Whoever wins the November 3 presidential election has an opportunity and a responsibility to help the United States move forward by making human rights a priority in the next administration. This includes ending policies that undermine the rights of people in the United States to live in dignity, speak their opinions, have families as they please, put sufficient food on the table, see a doctor without fear of financial ruin, and feel safe in their own skin. For far too long, many people in the country have faced systemic racism and discrimination, often at the hands of their own federal government.

An urgent human rights agenda awaits the next administration. Regardless of who wins the election, Human Rights Watch urges the next administration to take the following priority steps in US domestic policytoward advancing a future of dignity and respect for the rights of all.

The US should act swiftly to address economic impacts resulting from public health measures to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The Covid-19 pandemic has both highlighted and exacerbated poverty and inequality in the US, disproportionately impacting low-income and informal workers, racial and ethnic minorities, undocumented people, and people already living in poverty. The next administration should work with Congress, state and local governments to adopt comprehensive and effective policies to address unemployment and structural inequalities, including with regard to access to food, housing, quality education, affordable health care, and extended unemployment benefits through the crisis, as well as combat the impacts of excessive and predatory debt and abusive debt collection.

For more on poverty and inequality priorities.

Harms resulting from US policies at the federal, state, and local levels continue to disproportionately impact Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and low-income communities, posing grave dangers to their social and economic well-being. The next administration needs to confront the US history of systemic racial discrimination and support laws and policies that protect the rights of all people and address racial disparities in health, education, housing, employment, and the criminal legal system. The next administration should take all necessary measures to address the serious threat posed by white supremacist extremist groups. It should seek to remove obstacles to accountability for incidents of racial violence, and support reparations to communities most impacted by slavery and ongoing systemic racism.

For more on racial justice priorities.

The US needs to vastly reduce the number of people behind bars many of whom are detained or imprisoned because of racist laws and policies that for decades havedisproportionately affected Black and brown communities. Following the elections, the administration should get behind meaningful criminal legal system reforms that go well beyond those proposed thus far. These need to include reforms that reduce the role of police to address societal problems; investments in communities to advance public safety and equal rights; and independent accountability and oversight mechanisms that advance justice.

For more on criminal legal system priorities.

The next administration should promote laws, policies, and practices seeking gender equality. Historically, many women and girls have been left out of US successes on rights, especially women of color, women with disabilities, Indigenous women, and female immigrants. Systemic racism, economic and immigration status, age, and ones address can lead to unequal access to health care, paid family leave, and services for survivors of domestic violence. The next administration should make gender equality and justice a priority, create positions and interagency collaboration to support gender integration, and take specific actions to advance womens rights to health, economic justice, and a life free of violence.

For more on women's rights priorities.

People fleeing their homes in search of safety have a right to seek asylum, and the US has a long history of helping refugees. The next administration should oppose a deterrence-focused strategy toward migrants that has led to family separations, harsh detention conditions for adults and children, and a dismantling of the US asylum and refugee system. The US should limit excessive surveillance and data collection to enforce borders and should advance reform of an immigration system that has resulted in serious abuses under previous administrations.

For more on immigration and border policy priorities.

Discrimination against LGBT people remains a serious problem in the United States. The next administration should support the Equality Act, which would expressly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in education, housing, public spaces, federally funded programs, credit, and jury service. It should also support reauthorization of an LGBT-inclusive Violence Against Women Act that is intersectional and comprehensive and best serves communities at risk. The administration should swiftly reverse the discriminatory ban on transgender people in the military, ensure that sex discrimination protections are LGBT-inclusive and enforce them accordingly, and make certain that religious exemptions are not applied in a way that deprives LGBT people and others of their rights. It should also ensure that LGBT people fleeing persecution in their countries of origin can file asylum claims, in accordance with US and international refugee law.

For more on LGBT rights priorities.

The US should act urgently to realize access to affordable, reliable, and quality internet for all. The Covid-19 pandemic laid bare that the internet is essential to exercising a range of human rights, including freedom of expression and access to information, and to education and an adequate standard of living. The new administration should develop policies that rein in abusive and discriminatory practices by technology companies. It should require greater transparency and hold companies accountable for abuses that result from their practices and underlying business models, while respecting human rights and preserving a free, open, and secure internet. The next administration should give priority to promoting the adoption of a comprehensive data protection law, the absence of which has left peoples data vulnerable to exploitation by government, private companies, and foreign actors, in violation of peoples privacy rights. The new administration should ensure that efforts to automate social protection programs and other facets of public life using data-driven technologies protect welfare rights.

For more on technology and human rights priorities.

The next administration should significantly expand US efforts to address the climate crisis, the impacts of which pose an unprecedented threat to human rights around the world. It should reverse the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and adopt and support ambitious measures to transition away from an economy built on fossil fuels to one built on cleaner, low-emitting energy sources. The administration should also reverse rollbacks of and strengthen regulations that protect people from toxic pollution. And it should prioritize support to marginalized populations most affected by climate change and other environmental harms.

For more information on environment and human rights priorities.

The health, safety, and education of millions of children in the US are at risk due to inadequate access to education; outdated laws that result in hazardous child labor; overly punitive juvenile justice systems; and immigration policies that include detention, family separation, and summary expulsion. The next administration should take steps to enhance childrens education by prioritizing digital literacy and universal and affordable internet access, strengthen laws to protect their data privacy, and, when it is safe to return, ensure children stay in school. It should update child labor regulations and work with Congress to amend outdated labor laws that allow children to engage in hazardous work. It should also work with states to reform juvenile justice systems. Additionally, it should end the detention of migrant children, facilitate family reunification, and support legislative reforms that include strict protections for children.

For more information on children's rights priorities.

The US should take decisive steps to reverse decades of erosion of workers rights protections and implement comprehensive policies to protect the rights of workers to a safe and healthy workplace, a living wage, and overtime; as well as to organize and bargain collectively. Due to inadequate regulation and enforcement, many essential and other workers have faced unsafe working conditions without adequate labor rights protections during the Covid-19 pandemic. In some sectors, particularly in agriculture and food production, disproportionate numbers of workers have contracted the virus and died. The new administration should ensure effective oversight byand seek adequate funding for enforcement agencies, promote standards and binding rules that meet international norms, and prioritize the hiring of staff who are experts in workplace safety and workers rights.

For more information on workers' rights priorities.

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The Next President Should Protect Human Rights in the US and End Abuses - Human Rights Watch

As Republicans ram through Trumps third Supreme Court nomination with an election underway, Democrats are increasingly contemplating expanding the court. But rather than cover it with the objectivity they claim to strive for, the countrys dominant media outlets have adopted a right-wing frame of the issuecalling it court packingthat delegitimizes court expansion.

Ruth Bader Ginsburgs Death Revives Talk of Court Packing, announced a New York Times headline (9/19/20). What Is Court Packing, and Why Are Some Democrats Seriously Considering It? asked the Washington Post (10/8/20). In that piece, the Posts Amber Phillips explicitly acknowledged the bias inherent in the phrase, yet presented it as practically official:

Expanding the Supreme Court to more than nine seats sounds like a radical idea, and the term for it, court packing, sounds derisive because it has created controversy every time it has come up.

In typical corporate media style, such articles often present the issue as a he said/she said dispute. In the WaPo piece, Democrats are frustrated that the Supreme Court could get even more conservative, while Republicans paint that as sour grapes; over at the Times, Democrats characterize court expansion as a defensive move against Republican actions, not a unilateral power grab, while Republicans have called the idea radical and undemocratic.

In these formulations, one side must win and the other lose. But the reality they gloss over is that those arent the real teams here. The struggle over the Court is at heart a struggle between anti-democratic forces and the interests of the vast majority of people in this country.

In recent years, massive amounts of corporate money have been directed toward efforts, led by the right-wing Federalist Society, to capture the US courts for corporate interestsdismantling voting rights, favoring corporate rights over individual rights, and stripping the power of government to regulate corporations (CounterSpin, 10/16/20). By framing the issue as one of Republicans vs. Democrats, media ignore the more important threat to democracy as a whole. And by accepting court packing as the term for expanding the court, journalists lend a hand to those anti-democratic forces.

The phrase court packing isnt new. President Franklin D. Roosevelts opponents coined it to delegitimize his plan to expand the court after it repeatedly struck down parts of his New Deal in the name of restraining government power (federal andin some cases, like the courts rejection of New Yorks effort to set a minimum wage for womenstate). In the end, FDRs plan languished in the Senate, but the president won the war; in the wake of his public campaign against it, the court began issuing rulings more favorable to the New Deal and other economic recovery plans. One of the conservative justices retired, giving FDR the opportunity to swing the balance back in his favorno thanks to the media, which ran predominantly unfavorable stories about FDRs plan.

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The circumstances are different this time around, with Republicans on the verge of installing a 63 conservative majority, and none of the conservative seats likely to open under a Biden term; the oldest conservative justice, Clarence Thomas, is just 72, and hasnt given any indication that hes interested in retiring. Plus, its unlikely Biden would push forcefully for a court expansion the way FDR did, putting pressure on the court to temper its rulings. But the rampant journalistic use of the biased term court packing hasnt changed.

A Nexis search of US newspapers for the past three months (7/24/2010/24/20) turns up 244 headlines with some version of the phrase court packing (including, e.g., pack the court or packing the court). Less than half as many, 98, used a version of the more neutral court expansion (such as expanding the court), and almost half of those (48) also used the phrase court packing within the article.

Its also noteworthy what that these court packing stories highlightand ignore. In arguments about court expansion, the right tends to focus on ideas of tradition (like the false claim that adding justices would be unprecedented) and the culture wars (like Roe v. Wade). Democrats often lean on the Republican hypocrisy of blocking Obamas nomination of Merrick Garland to fill Antonin Scalias seat in 2016, when the GOP insisted, eight months before an election, that the voters should have a chance to weigh in before a new justice was confirmeda principle instantly abandoned when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died seven weeks before an election.

The role of corporate money and the Federalist Society, and the threats they pose to democracy, often go unmentioned by both sides. In the last three months, newspaper stories that mentioned court packing also mentioned Merrick Garland 358 times and abortion 337 times; Roe v. Wade made 159 appearances. But these stories mentioned the Federalist Society only 33 times; of those, only seven mentioned corporate or corporation.

In the end, its unlikely that even ifand its a big ifDemocrats take the presidency and the Senate, there will be enough agreement within the party to expand the Supreme Court. But thats also not the only way to counter the corporate takeover of the court. In the face of an intransigent pro-slavery court, Lincoln and his anti-slavery allies recognized that their most powerful and effective strategy was not to try to add enough justices to gain the upper hand within the court; it was to undermine the false image of an impartial, democracy-protecting court that must always have the last word. As Matt Karp writes in Jacobin (9/19/20):

Lincoln persisted in rejecting judicial supremacy and also the basic idea underlying it, that law somehow exists before or beyond politics, and thus it was illegitimate to resist the proslavery court through popular antislavery mobilization. We do not propose to be bound by [Dred Scott] as a political rule, he said. We propose resisting it as to have it reversed if we can, and a new judicial rule established upon this subject.

Others have advocated for a similar approach today: marginalizing rather than trying to capture the court (e.g., New Republic, 10/13/20). Neither task would be easy, but getting journalists to talk more directly about the true problems with the court is a critical step along the way.

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Journalists Pick Sides When They Call Adding Justices 'Court Packing' - Common Dreams

On October 15, 2020, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the U.S. Department of Treasury (FinCEN) released its Supplemental Advisory on Identifying and Reporting Human Trafficking and Related Activity (Supplemental Advisory). The last time FinCEN provided guidance on identifying trafficking in anti-money laundering (AML) processes was in Guidance on Recognizing Activity that May be Associated with Human Smuggling and Human Trafficking Financial Red Flags on September 11, 2014. The evolving tactics of human traffickers and behaviors of victims required updated guidance in order for financial institutions to better meet Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) obligations to assist the government in detecting and preventing money laundering.

The Supplemental Advisory focuses on four emerging tactics used by human traffickers to carry out and hide the proceeds from their illicit operations: front companies, exploitative employment practices, funnel accounts, and alternative payment methods. Front companies are lawful, licensed, and registered businesses which are used by traffickers to comingle the illicit proceeds generated from their scheme of human exploitation with that of a legitimate business. Examples include massage parlors, nail salons, even electrician services, and faith-based mission work.

Labor trafficking can be harder to detect than sex trafficking for AML departments. FinCENs Supplemental Advisory alerts financial institutions to examples of exploitative labor practices, including visa fraud, wage withholding, and recruitment fee advances. Note that in 2019, the Federal Acquisition Regulation: Combating Trafficking in Persons was amended to address prohibited recruitment fees and broadened contractor responsibility for violative recruitment fees in supply chains.

Funnel accounts continue to be a common tactic wherein a trafficker coerces a victim to open one or more bank accounts in their own name, and then directs them to deposit, transfer, wire, and withdraw monies in amounts below a reporting threshold, for the benefit the trafficker or the enterprise. Because the accounts are often held exclusively in the victims names, the trafficker remains anonymous.

Such account activity may lead to an Unusual Activity Report or Suspicious Activity Report but that would erroneously target the victim, not the perpetrator. Accounts may be closed by the financial institution, or at the direction of the trafficker, following overdraft or low balances, which can cause victims to incur bad credit status and prevent them from accessing financial services in the future.

The Supplemental Advisory further alerts financial institutions to the prolific use of prepaid cards, virtual currencies, smartphone cash applications, and third-party payment processors to advertise their sex trafficking business and receive payment.

Although the indicators list addended to the Supplemental Advisory is not significantly different than past iterations, it adds a set of case studies. Specific perpetrator and victim vignettes are effective in modernizing detection tools as they allow financial institutions to keep their pulse on real life examples relayed by law enforcement and survivor advocates. The Supplemental Advisory also reminds financial institutions that they are protected from liability for information sharing afforded under Section 314(b) of the USA Patriot Act. Traffickers often implicate multiple financial institutions and only through a wider lens and open communication can otherwise lawful-appearing activity be identified as suspicious.

Finally, the Supplemental Advisory notes FinCENs Customer Due Diligence Rule, promulgated in 2018, which generally requires some financial institutions to identify beneficial owners of commercial customers. Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, whoever knowingly benefits, financially or by receiving anything of value may be subject to criminal and civil liability. Therefore, diligence and monitoring processes are to include potential third-party participants in an exploitive scheme.

