Jul 14th 2020

THE PAST IS never dead. It's not even past, wrote William Faulkner, an American novelist. The observation rings especially true for the agonising problem of race in America. After centuries of slavery and segregation, African-Americans achieved formal legal equality only in the 1960s. Yet discrimination persists and they are far more likely to be victims of police violence than other demographic groups.

Cory Booker is a Democratic senator from New Jersey with bold ideas on how to improve the situation. In an interview with The Economist, he traced the cords of injustice that lay the foundation for todays problems, and offered solutions ranging from baby-bond legislation (giving poor children trust accounts) to removing ageing lead pipes that literally poison the countrys children.

Thats not radical, he says about these sorts of reforms, but common moral sense. The interview below with Mr Booker has been lightly edited.

***

The Economist: When you see a mass movement for racial justice happening again in this country and when you see frustration, not just over criminal justice, but the fact that black and white income gaps and wealth gaps are basically the same since 1968, what does that make you conclude about American society and government? Is it that formal legal equality has failed to guarantee equality of opportunity for black Americans?

Cory Booker: Look, we are a nation that has strong, sort of unbroken cords of racial injustice that have been with us for generations. And where lots of generational wealth has been created through the GI Bill [support to veterans for housing and education] through Social Security, through the Homestead Act, which granted massive tracts of land to new immigrants to this country. These are things that blacks were excluded from, that were barriers to economic opportunity.

We have a nation like that, up into my lifetime. My parents literally had to get a white couple to pose as us in order to buy a home in an affluent area of suburban New Jersey with great public schools. But we still live in a country where this denial of equal education is a part of our national fabric. Even today, we see schools that African-Americans attend receiving dramatically less funding than schools that are predominantly white.

These strong cords of injustice have never been broken. Our prison population has gone up about 500% since 1980 alone. Theres no difference between blacks and whites in using drugs or dealing drugs. But African-Americans were arrested for those crimes at rates three or four times higher than whites.

We have powerful, powerful forces of overt and institutional racism over the years that has really underdeveloped African-American opportunity and equality. It stretches now from the health-care system to issues of environmental justice. The number one indicator of whether you live around a Superfund site [designated a heavily polluted area] or drink dirty water or breathe unclean air is the colour of your skin. All of these things in their totality create a nation that still has such savage disparities and outcomes based upon race.

And I am encouraged that in this momentand I hope it's not a moment, I hope it grows to a greater movementthere is a greater expansion of our circles of empathy for each other. A greater understanding of the injustices that are there. It seems to be the dawning of an expansion of our moral imagination about how we can actually become a nation of equality, a nation of justice, and a nation that honors its highest values with a reality that reflects them.

The Economist: And how do you begin that difficult task of unwinding those deep threads that have not ever been broken? Whether its housing, policing, criminal justice, environmental issueshow do you start that? And do you feel optimistic about the possibility of change on some of those entrenched policy areas?

Mr Booker: Well, in a larger sense, first of all, the personal pronoun you use: I hope it's not a you, I hope its how do we do that? It's very hard in our country for us to create leaps in advancement without there being a greater sense of collective we, and a collective responsibility. The incredible legislation that's passed in our past from the suffrage movement to the labour movement to the civil-rights movement of the 1960s were all movements that happen because large swathes of American people put on personal responsibility to make dramatic change. The progressive movement in the 1920s was fuelled by people who weren't often directly affected by issues, seeing an urgency to change based on a growing consciousness.

It seems to be the dawning of an expansion of our moral imagination about how we can actually become a nation of equality

That is still ongoing: trying to expose the realities that are affecting our country as a whole and black people in particular, so that people feel a sense of moral urgency to address them. There are things that go on in our prison system that most Americans dont realise happen: that we shackle pregnant women when they're giving birth, that we put children in solitary confinement for extensive periods of times, even though our psychological professionals say that its torturous and causes brain damage.

I was encouraged when I heard very learned people telling me they never knew about what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma. [The prosperous neighbourhood of Greenwood, known as Black Wall Street, was destroyed by white residents in 1921.] Where people didn't know about the many places around this country that had seen such racial terror to the point where thousands upon thousands of Americans were lynched, often elected leaders, poor judges pulled out into streets and beaten. These stories have just been whitewashed from our history. I'm hopeful that we are at a period where awareness is growing, and with that, a sense of urgency to address it.

