplace. They received a fixed wage, while the owners took all the additional value that their labor created. They soon began to call their oppressive and exploited condition wage slavery in a conscious comparison to the conditions of African slaves on southern plantations.

The workers movement that arose in response began to organize labor unions and political parties around of program of cooperative production where workers would democratically manage their collective work and workers would receive the full fruits of their labor. They reasoned that economic democracy in cooperative production was the only way they could restore their freedom and achieve a decent standard of living under the conditions of large-scale production. The first political party in the world to raise this program which soon became known as socialism arose in Philadelphia and New York City in 1929 when labor unions organized the Workingmens Party. The Workies elected the president of the carpenters union to the state Assembly of New York.

The author of the Workies platform resolutions, Thomas Skidmore, soon penned a book calledThe Rights of Man to Property!He argued for common ownership of large-scale means of production, universal public education, a debt jubilee, and land redistribution. He called for the abolition of private inheritance with estates going into a public fund for distribution of a share to each person upon adulthood. He called not only for the abolition of slavery but for reparations, for land and a share of the nations wealth to the former slaves to help them get started on their farms. He called for citizenship for American Indians and suffrage and equal rights for women. With an eye to environmental protection, he decried the destruction of the planets resources that would eventually result from capitalisms promotion of the unrestricted use of unlimited private property.

This Red tradition of socialism can be seen as a way to recover the ecological sustainability that the Green tradition of May Day rejoiced and sanctified. It will take the full political and economic democracy of socialism to give the people the power to choose ecological balance instead of being powerless subjects of capitalisms competitive structural drive for the blind, relentless growth that devours the environment. Hence Green Party activists often describe their perspective as ecological socialism.

The Red tradition of May Day emerged in the 1880s in the United States. It arose out of the workers movement fighting for the same kinds of demands that the Workies had raised in 1829. The immediate impetus came from the Haymarket Massacre in 1886. On the night of May 4, 1886, 176 Chicago police attacked about 200 workers who remained after a day-long demonstration for the 8-hour day. The police fired live ammunition, killing four and wounding 70. Somebody threw a stick of dynamite. Eight of the labor organizers were charged and convicted. Four of them were hung to death. One of the Haymarket martyrs, Albert Parsons, a white former confederate soldier married to Lucy Parsons, a former slave of African, Indian, and Mexican descent, said at this trial, What is Socialism or Anarchism? Briefly stated it is the right of the toilers to the free and equal use of the tools of production and the right of the producers to their product.

Lucy Parsons campaigned across the United States and Europe to have the workers movement commemorate May 1 as International Workers Day. Many workers organizations supported her call, including the American Federation of Labor, which then urged its adoption by the Second International of socialist parties. The first international May Day celebration in 1890 was a big success. The demonstrations worried the establishments across the world. After Coxeys Army descended on May 1, 1894, in the first mass march on Washington, D.C. to demand public works spending to employ the unemployed in the midst of severe depression, President Grover Cleveland got Congress to declare a federal Labor Day holiday in September in a move designed to divide the labor movement.Green Party members will be joining with other working peoples organizations to commemorate International Workers Day this year online given the social distancing we must practice in this coronavirus pandemic.

What Greens can do to bring to these events is an understanding of the connections between the Red and Green traditions of May Day.Conservatives try to red-bait Greens as watermelons green on the outside but red on the inside. But we dont take that as an insult. We will be on the ballot line in November as the Green Party, but there is plenty of Red as well as Green in our platform.

*Howie Hawkins is the leading candidate for president for the Green Party of the United States, see HowieHawkins.US for more information.

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May Day Is Red And Green OpEd - Eurasia Review

Earl Heal: The Right Stuff

Last week we reviewed the primary concepts that Americas Founders developed in writing the Constitution. This week well review changed concepts and resulting effects made since the Constitution was ratified.

13th Amendment-Slavery Abolition: The first change was good. Some yet condemn the Founders for not abolishing slavery. The Founders took pragmatically available action toward limiting slaverys future. Had they insisted on abolition in the original Constitution, there would never had been a United States.

Sovereignty of the States: The first major violation of Founders intent was ratification of 17th Amendment directing that senators are chosen by state popular vote as opposed to appointment by state legislators. Senators are thus not obligated to represent interests of their state and, like representatives, serve the emotion of the masses. It was argued that the prior appointment system was fertile for corruption, but this change removed an important Founders check and balance concept separation of powers. James Mason explained in Federalist No. 51. The remedy . . . is to divide the legislature into different branches, and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action as little connected with each other. . . . Honestly, do you see Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Sen. Kamala Harris primarily acting in accordance with the Founders expectations?

Freedoms: Free speech zones where authorities say you may speak is not freedom. A conservative student on the Berkeley campus promoting membership in his group was beaten and sustaining brain damage that may be permanent. The offenders, though identified, are not being prosecuted. Religious freedom is now only to worship as others dictate. Oregon bakers were fined $115,000 for exercising their faith with no harm to anyone. Military chaplains, officers and enlisted have been formally disciplined, including discharge, for expressing religious beliefs. Conservative speakers have been barred from numerous events, in fear that Antifa and others will start yet another costly riot.

Government size: State governments were intended to be laboratories of government with each competing for better policies. The Great Depression decimated our nation. No nation anywhere had developed income insurance, an unforeseen result after the Industrial Revolution. By 1935, 30 states had implemented a form of economic insurance. Roosevelts federal Social Security program was actuarially sound. As the Supreme Court in 1937 granted approval to that first federal social program, it perhaps unwittingly opened the door for unlimited future federal social programs. Congress has frequently increased Social Security benefits and converted it from income insurance into a welfare and retirement program. Because employee/employer contributions were not proportionally increased, the Social Security piggy bank will soon be broke.

The Founders fear of centralized powers and government has been justified after 1937. A federal law to establish minimum wages instead of marketplace determination has, with one exception, had the unintended consequence of increasing unemployment among the target group, minimum wage workers. The War on Poverty, started in 1965, is the ultimate proof of the Founders wisdom and has cost $28 trillion to date.

Two-thirds of recent federal budgets are funding entitlement programs. The Heritage Foundation last year found the total number of federal government employees has increased by approximately 500,000 since 1965 yet it is difficult to name a federal program that has justified its expense. Poverty level remained at near 11% until 2009 when it increased toward 15%. Operation Head Start, an early preschool program, has serious problems: Every evaluation, including one requested by Congress in 2012, documented that any early advantage when entering elementary school disappear by the third year. Mental health issues have climbed dramatically since states were dismissed from primary responsibility. Fraud, distant supervision and incompetence is not unequivocally documented but enough smoking guns and logic suggest it is endemic.

Education, form of government and economic principles will be reviewed next week to identify those changes and results.

Earl Heal is a retired Air Force officer, Vacaville resident and a member of The Right Stuff Committee of the Solano County Republican Party. Reach him at [emailprotected].

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The Right Stuff: Is this America today? What happened? - Fairfield Daily Republic

Members of Charleston's poorest and ethnic minority communities say they can help build a more resilient state in the wake of the pandemic.

"We're living in a time, unfortunately, that is trying and putting to the test the fairness, the equity of all of our systems," says Bernie Mazyck of Summerville, who serves as CEO of the S.C. Association for Community Economic Development. "It should give everyone, up and down the social strata, give all of us a moment to pause and look at what we currently have, to reflect upon it and say, 'Something's wrong here, we need to rethink some things.'"

African Americans in the state are more likely than white people to die from COVID-19. Furthermore, those who have trouble accessing health care are less likely to be tested, and some of the lowest wage-earners in the state are the ones keeping essential services, such as grocery stores, running. Advocates say those at the margins have been impacted harder by the pandemic than the mostly white middle class.