FinCENs advisory on human trafficking is timely. In the last few months, regulators have signaled increased attention on financial institution responses to human trafficking. This past summer, Deutsche Bank was fined $150M by The New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) for compliance failures related to client Jeffrey Epstein, his sex trafficking enterprise and correspondent banks. In the Consent Order, NYDFS found the Deutsche Bank conducted business in an unsafe and unsound manner [and] failed to maintain an effective and compliant anti-money laundering program. This September, Westpac Bank was fined $920M USD by the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (Australias financial intelligence, anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism regulator) for failures in AML reporting, record keeping and detection, including transfers indicative of child sex trafficking. This fine is the largest paid to an Australian regulator for violation of money laundering laws to date. Also in September, the United Kingdom announced that the U.K. Modern Slavery Act of 2015 will be strengthened to (i) allocate more funding to enforce its requirements and (ii) mandate that companies modern slavery statements cover certain topics ranging from due diligence to risk assessment.

Increased regulatory focus on financial institution responses to human trafficking deserves attention.

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Fall 2020 Brings Increased Regulatory Focus on Financial Institution Detection of Human Trafficking - JD Supra

(This is the third installment in The Stakes 2020, a series of interviews with community leaders, organizers, and advocates highlighting what's at stake for Southern communities during this year's election. We're going beyond the candidates on the ballot to dig into how elections influence the policies, budgets, and regulations that affect Southerners'everyday lives. Find the rest of the interviews here.)

The rural South is plagued with the interconnected problems of failing infrastructure, poverty, and poor health, and the situation is particularly dire in the Black Belt a region stretching from Virginia to Texas where many Black descendants of those enslaved on plantations still live.

Catherine Coleman Flowers has worked to research and provide solutions to these problems for years, first as a resident of the rural Black Belt community of Lowndes County, Alabama, and then as the founding director of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice. Her work to expose failing waste management and water systems has made Lowndes County once a site of pitched battles over civil rights a focal point for politicians and policymakers concerned about poverty in the rural South. She also helped discover that hookworm, a parasitical infection common in countries with poor access to sanitation that was thought to have been eradicated in the U.S. South, was still prevalent in Lowndes County. Last month, she was named a MacArthur Fellow, receiving a no-strings-attached $625,000 award commonly known as a "genius" grant.

We spoke with Flowers about her life'swork in environmental and climate justice, and how she has leveraged her grassroots organizing to impact federal policy and the national conversation on poverty. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

* * *

You've been doing grassroots environmental justice work for years, and recently you won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award. Do you take this as a sign that more people are realizing the importance of the environmental justice movement especially in the South?

Yes. I think that it sends a clear signal. Another signal is the excitement I've gotten from people that have called me, like Sen. Cory Booker, who expressed that it not only elevates the environmental justice (EJ) movement in the South, but it elevates environmental justice.

I think that environmental justice has not been given the kind of attention that it should be given. And the people in EJ communities have proved that they're on the front lines of all kinds of injustices especially climate injustice.

Right! I know some of your behind-the-scenes work had already received international attention, like the 2017 report on hookworm showing up in Alabama.

To be quite honest, I was the one who came up with the theory for the hookworm. I reached out to Dr. [Peter] Hotez [the founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor's College of Medicine] because I realized something was going on, and I wondered if it was something American doctors were not testing for.

He decided to look for hookworm, and that's how we ended up finding it. Because of the relationships I have in Lowndes County where I'm from we were able to get people to participate in the study.

We found out that the U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty was coming to the U.S. on an official visit, so we wrote him and asked him to come to Lowndes County.

Speaking of Lowndes County, how did growing up in such a historic place inform your activism?

Both of my parents were activists, and that was a large part of it. I also was an activist as a teenager. I had the opportunity to meet with people from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). A lot of my organizing techniques and strategies are based on what I've learned from SNCC and how they organized in Lowndes County.

The other thing that helped me is the fact that I'm a native, and a lot of my cousins are in a community where everybody is related to each other. Even today, people can look at my face and tell that I'm a Coleman; there are not many places in the world that are like that.

You are an environmental justice activist, but a lot of your work also involves looking at the intersection of race and poverty. Why is that important?

Because one informs the other, and in a lot of cases, one could not exist without the other. A lot of the poverty is because of the issues around race, white supremacy, and slavery. There were systems that were put in place to keep people of color poor, so that they could get their labor for next to free. All that's connected to slavery.

On top of that, a lot of these communities are without infrastructure that allows them to have a decent standard of living. That puts them in positions to be preyed on by unscrupulous lenders, or by people not giving them access to housing that would allow them to build wealth.

Then on top of that, a lot of dirty industry is located in places where people have been deprived of the kind of infrastructure that they would need to have the type of green industries that would want to go there. They have also just been deprived, period, to keep the labor cheap so they can also be a source of essential jobs that dont pay a living wage.

All of this is connected at the intersection. We also found that it's in these same communities that we see high rates of COVID.

What are some of the misconceptions about the South that you find yourself battling against in your work?

That we are not as smart as we really are. There's a lot of victim blaming and there's a lot of shaming, but the people that are being blamed didn't put these systems in place. They didn't entrap themselves. These are systems that were designed to do just what they are doing.

Oftentimes I have to fight against these stereotypes of people in the South. People just assume that we don't know what we know, but I've found that a lot of people in the South are very smart to even have survived in the South all these years. It took a skill to exist in what I call a "parallel universe."

I think that the other misconception is that the only place you will find racism is in the South. That's not true. It'slike Malcolm X said anything south of the Canadian border is down South.

Can you talk about the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force you were appointed to? What work needs to be done to uplift climate change as a key policy in election issue?

I was appointed to be on that task force by Sen. Bernie Sanders. My role is to provide a perspective that was not present: a grassroots activist that has worked primarily in the South to talk about environmental injustice and climate justice and how it was impacting people on the ground, and to make sure that whatever goals that were put in place were goals that could have a direct impact right now on frontline communities.

Oftentimes when we talk about climate change and climate justice, the benchmark is set to be measured 10 to 15 years down the road. But what about the people who are suffering from cancer? How do we make sure they get the resources they need right now? That was my role to make sure that that was always at the forefront. It was assumed that these things would just happen, but our systems are not designed this way, no matter who the president is.

Regardless of who is elected president, what do you imagine the environmental justice movement will look like over the next few years?

I think the environmental justice movement will continue to put the pressure on and even put more pressure on the politicians and the structures that allow these communities to exist in the first place.

Now that more attention is being placed on this issue and people are starting to understand environmental justice, we can lift up the voices of those communities that have been crying out in the darkness for years and hopefully bring about the change that needs to happen. I believe that most Americans, if they really knew how folks were suffering from industrial contamination of the air and water where people live especially marginalized people and people of color they would not stand for it.

We have to continue to bring the pressure. The systems will still be in place after the election. Our goal is to try to dismantle and modify those policies and structures that have allowed this to exist for so long.

Are there any specific races you're watching because of their potential implications for environmental justice?

I'm following all of them. We have to pay attention to not just the presidential election. One thing that COVID has taught us is that where the leadership is not coming from the federal level, we can get it from the city level or the state level.

A lot of times it's the local leadership partnering with the state leadership to bring in these [polluting] plants. Then there's the federal policy that allows these plants to exist and go unchecked. A lot of these plants, especially if you go to places like Louisiana's Cancer Alley, these are multinational corporations that are existing in these communities. So there has to be a federal role. The EPA plays a role, but there are other organizations that play a role, too.

We have to watch each and every one of these elections because they are all important

How do we best honor people like Pamela Rush, a Lowndes County resident who died an early death of COVID this year because of bad policy decisions and neglect?

Vote. The way we honor Pamela and people around the country who are in the same situation as Pamela is to vote. Vote for people who have a shared value system. That's what's going to make the change in terms of the policies. My message to people is to vote and take 10 people with you to vote as well.

More here:

THE STAKES 2020: Catherine Coleman Flowers on the environmental justice movement and elections - Facing South

Dear Editor,

No doubt about it. The March general elections were decided, not by those who were dancing to the fanfare and future expectations of oil, but by those former sugar workers whose children could not go to school because there was simply no food. I know. I visited a few former sugar estate communities, specifically at Wales and Enterprise, and saw more hungry children than I ever saw, even during the destabilization decade of the sixties.

Regardless of political ideologies and discriminating administrations, no one should go hungry in a country which is principally agricultural and rural in economic setting and presently witnessing structural transition to an oil economy and an encouraging degree of commercialization of agriculture.

Yet poverty and hunger have been institutional characteristics of an enclave sugar economy that co-existed within, and greatly influenced the national economy, as well as the politics and sociology of the whole society not just the past five years or forty, but for hundreds of years.

Which therefore begs the reasonable, rational mind to think in the line of two major transformations: one ideological, the other structural. Afterall, reasonable, rational people do not govern and do the same thing over and over and over for a hundred years and expect different results as apparently all past administrations have been doing the past forty years. Reasonable, rational, and I daresay, nationalistic leaders with futuristic ideas embark on structural, institutional, and infrastructural development changes and projects (like the subway system of New York City) that will last for hundreds of years.

In term of ideology transformation, it must be noted that there exists, and has always existed ever since sugar was introduced in the third world, a serious antagonistic relationship between capital and labour, simply put, between ownership and workers. Ownership has on countless occasions through history pulled sugar out of disastrous bankruptcies by sheer exploitation of labour as expressed by slavery, indentured-neo-slavery, and current wage slavery. The mere shifting from slavery to indentureship was one such major instance as proven by Dr. Eric Williams in his doctoral thesis, later published in a book as, Capitalism and Slavery; and again by Hugh Tinker in his book, (Indentureship) A New System of Slavery; and even by me, in a Labor Economics paper at UG in 1978.

Labour, on the other hand, even sometimes aided and abetted by their respectable trade unions, have sabotaged the industrys productive and productivity capacities in a multiplicity of ways.

Hence, that antagonistic relationship definitely needs to change to a more favourable one, one in which there is mutual positive contributions to each other, and to the enclave industry, and to the national economy by both labour and owner.

Labour and owner must become one. Since the industry is principally agricultural, and land is the main form of capital, then the labour must belong to the land and the land must belong to labour. Which reminds me of a saying by Chief Seattle that I saw inscribed on a plaque in a museum in Kansas: The land does not belong to the people, the people belong to the land, and only when this is so can there be harmony between the two. The old, dirty, primitive savage even then, taught us that development is not only about landscapes, as is commonly perceived, but more about the transformation of lives. And concomitantly further, that economic development is about restructuring and transformation of the means, forces, and relations of production.

Oh God, when are we going to learn from those who did not attend our universities?

This is the first prerequisite to any agrarian reforms, and the utilization of agriculture to launch the economic development of any country. No country has ever jumped straight into industrialization by bypassing agriculture. It is and was imbecilic of wealthy oil-producing countries to have thought so, (and I say unapologetically, also the PNC and their mass of jump-up supporters). Wisely, most of these oil barons have corrected themselves the past thirty years or so after they realized that they had oceans of money but no food. Too bad Venezuela and Nigeria did not learn this lesson.

For fear of boring the reader, I will pause here, and having dealt somewhat on the ideological aspect of this proposal, I will continue soon on the second aspect of the economics of agriculture, a subject of which I am more comfortable.

Suffice the reader to know that I will write about Wales. I know every nook and cranny about Wales. I know the food productive capabilities of Wales. Wales was the fruit basket of the Caribbean; I was born in Wales and wrote a book about Wales that won the Guyana Prize for Literature.

But I now have on my economist cap.

Yours faithfully,

Gokarran Sukhdeo

Read the rest here:

Labour and owner must become one if sugar industry to thrive - Stabroek News

In July, Lawrence M. Mead, a prominent political scientist and public policy scholar at New York University, published a commentary in Society expressing racially violent narratives directed at Black and Latinx communities. His commentary blamed not only these communities, but by proxy all Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC), for the effects of historic and systemic inequities, ultimately characterizing us as leading unproductive lives.

Mead concluded that there are cultural differences between rich Western countries, described as ambitious individualists, and non-Western countries, described as cautious collectivists. If this rhetoric sounds familiar, its because this is another commentary in a long history of reducing structural racism to victim blaming. But we educators have a responsibility to work against such racial violence within academe and beyond it.

Meads perspective reflects the pervasive racist, anti-Black, patriarchal, hegemonic doctrines that permeate American society today. These traditional culture of poverty arguments use structural racism to blame BIPOC communities for the prevalence of poverty, crime and unemployment. The core reasoning grounding these arguments correlates societal challenges to cultural pathology. The narrative itself is mundane, founded in the work of Oscar Lewis and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and thoroughly discredited through sound empiricism. Once again, however, we are forced to confront the culture of poverty narrative and discredit its core thesis.

Lets begin with a modest assertion: globally, every country has some type of economic inequality and poverty. Certainly, poverty exists here in the United States. As of 2018, 11.8percent of people in the nation live in poverty. When the data are disaggregated, racial and ethnic differences exist, as well, with 21percent of Black communities, 25percent of Indigenous communities and 18percent of Latinx communities living in poverty.

It is important to recognize, however, that the methodology itself is problematic, as the reported poverty threshold for a four-person household with two children under the age of 18 is $25,465 -- or $4,695 less than the federal minimum wage ($30,160; calculated using a 40-hour workweek across 52 weeks for two working adults), and $43,343 less than a necessary living wage ($68,808) according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Living Wage Calculator estimates.

How can the poverty threshold be set so low, when the national average for a one-bedroom rental is $1,078 per month or $12,936 per year? Are we not expected to pay taxes, eat, pay for health and cognitive care, pay for childcare, or have any entertainment whatsoever? I digress purposefully to give pause because recognizing that poverty exists and that many communities exhibit a high degree of poverty should elicit two responses: 1) What informs those systems that create such poverty? and 2) How can we support these communities with immediate targeted efforts to mitigate the effects of poverty?

Poverty should not elicit a theory that blames the group, instead of a system that underpays and undervalues specific communities in a targeted manner. Thus, while poverty exists, a culture of poverty does not.

Poverty is not endemic to any culture or any society. Poverty itself is not monolithic, and there is no significant evidence that demonstrates poverty exists as an artifact of culture. Supporting a culture of poverty narrative, or renaming the narrative while maintaining its theoretical foundations that blame BIPOC communities, is nothing more than an attempt to reify the oppressive, classist, racist, hegemonic white supremacy that historically persecutes BIPOC communities. The culture of poverty narrative persists under the guise of peer review and professorship. Pathologizing poverty as intrinsically related to a group culture allows deficit theorists to blame the group, instead of focusing on the systemic inequities that create poverty.