Now, when you talk about me in a particular senseand use that personal pronoun like you, Cory Booker, as a senatorI have an obligation to try to continue to push the bounds of justice as a United States senator and propose things that will actually have a very practical impact on disparities.

For example, baby-bond legislation is not that sexy, but it's this idea that every child, regardless of race, born in our nation, gets a $1,000 savings account. And then based upon their income, just like we base the earned-income tax credit, that child will get up to $2,000 a year placed in an interest-bearing account that compounds interest. By the time they're 18, the lowest-income American kids will have upwards of $50,000 saved.

Columbia University looked at that legislation for young adults and found it would virtually close the racial wealth gap. Policy solutions like that, like massive expansions of the earned-income tax credit [which tops up the wages of low-income Americans] or the child tax credit. These are things that affect poverty overall in our country, but would end poverty for a significant percentage of African Americans.

The Economist: After this period of consciousness-raising, what else might go in a Great Society-like radical programme of change, assuming that Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump were not part of this conversation for the moment?

Mr Booker: I hope that our policies begin to reflect what real public safety is. We know unequivocally by the facts that expanding Medicaid lowers violence. Expanding the earned-income tax credit lowers violence. You can go through these things that you know empower people. There are pilot programmes all over this country that show that dealing with people who are struggling with mental illness with police causes their death.

I hope that our policies begin to reflect what real public safety is

Black folks are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than somebody white. Someone with a mental illness is over ten more likely to be killed by the police than someone whos white. And to think that we actually could have services that help people have [mental] health-care. Thats not radical, that's just common fiscal sense, as well as common moral sense. To have an expansive view of public safety, to start investing as a society into those things that help people, who are hurt and fragile, can lead to greater human flourishing.

Our country is an outlier. We really dont do much for children until they turn five or six. So we lead industrial nations in infant mortality, in maternal mortality and in low-birthweight babies. It would be cheaper to revive at-risk women doula-care than to pay the extraordinary costs of premature birth. Something called nurse-family partnershipswhich is just having a nurse visit a home to be supportive with information for at-risk pregnant womenactually lowers encounters with police dramatically. Every taxpayer dollar you spend on the programme saves four or five taxpayer dollars because it lowers visits to the emergency room for that mother and that child.

Its not like we dont know how to elevate human potential while saving taxpayer dollars, or how to lower our reliance on police, courts and prisons. We know enough already. Its just that were not, as a society, collectively prioritising what would be a much more beloved way to move forward. And so this greater human consciousness, I hope elevates this ideal that, whether youre a fiscal conservative or a progressive liberal, these are things that abide with all of our values. Its why Ive had some success moving criminal-justice reform with strange partners, like the Koch brothers or the Heritage Foundation.

In a globally competitive environment, America is really falling behind those nations that do a better job of elevating human flourishing and human potential. The number China has in their top 10% of their high-school students is relatively close to the number of all of our high-school students. In a global knowledge-based society, your greatest natural resource is the genius of your children.

In a globally competitive environment, America is really falling behind those nations that do a better job of elevating human flourishing and human potential

And were doing a bad job because were a nation that has an astonishingly high level of children whose brains are addled by permanent lead damage. There are over 3,000 jurisdictions where children have more than twice the blood-lead level of Flint, Michigan, and they are disproportionately black and brown children. And so right now we don't even care enough. And I know we have the heart for it, but were not manifesting it in our policies to do something simple, which would have been a fraction of the last covid-19 bill. Why dont we as a country replace every lead service line in America that goes to our schools, to day-care centres and to homes in the United States that would actually pay for itself through the productivity of those children and saving them from the violence associated with lead poisoning.

There are a lot of common-sense things that we can do that should accord with the values of everybody who calls themselves pro-life to everybody who calls themselves a progressive, but we're just not doing it.

And so this is what the echoed words of our ancestors said. Martin Luther King, who wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, was very critical. He actually said Im not as upset with the White Citizens Council or the KKK, I'm far more upset with the white moderates who are doing nothing. And he eloquently said that we have to repent in our day and age, not just for the vitriolic words and violent actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and inaction of the good people.

Well, I fear that we will have to repent in our generation, if more of us who are good peopleand that is the overwhelming majority of Americanslet another generation go by, where we dont correct these persistent injustices with strategies that we know work and that we know will save us taxpayer dollars. Yet we fail to engage in the struggle to make them possible. As the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, If theres no struggle, there is no progress.