"(Rebuilding) will require centering the voices of black people and indigenous and poor folk and immigrant communities," Charleston activist Tamika Gadsden says. "There needs to be a needs assessment that needs to be people led ... using grassroots organizing to listen to folks to let them tell folks what they need."

According to the 2018 census estimates, South Carolina's black population comprises 27.1 percent of the state. Hispanics account for 5.9 percent and Native Americans account for 0.5 percent of the population. White residents represent 68.5 percent of the population.

"Politics aside, take a step back and look at the people who have continually exposed themselves and [their] families to this virus so we can have food on our table," journalist and immigrant advocate Fernando Soto of Charleston says. "Take a step back and take it all in and realize, while we go through this pandemic together, we're not all in it together in the same way."

It was a sentiment repeated by many.

"Black folks and Latinos and other marginalized, low-income communities, they're the ones on the front lines," North Charleston Democratic Rep. J.A. Moore says. "Until we protect folks in the community I represent, not just identity-wise, then the whole state is vulnerable, the whole idea of taking care of the least of these because the least of these is who takes care of us."

Mexican immigrant Sonia Villegas of North Charleston says while many people in the state have tried to stay home during the pandemic, many in the immigrant community have had to work.

"Unfortunately, we are people who live day-by-day and we need to work," she says. "There's a lot of friends who have been able to stay home but a lot of single moms I know, they have to go out and look for the food and work every single day. If they don't work, they can't feed their children."

For some, the pandemic has exposed underlying inequities and could be the start of a conversation about the disparities' root causes. And, they say, now is the time to listen to the communities most deeply impacted by the virus and the economic fallout.

"If you're looking at trying to improve the conditions of people in a society, you have to look at the least of these, you have to look at those that have been historically neglected. The solutions on how we move forward have to be a bottom-up approach," North Charleston Democratic Rep. Marvin Pendarvis says. "If you do those things, in the long run you will be able to ensure prosperity."

Gadsden says the black and minority communities of South Carolina are not better prepared to weather catastrophe due to anything "supernatural."

"This isn't genetic, our ability to adapt and respond after being slighted, under-resourced, under-served," she says. "It's a byproduct of white supremacist culture ... It's the vestiges of slavery in this state and its inability to make amends."

Sabrina Grey Wolf Creel of Walterboro, a board member of the Edisto Natchez Kusso Tribe of South Carolina, says ethnic minorities and those earning a low income offer a unique viewpoint.

"We fight a lot of different things that most people don't fight every day," she says. "We might be a minority but we are still here where it would have taken other people out ... Low-income, minority groups, the difficulties that we face, that the average American doesn't, is one of the strongest things that keeps us survivors."

Republican Statehouse candidate Samuel Rivers, who is vying for his former seat held by Moore, said it isn't just a black-and-white issue. It's about what everyone wants.

"Everyone wants the same things: a good education, safe streets, the ability to send their children to college, financial security, good health, peace and tranquility," Rivers says. "It's just finding the different road maps to get there. When we do that we will come up with a balanced approach on how we can rebuild our state."

The very people who were left out of the Great Depression's New Deal and who have recovered the least since the Great Recession remain skeptical that the government can help or that any lasting change will result.

"We have had those experiences where we looked at institutions for help and we expect them to rebuild and, time and time again, black and brown people have been left behind," Soto says.

Still, there is hope. Soto says he has seen a shift on social media with more people caring about the fates of low-income workers, regardless of immigration status.

Gaining equal access to health care was a key concern for many, with some saying the state should reevaluate expanding Medicaid, an option the state has declined since 2009. Some of the states that initially declined Medicaid expansion have since expanded the federally supported service to include more people.

"The need right now, more than ever, is to expand Medicaid," Moore says. "Now is a time to not play politics and expand Medicaid so we can really ensure people can have the health care coverage we need."

In addition to expanding Medicaid, Moore says state lawmakers need to do better in funding the state departments that focus on health, the environment, and mental health.

Soto says people who are not insured also have difficulty in obtaining coronavirus tests. For that reason, he said, there should be skepticism when looking at S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control's demographic data for COVID-19, which lists 6 percent of cases as Hispanic.

"That's very concerning because that number seems very minute," he says. "To this day, I don't know where anybody would go for a free test. Hispanics, by and large, have to pay for things out of pocket because they don't have health care coverage."

Education for adults and children was another recurring theme.

"It takes upfront investment in our citizens. I don't think we can commit to long-term resiliency in South Carolina without investing in how we educate our kids," Moore says.

Mazyck of Summerville says South Carolina needs to rally around teachers post-pandemic.

"One of the things that's clear from this pandemic and this shelter-in-place order that we are currently living under everyone will say teachers are gold, and as such we should pay them as the gold that they are. The General Assembly has to be forced to increase the budget for teacher pay," he says.

Gadsden says marginalized communities cannot have equal footing without equal education, and she says South Carolina needs greater investment in education for communities of color. She says the majority-black counties are too often at the bottom in education, and minorities are too often left out of the best schools in a district.

For Emory Campbell of Hilton Head Island, education needs to extend beyond traditional education, especially for minority communities.

"We strengthen them by sharing the history with them or reteaching. Allowing families to begin to learn their history and their culture and that's how you strengthen the community, empower the community to do what they do best," Campbell says. "The rural communities in South Carolina and the communities along the coast, what they need most is education and how-to programs."

Campbell, retired as leader of the Penn Center on St. Helena Island, says those how-to programs should teach everything from gardening to finances. Born into the Gullah community of Hilton Head, Campbell says the community is made more vulnerable now by loss of identity and loss of skills.

"We dragged them off to work, we educated them poorly and yet they're the ones that had the resources to develop themselves," he says.

Soto says the immigrant community is facing a different challenge: parents are out working and cannot help children with school work, and sometimes the parents don't speak the language or have enough education to help.

Raising the minimum wage, affordable housing

Pendarvis says he's hopeful that there will be consideration for raising the minimum wage and addressing affordable housing.

"So many people in vulnerable communities, they work 9 to 5, they work minimum wage, and that's not enough for them to take care of their children and pay rent and utilities," he says, adding it also speaks to an affordable housing issue in the state. Both lead to financial instability for the most vulnerable, he says.

Mazyck says the pandemic has shown who the most essential and yet most underpaid workers are in the state.

"When you look at the bus driver, the Uber driver, the restaurant server, the fast-food server, when you look at all of those professions, the health professionals up and down the professional ranks, we now see how important those people are to our quality of life and to our economy but they're the ones paid the least, paid on an hourly basis," he says. "Then in order for them to live, housing is unaffordable so they oftentimes are living in substandard housing."

Mazyck said crises sometimes lead to low-income workers borrowing from high-interest payday or title loan lenders, a stopgap that could further undermine their financial situation.

"Those types of lenders, in a lot of cases, are predatory. They don't build or help that customer to help them get out of that loan or build that credit rating," he said. "As a result they fall further and further into economic dismay so we need financial systems that work so folks can access them. Some of that might require more financial education, credit counseling."

Rivers says financial preparedness of the individual will help people weather storms like this better.

"People need to be a little more financially prepared for times like these," he says. Financial preparedness and helping some South Carolinians get out of "the renting stage" will help people become more self-reliant, he adds.

Creel says she's noticed a bright spot from the pandemic: People are spending more time with family and with God.

"The pandemic took away shopping, sports events and all these things," she says. "It made you put back into focus the things that really matter like your family, your household, and making sure your neighbor is well taken care of as well. It's almost like a pause in time to see where you really are."

She said she hoped people will continue with a new perspective moving forward.