The stark reality is this: in 2020 Black, Indigenous and Latinx communities are targeted for persecution and blocked from opportunity through specific systems that reify white supremacy. Black, Indigenous and Latinx communities are far too often:

Despite the evidence, deficit theorists promote and publish their work, are lauded and praised as thought leaders in scholarship and policy praxis, and ascend prestige pipelines. Their work discounts systemic oppression, purposefully erasing the racial violence that BIPOC communities have endured. Deficit theorists also ignore the nefarious collectivism that creates those systems and dismisses historical racial violence.

Racial and cultural dominance in the United States is not the result of individualism that absorbed Indigenous and Mexican communities as Anglos moved west, as well as imported slaves to the South, as Mead suggests. Racial and cultural dominance is a collectivist effort by wave after wave of Europeans who agreed, before leaving their continent, to work in concert for control of land and wealth. This includes mass murder and genocide, chattel slavery, religious inculcation and persecution, sexual violence and rape, and the commoditizing of BIPOC bodies for profit, experimentation and seizure -- all of which trickled down through history to the disparities outlined above. European imperialism hoards wealth and power in modern society and believes no other entity is as valuable as itself.

The cultural differences between BIPOC communities and Anglo communities are not individualism versus collectivism but an ideological manifest destiny proliferating immeasurable violence to create, institutionalize and maintain white supremacy. This is the ideology Anglos must acknowledge, not the symptomatic racism visible in modern society. Furthermore, minoritized groups arent burdened by freedom, as Mead asserts -- we have simply never had the luxury of absolute freedom. We need look no further than the recent murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd for current examples.

As educators, scholars, researchers, advocates and community leaders granted the power to educate and inform, we in academe have the responsibility to do so in a manner that advances equity for historically and consistently oppressed communities. We have the responsibility to mend the wounds of racial violence. We have the responsibility to dismantle structural barriers while creating new systems of resistance and acceptance that celebrate and promote justice.

As teachers, it is also our responsibility to curate a message of justice, equity, diversity, inclusion and access so that the violence against ethnically and racially diverse communities long normalized in our society no longer influences public policy. We must continue to stand in solidarity to fight for civil and human rights and freedom and continue resisting white supremacy in all its forms. To do nothing less is a disservice to our craft, to our elders and to our ancestors.

So where do we go from here?

Admittedly, mobilizing an effort that leads to retraction of a commentary is negligible in the movement toward freedom and dismantling white supremacy. We must recognize as well the damage from that commentary is done. Nothing can reverse the steps that allowed for the commentarys publication. But in the short term, to dismantle inequity and racial violence, let those of us in higher education support the scrutiny of those systems that reify oppression in our local community. Lets support each other as individuals in a community so we are arent afraid to call out instances of racial violence and oppression. Lets collectively praise our work in an effort to promote basic civil and human rights and freedom. Lets continue to support each other as we preserve a discourse of our community that is factually accurate and refute deficit narratives based in deceit. Lets support each other as we take risks and get involved beyond our own area and subfield. Lets forgive and support each other as we engage in difficult dialogue.

Finally, lets be mindful of ourselves, of each other and our well-being, acknowledging that it is OK to take a step back as an individual -- recognizing that sometimes by stepping back, the movement can step forward. In developing our work, in developing our collective support, we understand there is no panacea, and the struggle for justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, access, opportunity and freedom endures, as we do.

Read more here:

Academics should continue mobilizing against the racist, anti-Black and patriarchal doctrines in US society (opinion) - Inside Higher Ed

Vandalism impedes First Amendment right

To the editor: The Henderson County Democratic Party has placed several large signs around the county on private property and many are suffering vandalism.These signs are protected by our constitutional right to free speech.The positive messages on these signs should represent the shared values of all Henderson County residents regardless of party affiliation.Some examples:

Protect Rural Hospitals

Support Small Business

Healthcare:A Fundamental Need

Reverse Climate Change

Main Street, Not Wall Street

Are the positive Democrat messages so intimidating and disturbing to the Republicans in Henderson County that it is necessary to resort to cowardly vandalism to quiet the messages that clearly support Western North Carolina people?Message to vandals: Instead of trampling on our First Amendment rights, it would be more constructive to engage us in a respectful dialogue about the merits of the values that we are expressing on our signs.

We need to hear from the more responsible members of the local Republican party denouncing these destructive tendencies of its more radical membership. Silence is consent, if not outright encouragement.

Kathleen Gould, chair, Henderson County Democratic Party

Save Social Security, Medicare

To the editor: In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. In the debate, conservatives spoke out against it. Rep. John Taber of New York: "Never in the history of the world has any measure been brought here so insidiously designed as to enslave workers and to prevent any possibility of the employers providing work for the people." (Social Security equals slavery.)

But, in 1932, Democrats had won an overwhelming victory and Republicans couldnt stop it. In the presidential election of 1936, Republican candidate Alf Landon called for the repeal of Social Security.

In 2005, George W. Bush and conservatives called for private Social Security accounts. If Bushs plan had not been stopped, the door would have been opened for the disabling of Social Security.

Social Security is not a constitutional right. Neither is Medicare. So, they are up for a vote every election cycle. Trump and his congressional enablers have to be voted out of office to stop the threats.

But, its not just Social Security and Medicare. The entire core functions of government that protect the safety, security, and well-being of citizens are under attack. Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Thom Tillis have to go! Vote them all out!

Chris Walters, Hendersonville

We need facts about Socialism

To the editor: I long to see a fact-based column on what Socialism is and is not. Socialism is not Communist Russia or China. It is not South and Central American dictatorships.

Socialized medicine: Medicare and the VA. Redistribution of income: Social Security. Medicaid: surely Marxist!

Yes, the Prime Minister of Denmark declared Denmark is not a Socialist country . . . they just have a "very extensive social safety net." Far more extensive than Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.

In 1978 the average CEO here made about 30 times the average worker and the top tax bracket was 70%. Today it is nearly 300 times the average worker and the top tax is 37%. Minimum wage, inflation-adjusted, peaked in 1968. If workers at the bottom are in fact essential, shouldnt they be paid at least a living wage? Henry Ford said if he paid his workers more, they could afford his cars. He would sell more and everyone would be better off.

Have we forgotten that basic economic reality of a consumer-driven economy? The Preamble to our Constitution calls for us to "promote the general Welfare." Lets talk about that, too, rationally and honestly.

Cheryl Goodwin, Columbus

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Letters to the editor, Aug. 28 - News - The Daily News - Jacksonville, NC - Jacksonville Daily News

More than anything else, I am motivated by the patients I meet in the hospital and their inability to afford life-saving medical care. I see healthcare as a right, not a privilege. I want to see healthcare coverage detached from employment status

Lenny Cioes entry into politics is audacious. Hes challenging Senate President Dominick Ruggerio in Senate District 4 (Providence, North Providence) in the Democratic Primary on Tuesday, September 8. Its difficult to challenge an incumbent, its much more difficult to challenge and incumbent who is as politically powerful, connected and well-financed as Ruggerio.

Cioe has been critical of the Senate President, who, along with Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello, has effectively shut down the General Assembly in the midst of a global pandemic. Ruggerio is also extremely conservative, voting against both reproductive rights and same-sex marriage.

Cioe is a Registered Nurse on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis. He is a 2003 graduate of the Community College of Rhode Island in respiratory therapy and a 2008 graduate of Rhode Island College where he received a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. Lenny has been a health care professional for 18 years. We conducted this interview by email:

UpriseRI: What made you decide to run for State Senate against a powerful, connected Senate President?

Lenny Cioe: My parents taught me that I can fight to make the world around me a better place. First, this drove me to become a nurse. I buried many friends during the AIDS crisis, and decided I wanted to enter the healthcare system to make it better at protecting the people it usually left behind. But I cant help the people who are too afraid to even come into the hospital because theyre afraid of the bill. I am running for State Senate because I want to fix our broken healthcare system. I happen to live in the same district as Senator Ruggerio. And while its been difficult to run against someone with so much power and so many connections, it has only pushed me to work harder. Our Senate should not be controlled by someone who cares more about private interests and profit than he does the people of Rhode Island. I am running to bring true civic leadership to Smith Hill.

Funding for our reporting relies entirely on the generosity of readers like you. Our independence allows us to write stories that hold RI state and local government officials accountable. All of our stories are free and available to everyone. But your support is essential to keeping Steve and Will on the beat, covering the costs of reporting many stories in a single day. If you are able to, please support Uprise RI. Every contribution, big or small is so valuable to us. You provide the motivation and financial support to keep doing what we do. Thank you.

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UpriseRI: Do you think the Rhode Island Senate has been serving the people of Rhode Island?

Cioe: Our State Senate serves some Rhode Islanders very well, but leaves many more behind. For instance, the 2006 tax cut on the top 1% of earners in our state served the very wealthy, but resulted in a huge decrease in tax revenue that could have been used to serve everyone else. That money should have gone to our healthcare system, our schools, and affordable housing developments. That is how the State Senate can truly serve the people of Rhode Island: reform the tax system so that the super-rich pay their fair share, and use that money to fund public services.

UpriseRI: Is your opponent serving his constituents?

Cioe: My opponent is serving his friends. He has spent 35 years in office making connections that benefit him and his supporters.

UpriseRI: What issues are motivating you? What are you hearing from voters as you knock on doors? How does outreach work during COVID?

Cioe: More than anything else, I am motivated by the patients I meet in the hospital and their inability to afford life-saving medical care. I see healthcare as a right, not a privilege. I want to see healthcare coverage detached from employment status.

I will fight for single-payer healthcare. Healthcare is an investment in every Rhode Islander. We must guarantee this basic right so that the people of our state can focus on their jobs and their families, not their outrageous medical bills.

I have been so encouraged by the conversations Ive been having at the doors. Voters are really excited for change. Regardless of how they feel about Ruggerios time in office, they are ready to see someone new in the Senate. They are excited to see someone whose values align with their own as Democrats. Voters are excited to have a choice this year.

Outreach during COVID has been difficult, because people are reluctant to come to the door and talk to a stranger. But we have been practicing social distancing at the doors, and all our canvassers always wear a mask and travel with hand sanitizer. The hardest thing has been that we cant host the fundraising and informational events that we would during a normal election year. That just means were leaning more heavily on online outreach.

UpriseRI: In addition to the crisis of COVID, Rhode Island is facing a reckoning with our history of racism and slavery, as well as an economic crisis, a housing crisis and an unemployment crisis. Its a big job right now. What are your instincts as to what should be done in the short term and the medium term?

Cioe: In the short-term, measures like removing Providence Plantations from our states name are good ones that show us were moving in the right direction to address our history of racism and slavery. But that is not nearly enough.

Our police are supposed to keep our communities safe. To do that, they need to be well-trained in anti-racist settings. But we must also understand that community safety doesnt just come from law-enforcement: it comes from secure housing, access to healthcare, and quality public education. Our state funds must be distributed across all of these areas.

In the medium term, we need to put our money where our mouth is. Right now, the top 1% of earners in our state only pay 7.9% of their annual income in taxes. The poorest 20% of Rhode Islanders pay 12.1%. We must get rid of this regressive tax cut and have the rich pay their fair share. This will allow us to provide healthcare to all Rhode Islanders, invest in affordable housing, and institute a living minimum wage.

Were also facing the climate crisis, and we have to take bold action to act immediately. I will fight for the Green New Deal, which will create thousands of jobs for Rhode Islanders, addressing the growing unemployment crisis.We cannot delay bold action against climate change. We need a just transition to 100% renewable energy by 2030 that prioritizes those made most vulnerable by a changing climate. We must create jobs along the way, and make it work for our economy.

UpriseRI: Can you expand a little on your thoughts about housing?

Cioe: We need to invest in affordable and safe public housing, rather than prioritizing profitable sales to private developers. We can make no progress in our state if the basic need for safe and stable housing is not met for Rhode Islanders.

UpriseRI: Id like to ask about a few subjects we havent quite covered yet. Your opponent has voted against both same sex marriage and reproductive rights. Where are you on these issues?

Cioe: I will always protect a womans right to choose and as a gay man, I will always fight for LGBTQ rights. I would like to see the definition of common-law marriage in Rhode Island expand to include queer couples living together.

UpriseRI: Thank you!

Read more:

Stabbing at the heart of the beast: An interview with Lenny Cioe - Uprise RI

Directors of clothing manufacturers in Leicester have been struck off for a combined total of more than 400 years in cases costing HMRC millions, data shared with the Guardian reveals.

Details of disqualified directors in Leicester provided by the Insolvency Service show that more than 50 people with links to the citys textiles industry are currently banned from running companies for between three and 14 years.

They represent about 40% of all disqualified directors linked to companies listed on Companies House as headquartered in Leicester, suggesting that clothing manufacturers are hugely overrepresented against the citys business community as a whole. Just over 1,000 of the 38,393 active companies registered in Leicester are listed as manufacturers of textiles or wearing apparel, or about 2.5%.

Leicesters textiles factories have faced heavy scrutiny since the city became the first in the UK to face a second lockdown. One factor linked to the spread of coronavirus was a lack of social distancing measures in some of the hundreds of factories and workshops in Leicesters garment district, where companies are also accused of failing to pay workers the minimum wage.

The fast fashion firm Boohoo has also been heavily criticised over its oversight of its supply chain in Leicester. Last week the Guardian revealed that 18 Boohoo suppliers had failed to prove they paid workers the minimum wage, and industry sources said they were aware of similar audits on dozens more firms.

The new disclosures suggest minimum-wage issues in Leicester go alongside a range of other problems in factories there, including employer tax violations and allegations of so-called phoenixing when a company goes bust owing significant sums in tax, only to reopen under a different name soon afterwards.

HMRC said it made 25 investigations into textile firms VAT affairs in 2018-19 and recovered more than 2m in tax.

Neil Williams, a legal director at the law firm Rahman Ravelli who has worked on serious tax fraud cases, said the figures certainly seemed on the face of it to be disproportionate. A concentration to that level suggests that somethings going on. A lot of it will be about the fact that many of the workers in these companies will not be on HMRCs radar, and that can mean PAYE fraud.

The Guardian understands that a dossier of public records on clothing businesses financial affairs has been submitted by industry experts to the National Crime Agency, which has been ordered by Priti Patel, the home secretary, to examine allegations of modern slavery in the city.