The Economist: A programme like baby bonds, which would do a lot on the racial wealth gap, would take 18 years for those accounts to accrue. And in the present day, theres a strong racial child-poverty gap. What do you see as the tools to fix that problem?

Mr Booker: The two very obvious tools are a massively expanded earned-income tax rate by more than half and a massively expanded child tax credit, like a lot of our peer nations do. But there's other tools that wed have to use to catch us up to the rest of the industrial world, like having affordable child care. We have a country in which child care in most states is more expensive than state-college tuition. It is unconscionable that we are doing that.

These are insane things that go on in this country that in our peer nations do not

We have something called the mortgage-interest deduction, for example, that is overwhelmingly used by the higher income. That tax expenditure goes to the wealthy in our country overwhelmingly. Why dont we do something for working people in America and have a rental tax credit if youre paying more than a one-third of your income on rent, which would cut poverty by the millions in America and give people security? One of the things that so undermine student performance are families who face evictions and are jumping from apartment to apartment. So theyre facing issues of fairness in our tax code like the ones I just mentioned, while also dealing with issues like paid family leave or child care that would take America so far in ending racial gaps.

A friend of mine named Natasha who worked a minimum-wage job couldn't afford housing. Her son was sick with asthma. Again, a black child is about ten times more likely to die of asthma complications than a white child. And she had to make a terrible decision of whether to stay at her job and get a pay-cheque that she really needed to keep a roof over the head of her kid, or to leave and go across the street and be with her child in the emergency room who was gasping for breath. I mean, these are insane things that go on in this country that in our peer nations do not. And we put our families in deep levels of stress and anxiety that ultimately undermines their overall flourishing.

We in this generation can end those things if we are committed to making real the ideals of our country and the laws of our countrythat we really are a nation that believes in life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that believes in human flourishing; that believes in equal justice under the law. And these are things that I think are long past [due]. Time has come. And, interestingly, they poll really well on both sides of the political aisle. But our people in elected office need more of a push to make them the law of land.

The Economist: You remain the optimist.

Mr Booker: Thank you. Forever, a prisoner of hope. And if anything, our nation's history is testimony, the triumph of hope, often under insurmountable conditions and odds.

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Interview: Cory Booker - Making real the ideals of our country | Open Future - The Economist

Pro-slavery advocates before and during the Civil War worked to defend the morality and necessity of American chattel slavery, and one of their defenses was that African-American slaves were actually much better treated than free white Americans.

George Fitzhugh wrote in Cannibals All! or Slaves Without Masters, published in 1856, of the benefits of American chattel slavery for African-Americans versus the plight of free white Americans.

But we not only boast that the White Slave Trade is more exacting and fraudulent (in fact, though not in intention) than Black Slavery; but we also boast that is tis more cruel , in leaving the laborer to care for himself and his family out of the pittance which skill or capital have allowed him to retain. When the days labor is ended, he is free, but is overburdened with the cares of family and household, which makes his freedom and empty and delusive mockery. But his employer is really free, and may enjoy the profit made by others labor, without a care, or a trouble, as to their well-being. The negro slave is free too, when the labors of the day are over, and free in mind as well as body; for the master provides food, raiment, house, fuel, and everything else to the physical well being of himself and his family. The masters labors commence just when the slaves end. No wonder men should prefer white slavery to capital, to negro slavery, since it is more profitable, and is free from all the cares and labors of black slave-holding.

The defenders of American chattel slavery argued that free white Americans were wage slaves, forced to work long hours for low wages in horrid working conditions, which was actually quite true. This gave credibility to the pro-slavery argument in the minds of white Americans in 1856.

Slaveholders asserted that they were benevolent to their slaves and actually treated their slaves well, whereas northern factory owners and other employers abused and overworked their white American employees and then callously cast them out of their work places to fend for themselves, casting the freedom of white Americans as a miserable existence.

Pro-slavery advocates argued that African-American slaves, on the other hand, lived secure lives of comfort and security under the paternalistic care of enlightened and benevolent Christian slave holders.

Indeed, Fitzhugh argued that The negro slaves in the South are the happiest, and in a sense, the freest people in the world, and that they were well treated, living in a utopian world without stress or want.

Free white American workers, on the other hand, were described as wage slaves who were held in thrall by greedy psychopathic employers, and thus abolitionists and free soil advocates were villains who wanted to wrench the slaves from their utopian existence in slavery into the horrific misery that free white Americans had to endure in their daily lives.