"For us to go stronger, it's putting God back in the center of it and [moving] forward," Creel says. "Love your neighbor as you love yourself."

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"We need to rethink some things" to emerge from this pandemic stronger - Charleston City Paper

The COVID-19 crisis only heightens the urgency of black reparations. Long overdue, they are now more essential than ever.

Mounting statistics confirm disturbing evidence of racial disparities in reported coronavirus deaths. In Wisconsin, perhaps the state with the most extreme ratio of black morbidity, black people represent 6 percent of the population and 40 percent of the deaths. Those African American deaths have occurred at a rate 700 percent higher than black people's share of the state's population. In our home state of North Carolina, black people account for 22 percent of the population but close to 40 percent of the deaths.

So what explains these disproportionately large numbers of black people dying of the coronavirus?

Black people are overrepresented in jobs designated as socially essential but paying low wages in transportation, food and health services, as well as child and elder care. These are jobs where the physical distancing now needed for health safety is not possible. Consequently, African Americans are reduced to a Hobson's choice: either having a greater risk of outright job loss or continuing employment in unsafe occupations. Horrifying as these deprivations are, they are not new. They are just the latest example of how racism and discrimination play out in America.

There have been numerous historic moments when America could have eliminated racial inequality and granted blacks access to the same opportunities as whites. When the nascent republic was formed in 1776, it could have embraced black people as full citizens. At the end of the Civil War, when newly emancipated African Americans were promised 40-acre land grants, the country could have reversed many of the economic effects of enslavement. Black enfranchisement could have been protected during the Reconstruction era, and anti-lynching laws could have been passed, reversing the trajectory of racial injustice. The New Deal and the GI Bill, had they been administered equitably, could have given African Americans the kind of financial cushion so desperately needed now. And when, nearly 60 years ago, civil rights legislation was passed, the legislation was weakly enforced, and with it the nation lost another chance to become a true democracy.

The denial of the promised 40-acre land grants for newly emancipated blacks at the end of the Civil War was accompanied by the award of large tracts of land to whites. These awards are what Neel Kashkari calls "free equity." In this case, one group is provided a gift of a lucrative asset. Kashkari, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis president, defines free equity as unearned or unmerited gifts that provide a substantial boost toward economic security and well-being.

Kashkari is referring to the 1862 Homestead Act and the Southern Homestead Act of 1866. These initiatives made grants of 160 acres to heads of household, for a minimal filing fee, with the goal of occupying the western territories. These outright gifts of real estate and its use privileges, to encourage settlements and farms, could be handed down to subsequent generations. With extremely rare exceptions, black people were systematically excluded from these programs, leaving them without any subsequent margin of protection, including the current economic collapse.

Ultimately, white supremacy has produced three stages of grievous racial injustice: slavery, legal segregation in the United States (America's apartheid regime), and ongoing discrimination in housing, employment, policing, access to credit and health care, compounded by mass incarceration. These three stages of atrocities establish the case for black reparations.

So, what, exactly, do we mean by black reparations?

Black reparations refer to America's denial of the promised 40-acre land grants to newly emancipated black people at the end of the Civil War. The long-term effect is black American descendants of persons enslaved in the United States constitute 13 percent of the nation's population but possess less than 3 percent of the nation's wealth. At the household level, the gap constitutes a black deficit of $800,000 in average net worth. To bring the native black share of the nation's wealth at least into equivalence with its share of the population would require $10 trillion to $12 trillion.

A suitably crafted reparations initiative can erase the racial wealth gap by raising the black level to equal the existing white level. Indeed, as we write in our new book, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, "We view the racial wealth gap as the most robust indicator of the cumulative economic effects of white supremacy in the United States."

Without the cushion of wealth, black families are exposed to greater vulnerabilities. The hard realities of the pandemic make this painfully clear. Wealthier families can better negotiate unpredicted losses of income due to unemployment, vehicle breakdown or catastrophic illnesses. Typically, black workers toil in low-wage jobs, living from paycheck to paycheck. The black unemployment rate generally is double the white unemployment rate; the implications are ominous when the overall unemployment rate is projected to reach 30 percent.

Why does the pandemic intensify the urgency of a reparations program?

The black-white mortality disparity can be attributed, in part, to the disproportionate presence of pre-existing conditions, including asthma, diabetes, heart disease and hypertension. This is aggravated by inequitable medical treatment.

The deeper root of black susceptibility to COVID-19 is greater black financial peril, indexed by the gulf in black and white wealth. Four white American billionairesJeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberghave about as much wealth as 90 percent of black Americans.

The federal government can pay for reparations. The rapid enactment of the legislation of a $2.2 trillion economic rescue package proves Congress can find the needed money when motivated to do so. We know, now, the debt can be paid. We only need the will to do it.

William A. Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies and Economics at Duke University. A. Kirsten Mullen, the founder of Artefactual, is a folklorist, museum consultant and lecturer whose work focuses on race, art, history and politics. Their book, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, is newly available from the University of North Carolina Press.

The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.

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Coronavirus Is Making the Case for Black Reparations Clearer Than Ever | Opinion - Newsweek

In the annals of television history, Game of Thrones will surely go down as one of the most visually ambitious. This show, more than any other, showed that the medium of television is, in fact, capable of capturing the grandeur andepic scale more typical to full-length features.

RELATED: 10 Character Inconsistencies in Game of Thrones

A great deal of that success has to do with the ease with which the series shifts between scenes that are real and those that are CGI, often suturing us into the alternate reality of Westeros. Today, we'll look at several excellent examples from both sides of the coin.

One of the most traumatizing moments in the entire series (and thats saying something) comes from seeing the road to Meereen lined with crucifixions. In this instance, Dany has decided that the most fitting way to inaugurate her conquest of the city (and to show her devotion to ending slavery) is by crucifying the former Masters, leaving their corpses as a warning. Its all the more troubling for the visceral reality of it, and it is a harbinger of the dark things to come.

The city of Braavos, famous for its assassins and for its fencing masters, is loosely based on the city of Venice. Unlike some of the other cities in the series, it is actually portrayed with quite a lot of detail, and we are even treated to a magnificent overhead shot of its expanse. Its quite a breath-taking view, and the fact that it is CGI is a potent reminder of just how much technology can accomplish.

Game of Thrones made audiences everywhere gasp when they killed off one of their main characters at the end of the first season. What makes it even more compelling to watch is that you know that these are real actors reenacting this traumatic scene from the novel upon which the series is based.

RELATED: Game Of Thrones: 10 Things That Might Have Happened If Ned Stark Survived

Sean Bean deserves a lot of credit for bringing Ned Stark to life, in particular imbuing his last moments with the tragic nobility that is such a part of his character.

Though it is based on the real Hadrians Wall in the north of England, the Wall of Westeros is far more vast in scope, towering many, many times the height of a giant (let alone a man), and imbued with powerful magic. It comes as no surprise, then, that the series uses CGI to bring it to life. This allows them to show us how truly vast this construction is, particularly when juxtaposed to the tiny humans crawling upon it, desperate to reach the lands of the south.

At the beginning of the series, we are treated to several scenes of the siblings Dany and Viserys walking through the sun-drenched city of Pentos, where they are the guests of one of the citys powerful merchants. The fact that these scenes are real rather than CGI gives them an immediacy, a sense that we, too, are there in that space of security, a place where Dany can have at least a little bit of peace before she begins her path toward power and madness.

One of the most exciting scenes is when Dany first begins to ride Drogon. Its a potent reminder of just how powerful these beasts are, and how they fundamentally change the nature of the war that Dany is about to wage against her enemies in Westeros. The fact that, somehow, the wizards in charge of the series CGI made Drogon, as well as the other dragons, so convincingly realistic is a testament to their tremendous skills.