Andrew Bridgen, the MP for North West Leicestershire who has campaigned on factory conditions in Leicester and described the garment industry there as the wild west, said the activities of such companies were putting legitimate competitors out of business.

Many of those who have been struck off will continue to act as shadow directors, said Bridgen, a former regional chairman of the Institute of Directors. He called on HMRC to focus attention on the problem. The regulators need to concentrate on areas of concern, and clearly whats going on in Leicester is an area of concern. They need to risk-assess these businesses and sectors and concentrate their resources where there are obvious problems.

While a director may be struck off over tax issues, they are not barred from owning a company if others manage it. There are fears that in some cases, banned directors may continue to play an active role in running the new companies, simply installing a new director to sign documents and be the public face of the business. Several of the struck-off directors are now persons of significant control in companies created after their previous businesses went into liquidation.

When HMRC finds that a former director acts in breach of a disqualification order or undertaking, it may seek to make them personally liable for any tax debts accrued while disqualified. They may ultimately face criminal investigation and a prison sentence of up to two years.

The reasons for disqualifications were not available in all of the cases examined by the Guardian, but in 21 of the 28 files where the basis for disqualification was provided, it related to tax fraud, inadequate tax returns, inadequate accounting records or trading to the detriment of HMRC an umbrella term for cases where other creditors, including directors, have been paid but the tax authority has not.

While only limited information was available on the tax liabilities owed when the companies in question went bust, significant sums were owed to HMRC in some of those where information was provided.

In one case, a director was struck off for eight years after his company went into liquidation owing 848,214. In another, a director was struck off for seven years when he failed to submit VAT returns and his company went bust owing 739,232.27. A third director who failed to preserve or deliver up adequate accounting records took his company into liquidation owing 491,799.37 in tax. The nine companies where figures were available went bust owing a total of 3.5m an average of 389,000.

Williams said HMRC was often the main debtor in phoenixing cases. HMRC will be looking for shadow directors, family members, or patsies paid to sign documents with no accessing to banking, essentially but [the former directors] will remain the controlling minds. Its hard for HMRC to prove without an investigative capacity: where theres a closed shop factory, its very hard to gather that information.

Frances Coulson, the head of insolvency and litigation at Moon Beever solicitors and deputy chair of the Fraud Advisory Panel, said such activity in the clothing industry was nothing new. She said HMRC needed to do more to allow creditors to appoint independent liquidators to investigate insolvent businesses. You can disrupt these activities and recover funds if you appoint a liquidator, she said. People should be prosecuted, but that takes a long time and a lot of money. You can do both.

Excerpt from:

Leicester garment factory bosses banned from running businesses for more than 400 years - The Guardian

The innauguration of Thabo Mbeki as South African president, pictured with previous president Nelson Mandela, in Pretoria on 27 April 2004. (Photo: Gallo Images / Christiaan Kotze)

This is Part 2 in a two-part series. Part 1 can be read here.

The failure of the South African Left

This is a subject more properly dealt with by books, many books. This is true even when, as here, the focus is exclusively on the white Left. The absence of a black Left critique (with the notable exception of Neville Alexander silenced by death in 2012) makes evident their concurrence with the positions of their white comrades.

Two events (although both involving the SACP and Cosatu) encapsulate the general failure.

The first event began with a heated public debate in the build-up to the 1994 elections. At issue was the pay and perks given to the outgoing members of the apartheid Parliament. The critique from the Left was that MPs salaries, rather than continuing to be that of the First World, should reflect the Third World reality of most South Africans. One of the first steps taken by the new Mandela government was to establish a commission to recommend a pay structure appropriate for the then-new South Africa. At least one member of the commission was not only a member of the SACP but, unlike most other communists, she was not also a member of the ANC. Her reason for this, she told me, was that the ANC was bourgeois.

The commission duly reported towards the end of 1994. It found that there was indeed a major problem with MPs pay: it was too little! The new Parliament voted themselves the recommended salary increase. This, arguably, turned out to be the single most seminal decision of democratic South Africa. As an ironic inversion of the slogan of the 1922 white miners, it was a case of: Elites of the world unite to make way for a Black South African elite (a comment made by Diane Salters).

The SACP, with its large parliamentary presence (as part of the ANC contingent), was silent about the increase. So, too, was the officially socialist Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), which also had a significant presence on the ANC benches in Parliament. There was, indeed, only one notable public dissenting voice: that of Archbishop Desmond Tutu who said much of what one would have expected from the SACP and Cosatu consistent with the struggle having been on behalf of our people.

I asked some of the leading members of the parliamentary SACP, both as MPs and members of Mandelas first Cabinet, how they could have supported this unexpected move. They explained that they had queried the decision within the ANCs parliamentary caucus. They had kept quiet when accused of being racist; that they were querying the matter only because most MPs were now Africans.

This event needs closer unpacking. The African response will be deferred until the final section of this article. For now, what needs addressing is an outrageous accusation. The charge was against individuals whose commitment to the struggle against white racism was beyond question: they had not only devoted most of their lives to the Struggle but had risked their very lives as part of the Struggle. In a word, they were part of a small group best placed to be mortified by their own sometimes lifelong comrades accusing them of racism. Adding to the manifest injustice of the charge is that it stemmed from a single event that went to the very heart of the Struggle: the ANCs acceptance of a salary increase when the ethical position made so clear by a shocked Archbishop Tutu was to have argued for a pay cut consistent with the Struggle having been on behalf of our people.

Why had these white communists allowed themselves to be cowed?

An immediate answer is the two-stage revolution of the SACPs strategic understanding of the transition to socialism: South African capitalism would first need to be normalised by the emergence of African capitalists before the class contradictions of capitalism were sufficiently developed for the African working class to separate itself from its racial identity and thereby lead the revolution to socialism.

Whether or not they were familiar with Marxs own words about the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure being the specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers, they knew more than enough. They knew that beginning with 16th century slavery, to say nothing about the enforced bloody creation of a black working class and the gold and diamond riches that required cheap labour, racism made the exploitation and oppression morally acceptable. This is to say they knew and they taught others to know that the exploiters had to turn the exploited into non-people for the fruits of the exploitation to be devoured without guilt. Race, in other words, was, in origin, a social construction of class imperatives; the innermost secret of capitalism where the dehumanised Other was of a different skin colour.

This understanding does indeed offer what could be an immediate answer to the SACPs acceptance of the salary increase. But this would be far too simple to be anything near a sufficient explication.

Making sense of the silence of the white communists in 1994 suggests that race had by then become different from and independent of class. Moreover, the specifically African race of South Africa was implicitly seen to be classless, without any class divisions. It is further suggested that, such was and is the identification with the victims of class oppression that the working class, the class for itself which was to be the springboard into a classless society, was metamorphosed into the hegemonic primacy of a classless black race of Africans.

Inherent in this perception is that capitalism functions according to the colour of its capitalists. Thus, black capital behaves differently from white capital.

Confirmation of this colour confusion brings us to the second of the two events. In 2003, as part of the governments strategy of creating a black bourgeoisie, it outsourced one of its state-owned enterprises (SOE) to a large British transnational corporation that, together with African owners, bought 51% of the enterprise. The now African-managed company was offering a 0.5% wage increase conditional on an increase in the working week from 40 hours to 45 hours. Sick leave was to be reduced and transport subsidies phased out. The wage negotiations resulted in bitter and prolonged strike action. Six weeks into the strike, the lead negotiator of the main Cosatu-affiliated trade union involved, who was a life-long (white) socialist, made the following confession:

The problem with this dispute is that we didnt put up a huge resistance to this particular privatisation. To be honest I think the union genuinely believed, because there was a strong black economic empowerment component, that things wouldnt be too bad, but its been quite the contrary. Everyone in our union agrees that we have not come across such hard-headedness since the 1980s and, if anything, this is the kind of dispute that will harden attitudes against privatisation because it simply demonstrates what can happen (Mail & Guardian 23/1/04).

Strikingly, the hardening of attitudes was against privatisation rather than a reassessment of the attitude towards the black capitalists. Another Cosatu-affiliated trade union, whose members were also part of the strike, expressed its anger that a company, prominently owned by Africans, could be so anti-worker (SABC News 28/1/04).

The abandonment of any Marxian class analysis is, indeed, most evident when it comes to Thabo Mbekis creation of the black bourgeoisie. When the language changed from black bourgeoisie to its current Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) or Transformation, it was met with the same silence. Both should be a direct challenge to the Left. In the name of this transformation, we now have a South Africa unequivocally committed to interfering with the normal reproduction of our inherited class structure.

The Left (particularly initially) says little about this, and the SACP and Cosatu the ANCs formal allies have done nothing in practice to challenge the mere transfer of class-defined benefits to the members of the government, or the ANCs leading cadres, African businesses and African professionals. BEE claims the empowerment of all black people. One doesnt expect the government to say anything about whether this is possible under capitalism. But the Lefts essential silence is consistent with its view of Black being classless and, therefore, of an empowerment that embraces the working class. Black capitalism ends up being a socialism for the working class!

A further striking testimony to the characteristic primacy of colour rather than class among the Left was provided by a leading member of the SACP. In a private conversation with me (probably in 2000 or 2001) about which class bourgeois or worker benefits from the SACPs alliance with the ANC, the life-long white communist stunned me by saying he couldnt objectively critique the ANC because the ANC not the SACP was the centre of his life!

This acknowledgement has further ramifications. What is essentially a romanticised picture of socially constructed Africans shapes the white Left in other significant ways. The very strength of the empathy with the oppressed produces an inversion of the classical defence mechanism of identification with the oppressor. The standard example being the Jews who hid their identity by being the most anti-Semitic of the Nazis. Not being able to change their colour, the white Lefts inability to become the oppressed has resulted in both a favourable predisposition towards Africans, and a deferential surrender to African nationalism.

Disavowals of being white by attacking anything they can label White is another consequence. Hence the white Lefts leading role in colour-coding class privileges. White Monopoly Capital is probably a white Left invention. Rather than speaking of residential areas of the rich, the reference becomes White areas. Under the original Racial Capitalism of apartheid, white areas were White as a function of law; under the current Racial Capitalism they are rich as a function of capitalism. Yet, the Left chooses the anachronistic apartheid designation rather than the current class one. Similarly, class privileges regardless of which specifics invariably become colour-coded as White privileges. The working class itself is similarly and anachronistically racialised as the black (meaning African) working class. It is with these various colour confusions where the black Left joins the white Left in the racialisation of class.

A far bigger challenge now faces us. Understanding the white Left is easy compared to making sense of the turpitude of what might appear to be a racialised African disorder. Recall the anguished question of the Daily Maverick editorial: The [African] elite are immune to everything, including shame.

Racism turned upside down: The black bourgeoisie play the race card

There is an easy answer to why and how South Africa has now become the broken society spoken about in so many different ways and by so many different people. The answer is to invoke Fanon. Writing in 1961 about the then very new phenomenon of decolonisation, Frantz Fanon, in his celebrated, The Wretched of the Earth, provides a penetrating analysis of the post-independence black leadership that is perspicacious of todays SA.

The national middle class discovers its historic mission: that of intermediary. Seen through its eyes, its mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation; it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the mask of neo-colonialism. The national bourgeoisie will be quite content with the role of the Western bourgeoisies business agent. But this same lucrative role, this cheap-Jacks function, this meanness of outlook symbolize[s] the incapability of the middle class to fulfil its historic role [of transformation. Instead] the spirit of indulgence is dominant and this is because the national bourgeoisie identifies itself with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the West. [The national bourgeoisie] is in fact beginning at the end. It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness, or the will to succeed of youth.

This searing critique, however, is not the sufficient answer to South Africa in 2020. The ANC itself recognises this. It did so in 1969 when it committed itself to avoiding these dangers. Arguably among the most important ANC documents, prior to its unbanning in 1990, is its Morogoro Conferences Strategy & Tactics. The then-commitment is so starkly different from todays reality that it bears repeating in some length.

Our nationalism must not be confused with chauvinism or narrow nationalism It must not be confused with the classical drive by an elitist group among the oppressed people to gain ascendancy, so that they can replace the oppressor in the exploitation of the mass.

In our country more than in any other part of the oppressed world it is inconceivable for liberation to have meaning, without a return of the wealth of the land to the people as a whole. It is, therefore, a fundamental feature of our strategy that victory must embrace more than formal political democracy. To allow the existing economic forces to retain their interests, intact, is to feed the root of racial supremacy, and does not represent even the shadow of liberation.

Our drive towards national emancipation is, therefore, in a very real way, bound up with economic emancipation. This perspective of a speedy progression from formal liberation to genuine and lasting emancipation, is made more real by the existence in our country of a large and growing working class whose class consciousness complements national consciousness. Its militancy and political consciousness as a revolutionary class will play no small part in our victory, and in the construction of a real peoples South Africa.

Thabo Mbeki, the president who declared the formation of a black bourgeoisie to be among the top priorities of an ANC government, the same Mbeki who was a member of the Central Committee of the SACP, provides much of what I would consider to be a Marxian answer to our conundrum. His answer, moreover, carries all the weight of his own contradictory position. He thus merits being quoted at some length. Adding to its significance is that it comes from his speech delivered at the 4th Annual Nelson Mandela Lecture in July 2006, presented, moreover, before an audience that included a great number of the black bourgeoisie he had already helped create.

[T]he new order, born of the victory in 1994, inherited a well-entrenched value system that placed individual acquisition of wealth at the very centre of our society as a whole.

Thus, every day, and during every hour of our time beyond sleep, the demons embedded in our society seem always to beckon each one of us towards a realisable dream With every passing second, they advise, with rhythmic and hypnotic regularity get rich! get rich! get rich!

And thus has it come about that many of us accept that our common natural instinct to escape from poverty is but the other side of the same coin [with] the words at all costs, get rich!

In these circumstances, personal wealth, and the public communication of [that] message becomes the means by which we communicate the message that we are worthy citizens of our community, the very exemplars of what defines the product of a liberated South Africa.

This peculiar striving produces the particular result that manifestations of wealth determine the individuality of each one of us who seeks to achieve happiness and self-fulfilment, given the liberty that the revolution of 1994 brought to all of us.

In these circumstances, the meaning of freedom has come to be defined not by the seemingly ethereal and therefore intangible gift of liberty, but by the designer labels on the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the spaciousness of our houses and our yards, their geographic location, the company we keep

It is perfectly obvious that many in our society, having absorbed the value system of the capitalist market, have come to the conclusion that, for them, personal success and fulfilment means personal enrichment at all costs, and the most theatrical and striking public display of that wealth.