This view of slavery still persists in the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War, which persists to the present day.

Grady Atwater is site administrator of the John Brown Museum and State Historic Site.

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George Fitzhugh and the defense of slavery | Voices | republic-online.com - Miami County Republic

The reporter also found the factorybased in Leicester, the only U.K. city that has had its lockdown extended by two weeks because of a spike in coronavirus caseshad been operating continually since March without complying with recommended social-distancing measures. It is also accused the factory of pressuring workersthe majority of which were Asian and more susceptible to infectionto turn up for work even if they had tested positive for COVID-19.

The factorysignposted as Jaswal Fashionshad actually ceased trading in 2018 and was not a declared supplier. In a press statement, Boohoowhich owns fashion brands PrettyLittleThing, Karen Millen, and Coastsaid it appeared a different firm was using Jaswals former premises and that it was trying to establish the identity of this company and why its garments were in its hands.

Sarah Riding, a partner at law firm Gowling WLG, says that the fact that there are not proactive checks in place already at Boohoo is disappointing, given their prominent place in the market and claims of high ethical commercial standards.

On July 8 the company stated it would launch an immediate independent review of its U.K. supply chain; commit 10 million (U.S. $12 million) to root out supply chain malpractice; and speed up its independent third-party supply chain review with ethical audit and compliance specialists. The first update on its review will take place in September.

Its attempt to regain its ethical credentials has, however, so far not paid off.

Major retailers including Next, Asos, and Zalando dropped Boohoo following the allegations, while one of its largest shareholders, Standard Life Aberdeen (SLA), also divested most of its stock in the company.

Lesley Duncan, SLAs deputy head of UK equities, said that having spoken to Boohoos management team a number of times this week in light of recent concerning allegations, we view their response as inadequate in scope, timeliness, and gravity.

If a suppliers practices relating to human rights, labor standards, or environmental protection are found to be substandard, it is the customer company that will be held to account.

John Perry, Managing Director, SCALA

The case has highlighted a number of ongoing concerns over workers health and safety that have become exacerbated during the pandemic, as well as inherent weaknesses in companies monitoring of their supply chainsoften in industries reliant on high rotations of unskilled and (often undocumented) migrant labor.

Other U.K. companies have also fallen foul of abuses in their supply chains. On July 13 fast-fashion firm Quiz suspended one of the suppliers to its suppliers after claims another factory (also based in Leicester) offered a worker just 3 an hour to make its clothes. The national minimum wage for people over 25 years old is 8.72 an hour.

The National Crime Agency and the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA) have since visited a number of business premises in the Leicester area to assess some of the concerns that have been raised in respect of modern slavery and have said that further visits are likely to continue. So far, they have not identified any offenses under the Modern Slavery Act 2015.

Transparency in supply chains has been hampered by the pandemic in several ways. Business interruption has caused some trusted and approved suppliers to go bust while an inability to source goods and materials quickly has forced some companies to switch contractors without conducting the usual levels of due diligence or conduct site visits due to travel restrictions and health and safety concerns during the lockdown. Approved suppliers may have also subcontracted part of the work due to financial necessity, despite the terms of their contracts.

Chris Wrigley, co-head of law firm Osborne Clarkes global compliance team, says that COVID-19 has made scrutiny of supply chains harder because of the difficulties in conducting audits and, in some sectors, the need to change supply chains in response to the pandemic. However, supplier due diligence should be ongoing and, as restrictions ease, there will be opportunities to address gaps that have been created by the pandemic.

One of the problems with monitoring supply chains is that companies tend to focus on getting more assurance on working practices in high-risk countriesin the case of garment manufacturing, this would include India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Cambodia, and other developing countries: They take it as read that suppliers on their own doorsteps will act in accordance with their contractual obligations. The Boohoo and Quiz cases have shown how fanciful such expectations can be.

Experts say it has become increasingly obvious organizations need to talk to their suppliers about how they are monitoring their supply chains to ensure appropriate protections and standards are maintained. Companies also need to be prepared to enforce these expectations by contractual compliance obligations in their supplier contracts and codes of conduct, as well as carry out external audits and site visits. Further, if suppliers are going to subcontract part of the work, companies should insist on knowing what work will be contracted out, and to whom, so that they can be added to an approved list.