Beneath her pleasant and disarming exterior, the character of Margaery Tyrell (played by the inimitable Natalie Dormer) shows again and again that she has the cunning and the subtlety to survive the Game of Thrones (for a time, anyway). Her marriage with Tommen marks the second time that she is bound to the fates of House Baratheon and, as one of the scenes that is actually shot rather than CGI, its a reminder of the splendor that the royal court can summon.

Cerseis magnificent plan to destroy the Great Sept of Baelor (as well as everyone inside of it) is one of her crowning achievements as a character, however terrible it may be.

RELATED: Game Of Thrones: 10 People Cersei Should Have Been With Other Than Robert

Even though we know that it is produced through the magic of CGI, it is still breathtaking and horrifying to watch this magnificent structure that has stood for so long as the heart of the Faith of the Seven reduced to nothing but smoldering ruins, a sacrifice on the altar of Cersei's vengeful ambition.

It is one of the meetings that would reshape the entire history of Westeros, the fateful encounter between Jon Snow and Dany, one of them the bastard nephew of the other. Once again, the fact that it is real makes it so that one can sense the energy crackling between these two people, both of whom have their own ambitions, their own purposes for Westeros, that will eventually set them on a collision course. The beautiful, if imposingly austere set design is also to be appreciated.

Sometimes, there is nothing as exhilarating to watch as a magnificent fleet setting sail on a voyage of conquest. That is certainly the case when Danys fleet at last sets sail from the continent of Essos, bringing an army with which she hopes to finally conquer Westeros and bring about the fruition of all of her dreams. At this point, we do not yet know how her journey will end, and so we can simply immerse ourselves in the beauty of watching theships brought to life.

NEXT: 10 Game Of Thrones Vs Lord Of The Rings Memes That Are Too Hilarious

NextThe Simpsons: 10 Hidden Details About The School You Never Noticed

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5 Scenes In Game Of Thrones That Are Real (& 5 That Are CGI) - Screen Rant

With the recent addition of twenty-six million people to U.S. unemployment rolls, and millions more in the informal economy cast adrift by actions taken to address the coronavirus pandemic, a political response of sorts is sure to be underway. While superficial economic comparisons to the Great Depression are already being put forward, the U.S. has now had three-plus years of political comparisons to the rise of European fascism without the economic conditions of the Great Depression. Both are off-base for reasons specified below.

The economic comparisons ignore the government response in the form of increased and extended unemployment benefits for those lucky enough to be counted as officially unemployed. At a high level, as millions are experiencing extraordinary economic hardship, some time has been bought before absolute catastrophe proportionate to the Great Depression is cemented as our fate. While it is little solace to those suffering, the systemic problem should the pandemic ease is that already tenuous economic relationships will take some time to be rebuilt.

Enough of these tenuous relationships have already been broken so that widespread and deep economic misery will persist. A Federal Job Guarantee could in theory provide useful employment at a living wage for those who dont get hired / rehired due to frictions like businesses permanently closed by the pandemic. As the corporate bailouts demonstrate, the Federal government has spending capacity limited only by real resources. However, four decades of neoliberal reforms have rendered ad hoc mobilizations in the public interest improbable.

State capitalism (corporatism) has produced a division of labor amongst the political class, with Republicans serving dirty industries while Democrats serve Wall Street. Social expenditures can be either publicly or privately funded. Wall Street profits from private funding. The Democrats austerity policies are imposed to boost this private funding. This currently finds Republicans leading calls for bailouts for their patrons as Democrats feign ignorance of how public finance works to ask how public expenditures in the public interest will be paid for?

Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, in the very pit of the Great Depression, on a platform of economic renewal attached to racial scapegoating. The American explanation of this rise proceeds from racial scapegoating without mention of the American contribution to it, the material circumstances of the Great Depression or the Nazi platform of economic renewal. Source: voxeu.org.

This is roughly analogous to the roles of liberals and conservatives in Weimar Germany before the political ascent of the Nazis. The difference now is that the West isnt yet in a new Great Depression. The broader question of whether this is a relevant analogy has had little impact on the banal and simplistic analogies being made. However, it would be foolish, given the circumstances, not to think the question through and act if needed. The American view that ideology drives history was developed after WWII to explain the rise of European fascism without addressing the role of capitalism in creating the Great Depression.

To understand the improbability, instances of well fed, well housed and well employed people who were motivated by ideology to join fascist movements in material numbers have little historical precedence. The best known case in the U.S. was the Business Plot of 1933 led by Wall Street financiers. Again, the backdrop was the Great Depression and the financiers sought to reverse New Deal reforms they claimed impinged on their liberty. The plot was revealed by self-proclaimed gangster for capitalism, U.S. General Smedley Butler, who the coup plotters had tried to enlist.

The notion of ideology as driver of history in present circumstances European fascism, was developed by members of the Mont Pelerin Society where neoliberalism was founded as pragmatic capitalism. Founding member and erstwhile philosopher Karl Popper lent a left-wing patina to the economics of the radical right to what came to be known as the Chicago School, through studiously ignoring or misrepresenting the work of Marx and Heidegger to create an American view. The philosophical problem with pragmatism is that it depends on unstated premises. What is pragmatic for the richsay reducing wages, may be its opposite to workers.

According to SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center) data, the number of white racist groups in the U.S. peaked in recent history in 2008, at the onset of the Great Recession. Despite U.S. President Donald Trumps toxic racist chatter, this number has been falling throughout his tenure in the White House. Last year, 2019, saw the lowest number of white racist groups since 2008. While any number greater than zero is too many, charges that Mr. Trump is leading a fascist resurgence arent borne out by this data. Source: SPLC.

Through this American view, a morally and politically corrupt leader uses psychological coercion to lead weak willed followers into the fascist abyss of racialized, militarized slaughter. The myth that Nazis were a working class revolt led from below is belied by the close ties of the Nazi leadership to leading industrialists in Germany and the U.S., and even the British royals. That ideological accounts leave as a footnote, or exclude entirely, the role of the Great Depression in creating the material conditions in which the logic of fascism took hold suggests that they are motivated by willful ignorance and / or economic interests.

Karl Poppers pragmatic philosophy of science saved the American technocratic view of it as method divorced from ideology. While few who have spent more than a few minutes thinking about it support this view the structural ontological premise of subject-object dualism is wholly ideological, it was realized after WWII when the U.S. brought dozens of Nazi scientists to the U.S. to work in American industry in what was dubbed Operation Paperclip. That these Nazis were able lift themselves up to contribute to American genocides in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and so forth and so on is heartwarming in an evil-incarnate kind of way.

Coming after WWII, this newfound pragmatism was used to separate the modern American era from three centuries of slavery, genocide against the indigenous population that was still ongoing when the Nazis came to power, the American eugenics program that is still found in state law in the U.S. in 2020, and the genocidal tendencies of the imperial era. If ideology motivates history, what ideology motivated this history? Before answering, you may wish to ask yourself if you agree with the Nazis that race is an ontological, rather than a historical, category.

The difference is crucial. What it means in plain language is that if race is an intrinsic quality, then racist tropes like black criminality can be attributed to natural differences between the races rather than to the history of racialized class relations, strategies of economic expropriation like slavery and convict leasing, and the use of the law to support and maintain exploitative class relations. As Karl Poppers science has it, there is remarkably little support for the claim of intrinsic distinctions outside of historical class relations. This doesnt reduce race to a class issue, so-called class reductionism, but by placing it in history, it takes it away from the Nazis.