What this means is that many in our society have come to accept that what is socially correct is the notion that each one of us is as excellent a human being as our demonstrated wealth suggests!

After this, one may well ask, is there anything more to say? There is! The black bourgeoisie are no more immune to thinking well of themselves than the white variety who, to achieve the dehumanisation of the exploited Other, invented a subhuman race of black people.

The black bourgeoisie achieve this same end within the inequalities of capitalism and the status system it necessarily evokes by inverting the racism they keep alive. They do this in two ways. First, both legitimising their personal enrichment at all costs and, indeed, being the steroids on which they achieve even greater heights of personal enrichment, are the White Supremacy and Whiteness they have resurrected as the reminders of the reality of their dehumanisation. The fortunes the white bourgeoisie pay themselves are further reminders of felt injustice. As a South African inversion of race always being a relational construct, the meaning of Blackness both implies and depends on Whiteness (Posel, D. (2010). Races to consume: revisiting South Africas history of race, consumption and the struggle for freedom, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33(2), 157-75).

Saying all this is not to absolve them of their individual immoralities. What it does do is underscore the salience of Marxs hidden secret of the specificities of the societal whole built on and around the way in which capitalism produces mass poverty and obscene inequality as the collateral damage of the wealth expropriated by the few regardless of colour.

The ANCs Black Lives Matter is not a hypocrisy. It is much more than that. It is a defence. It is the second of the two ways in which the African rich seek to think well of themselves. It serves as a self-justification of otherwise intolerable actions and unthinkable greed. Our people expresses an anguish that assuages the guilt of their class separation from the people they have left behind. Like the trickle down rationalisation once so favoured by the global rich, the African rich are probably appeased by thoughts of our people being the eventual beneficiaries of their current, reprehensible labours.

The ANC is not the cause of corruption. Nor is BEE or tenderpreneurship, or even privatisation. All are symptoms; all facilitate corruption. But none are the primary causes.

From being a colonial and apartheid nightmare, Racial Capitalism has become a means of delivering long-delayed reparations but only for a few. Colour-coded class-inequalities have the last ambiguous laugh. A laugh of celebration but also a laugh of remorse.

Changing the world or, more modestly, South Africa always first requires a sufficient understanding of the conditions in need of changing. This long essay therefore ends by returning to the beginning: the need for change. Against this urgency, the analysis offered here is easy. DM

South Africa: The upside-down world of racial capitalism and Black Lives Matter, Part 1

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South Africa: The upside-down world of racial capitalism and Black Lives Matter, Part 2 - Daily Maverick

Dear Editor,

After reading Flawed men, perhaps, but great deeds in the Aug. 8 EagleHerald, I got to wondering who would write such an editorial in defense of Columbus, an entrepreneur seeking great wealth and high office who would enslave, torture and murder the indigenous population to obtain his goals? And it struck me that it must be someone who makes a very large salary supporting the rich and powerful and making them look as good as possible when theyve done serious wrong. Columbus did more than just mistreat the indigenous population. He committed a crime against humanity and not a great deed.

And our founding fathers were cut from a very similar cloth as Columbus. They also aspired to high office and stockpiled fortunes through both chattel and wage slavery. They designed a government that would protect the rich and powerful and would pacify and hold down the working class, poor, and slaves who they considered to be beneath them. These were not great deeds, but great evils.

The founding fathers were the role models for governance that holds back real progress towards true democracy and continues to haunt us to this very day. President James Madison, considered to be one of the most important founding fathers, said that democracy needed to be limited and government designed to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority and that unchecked, democratic communities were subject to the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._10#Background.

Professor Noam Chomsky, who many consider to be this countrys greatest intellectual, described very accurately the thinking and behavior of the founding fathers in this regard in a YouTube video entitled Noam Chomsky - Madison vs. Aristotle.

The Bible also speaks against the great sins of the rich and powerful in no uncertain terms. Our founding fathers were much like the Pharisees that Jesus denounced and promised would never enter His Kingdom because of their material wealth. Luke 6:24; Matthew 19:23-24; 23:1-39. James warns us how these big-money types exploit the poor, slander the name of Jesus, and are destined for horrible destruction in the end times. James 2:5-7; 5:1-6.

The author of the Detroit News editorial should have dug deeper into the Scriptures and considered the Commandment against making and worshipping idols as applied to statues of rich and powerful men. Exodus 20:4.

William Swenson

Menominee

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Founding fathers 'cut from similar cloth' | Opinion | ehextra.com - EH Extra

No one questions the fact that restaurant employees, and owners as well, are suffering greatly due to the chaos COVID-19 has wrought over the past several months. But lost in the backbiting on Capitol Hill over whether we should pay a premium on unemployment benefits, or restore the three-martini-lunch deduction, is the fact that the restaurant industry could benefit from structural, financial and legal help during this crisis.

Meanwhile, essential workers including restaurant employees are facing threats of evictions and hunger.

To that end, last week a coalition of dozens of restaurant workers and leading restaurateurs in New York asked the states governor, Andrew Cuomo, to deploy his executive authority to push for changes thatboth benefit and reform the states restaurant industry.

The Safe and Just Reopening Plan looks out for restaurant owners and workers alike. For restaurateurs, the plan advocates for both tax relief for restaurants and the ability to charge a safe reopening fee if restaurants agree to certain health and safety protocols in the era of COVID-19.

For workers, such a plan would allow wait staff to tip out kitchen and other back-end staffand, most importantly, it eliminates the subminimum hourly wage that has long been the norm in most U.S. states.

The federal minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 per hour. While actual wages vary from state to state, all workers who receive tips are paid less than the state's minimum wage for otherworkers.Thissubminimum wage is a holdover from a long begone era,and its critics say that the federally mandated low hourly wage is part and parcel of the systemic racism endemic across the U.S.

According to historians who focus on the post-Civil War era, the subminimum wage has its origins in slavery. After Emancipation, there was plenty of low-wage labor available to businesses such as restaurants. The hospitality sector was quickto catch onto the idea that hiring Black people to work for tips would be a way to keep labor costs down. At the same time, growing trends in transatlantic travel introduced American travelers to a European custom that appeared sophisticated once U.S. citizens returned to their side of the pond. The problem with the sophisticated veneer of tipping was that whats nowconsidered etiquette has its origins in racism.

One company notorious for this practice during the later 19th century was the Pullman Company, which hired Black porters to cater to its well-heeled white customers who traveled by train across the U.S.

Fast forward decades later, and coalitions including One Fair Wage insist its time to rethink the way in which the restaurant industry pays employees.

The subminimum wage in New York State is higher than the U.S. federal rate ($11.80 versus $2.13), but in this day in age anyone knows the math doesnt add up to allow for a minimal standard of living. In New York, tipped workers, still subject to a subminimum wage by law, are more than twice as likely to live in poverty and rely on Medicaid compared to the rest of the state workforce, says the authors of the groups most recent report.

One Fair Wage also says its data show that, nationally, white male tipped workers make about $5 an hour more than their Black women counterparts; in New York City, the discrepancy is $8 an hour. And the gaps arent just in wages: The group's research shows that restaurants were twice as likely to hire white workers over people of color. Further, 40 percent of white managers in the restaurant industry demonstrated a clear preference to hire white people over Black peopleand other people of color.

To date, 50 restaurant owners and at least 200 workers have joined One Fair Wage to support the Safe and Just Reopening plan. Joining them are celebrity chefs David Chang of Momofuku fame, as well as Tom Colicchio and Danny Meyer.

Chang in particular has been vocal about the ravages COVID-19 has heaped on restaurant workers, and emerged as a leader when it comes to showing how restaurants can operate safely during this era. Forced to close some of his restaurants, he co-launched a fund to help employees make ends meet, and he directed his human resources staff to pay healthcare premiums for laid-off employees as long as it was financially possible.

As of press time, the One Fair Wage-led directive is focused on New York, but it offers a template of how all U.S.restaurants and their employees can survive during a pandemic that so far appears to have no end in sight.

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Image credit: Jason Leung/Unsplash

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It's Time the Restaurant Industry Shed This Legacy of Slavery - Triple Pundit

A Brentwood couple, have been charged with conspiracy, extortion and labor trafficking of their in-house nanny, the district attorneys office announced in a press release Monday.

Ijeoma Chukwunyeluand Nnamdi Onwuzulike made their first court appearance last month, and entered pleas of not guilty in Contra Costa Countys first criminal labor trafficking case. In addition to labor trafficking under Penal Code section 236.1(a), defendants are charged with extortion and conspiracy to violate Labor Code section 1199 which requires employers to follow Californias minimum wage and hour requirements.

In this case, a woman was recruited from outside the United States to be a nanny for a family with young children in East Contra Costa County. Defendants instructed the victim to obtain her passport and visa fraudulently and claim she was coming to California for three weeks as a tourist to attend the wedding of her son and the defendants daughter. Because of her economic circumstances, and fear that the job opportunity would be given to someone else, the victim followed the instructions she was given. She was not aware of her legal rights to minimum wages, breaks, overtime or employment conditions under California law.

When the victim arrived in California in April of 2017, defendants took possession of her passport and visa. From the time she started until October of 2018, the defendants required her to perform work beyond what she was hired to do. She was required to sleep on the floor of the childrens room so she could care for them round the clock, to cook for the entire family and clean their 5-bedroom house for no additional wages. They did not provide the victim with breaks or days off from her work responsibilities as required by California Law. The defendants never paid her overtime for any of the additional hours she worked and continued to employ her with knowledge that her visa expired. This made the victim a particularly vulnerable worker without immigration status who was fearful of deportation.

This investigation was a collaborative effort between the Brentwood Police Department, the Contra Costa County District Attorneys Office, Homeland Security Investigations, the United States Department of Labor, and the California Department of Industrial Relations/Division of Labor Standards Enforcement and the Victim Witness Assistance Program within the DAs Office. The investigation began when American Medical Response (AMR) personnel recognized a victim in need of assistance and connected her to resources that could help her.

As the COVID-19 pandemic causes massive job losses and severe economic instability, California workers are more vulnerable than ever to exploitative employment practices. Our collaborative efforts on this investigation led to a successful filing of this case. I am proud to work with our partners at all levels of government to protect workers and seek justice for those harmed by predatory behavior, stated Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton.

The California Labor Code and a series of 17 Wage Orders maintained by the California Department of Industrial Relations set forth state minimum wage and overtime requirements for nearly all types employees, including live-in domestic workers. The orders can be found here: https://www.dir.ca.gov/iwc/WageOrderIndustries.htm and information about worker rights can be found here: https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/dlse.html. These rights apply to California employees without regard to the persons immigration status. Such illegal practices by employers could carry both civil and criminal liability for the employer even if the worker agrees with the employment conditions out of financial desperation, concern for their immigration status, or simply because the employee did not know their rights.

The experience of this domestic worker represents countless more who are preyed upon because of economic desperation. These criminal acts are not only illegal but immoral, said California Labor Commissioner Lilia Garcia-Brower. Human trafficking is modern day slavery, an we are committed to stopping it by partnering with agencies to eradicate this horrific crime.

The case is being prosecuted by the DAs Office, which is a member of the Contra Costa Human Trafficking Taskforce. The Taskforce is comprised of local, state and federal law enforcement and community-based victim service partners. The Task Force works collaboratively to identify and investigate all forms of trafficking in our community while providing victims with culturally competent services and support.

Our agency remains relentlessly committed to dedicating resources to disrupt and dismantle organized crime associated with human trafficking, and will continue to work collaboratively with our Taskforce partners to make an even greater impact, said Investigations Lieutenant Walter OGrodnick with the Brentwood Police Department.

Any person who thinks they may be a victim of labor trafficking in Contra Costa County can make a report to the DAs Office Human Trafficking Tip Line at 925-957-8658.

HSI appreciates the opportunity to partner with the various agencies in the Contra Costa County Human Trafficking Task Force in order to provide victims with the resources they need and deserve and to hold the violators to account for actions akin to modern day slavery, said Tatum King, Special Agent in Charge - HSI San Francisco.

Case information: People v. Nnamdi Onwuzulike and Ijeoma Chukwunyelu, Docket Number 04-199478-9

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Brentwood couple charged with labor trafficking of nanny - thepress.net

The recent release of the musical Hamilton by the Disney+ channel on July 3 received favourable reviews across Canada and the United States.

Critics have lauded the musical for its innovative mash-up ofhip hop, jazz, blues, rap, R&B, and Broadway, and for how the show jubilantly demonstrates hip hops entwinement with American traditional ideals of self-invention and freedom.

The musical has also been praised for casting mostly Black and brown faces in roles of the American Founding Fathers, a move that underscored how political ideals in the United States belong to and are creatively advanced by all Americans.

What is especially interesting in the summer of 2020 is that Hamilton was presented at a time of intense political divisiveness and protest in the U.S. The streaming of Hamilton also gained dramatic significance in the context of the recent Black Lives Matter protests in face of racist police violence.

Many have interpreted the July 3 release, one day before American Independence Day, as intended to remind patriotic Americans of their ability to unite and work towards a fairer government and society.

Ever since the musical was originally staged in 2015, many professional historians were surprised that a musical about statesman and Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, mostly known for having his portrait on the 10-dollar bill, would be such a commercial and critical success.

Given Hamiltons interest in challenging traditional narratives, demonstrated both by shows largely Black and racialized cast and brilliant appropriation of diverse musical and theatrical traditions, some historians of the American Revolution have been puzzled that the show didnt explicitly address how the white historical figures were connected to the history of slavery and anti-Black racism.

Although the shows creator and star, Lin-Manuel Miranda, portrayed Hamilton as a man dedicated to the abolition of slavery, historians like Annette Gordon-Reed have argued that Hamilton was only moderately concerned about eradicating the institution of slavery in the U.S.

For Hamilton, ensuring the survival of the U.S. as a nation-state trumped any other concerns, including slavery. This meant making awkward compromises with the Southern slave-holding states.

Neither the musical nor most historians have addressed how Hamiltons political ideas affected Indigenous Peoples. Hamilton was not as directly involved in diplomatic negotiations with Indigenous nations, unlike President George Washington.

However, Indigenous Peoples cannot be separated from the story of the founding of the U.S. This claim is most recently put forth in a study suggesting Indigenous history is central to all U.S. history. This is particularly true for the first decade following the end of the American War of Independence.