The U.K. Modern Slavery Act is meant to encourage businesses to understand where in their business and supply chains there are risks of employee exploitation or modern slavery and then identify effective steps and use their influence to improve conditions.

The legislation, however, only requires companies to make statements in their annual reports about what measuresif anythey are taking to uncover incidents of slavery in their supply chains. There are no criminal sanctions attached. Instead, the government hopes companies will do the right thing because failure to do so will hit their bottom lines more harshly than any fine could hope to achieve as customers and investors dump them.

Experts largely agree. If a suppliers practices relating to human rights, labor standards, or environmental protection are found to be substandard, it is the customer company that will be held to account, says John Perry, managing director of SCALA, a provider of management services for the supply chain and logistics sector.

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Boohoo complaints put spotlight on supply chains and working practices - Compliance Week

By Anuradha Nagaraj

CHENNAI, India, July 15 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Village councils and community groups in India have been asked to protect children from traffickers and help authorities identify and rescue missing residents, amid concerns that the coronavirus pandemic is pushing more people into modern slavery.

India's home affairs ministry this month issued an advisory urging state governments to set up or improve local anti-trafficking units, and work closely with community leaders to warn people about traffickers taking advantage of the outbreak.

Local councils may be asked to keep a register of villagers and track their movements to prevent children being "transported on a large scale for wage labour, prostitution and trafficking", said the directive by the ministry's women safety division.

State governments have also been tasked with launching anti-trafficking awareness campaigns, in addition to ramping up surveillance at bus stops, train stations and state borders.

"Generation of awareness at all levels is considered a very potent and effective weapon to fight the crime of trafficking and exploitation of women and children," the advisory said.

The home ministry could not be reached for further comment.

As India slowly opens up after months of lockdown to control the spread of COVID-19, officials and activists fear countless people without work, food or money may fall prey to traffickers.

Debt bondage islikely to increase as people struggle to pay off high-interest loans while child workers may slip under the radar andreturn to work as industries re-open, charities said.

"Children or youth are more likely to be persuaded or tricked by criminals who will take advantage of their emotional instability and missing support system," the advisory said.

Rishi Kant, founder of the anti-trafficking charity Shakti Vahini, said special measures and extra vigilance were necessary to combat the crime across India in the wake of the pandemic.

"Special committees under the leadership of village heads will have first-hand information on strangers in their neighbourhood or families that are in distress," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "Both will help prevent the crime."

The federal government in March disbursed one billion rupees ($13.3 million) to strengthen existing anti-human trafficking police units at state level and establish new ones along India's borders with countries such as Bangladesh and Nepal.

About 2,400 human trafficking cases were reported in India in 2018, with nearly half of the victims aged under 18, according to the latest available government crime data.

Related stories:

In India, child labour victims struggle to receive state compensation

No way back: Indian workers shun city jobs after lockdown ordeal

Death of 12-year-old Indian farm worker spurs child labour probe

(Reporting by Anuradha Nagaraj @AnuraNagaraj; Editing by Kieran Guilbert. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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India asks local leaders to boost anti-trafficking drive amid virus threat - Thomson Reuters Foundation

The Ohio Board of Education condemned hate speech and racism in schools, directing the Department of Education on Tuesday to review state curriculum models and tests for racial bias and recommend ways to "ensure that racism and the struggle for equality are accurately addressed."

The resolution, approved by a vote of 12-5, "strongly recommends that all Ohio school districts begin a reflection and internal examination of their own involving teachers, parents, students and community to review curriculum; hiring practices; discipline strategies, suspension and expulsions; classroom resources including text books; and professional development."

It also requires bias training for Department of Education employees.

The resolution by board President Laura Kohler follows the May 25 killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, while in the custody of Minneapolis police. Floyds death and others of Black Americans at the hands of police sparked demonstrations in Ohio and across the country.

"We must confront our own bias. We must learn about how racism impacts society and how to recognize and eliminate racism perhaps even in our own hearts," Kohler, of New Albany, told colleagues at the boards monthly meeting, calling the resolution among the most important of her tenure.

"We must begin to understand people who have experienced things that we have not. We must recognize the humanity in each of us, and affirm that each child is equally important and deserves an equal opportunity to thrive."

In its resolution, "the state Board of Education condemns, in the strongest possible terms, white supremacy ideology, hate speech, hate crimes and violence in the service of hatred. These immoral ideologies and actions deserve no place in our country, state and school system.