A question that Americans should probably ask themselves, but almost certainly wont, is: would they recognize a fascist government if they were its beneficiaries? Of course, the question assumes that there are any beneficiaries of fascist governance. But what if these Americans lived in nice houses and had their fill of consumer goods while the state created the largest prison system in human history in both absolute and relative terms, turned the civil police force into a military force with impunity to kill some classes of citizens, and wealthy oligarchs and corporate executives assumed de facto control of the state?

The point isnt the pulp right-wing theme of lost liberty, but rather the idea that unless youre on the losing side of history, abhorrent conditions for other people tend to be invisible. The perennial question for Germans a generation ago was how many knew of Nazi atrocities? Separately, a significant literature arose around the Nazi economic miracle. Adolf Hitler ascended to power in 1933, the pit of the Great Depression. The circumstances in which he rose to power, and his ability to put large numbers of unemployed Germans to work, produced different realities for ordinary Germans and the millions of victims of the Nazis.

None of this is to argue moral, political or historical equivalence between the U.S. and the Nazis. There are points of intersection and divergence. The question is: can there be radically different lived experiences of so-called liberal Democracy? How can a free nation have the largest absolute and relative carceral population in world history? Military production might explain why surplus military equipment would be made available to civil police forces, but the availability of equipment doesnt explain the militarization of the police. And the presence of militarized police has different meaning in poor neighborhoods than in rich.

It would be encouraging if the liberal class, which includes most of the American left, were looking at economic conditions when worrying publicly about the threat of ascendant fascism. If people are well employed (Job Guarantee), have shelter and food security (Green New Deal) and a functioning healthcare system (Medicare for All), the threat of ascendant fascism is minimal, no matter what foul blather emanates from on high. Again, the number of racist groups has been falling throughout the last four years, not rising as MSNBC, CNN and the New York Times have spent recent years asserting.

But the issue cuts deeper still. The liberal class is willing to live with deplorable conditions for an already large and sure to be growing proportion of the population. And its role as agent of the rich makes it morally and politically culpable for these conditions without the benefit of being rich. This gives a material basis to its preference for ephemeral ideological, explanations of the rise of European fascism. If blame can be placed with an errant leader rather than serial crises of capitalism, then changing leaders means they can keep capitalism.

The neoliberal solution to the fascist threat was / is pragmatic capitalism. Anyone with a leftish understanding of capitalism knows that there is no such animal. What is pragmatic for one class isnt for another. For instance, the 2009 bailouts came on the backs of working people (austerity) and bank borrowers (foreclosures). This makes austerity particularly not constructive for those worried about ascendant fascism. It was the austerity that followed earlier bailouts that set the stage for Donald Trump. As profoundly not constructive as Donald Trump is, he didnt create the conditions that led to his political ascendance. Liberals did.

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Economic Decline and the Threat of Fascism - CounterPunch

the Law on the abolition of wage slavery operates in Russia since 2014. Employees have the right to choose the Bank card that will be paid salary. Last year came into force the latest amendments: employers will be fined for refusing to list the salary on the card that was chosen by the employee. The new law complicated the work of accountants: they have to manually transfer staff salaries to cards of different banks. However, at the end of 2019 appeared a service that will help move the time-consuming process in a single click.

Amendments to the labor law gave Russians the right to choose any Bank to open a salary account. The downside is the increased time and financial costs, which fell on the shoulders of employers.

How much money big business loses on salary

Accountants have to complete a separate payment documents and send them to different banks. The increase in labor costs is especially noticeable in medium and large business. The staff also noticed the change: wages began to fall to the map later than usual.

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Wage slavery: why employees withhold wages, and accountants across the country are going crazy in payday - The Global Domains News

As I scrawl the sloppy copy for my latest manifesto on a windowpane between my thoughts on string theory and Kevin Bacons connection to 9/11 (Madoff made him do it!), I am sincerely struck by Americas latest outpouring of affection for the pathologically eccentric. We may be on the veranda of a new black death but it has never been a better time to be mad in America. Not only is the evening news waxing hysterical and joining the angrier voices in my head like a Henry Rollins gospel ensemble, but every corporate huckster from Viacom to Disney apparently wants to be alone with me (Ill be Daria if you play Snow White).

Even before this country was strapped down into the straitjacket of corona pandemonia, a movement to normalize and destigmatize the scarlet letter of mental illness in mainstream America was well underway. Finally, its OK to be nuts! Fuck, its downright sexy. But this brings to mind a question that has long haunted me. What exactly is mental illness in this age of post-modern collapse and synergistic corporate hysteria? What does it mean to be crazy in such a sick sad world?

According to all the back-slapping do-gooders in the medical establishment, as well as the cultural icons who pander in their jabber, mental illness is just that, an illness of the mind. But just try and ask your therapist what the fuck that really means and hell likely smugly reply, Well, what do you think that means?, before charging you half a grand for his insightful Freudian evasive maneuver. The fine folks at the DSM seem to agree that mental illness is a condition affecting mood, thinking, or behavior in a way that negatively affects functioning in mainstream society. But thats just it, have you taken a fucking look at mainstream society lately?

Palestinian children are starving next door to wealthy kibbutzs, the coral reefs are bleaching like goddamn gym socks, the Amazon is burning to the fucking ground, supposed democracies are fighting a plague with a growing police state, and you fuckers still care more about Kylie Jenners bleached asshole than your own impending doom. If this is what passes for mainstream society, why the fuck would any person with half a conscience even want to function in it? I may be sick, but you people are fucking depraved. Lets have another Whopper and bomb Iran, oh what a normal world!

I have always been pathologically at odds with the normal world and the normal world has never made their disdain for my inability to conform to its wishes a secret. At a very young age, I learned the harsh lesson that I was different and that wasnt OK with the upstanding adults in my life. My issues with what is commonly known as mental illness have always been deeply intertwined with my dizzyingly fluid gender identity, and why not? Just like gender (not to mention race, sexuality, and adulthood), mental illness is essentially a social construct defined by class and civilization.

In fact, it wasnt so long ago that the DSM considered all queer bodies to be insane. I happen to agree with them. Your average Jane is just peachy with normal. She puts on the appropriate uniform, performs wage slavery, and goes home to accept all the right organs in all the right holes. Us queer and crazy folk are biologically driven not to blindly embrace such preconceived notions and for that sin we must be carefully categorized and heavily medicated before we can serve the only role deemed fit for us to play by the sane world, as well behaved tokens of progress and tolerance. Ooh! Doesnt it just feel yummy to belong?

But some of us dont want to fucking belong. Weve had a look at your beige Barbie Dreamworld and we can smell the corpses baked beneath the plastic veneer. And now there are more of us, more every single day. You see, it is society, with its amoral global capitalist bloodbath and the diseases this fosters, which is truly unhinged, and the harder this hard truth becomes to ignore, the more insane people proliferate. Do you really think all the mass shooters work for the NRA? Do you honestly believe that kids are throwing themselves from tall buildings because theyre simply bummed out? Weve had enough. We see the writing on the fucking wall and we dont like what it says. Coronavirus is just a dress rehearsal for the upheaval that is to come. So civilization finally sees us, and welcomes us, and cherishes us, just so long as the growing horde of pathological malcontents stays home and stays properly medicated.

Well, Ive got some writing for your wall- Fuck. You. This is one crazy person who wont keep quiet while the sane savages rape and pillage whats left of this planet in one big craven mass suicide attempt. I will rage like a proud lunatic against your twisted designs and youre gonna need to build bigger pills and bigger prisons to shut me up. Better get to work. Your time is running out. The dawn of the day of the mad dog is upon us.