After Britain had surrendered its claims to North America, with the exception of Canada, to the U.S. in 1783, a number of powerful Indigenous nations still occupied lands west of the Appalachians. These nations included the Cherokees and the Creeks in the Southeast as well as a confederacy of nations consisting of Shawnees, Wyandots, Lenapes (Delawares), Ojibwes, Ottawas and others in the Ohio region, known as the United Indian Nations.

Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), the Mohawk leader who had been closely aligned with Britain since before the American Revolution, was one of the initiators of the United Indian Nations in September 1783. There was a constant fear among U.S. politicians that these Indigenous nations would align with Britain and Spain against the United States.

As historians Gregory Lablavsky and Jeffrey Ostler have shown, Hamilton advocated for a federal military force that would be able to confront the savage tribes on our Western frontier [who] ought to be regarded as our natural enemies during the constitutional ratification debate in 1788.

According to Hamilton, the Indigenous nations in the west would support the Spanish in Florida and the British in the Great Lakes region because they have most to fear from us and most to hope from them.

In Hamiltons opinion, a strong national army was necessary to deal with the European and Indigenous threats to the new nation. Once the U.S. constitution was ratified in 1788 with its emphasis on a strong central government, Hamilton became the first Secretary of the Treasury in 1789.

In that role, Hamilton ensured that the American government had an army at its disposal that could be deployed to wage genocidal warfare against Indigenous nations.

In June 1790, Brig.-Gen. Josiah Harmar, the commander in charge of the U.S. military efforts against the United Indian Nations in the Ohio region, received instructions from Secretary of War Henry Knox to go on the offensive to extirpate, utterly, if possible, the said Banditti. This was a demeaning reference to the Indigenous warriors who were defending their lands and families.

The verb extirpate was used in the 18th century as synonymous with exterminate.

Although the Indigenous confederacy was able to hold back the U.S. army for several years, the American military wore down the confederacy by 1794 by repeatedly destroying Indigenous villages and cornfields. The actions of the army forced Indigenous Peoples to surrender the fertile Ohio Valley to the U.S. in 1795.

Joseph Brant and his followers, mostly Mohawks and other members of the Haudenosaunee or Six Nations confederacy, escaped American expansion by resettling on the Grand River in Upper Canada. However, Brant and the Haudenosaunee soon became embroiled in complex negotiations with British officials over the meaning of the Haldimand Proclamation of October 1784 that originally created the huge tract of land for the Six Nations along the Grand River.

The Shawnees, Wyandots and Delawares continued to defend their lands against the United States until the end of the War of 1812. After 1815, many members of the United Indian Nations migrated to Missouri and Kansas to escape American expansion. During the 1830s, the remaining Indigenous Peoples in Ohio and Indiana were forcibly removed by the U.S. government to reserves in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma and Kansas). Their descendants still live there today.

Clearly, Hamiltons ideas of a federal army and an expanding nation had fateful consequences for the Indigenous Peoples who lived in what is now Ohio and Indiana.

Just like the musical could have dealt more fully with slavery, the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives would have forced audiences to grapple with the implications of Hamiltons policies.

For all its brilliant creativity, the musical missed out on the unique opportunity to inform the public about the impact of the new American nation upon the Indigenous nations of North America. Perhaps one day a new musical will be written about the origins of the U.S. that explicitly incorporates Indigenous perspectives and actors.

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'Hamilton' ignores the statesman's strategy to fund genocidal warfare against Indigenous Peoples - The Conversation CA

Constitution Illustrated R. Sikoryak

Drawn & Quarterly

July 2020

How many artists have created their own genres? Robert Sikoryak may stand among few, especially for genres within the comics form.

He has an eloquently simple concept: combine a set of words with incongruous drawings in the styles of famous comics. For his first 2009 graphic novel, Masterpiece Comics, Sikoryak retold classic works of literature, such as The Scarlet Letter, Doctor Faustus, and Crime and Punishment, featuring Little Lulu as Hawthorne's Pearl, Garfield as Marlowe's Mephistopheles, and Batman as Dostoyevsky's homicidal protagonist.

In 2017, Terms and Conditions earned Sikoryak greater attention for an even stranger premise: the complete, unabridged iTunes user agreement with Steve Jobs drawn in 94 pages of constantly changing styles. For The Unquotable Trump, released later the same year, he applied his formula to political satire, inserting Donald Trump cartoon images and verbatim quotes into comic book covers, with an appropriate emphasis on supervillains.

Now Sikoryak delves even deeper into American politics by adapting the most central US text. Constitution Illustrated provides the complete, unaltered Articles and Amendments in 114 cartoon vignettes. The book is both Sikoryak's widest range of comics homages yet and, more oddly, his most practical. Where the iTunes contract was a comically absurd choice because so few people have ever bothered to read it, the Constitution is, of course, a keystone of US law and culture. Sikoryak even evokes a pocket-sized edition, that ubiquitous prop used by politicians and pundits in need of something to clench and wave above their heads.

I just used my copy to check whether the 19th Amendment established the right of women to both vote and hold office or just to vote. The page features a spot-on imitation of H. G. Peter, the first but uncredited Wonder Woman artist. That pairing is a good illustration of Sikoryak's logic and humor. Though unlike the adaptions in The Unquotable Trump, the page isn't an exact recreation (like John Romita's 1975 The Hulk on the Rampage cover), but a formally freer combination of style and subject. (The 19th Amendment, by the way, is just for the right to vote.)

If you're a comics aficionado, Constitution Illustrated is also the ultimate pop quiz. I didn't keep score as I flipped through the first time, but I chuckled when I recognized the logic behind each discordant pairing, especially the superhero motif. For Article I, Section I describing the division of Congress into the Senate and the House, Sikoryak draws two muscular and oppositely colored patriots sprinting in a mirrored pose cribbed from the 1976 cover of The Greatest Race of All Time! Superman vs. the Flash. The two DC heroes are allies on the same team, but they still compete against each other all too often. That antagonism increases when the House's Super Friends face a row of Senate supervillains in an illustration of the House's sole power to create tax-raising bills and the Senate's power to amend them.

Instead of Spider-Man's antagonists Prowler and J. Jonah Jameson watching Peter Parker fall from a window, Sikoryak draws a presiding Chief Justice and a Senator watching the President in the same posean apt illustration for the protocols for trying an impeachment. President Parker bears no resemblance to either Donald Trump or Bill CIinton, but Sikoryak kindly adds tingling spider senses emanata as a helpful clue (something artist Romita did not include on the original 1969 cover).

A 1943-based colonial Captain America blocks a spray of musket bulletsmetaphorically blocking the states' ability to wage war, a power exclusive to the federal government. Sikoryak leaps to 1992 for Article II, Section 2's description of the President's role as Commander in Chief. I admit I didn't recognize Jim Lee's Wild C.A.T.s cover, just the decade-defining style which I took for Rob Liefeld. Happily, Sikoryak provides a cheat sheet in the appendixes, listing the source for each of adaption.

The list of comics artists that get a respectful nod in Sikoryak's Constitution Illustrated is dizzyingly eclectic. It includes Alison Bechdel, Garry Trudeau, Roz Chast, Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Charles Schultz, Frank Miller, Scott McCloud, Adrian Tomine, and many more. This book could be used in courses in comics and cartoon history, as it features some of the earliest creators, like Richard Outcault (The Yellow Kid) and Windsor McCay (Little Nemo), and some of the most recent, like Noelle Stevenson (Lumberjanes) and Bianca Xunise (Six Chix).

Black artists George Herriman, Jackie Ormes, Matt Baker, Barbara Brandon-Croft, and Aaron McGruder are represented, as well as the presentation of Black characters by non-Black artists. The Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez tribute is the most diverse, implying a hope that the Electoral College, which it describes should reflect the same level of diversity. Less subtlety, Sikoryak draws a chain-breaking Luke Cage to illustrate the slavery-ending 13th Amendment. His 25th Amendment depicts a Black vice-president assuming the presidencyjust as the Black character John Stewart assumed the role of Green Lantern in DC comics.

My favorite, though it's disturbing, is Mandrake the Magician turning his African servant Lothar partially invisible beneath the census directive to count only "three fifths of all other persons", meaning, of course, slaves. The image unites the racism of the Article with the racism of the 1930s characters. It also highlights how any contemporary analysis of the Constitution must address its deep flaws too. Sikoryak's satirical pairings breathe new and sometimes uncomfortable life into the United States' most living document.

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Sikoryak's 'Constitution Illustrated' Pays Homage to Comics and the Constitution - PopMatters

Outbreaks of Coronavirus (Covid-19) on cruise ships are currently disrupting holidaymakers plans across the world. But away from the headlines of the inconvenience to privileged travellers, a global human crisis is unfolding. Seafarers are suffering. And they are largely unnoticed.

Pretty much every country in the world depends on shipping. Globally over 1.6 million people work as seafarers. Ships transport around 90% of the worlds trade. In 2016, then-United Nations general secretary Ban Ki-moon released a statement saying:

Everybody in the world benefits from shipping We ship food, technology, medicines, and memories.

He also said that the shipping industry has helped improve global living standards and helped lift millions of people out of acute poverty. But he acknowledged:

the vast majority of people are unaware of the key role played by the shipping industry, which is largely hidden from view.

This hidden from view situation has allowed the ongoing exploitation of maritime workers. Partly because of the international nature of shipping, its difficult to regulate.

Wages in the shipping industry are often shockingly low. Last year, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) reported:

super exploitation on merchant ships in UK waters sees basic rates of pay as low as 1.83 per hour

This means UK workers are undercut by workers from overseas, which causes problems for both seafarers in the UK and in countries that supply the majority of crews. But the maritime industry isseen as a special case, which allows the exploitation to continue and causes discrimination against foreign workers.

But its not only financially that maritime workers suffer. A recent in-depth study found that seafarers are likely to suffer in five main areas. Personnel Todaylists them as:

Fatigue impact of long working hours, changes in working hours, shift work and overtime

Working environment heat, noise, ship movement, food quality, length of deployment, access to gym and exercise equipment

Role level of autonomy, task and skills variety, workload, job satisfaction and rank

Socialisation social interaction on board, cultural awareness, transient nature of crews on a ship, and openness of communication

Leadership the level of support offered and influence over conditions and culture.

In 2017, the maritime union Nautilus demanded action from the UK government to tackle exploitation of seafarers in the UK, many of whom were victims of modern slavery, and many more who were living in unacceptable conditions, with infestations and lack of fresh and nutritious food. In 2019, the RMT slammed the government for ignoring what it termed ships of shame. At the time, general secretary Mick Cash said:

Companies will trouser millions of pounds of taxpayers cash while they crew their ships with exploited seafarers from other countries.

Coronavirus has compounded all these issues, leading to port closures and travel restrictions. Crew changes were suspended in March 2020 as a short-term solution to stop supply interruption. But crew members still have no idea when they will be able to disembark and see their families. The International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) estimates:

300,000 seafarers are trapped working aboard these vessels, and another 300,000 are facing financial ruin at home, desperate to relieve these ships and start earning wages again.

Governments around the world recently signed up to an agreement at the UK-convened International Maritime summit on 9 July 2020. It seeks to safeguard seafarers rights and working conditions during the coronavirus crisis, and all 14 signatories recognise seafarers as keyworkers.

Even so, only 15 countries globally have opened their ports. So some crews are facing being trapped at sea indefinitely, while others are trapped at home. The ITF says:

Governments are the biggest barrier to resolving the growing crew change crisis.

Alarm bells should potentially ring when we consider that the top five suppliers of ratings (non-officer crew members) to the maritime industry are the Philippines, China, Indonesia, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine. China, Ukraine and Russia tend to rank pretty low in terms of human rights.

A similar group of countries supply the most officers to the maritime industry, with China topping the leader board and the Philippines, India, Indonesia and Russia following. In 2019, China had the worlds second-largest shipping fleet and constructed a third of all vessels globally. Around a third of all shipping routes pass through the South China sea.

So its problematic that China, Russia, and Ukraine were conspicuously absent from the International Maritime Summit in July. It doesnt take a big leap to see that without three of the top five crew suppliers involved, securing better rights for seafarers is likely to be near impossible.

But its not enough to point fingers at those countries which supply seafarers. In a global industry, all governments have a safeguarding duty to protect workers. And instead, wealthy countries are ignoring worker exploitation to make a better profit and undercut minimum wage contracts. They leave workers from poor countries with no choice but to get on board, because if they dont, they and their families will suffer even more.

For too long we have shuttered ourselves from the chronic conditions and poverty inflicted on people we rely on for all of our basic needs. It seems that shipping is yet another industry where profit is put so far before people that workers are drowning. And given how vital they are to humanitys access to fundamentally important supplies, its past time to pull the curtain back on the global conditions for maritime workers.

Featured image via Unsplash Andy Li

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Seafarers face welfare crisis as Coronavirus compounds appalling conditions - The Canary

No wonder that two of the top-10 songs of 1945 were My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time and Accentuate the Positive.

And yet this week, three-quarters of a century after the end of the conflict that left the United States preeminent in the world and the savior of Europe, the dreams seem darker and the positive, elusive. American citizens are banned from entering the Continent because of the rampant spread of the coronavirus in their homeland, the American president is reviled by most of the countrys traditional allies, and the institutions that far-sighted American statesmen used to construct the architecture of the post-war era diplomatic and economic structures are either in tatters, in turmoil, or in trouble.

For Americans, the long look back to the sense of infinite possibility of those days has become a sentimental journey the title, as it happens, of the number one song of 1945.

We talk loosely of the Greatest Generation, those who stepped into the breach to win the war and lived into the promise of the peace that followed. And many great things were in fact begun in those days:

The first slender slender and appallingly inadequate stirrings of justice for Black Americans, eight decades after the war that ended slavery. The making of an economic boom that seemed built to last forever, and that might even throttle poverty at last. And the necessary diminution of the power of corrosive nationalism around the world the malign force that fueled two catastrophic world wars with the birth, among other historic innovations, of the United Nations.

But retrospect makes it clearer by the day that this was work more begun than completed. Black lives still dont matter enough. Economic inequality is graver than ever. Nationalism of the most worrisome sort is on the rise, here and elsewhere in the world. And so on, missions still to accomplish.

Still, it is a good time to reconsider those days and those dreams.

That postwar world, weary from 2,194 days of brutal conflict and mechanized death, looked to America the postwar equivalent of what Churchill had called the sunlit uplands for leadership, and for inspiration.

The United States was not only ready to assume this role but it was totally rational that it should do so, said Jeremy K.B. Kinsman, who has served as Canadas ambassador to Great Britain, Russia, Italy, and the European Community. There was nothing bad about it, which is why the Trump phenomenon of America First is so troubling to so many of Americas closest friends.