"The starting point of our work in racial equity must be reflection and internal examination, whereby the board will look for ways to engage our members in open and courageous conversations on racism and, inequity."

The resolution cites several inequities, including: Black male students lagging behind their white counterparts in graduation rates and other measures; Black male students disproportionately affected by suspensions, expulsions and zero-tolerance discipline policies; and "systemic inequity in education has relegated millions of children of color to under-resourced, struggling schools; and significant gaps between the performance of Black students compared to their white peers exist even in generously resourced schools."

In response to objections by some members, the board agreed to drop from the resolution references to "white privilege" and "white supremacy."

Kohler said students living in poverty and students of color, are at a disadvantage because they do not have equal access to resources like internet access and textbooks

"But Black students often face another, more insidious obstacle to success," Kohler said. "The long lasting and still present effects of our countrys history of slavery, oppression, and exclusion have created barriers to access, opportunity and outcomes...

"Generational poverty and the absence of two parent families have depressed Black students educational attainment. In addition, some of the people and systems assigned to lift them up have let them down because of their own bias and racism. Is it any wonder that Black students are less likely to perform as well as their white peers? That they are less likely to graduate? That they are less likely to be engaged in fulfilling, meaningful and enjoyable work that earns a living wage?"

ccandisky@dispatch.com

@ccandisky

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State Board of Education condemns hate speech, takes aim at racial bias in schools - The-review

AI in the fashion industry The next big thing or one step too far?Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere at the moment. Much of this is focused around data analytics crunching business numbers at ferocious speed and as frequently as possible. It is being discussed in terms of its impact on business, employment and human rights across all industries. Butin the context of fashion brands and fashion retail, what has it to offer business decision-making? asks Malcolm Newbery.

Gap Inc to compensate suppliers in full for cancelled ordersUS specialty apparel retailerGap Incsays it willwork collaboratively with its vendors to compensate them in full for finished goods and goods in production that were cancelled or subject to pack and hold.

Elcatex secures $100m loan to bolster Honduras productionThe Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has loaned US$96m to Honduran textiles and apparel manufacturer Grupo Elcatex to help it bolster production and exports.

Quiz latest to offload Leicester supplier amid "modern slavery" allegationsQuiz has launched an investigation into one of its Leicester-based suppliers, the second UK fast-fashion retailer to do so in under a week, after allegations of non-compliance with living wage requirements at itsfactories surfaced.

PVH to axe 450 jobs and close Heritage Brands Retail businessPVHCorpisto slash its North American corporateworkforce byabout 12% and exititsoutlet store Heritage Brands Retail business as the group looks to align its operations in the region with the evolving retail landscape.

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Top stories this week on just-style... | Apparel Industry News - just-style.com

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

The images of migrant workers and their plight have receded from our screens; perhaps most of them have already returned to their villages.

Images are transient in the digital world, replaced quickly by other sets of images begging for attention. The images that haunted us were of working families who walked hundreds of kilometres during the sudden nationwide lockdown, haunted by starvation, their belongings carried on their heads, their children walking barefoot or in broken flipflops, the old and sick carried on shoulders.

These images told of the hunger and humiliation they suffered on their long journey, and of the many who died cruel deaths before reaching home. The images are already beginning to be history in public memory.

If the post-pandemic, post-Covid world is to be restructured as inclusive and just, as equitable and empathetic, then the experiences of migrant workers must be saved from receding into history, for the lockdown was not only a tragic experience, it also exposed the nature of the urban economy that thrives on exploiting the labour of informalised workers.

How can the disembodied poor be saved from becoming history? By remembering.

By re-membering who the dispossessed people are, remembering how our lockdown drove them to such despair, remembering what they encountered on their long journey home, and the political and social failures to respond to the crisis, we may be able to build the foundation for a better, and kinder, and equitable, and inclusive, and just world.

The urban informalised economy in India is predominantly worked by an estimated 100 million migrant labourers from rural areas, who work in construction, manufacturing, hospitality, trade, services and sundry other jobs that city-dwellers require.

Without a work contract, health insurance, or any financial, public, or social security to buffer them through a crisis, migrant workers in the informalised sectors of the economy are prone to vulnerability and destitution, as their exodus in the wake of the lockdown showed.