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Fear and Loathing in Coronaville Volume 4: Insanity is a Virtue in a Mad World - CounterPunch

When I teach First Amendment law, I tend to talk for a few minutes each week about real First Amendment events in the news. In October 2019, when two UConn students were being prosecuted for "racial ridicule" for walking on campus and shouting "nigger" (apparently at no-one in particular)an extremely rare instance of an actual hate speech prosecution in the U.S., and thus an excellent illustration of the legal rules that we had been learning and the arguments that we had been consideringI discussed that case in class. As I always do, I discussed the facts, without expurgation or euphemisms. A few weeks after the class, I learned that some students had disapproved, but I didn't discuss it further with any students.

In early March 2020, right before an event at which a professor from a different law school was talking, someone shouted to me something like, "Volokh, don't use the n-word today!" (I'm not expurgating here, as you might gather; he did say, "n-word.") The speaker, to whom I was talking at the time, asked me what that was about, and I responded that, last Fall, I had talked about the prosecution of the UConn who had shouted "nigger," and some students were upset about my quoting that word. I wasn't speaking to the class as a whole, though I also wasn't trying to whisper: Especially at an American university, it seems to me, faculty and students (and others) should be free to discuss incidents in the news (or incidents in the law school) without looking over the shoulder to see who might overhear and be offended.

Also, no-one has tried to make anything of this (at least yet), but to fully disclose matters, let me note that in my Amicus Clinic class this Semester we were discussing our cases, and in one of them a man was being prosecuted for saying "What, are you an idiot? What do I have to do, be a nigger to be served in thisin this place?" to a black employee at the VA. (I believe that such speech might well have been constitutionally unprotected against a "fighting words" prosecution, or perhaps under some other theory; but the jury instruction in his case allowed the jury to convict him based on the use of "loud, abusive, or otherwise improper language," and our argument for amici will be that this prohibition on "otherwise improper" language is unconstitutionally vague and potentially viewpoint-based.)As you might gather, I quoted that as well.

My Dean (whom I much like, and whose work I generally much respect) has now issued a public apology to the UCLA Law community for the first two of these incidents:

Earlier in the year, Professor Eugene Volokh used the "n-word," both in classin teaching a First Amendment caseand outside of class when recounting the incident to a colleague. As you may know, Professor Volokh has strong views about why he chooses to use incendiary languageeven when vilein his classroom, without euphemism or alteration. While he has the right to make that choice as a matter of academic freedom and First Amendment rights, so long as he is not using this or other words with animus, many of usmyself includedstrongly believe that he could achieve his learning goals more effectively and empathetically without repeating the word itself. That is equally true in casual settings outside the classroom. Slurs, even when mentioned for pedagogical purposes, hurt people. The n-word is inextricably associated with anti-Black prejudice, racism and slavery; it is a word that carries with it the weight of our shameful history and the reality of ongoing anti-Black racism. I am deeply sorry for the pain and offense the use of this word has caused, and I very much respect the important work our Black Law Students Association undertook, using speech to counter speech, in the flowchart they distributed around the building.

I want to respond here by explaining why I think I was right, and why I will continue to accurately quote things in class and outside it. This is of course very similar to what I said about the controversy at Wake Forest involving the great legal historian Prof. Michael Kent Curtis, but I thought I needed to repeat it here as well.

My view is that, in class readings and in-class discussions (as well as in outside-class discussions), professors ought to mention what actually happens in a case or incident, without euphemism or expurgation; and students should feel free to do the same. If professors and students feel uncomfortable with saying those words themselves, I wouldn't condemn their decision to use an expurgated form (see, e.g.,Prof. Geoffrey Stone's decision along these lines); but I think the better approach is to accurately quote.

Professors certainly shouldn't use epithets, racial or otherwise, to themselves insult people. But when they are talking about what has been said, I think it's important that they report it as it was said. This is often called the "use-mention distinction," see, e.g., Randall Kennedy,How a Dispute Over the N-Word Became a Dispiriting Farce, Chron. Higher Ed., Feb. 8, 2019; John McWhorter,If President Obama Can Say It, You Can Too, Time, June 22, 2015(distinguishing "using" from "referring to").

Thus, when I have talked in my First Amendment Law class aboutCohen v. California, I talked about Cohen's "Fuck the Draft" jacket, not "F-word the Draft." When I talked aboutSnyder v. Phelps, I talked about Phelps' signs saying things like "God Hates Fags." When I talked aboutMatal v. Tam, I talked about a trademark for a band called "The Slants," which some view as a derogatory term for Asians. I suspect many, likely most, law professors do the same; they should certainly be allowed to. If I were to talk about the Redskins trademark case, I would say "Redskins," rather than talk around the word, the way some news outlets apparently do.

To turn to speech hostile to a group I belong to (Jews), when I talked about a rare recent group libel case, the MontanaState v. Leniocase, I noted that Lenio said, "I think every jew on the planet deserves to be killed for what kikes have done to our #dollar and cost of living Killing jews > wage #slave .," "#Copenhagen [referring to the then-recent Copenhagen shootings, including at a synagogue] It's important to note that jews hate free speech & are known bullsh-ters, could be #falseFlag So Hope for many REAL dead kikes," and "Now that the holocaust has been proven to be a lie Beyond a reasonable doubt, it is now time to hunt the Nazi hunters." (As it happens, both my parents came close to actually being killed by Nazis in World War II: My father was trapped in besieged Leningrad [civilian death toll about 1/3], and my mother was a Jew in Kiev [likewise, death toll about 1/3 or more] who would likely have been murdered with the other Ukrainian Jews if she hadn't been evacuated to Siberia. Nazi rhetoric and symbolism: Not my favorite.)

We have had readings or slides discussing cross-burning, and depicting swastikas and Confederate flags connected to cases or problems. And of course when I talk about leading First Amendment cases (such as Brandenburg v. Ohio,Virginia v. Black,NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware,Board of Ed. v. Pico, and more) that use the word "nigger," I don't try to avoid the word, and don't expect my students to.

This is so for several related reasons:

[1.] First, the law school is part of a university, where we should try to discuss the world as it is, the evil as well as the good, whether in law classes, history classes, literature classes, film classes, modern music classes, or elsewhere. This strikes me as a fundamental feature of the modern university: The right (I think the duty, but at least the right) to accurately present and discuss the facts of the world around us. That should be true of literature departments, of history departments, of law schools, or any other part of the university where such matters may arise.

[2.] Another reason is that, once a rule is set forth that you can't use "nigger," people will naturally assume that this reflects a broader principle. What about "fag" in "God hates fags" fromSnyderor the other Westboro Baptist Church cases? What about swastikas or Confederate flags or "Negro," in law school classes or history cases or other classes in which these are parts of the relevant materials?

Normally, we expect students to accept candid discussions of awful things (and history and law are chock full of awful things). But once one word that bitterly insults one group is made taboo, it's human nature for other groups to expect equal treatment for themselves. A categorical principle that all of us can quote all words, precisely because we are reporting the facts rather than using the words pejoratively, strikes me as a much better approach, and one that will help decrease the extra hurt feelings that will arise if, say, gay students were told that "fag" can be quoted but "nigger" can't be.

[3.] Beyond this, a good deal of history and of crime is much more painful than mere racial hostility (even the bitter hostility that many actual uses of "nigger" reflect). Genocide. Slavery. Hitler, Stalin, Mao. Rape.Child molestation. Lynching.

Some students may understandably find being reminded of such things to be much more painful than just hearing a quote from some racists. To give one concrete example, some years ago several law school administrators at a Top 20 law school told students designing a moot court problem to remove one of the precedents from the readings. (Moot court problems often focus on writing and oral delivery rather than research, and therefore give students a closed set of precedents on which they can rely.)