In abandoning two centuries of isolation, the United States not only joined the international order but also reshaped it.

Despite all the mistakes and tragedies since then, including two long wars in Asia, there have been some phenomenal successes, said Adam Roberts, emeritus professor of international relations at Oxford. In 1989 and 1990 the Soviet Empire, and then the Soviet Union itself, collapsed, and now in 2020 we can celebrate the fact that major inter-state war has been avoided for 75 years. The trouble is that this is no time for celebration. The US, like the UK, is floundering in a COVID-19 mess largely of its own making.

* * *

And so this is a bittersweet anniversary, the sweet coming from the celebratory reflections; the bitter coming from the promise that went unrealized, and the promises unfulfilled.

I do believe the World War II generation was ideally suited to take on the historic challenge of a two-front war because so many members were hardened by the experience of the Depression, said broadcast journalist Tom Brokaw, who took the Greatest Generation tag for the title of his bestselling book, in an interview for this essay. But he added that when people question the label he has a ready response: I said greatest. I did not say perfect.

That great but imperfect generation was so powerful a presence in modern American life that for 14 consecutive elections in the 20th century, at least one of the major-party presidential nominees was involved in the war 50 percent more elections than those contested by the 18th-century Founders.

That group of politicians was marked by the war, as people involved in all-consuming events like war are, said Angus King, who taught a course in leadership at Bates College and Bowdoin College before being elected to the Senate from Maine as an Independent. We saw it in the Civil War... and today, when politicians who were in Iraq or Afghanistan have an aura. And certainly this is the case with the World War II presidents.

And would-be presidents.

World War II changed my life and the lives of countless other Americans, said the Republicans 1996 presidential nominee, former senator Robert J. Dole of Kansas, who was gravely wounded in the last days of World War II and at age 97 is one of the 300,000 veterans of the war still alive. We paid a heavy price I paid a heavy price but we prevailed. It took me years to recover. Im still recovering. But it was worth it. Fighting in that war was the most important thing I did in my life.

Just as important was what followed the war: the high hopes of the veterans, of those on the home front, of millions abroad, in displaced-persons camps, in the squalor of wrecked cities, in countries where the manufacturing base was destroyed and the agricultural prospects minimal.

On anniversaries like this, we salute how much was accomplished in those 75 years. And yet:

It would have been inconceivable to those imagining the postwar world, that life expectancy in the United States would be lower today than that of Poland, Germany, Italy, and Japan, countries left destroyed by ground combat and airborne assault. It would have been beyond comprehension that the cost of a college education, brought within the reach of millions because of the generosity of the GI Bill, would be beyond the grasp of millions in 2020. It would have beggared belief that American prosperity had not reached into the bottom quarter of the workforce. It would have astonished the 350,000 women who enlisted in the armed forces and the many hundreds of thousands who worked in wartime factories 310,000 of them in the aircraft industry alone, 65 percent of the total aviation-manufacturing workforce that 75 years later, women would still be fighting for equality in the workplace and were earning on average about 81 cents to the dollar that men were earning.

Very seldom do you get a crack in time when there is so much to be rebuilt, said Stephanie Coontz, a historian at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. We blew it after World War I but after World War II it looked as if we might do it, though we did not include Blacks and women. At times like this we dont look back at the way things were, but at the way we hoped things were becoming.

Moreover, in the peace that emerged after the war it would have been difficult to imagine that Americans of color, many of whom joined in the fight for freedom around the world, still do not enjoy the fullness of freedom and equality at home or anything close to it and that the ethnic and religious hatred that the soldiers, sailors, and aviators of World War II thought they were eradicating from the face of the earth would have remained a scourge on the earth.

World War II uncovered laid bare for us that hate is capable of bringing on the greatest evil, said Rabbi Jeffrey Myers of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where two years ago 11 Jews were murdered while he led them in Sabbath prayer. It makes me pause and wonder 75 years later whether we have accomplished all that much. The good people on this earth have been engaged for millennia in this work, and the anniversary of the end of the worst period of hate in history reminds us that there is so much more work to be done.

* * *

Three-quarters of a century is, to be sure, a long time. It is the distance between Shays Rebellion in Western Massachusetts and the outbreak of the Civil War in Charleston, S.C., between the election of Benjamin Harrison and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, between Pearl Harbor and the inauguration of President Trump.

The America of 1945 was without supermarkets, freezers, dishwashers, even ballpoint pens. Since then the shopping center sprouted, was converted to a mall, and then just about died. Popular music went from 78s to LPs to eight-tracks to CDs to iPods to streaming services. The births of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Trump, Dolly Parton and Cher were a year away.

But an economic explosion was imminent, fueled by consumer demand that had been building during the Depression and war years. In the immediate postwar period, personal consumption expenditures created an average annual growth rate of per-capita GDP of 2.5 percent, according to a study that senior analyst Nick Bunker prepared in 2014 for the liberal-leaning Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

But that galloping growth would not prove to be equitable growth not nearly.

The gap between those high on the income ladder and those in the middle and lower rungs did not change substantially from the end of the war until the 1970s, when the gap began to widen. The share of income growth captured by the top 1 percent in Massachusetts between 1945 and 1973, for example, was 2.9 percent. That figure rose to 50.4% in the period from 1973 to 2007, then to 58.4 percent in the eight years that followed, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Today, in fact, the average income of the top 1 percent of Massachusetts residents is $1,904,805, while the average income of the other 99 percent is $61,694, a top-to-bottom ratio of about 30 to 1.

The result is a different United States from the one many dreamed of at wars end. In effect, the anthropologist and author Jared Diamond has written, the U.S. is a country of 328 million inhabitants that operates as if only 50 million of them matter.

All that, despite the massive exposure of Americans to education, regarded for generations as the sturdiest ladder of social and economic mobility.

In years leading up to the war, the United States, in the characterization of the Harvard economist Claudia Goldin in a 1998 study, pulled far ahead of the rest of the world in high-school graduation, with a rate of 50.8 percent. There are conflicting figures for high-school graduation today, but there is a consensus that the figure has risen by more than half since then and that the rate for Blacks and for Hispanics is lower than that of whites. An engine of opportunity has stalled.

The GI Bill opened the college gates to World War II veterans in what Ira Katznelson, the Columbia historian, called the single most important piece of legislation ever passed in America to create a modern middle class.

Today the typical college graduate earns about $80,000 while those with only a high school degree earn about $36,000.

But in education, as in all areas of American society, the cruelest dividing line was race.

The benefits of the GI Bill for Black veterans were, to be sure, substantial, but they were not equally distributed, in part because of the role the states played in the program. State legislatures, for example, voted enough money for every white person to attend universities in South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi, but not enough for Black person to enroll in the states historically Black colleges.

It was a period when middle-class America was invented among whites, said Ivory Nelson, who was president of Lincoln University, a historically Black institution in Pennsylvania, from 1999 to 2011. But middle-class America for Blacks doesnt exist even now.

The effect was to cement, even to widen, the distance between white America and Black America, despite the achievements of the civil-rights movement and the advancements some now under siege of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The country never dealt with the race question, said Larry Davis, founder of the Center on Race and Social Problems at the University of Pittsburgh. It didnt want to deal with it because it wouldnt admit guilt. We let the South have its way. ... After World War II the country continued to sacrifice Black people to keep the South happy. Can you imagine how much wealth of Black people was lost?

This failure cut especially deep for Blacks who had high hopes that World War II would be not just a chance to save the world for Democracy but to perfect our own. This was a vision captured poignantly in the so-called Double-V Campaign, begun after a 26-year-old wrote a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier, a Black newspaper, asking: Should I sacrifice to live half American?

What came of his question was a new push for two victories, one overseas, the other at home.

Some progress has been made, to be sure. But according to research by Patrick Bayer and Kerwin Kofi Charles set out in 2018 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Black-white wage gap has returned to Truman-era levels.

We may have won victory in World War II but we havent achieved the second V in the Double-V Campaign, said Rod Doss, the Couriers current editor and publisher.

* * * *

In no war was the home front more important than it was in World War II, and in no conflict did war produce more changes at home, including an increase in home ownership from about half of Americans in 1945 to two-thirds today, according to the Census Bureau.

And there were tremendous changes in gender roles inside those homes. The numbers of women at work went up during the war, the Harvard historian Nancy Cott said, but what was more important was the kind of work highly paid industrial work women were doing. By 1952, there were 2 million more working wives than there had been during World War II.

But another big change came shortly after the war, when changes in the federal tax code favored married couples who had one primary earner. The result was that a man who supported a woman not employed outside the home paid substantially less in taxes than a single man making as much money.

Womens gains were often sacrificed, said Rebecca Davis, a University of Delaware historian. It became clear that society thought it more important to preserve mens jobs.... It helped explain a lot of anger women had in the 1960s and even now.

And as the late 1940s rolled into the 1950s, vast transformations were underway in American domestic life.

The 1950s were a unique moment in the history of marriage and the family, said Christine Whelan, director of the Money, Relationships and Equality Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Never before had so many people shared the experience of courting their own mates, getting married at will, and setting up their own households. Never had married couples been so independent of extended family ties and community groups. Never before had so many people agreed that only one kind of family was normal.

There is, thankfully, no such agreement today.

Americans also roared out of World War II with enormous confidence in progress through science. Nuclear weapons technology could be used for peaceful energy. The DuPont Co. had spoken of better living through chemistry since 1935, but after 1945 it became a conviction rather than a slogan. Scientists began to understand DNA, to battle disease with new and more powerful tools, and to achieve remarkable feats of exploration through NASA.

The decade after the war was the true high point for doctors and scientists; the pinnacle may have been Jonas Salk and his polio vaccine, with research financed by the March of Dimes and its more than 100 million Americans contributors.

We came out of World War II with science in the ascendancy, said Richard Scheines, a Carnegie Mellon University expert in the philosophy of science. We thought we could feed the world. We thought there could be clean energy, It turns out that the world is more complicated than we thought. It turned out that we couldnt figure everything out.

That was never so clear as it has been this year, when the coronavirus consumed more American lives than the Korean and Vietnam conflicts combined.

There was confidence science could solve all the problems the world faced and that all infectious diseases could be taken care of, said Jason Opal, a McGill University historian who is writing a history of epidemic diseases in the United States with his father, Steven Opal, a clinical professor of medicine at Brown. Now we know better, and we have lost confidence in our ability to solve our problems. The decline in science is part of the decline in the morale of America.

That is not the only decline from World War II-era heights that America is experiencing today. Its decline in international prestige and global influence is one of the themes of the era.

The US was the key player in establishing a liberal international order, said Kiron Skinner, former director of policy planning in the State Department in the early Donald J. Trump years. Today the international order is adrift and the ideas the US helped shepherd are being contested not only by other powers but also inside the US.

Nowhere is that more apparent than at the United Nations, founded amid soaring rhetoric and hopes in the war-ending year of 1945.

It was the silver lining of the Second World War, said Stephen C. Schlesinger, author of a 2003 history of the San Francisco conference that created the UN. These people had seen 30 million people die in the First World War and 60 million in the Second World War and wanted to make sure that a Third World War would never happen.... Today nobody is happy with it today except that it has lasted 75 years.

When World War II ended, there was no doubt that the strongest economy was in the United States. It was the collective sense of the global markets that US government bonds were the most risk-free asset and that the dollar was the worlds reserve currency, notions codified in the fixed exchange rates that came out of the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944.

If we lost the war, none of that would have been the case, said Matthew J. Slaughter, the dean of Dartmouths Tuck School of Business Administration and a member of George W. Bushs council of economic advisors. A lot has changed, but the US dollar is still the worlds most important currency.

We had licked the Depression and won a just war, and the country was punch-drunk at VJ Day, said David M. Kennedy, the prominent Stanford historian. The world was wide open for those of that generation who survived. A lot of the aspirations of the moment were fulfilled. But we look a little less triumphant today. For sure we have some steps to go, and I wonder whether this journey ever ends.

And where it will take us. The generation that won the war and prospered in peace, made the world, in many ways, a better place. Better, but not perfect.

See the article here:

The generation that won WWII made the world a better place. Better, but not perfect - The Boston Globe

The widespread media reporting of illegal migrants packed like sardines into dangerously overloaded dinghies making the dash across the English Channel from France appears to be a regular a part of our British Summer. It is almost as traditional as the local village fete and its best fruit and vegetable competition judging, perhaps even more so this year as the village fetes have mostly been canceled due to the COVID 19 pandemic.

Our island has been looked upon enviously, throughout history, by those willing to cross treacherous seas in search of easy pickings. For almost 300 years from 793AD until 1066, the Vikings steered a course to our shores. The sight of their longboats striking fear into the indigenous population and signaling the start of another Viking Summer.

In recent days, the BBC has been filming the ruthless people traffickers plying their trade from a beach near Calais. The reporter claimed he had informed the French authorities of the imminent departure of the migrants and the presence of those organizing the trafficking, but no police or enforcement officers appeared.

Having in my early adulthood sailed on a reasonably sized yacht across the channel, which is the busiest sea lane in the world, I am well aware that the bow-waves from the large vessels which ply their legitimate trade through our waters are quite capable of overturning this barely floating death-traps. It is very telling that those who organize and profit from this misery dont travel in them.

I did have to laugh at the comments of Labour peer Admiral Lord West who as a former defense minister was gently stroked in a TV interview for his views on the use of our Navy to deter these little boats. The Europhile Lord claimed with a straight face that people will always want to get into the EU and wasnt picked up by the slow-witted interviewer on three obvious points:

Commentators remark that the record numbers of unconventional arrivals may be because of the fear of future changes to the UK's asylum laws. The fact is that when we are out of the current transition period of being under EU law on the 31st December 2020, we will be able to amend our legislation as we see fit to address this problem. However, the abandoned boats on our shores are just the visible tip of the iceberg concerning illegal migration. Most illegal migrants arrive in our country legally and are people who have arrived on an education or tourist visa and simply overstay. Those who travel to the UK illegally do so by many routes often hidden in vehicles with or without the drivers' knowledge.

The fact is that traveling from France to the UK illegally to claim asylum should not be grounds to remain in the UK, as asylum seekers are obligated to make their claim to asylum in the first safe country and it would be difficult for even the most ardent Francophobe to claim that France, by world standards, is not a safe country for asylum seekers.

It is illegal for anyone in the UK to employ or rent property to an illegal immigrant and fines on conviction for doing so are substantial. Why then, when their grounds for claiming asylum in the UK are so dubious,arethey coming here?