The problem was about the First Amendment and threats. The case that they were told to remove was the most important precedent in the field,Virginia v.Black.The reason given to remove the case was that the precedent involved cross-burning, which might be seen as too traumatic for some students. The result would have been pedagogically nonsensical, Hamlet without the Prince. Indeed, it would have taught the wrong messageand, I think, would have been humiliating for the students and the school when outside judges asked the students in the oral arguments why they hadn't discussedthekey precedent.

Fortunately, the decision was ultimately reversed. But this is where we go with the logic of compulsory expurgation of racially offensive material from sources that include it.

[4.] Moreover, law schools are training people to become lawyers. Lawyers have to deal with facts as they are, regardless of how unpleasant those facts may be. They need to read cases that contain nasty words and describe nastier actions. Do a Westlaw search fornigger & da(aft 1/1/1990), and you will find a bit more than 10,000 such cases, and there are many cases that quote other epithets as well; nor is the pace slowing down. (These cases, by the way, include Supreme Court opinions by, among others, Justices Blackmun, Ginsburg, Marshall, O'Connor, Sotomayor, and Thomas.)

And that's just in the cases that lawyers may have to read and discuss. On top of that, lawyers have to listen to witnesses who report what they heard. They have to listen to opposing counsel who quote cases and evidence. They have to hear judges who do the same. (Westlaw archives far fewer oral arguments than cases, but a search through its limited trial transcript and oral argument database for likewise reveals hundreds of mentions of "nigger.")

And indeed every day, lawyers of all races, religions, ethnic groups, and sexual orientations handle caseswhether in criminal law, employment law, education law, civil rights law, family law, or elsewherein which they hear extremely offensive material. They handle these situations with professionalism, and don't let the casual cruelty, callousness, and hatred that they read or hear about get them down. (Just to give one prominent example, the defendant's brief in the leading First Amendment precedent Brandenburg v. Ohio, a case in which a KKK speaker used the word "nigger" repeatedly, was cowritten by Eleanor Holmes Norton, now the delegate to Congress from D.C. and then a young black lawyer. Unsurprisingly, both the Supreme Court opinion and Del. Norton's brief accurately and repeatedly quoted that word.)

I do not for a moment think that black lawyers allow themselves to be debilitated by hearing material about racism, gay lawyers about hatred towards gays, Jewish lawyers about anti-Semitism, and so on, whether that material describes violent attacks, contains epithets, or whatever else. I think that, as law students and law professors, we should follow this example.

[5.] Indeed, the implicit message of the claim that black law students, in particular, need to be protected from hearing cases that contain the word "nigger," because they find it so "painful" or "challenging" (to quote the Dean of Wake Forest's law school) or offensive or even traumatic, is that young black lawyers will likewise be sharply disturbed by hearing the word in the everyday reality of their practicesin courtrooms, in depositions, in witness interviews, wherever it is part of the facts of a case or of a relevant precedent. If this were true, then this would suggest that black lawyers are going to be less effective than white lawyers, because they are so pained, challenged, disturbed, and distracted by simply hearing the word.

As I mentioned in item 4 above, I do not for a moment believe that black lawyers actually are less effective lawyers, precisely because I do not believe that they are so easily wounded simply by hearing the facts of a case. But I also don't believe that black law students (or other law students) are likewise so easily wounded.

I believe that students and lawyers of all identities are perfectly capable of handling the often ugly reality of the world, as reflected in the precedents and in the cases before them. And I think it does them no service to tell them that they are somehow entitled to be so shielded from that reality that they don't even hear some aspects of that reality.

For more on this subject, see Randall Kennedy's bookNigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word,(2003), as well as Randall Kennedy,How a Dispute Over the N-Word Became a Dispiriting Farce, Chron. Higher Ed., Feb. 8, 2019; John McWhorter,If President Obama Can Say It, You Can Too, Time, June 22, 2015, which I also mentioned above. And if you're interested, you might also considerJohnnie Cochran's argumentin the O.J. Simpson trial, which I think provides a helpful analogy (though I recognize that we're talking here about analogy and not identity).

Prosecutor Chris Darden had argued that the Judge should exclude evidence of Mark Fuhrman's use of the word "nigger," "because it is so prejudicial and so extremely inflammatory that to use that word in any situation will evoke some type of emotional response from any African American within earshot of that word." Darden went on,

Mr. Cochran would like to ask a white police officer if he ever used that word and after that white police officer testifies there will be other white male police officers, and by the time those other officers testify they willthe jury will have heard this word, they will be upset, they will have become emotional, and as soon as Mr. Cochran works them up into that emotional frenzy he would like to get them into, as soon as he does that and the next white police officer takes the witness stand, the jury is going to paint that white police officer with the same brush Mr. Cochran painted Detective Fuhrman.

Here was Johnnie Cochran's response:

[Mr. Darden's] remarks are demeaning to African Americans as a group.

It is demeaning to our jurors to say that African Americans who have lived under oppression for 200 plus years in this country cannot work within the mainstream, cannot hear these offensive words. African Americans live with offensive words, offensive looks, offensive treatment every day of their lives, but yet they still believe in this country. And to say that our jurors, because they hear this offensive wordevery day that people call, that they interact with people, we have heard this in the questionnairesto say they can't be fair is absolutely outrageous for the prosecution to stand here and over the last couple of days to present character assassination against this man, unfounded, bogus charges after charge after charge, then to withdraw seventeen of those charges, for them to have the temerity, the unmitigated gall to come into this courtroom and talk about fairness.

What we are going to be talking about this afternoon, your honor, is words out of the mouth of Mark Fuhrman. What I want to share with you are the things that this man said, not what we made up, what he said, what he told people.

Your honor, we didn't create Mark Fuhrman. We take witnesses the way we find them. We didn't tell him to go to the doctor and say all those things that I will share with you this afternoon. We didn't tell him to say those things in front of Kathleen Bell.

Cochran was an excellent lawyer who was prepared to confront the ugly reality of the world in effectively defending his client. Teaching students that they are entitled never to hear the word "nigger" quoted from accounts of real cases or incidents will not, I think, help them become such excellent lawyers.

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UCLA Law Dean Apologizes for My Having Accurately Quoted the Word "Nigger" in Discussing a Case - Reason

Slavery is not a thing of the past. It still exists today, affecting millions across the world, including our home here in Hong Kong, where Kenyan domestic workers are trafficked and subjected to forced labour in the city.

In the past years, high-profile stories documenting the abuse of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong, such as the cases of Erwiana Sulistyaningsih and Kartika Puspitasari have put modern slavery and forced labour into the spotlight. But there have been many, perhaps thousands of cases that have never been covered. The stories of these victims of human trafficking, abuse, modern slavery are more often than not hidden, lost and forgotten, especially amidst the dominant headlines surrounding months of protests followed by the global coronavirus pandemic.

Investigative work undertaken by Hong Kong nonprofit Migrasia has uncovered at least 5 known victims (and dozens more implicated) in a collective case of human trafficking and forced labour of Kenyan domestic workers.

In 2018, the Hong Kong government enacted an Action Plan to combat trafficking and enhance the protection of migrant domestic workers in the city. The plan outlines various measures, from mechanisms to screen victims to increasing penalties for offenders and providing witness immunity.

But what Migrasia has exposed is the depressing fact that Hong Kong isnt just a regional transit hub for the global illegal trafficking trade. There is a systematic failure to protect victims at every turn. Kenyan victims of trafficking and forced labour who are fighting for their justice have been facing opposition at every single step of the way.

The stories of the women that Migrasia are currently working with are appalling cases of consistent exploitation by an agency which is still operating at large, unpunished and with near impunity.