They come because we have a huge sub-culture of illegal workers and modern slavery in our country, a thriving sub-culture that I have recently been able to expose. Until recently the modern slavery unit at the Home Office maintained that there were about 8500 modern slaves in the UK, I can assure you that there are more than that number in the City of Leicester alone.

I estimate that there are at least 150 000 modern slaves in our country and possibly many more, We are victims of our success, free healthcare at the point of need, free education, a comprehensive benefits system and a high, by world standards minimum wage per hour. This offers huge opportunities to the unscrupulous employers and landlords and all they need is a constant flow of illegal migrants to exploit.

By the time those enticed to enter the UK illegally with the prospect of the land of Milk and Honey realize that the grass is not always greener, it is too late and they are in the system, or more accurately most of them are outside our system and its protections. They can try to get asylum, fail, and disappear into the UKs ugly exploitative sub-culture. It will take a long time to repay the traffickers working and existing, not living, in the UK on 3.50 per hour cash in hand.

Before you buy that 10 dress made in Leicester or have your car washed by hand cheaper than it can be done by the automated systems, that now appear redundant and unused, please remember as the Anglo-Saxons came to know in dealing with the Vikings, while ever you are willing to pay the Danegeld you will always have the Dane.

Link:

MP Andrew BRIDGEN: Here's The Truth About Illegal Migration And The Solution If We Want To Deal With It - The Pavlovic Today

As Black Live Matters protests spread around the world, TV episodes and films featuring blackface, anti-Black tropes, and inaccurate depictions of slavery resurfaced in the cultural conversation.

Many studios responded by pulling the episodes, cutting those scenes, or putting disclaimers before the original, unedited material. Episodes of "30 Rock," "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," "Scrubs," "The Golden Girls," and "Community" were among those removed from streaming services for showcasing blackface. A scene from "The Office" was cut.

Meanwhile, "Gone with the Wind" exists in its entirety on HBO Max with a five-minute introduction about how it "denies the horrors of slavery." A season-three episode of "Mad Men" now has a disclaimer.

Insider spoke with five Black creators, writers, talent, and executives about the differing studio responses. They said the actions didn't address the larger issue of systemic racism that permeates Hollywood and enabled blackface to appear on contemporary TV in the first place and they outlined what studios need to do to make actual change.

Four episodes of "30 Rock" have been pulled from streaming services. Ali Goldstein/NBCUniversal Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

Most of the people Insider spoke with said episodes shouldn't be pulled from streaming services it would be more harmful to sweep them under the rug. Rather, there should be a larger conversation about why they were allowed to be made in the first place.

"Pretending these episodes never existed doesn't change the fact that they did," Bianca Sams, a screenwriter who has written episodes of "The Originals" and "Titans," said in an email.

"They were written. They were shot. They were edited. Millions of dollars were spent on them," Sams said. "They got approved by studios, networks, producers. It happened. Taking them off the air doesn't change that. Because erasure and abdication of responsibility never fixes a problem it simply exacerbates the issue."

Anniwaa Buachie, a creative performer, said episodes with blackface should be removed from public viewing, though not from archives. Buachie added that many non-Black people fail to understand the severity of blackface, which dates back to the 1600s and involves white actors harmfully portraying Black people as one-dimensional stereotypes.

"I don't want it to be a situation where it's forgotten and we were just making all of this up," Buachie said, adding that pulling episodes isn't enough.

"It continues to disseminate really negative attitudes and perceptions worldwide about Black people," Buachie said. "It promotes this belief that Black people are racially and socially inferior."

"There needs to be accountability and acknowledgment of the material. In 2020, blackface cannot be seen as funny. It's not funny, especially when everyone around the world can see what's happening to Black women and Black men on a daily basis," she said, referring to the Black Lives Matter movement and the killings of Black people including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery.

Millicent Shelton who has directed over 100 episodes of TV for shows including "Black-ish," "P-Valley," and "The Flash" directed two episodes of "30 Rock," in seasons three and four.

But Shelton said that at the time, she wasn't aware of a season-three episode with blackface, in which Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) and Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) swap lives as a Black man and a white woman for a day.

Millicent Shelton is seen directing an episode of "Jessica Jones" with Krysten Ritter. Netfliix

"They certainly didn't ask me to direct it, because I would have said something," Shelton said.

"I respected people that worked on that show," Shelton said, adding, "But I question why those episodes were ever made and why they thought that was funny."

Shelton said that she doesn't believe in censorship and that she does believe there's a productive conversation to be had from looking at racist material to help educate people. But she said there's a difference between something like learning about the racist 1915 movie "Birth of a Nation" in film school and seeing blackface and racism in today's sitcoms.

"'Birth of a Nation' was racist, and it was openly so," Shelton said. "With the contemporary stuff that's come out, they're not attempting to be racist they're attempting to be funny. And you have to ask yourself, what kind of culture are we in where racism is something that's to be laughed at?"

A number of people in Hollywood need to see and approve a joke before its filmed. Reuters

"The fact that there are so many episodes featuring blackface at all is wildly problematic," Sams said, because a script goes through many hands before it makes it to the screen.

"No less than 50 to 75 people encounter the idea before it ever makes it to the actor, and another 50 to 75 before it makes it to the audience, which means that 100 to 150-plus people have allowed that image to make it to the screen," Sams said. "They were all tacitly complicit in that image making it to air."

In an essay on Deadline, Prentice Penny, the showrunner for "Insecure," said that in order for a joke to get on TV it needed to be approved by the showrunner, make it through script rewrites and a table read, and have both the studio and the network sign off before it's filmed. After that, an editor, the studio, and the network have to clear it, along with sponsors and local affiliate stations.

But there's a lack of nonwhite people involved in that process. A 2017 report from Color of Change titled "Race in the Writers' Room" looked at 234 shows across 18 platforms and found that 90% of the shows were run by white showrunners. More than two-thirds had no Black writers, while about 17% had one Black writer.

For example, "30 Rock" had an almost all-white writers' room for its seven-season run. Of the 42 producers on the show, Insider couldn't verify any are Black. Donald Glover was credited as an executive story editor on 22 episodes and a writer on two episodes in seasons two and three. Hannibal Buress was credited for writing one episode of season five.

Cast and crew members of "30 Rock" at the 2008 Emmys. The show won outstanding comedy series. Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey won outstanding lead actor and actress in a comedy series. Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

"When you look behind the scenes, there's no one in a position of power who is Black on that show," said Ron McCants, who in 2018 founded The Parity Project, a nonprofit fighting for equal representation and pay for Black creators in Hollywood.

"You're putting an unfair burden on the staff writer, story editor, editor, even coproducer to call it out," he said. "Your job is on the line, especially when you're the only one or the only two."

Sams said that racism appearing in TV shows despite the number of people a script needs to go through "tells you just how normalized and pervasive casual racism is within our industry and society."

While studios have removed some episodes with blackface from digital services, other episodes perpetuating harmful stereotypes remain. Hulu still has two "30 Rock" episodes featuring Alec Baldwin in forms of brownface. On a season-three "Golden Girls" episode, the women hire and later fire a Black housekeeper, accusing her of being lazy and placing a curse on them.

Representatives for Hulu and Tina Fey, the "30 Rock" creator, did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment. NBCUniversal declined to comment.

A thumbnail of "Generalissimo," the 10th episode of the third season of "30 Rock," on the Peacock TV app, shows Baldwin in brownface as an actor named Hector Moreda. NBCUniversal/Peacock

The people Insider spoke with said studios needed to go beyond pulling episodes or adding disclaimers to old content and instead focus on making tangible changes for Black, Indigenous, and people of color in Hollywood.

Four of the five people Insider spoke with recounted experiencing racism, sexism, and microaggressions in recent years, including being mistaken for someone with a lower position on set multiple times, having difficulty getting on a studio lot even with credentials, hearing a white executive story editor dropping the N-word casually, and having a white hairstylist use the wrong products on their hair.

Anniwaa Buachie, Millicent Shelton, and Bianca Sams said Hollywood needs to recognize what enabled racist TV episodes to air and prevent it from happening again. Anniwaa Buachie: @snvps; Millicent Shelton: Charley Gallay/Getty Images for NAACP Image Awards; courtesy Bianca Sams

"It's a limited gesture to add a disclaimer or pull material," Taylor K. Shaw, the CEO and founder of Black Women Animate Studios, said in an email.

"There are tons of shows in development, and when we recover from COVID-19, shows will be back in production," she added. "Now is the time to create a real plan of action for how your studio will shift industry culture, starting with your content and/or the content you stream."

Some of that change starts in the writers' rooms but talent and creators don't want to see a BIPOC voice here and there. They want to see more people with diverse backgrounds in positions of power so that others can feel safe voicing concerns without the fear of retaliation.

"If we are in the room when those decisions are made, we are not listened to when we speak up," Shaw said. "If we do speak up, we run the risk of being fired or blackballed."

Hollywood needs systemic change, not small gestures, creators say. Getty Images

"I don't want to be the only nonwhite or non-male person in a room. I don't want to be the 'other' in every space," Sams said. "Hollywood definitely needs Black and BIPOC decision-makers shaping content: showrunners, directors, C-suite executives, talent agents, producers, financiers. We also need Black crew and technicians executing these amazing projects."

Organizations like Color of Change, Women of Color Unite, Black Women Animate, and The Parity Project are working to make some of these changes a reality by seeking inclusion and equitable pay for Black artists, executives, and representatives in TV and film, as well as helping to tell authentic Black stories.

The Parity Project, for example, hosts annual town-hall meetings to discuss wage gaps and harassment in the industry and to network. It offers mentorship programs to Black creators and students which it plans to expand worldwide and works to track the racial diversity behind the scenes of every show on TV.

Ron McCants speaks to a group during a Parity Project town-hall meeting in 2019. Michelle Renee Jackson

"It's not just about pulling the episodes or a disclaimer," McCants said, adding that studios "can do whatever they want, in my opinion, about that."

"What they should be doing is saying, 'In order to make this right, we need to ensure that 40% of our staff is BIPOC. We need to set a date, and it can't be too far in the future. It has to be over two years that this needs to happen,'" McCants said.

"Give us the resources to tell the stories we know how to tell best," Shaw added. "If you truly want to support Black lives, go beyond words and small gestures. A shift in Hollywood culture will require financial investment and dedicated time."

If you have similar experiences you'd like to share or have experienced racism or sexism in the entertainment industry, please email kacuna@insider.com. You can also direct-message me on Twitter @KirstenAcuna or reach me securely on Signal.

More here:

Hollywood is taking down blackface TV episodes, but Black creators say it's not enough - Insider - INSIDER

AUGUST 10, 2020 Updated 17 hours ago

Associate Professor Christina Stringer is from the Department of Management and International Business at the University of Aucklands Business School.

Ideasroom

Let's not delude ourselves, temporary migrant workers are being exploited in this country -and it'snothing new, writes Christina Stringer

The reality of slavery, human trafficking and the exploitation of temporary migrant workers in New Zealand was exposed last month with the successful conviction of a 66-year-old man in the Napier Crown Court.

Joseph Matamata was found guilty on 13 charges of dealing with slaves and 10 charges of trafficking people. This was the first time the slavery charge was used in New Zealand. It is the fourth people-trafficking trial but only the second that has led to a people trafficking conviction. Defendants in the other two trials were found not guilty of people trafficking but guilty of other offences.

On the same day Matamata was sentenced to 11 years, the Government announced policy changes to further address the exploitation of temporary migrant workers. These changes were a result of an extensive review undertaken by MBIE into migrant worker exploitation in New Zealand. Research I undertook with colleagues fed into this review.

The facts of the Matamata case, which the judge described as abhorrent, might have surprised some New Zealanders who think trafficking and slavery are crimes that only take place overseas. But let us not delude ourselves, temporary migrant workers are being exploited in this country -and it is nothing new. One only needs to scan media headlines over the past years to find reports of exploitation, and they are becoming more common.

Just this week in the media have been reports of the exploitation of migrant workers working for Ravinder Arora, a franchisee owner of Bottle-O stores. Arora is reported as paying his staff as little as $7 per hour. It is also reported that he has failed 19 investigations by the Labour Inspectorate.

We do not know how extensive exploitation is, and numbers of victims are difficult to estimate as this is a population that is vulnerable for a number of reasons. Some are open to exploitation because of debt associated with coming to New Zealand and their visa status, as well as difficulties in finding employment and their lack of knowledge of employment rights. In some instances, employer-sponsored visas feed into the vulnerability of migrant workers.

Many do not speak up because they fear losing their jobs and, by extension, their visas, making them subject to deportation. They may also not speak up because of the fear of losing opportunities -and so their exploitation continues: They are underpaid, they experience poor working conditions and, in some cases, poor living conditions. Some are required to pay back a portion of their wages to their employer in what arebecoming elaborate schemes. Workers were paid their legal entitlements, thus allowing their employer to maintain legitimate wage records, with the requirement they pay back cash to their employer -undercutting their legal entitlement. Others are subject to mental and emotional abuse, some even physical abuse -a major factor in the Matamata case.

So what is the Government doing to help the plight of these workers? Itis proposing a set of policy and operational changes focused on prevention, protection and enforcement. For example, a helpline will be established to provide a mechanism for temporary migrant workers to report exploitation. The proposed stronger enforcement mechanisms - i.e. the banning of those convicted of exploitation from managing or directing a company - and a focus on franchisees and third party companies such as labour hire companies are also key initiatives. There is also a proposal to create a new visa for those reporting they are being exploited.

But the Government cant do it alone; unions and migrant support networks cannot do it alone. Temporary migrant workers play a critical role in our workforce and addressing their exploitation requires an across-the-board effort.We all have a part to play. The following cases show what the public can do and how institutions can respond.

In 2016, Faroz Ali was convicted of 15 counts of people trafficking from charges laid as a result of a member of the public speaking up. One of his victims had talked to someone at church about her exploitative conditions. That parishioner contacted others, which led to chargesbeing laid against Ali.

Last month, the New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants terminated Nafisa Ahmeds membership for bringing disrepute to the industry.Ahmed, part of the Bangladeshi sweet shop case, was convicted on exploitation charges and is currently on probation after serving one year of a two-and-a-half-year sentence.

I have said in the past that the contribution of migrant workers to the New Zealand economy must be valued and their vulnerabilities addressed. My view remains the same -and we still have a way to go.

Originally posted here:

What slavery case exposed about exploitation in NZ - Newsroom