Victims were deceived by an unscrupulous agency and lured into believing that the job that lies ahead of them will promise high salaries, long-term contracts and good living conditions. Unaware that agencies are bound by Hong Kong law to charge no more than 10% of the first months salaries, prospective workers were overcharged a fee of HK$24,000 to take up the opportunity, forcing them to undertake various loans and guarantee documents.

Upon arrival in Hong Kong, their passports were confiscated from them. They must work for a monthly salary, 90% of which is deducted until they pay off their loans all the while being subjected to physical and verbal abuse. They are left with practically nothing. No phones, no holidays, no statutory days off that domestic workers are entitled to by law. Not even three meals in some cases. Some are not allowed to set foot outside their employers homes for months on end. They are stripped of their human rights and dignity.

While a handful of victims have stepped forward, Migrasia estimates that dozens from Kenya have been brought to Hong Kong by this particular agency alone. It is possible that more than 200 were involved, but the Hong Kong Immigration Department has not made available the statistics of entry visa applications for Kenyan and Nepalese nationals, despite an Access to Information request submitted by the organisation.

When at least 8 Kenyan nationals reported their case to the Employment Agencies Administration (EEA) and the Hong Kong Police Force in addition to the Immigration Department in 2018, no concrete action has been taken to stop the perpetrating agency from its illegal operations, from facilitating modern slavery to suspected laundering of the funds they illicitly took from the victims.

There has been no investigation, no prosecution, no warning letter issued.

In fact, victims were threatened with arrest when they explained to the authorities that the agency had forged some of their employment documents. Even when the individuals were identified as victims of trafficking by the United Nations-affiliated organisation International Organisation for Migration (IOM), no conclusive law enforcement actions were taken by the Hong Kong authorities.

And now, not only are low-wage earners and disadvantaged groups in Hong Kong disproportionately exposed to the impact of the the coronavirus pandemic, those who have been harmed by the fraudulent agency are being pushed even further away from the justice they deserve. The most vulnerable in society are now even more at risk due to Covid-19. Victims of abuse are having difficulty accessing justice. Hong Kongs courts have been practically shut down and cases are being pushed over and over again, explained David Bishop, co-founder of Migrasia, lawyer and principal lecturer at the University of Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong system should have sprung into action when authorities were first notified of alleged modern slavery. But it didnt it failed to protect some of the most exploited people in the city where help is needed the most.

Despite the uphill battle, organisations like Migrasia are still advocating for change and are actively working to bring justice for the marginalised. Last year, 80% of the Hong Kong governments successful prosecutions relating to migrant workers and forced labour including the most recent arrests of job scammers targeting foreign domestic helpers were brought forward by Migrasia. They have also developed the Know Your Agency app to visualise the scale of the problem and educate the community.

But we cannot rely on civil society organisations alone. The Kenyan cases of human trafficking are just one of many cases where people suffer horrific conditions of abuse and modern slavery passing through or happening in Hong Kong. Across wider Asia, there are 11.7 million people in forced labour conditions.

Without systematic change in the city to eliminate its role in the underground market, there will only be more hidden victims left in the dark.

Lead image courtesy of Freepik.

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Modern Slavery: The Kenyan Domestic Workers That Are Trafficked & Forced To Work In Hong Kong - Green Queen Media

When the 13 United States of America declared independence from the United Kingdom in 1776, the founders were attempting to break free from the tyranny of Britains top-down centralized government.

But the first constitution the founders created, the Articles of Confederation, vested almost all power in individual state legislatures and practically nothing in the national government. The resultpolitical chaos and crippling debtalmost sunk the fledgling nation before it left the harbor.

So the founders met again in Philadelphia in 1787 and drafted a new Constitution grounded in a novel separation of state and national powers known as federalism. While the word itself doesnt appear anywhere in the Constitution, federalism became the guiding principle to safeguard Americans against King George III-style tyranny while providing a check against rogue states.

READ MORE: How the United States Constitution Came to Be

The Articles of Confederation.

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The Articles of Confederation were written and ratified while the Revolutionary War was still raging. The document is less of a unifying constitution than a loose pact between 13 sovereign states intending to enter into a firm league of friendship. Absent from the Articles of Confederation were the Executive or Judicial branches, and the national congress had only the power to declare war and sign treaties, but no authority to directly levy taxes.

As a result, the newly independent United States was buried in debt by 1786 and unable to pay the long-overdue wages of Revolutionary soldiers. The U.S. economy sunk into a deep depression and struggling citizens lost their farms and homes. In Massachusetts, angry farmers joined Shays Rebellion to seize courthouses and block foreclosures, and a toothless congress was powerless to put it down.

George Washington, temporarily retired from government service, lamented to John Jay, What a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal & fallacious!

Alexander Hamilton called for a new Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 where the Articles of Confederation were ultimately thrown out in favor of an entirely new form of government.

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When the United States cut ties with Britain, the founders wanted nothing to do with the British form of government known as unitary. Under a unitary regime, all power originates from a centralized national government (Parliament) and is delegated to local governments. Thats still the way the government operates in the UK.

Instead, the founders initially chose the opposite form of government, a confederation. In a confederation, all power originates at the local level in the individual states and is only delegated to a weak central government at the states discretion.

When the founders met in Philadelphia, it was clear that a confederation wasnt enough to hold the young nation together. States were scuffling over borders and minting their own money. Massachusetts had to hire its own army to put down Shays Rebellion.

The solution was to find a middle way, a blueprint of government in which the powers were shared and balanced between the states and national interests. That compromise, woven into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, became known as federalism.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights created two different kinds of separation of powers, both designed to act as critical checks and balances.

The first and best-known of the separation of powers is between the three branches of government: Executive, Legislative and the Judiciary. If the president acts against the best interests of the country, he or she can be impeached by Congress. If Congress passes an unjust law, the president can veto it. And if any law or public institution infringes on the constitutional rights of the people, the Supreme Court can remedy it.

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But the second type of separation of powers is equally important, the granting of separate powers to the federal and state governments. Under the Constitution, the state legislatures retain much of their sovereignty to pass laws as they see fit, but the federal government also has the power to intervene when it suits the national interest. And under the supremacy clause found in Article IV, federal laws and statutes supersede state law.

Federalism, or the separation of powers between the state and federal government, was entirely new when the founders baked it into the Constitution. And while it functions as an important check, its also been a continual source of contention between the two levels of government. In the final run-up to the Civil War, the Southern states seceded from the Union in part because of the federal government was unconstitutionally encroaching on their domestic institutions of slavery.

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According to James Madison, a committed federalist, the Constitution maintains the sovereignty of states by enumerating very few express powers to the federal government, while [t]hose which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.

Article I Section 8 contains a list of all of the enumerated powers that are exclusively delegated to the federal government. Those include the power to declare war, maintain armed forces, regulate commerce, coin money and establish a Post Office.

But that very same Section 8 also includes the so-called Elastic Clause that authorizes Congress to write and pass any laws that are necessary and proper to carry out its enumerated powers. These powers are known collectively as implied powers and have been used by Congress to create a national bank, to collect a federal income tax, to institute the draft, to pass gun control laws and to set a federal minimum wage, among others.

Other than that, the Constitution grants almost all other power and authority to the individual states, as Madison said. While the Constitution doesnt explicitly list the powers retained by the states, the founders included a catch-all in the 10th Amendment, ratified in 1791:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Those so-called reserved powers include all authority and functions of local and state governments, policing, education, the regulation of trade within a state, the running of elections and many more.

In the United States, federalism has proven a successful experiment in shared governance since 1787 and provided the model for similar federalist systems in Australia, Canada, India, Germany and several other nations.

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