The daily-wage economy is even more precarious within the informalised economy and daily-wage earners are more vulnerable. It is estimated that around 40% of Indian workers earn a daily wage, of as little as 400 or 500 rupees, and women daily wagers earn even less.

The vast majority of migrant workers who come to the cities to earn an income are either farmers with small or marginal landholds, or landless labourers.

What drove millions of workers to undertake the long and arduous journey on foot? The fear of imminent starvation. The basic need for bare survival overtook their fear of the deadly virus. They were placed in a situation where death from lack of food became a more immediate possibility than death from the disease. And if they were to die in any case, as many said, they chose to risk their lives and reach home somehow.

People felt orphaned and abandoned by their employers and governments. A feeling of rejection, non-belonging, hopelessness, betrayal, and sheer despair is palpable when we hear their voices on the videos recorded by journalists.

The pictures are equally haunting: public authorities spraying toxic chemical disinfectants to sanitise these workers; a child asleep on a suitcase while the mother drags it; a child trying to wake his dead mother on a railway platform; scattered rotis on a railway track where a train crushed 16 workers to death; people walking in the dead of night to avoid the scorching sun; people packed inside a cargo carrier.

There are many such images we need to search and remember.

There was a total political failure in responding to the migrant workers crisis. That no one thought about the millions of workers in the cities who would be jobless and stranded points to the absence of the majority of Indians from political decision-making.

Some of them left the cities as soon as the lockdown was declared; others waited for their employers and the government to give them some assurance and help, failing which they set out for their villages.

Meanwhile, the union government was telling the apex court that there were no migrant workers on the roads, even as thousands of them were making the hazardous journey on national highways.

Meanwhile, three state governments - Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh - proposed to change labour laws to make them more amenable to employers.

Uttar Pradesh proposed to suspend for three years the legal protections dealing with wages, working hours, and health and safety measures among others that safeguard the rights of workers, thus reducing the already precarious informalised wage-work to modern slavery.

After 47 days of this, when special trains were organised by the railways to take the migrant workers home, the hassle and expense of booking tickets itself created panic among people, and many had to take loans or sell their belongings to get a ticket home.

The trains went on detours, taking a much longer time to reach their destinations, further exhausting an already weary and hungry people.

It is alleged that the government of Karnataka even cancelled the special trains to keep workers captive for construction industrialists.

Not only did the union and state governments not put any pressure on these industrialists to pay their workers during the lockdown, their proposals to change the labour laws and attempts to keep workers captive revealed a State that was ready to sacrifice the poor for keeping the industries of the rich running.

The police, instead of facilitating the distressed workers, gladly assumed even more authority. Caning ordinary people, making them crawl as punishment, forcing them to travel in vehicles that were carrying dead bodies - there were numerous such stories of police action. The police saw the workers as a menace and dehumanised them.

Along with the political failure, our society failed colossally to respond to this crisis. From tacit support to legitimise government inaction or obduracy, to deflecting the crisis, to complete silence as if this were not an issue that matters, the complicity of the propertied classes was all too apparent.

Our societys indifference, apathy, and hostility were staggering. This cannot be shrugged off only as a lack of moral conscience. It exposed our allegiance to the State and to the neoliberal economy, the two forces responsible for the crisis.

The same people would have responded to a crisis caused by flood or cyclone, because they see these as natures fury but the beneficiaries of a lopsided economic growth propelled by liberalised big business supported by the State chose to turn their eyes away as the edifice on which our riches are based came crumbling down.

This social failure was further exposed by our indulgence in aestheticising, romanticising and glamorising migrant workers.

A picture of a 15 year old girl who cycled 1,200 kilometres from Gurugram to Bihar, carrying her injured father on the pillion, was seen as beautiful. People who undertook long and arduous journeys on foot were saluted and appreciation was showered on them. Their reaching home became a feel-good sight.

It says a lot about people, about a society, that sees aesthetics, romance and glamour in sorrow, cruelty, hunger, and death. It was sheer desperation and willpower that gave these workers the agency, but to appreciate that agency without acknowledging the contexts and reasons is to hide, or worse, approve what led to the crisis.

Millions of informalised workers constituting the workforce in urban economy remain invisible to city-dwellers. The crisis that unfolded during the lockdown exposed an exploitative economy that survives on the cheapened labour of people who leave their villages and a starved agrarian economy to come to the cities in search of work.

If we are to change the structure of exploitation and inequality, the invisibility of migrant workers must be made visible. They did become visible for a short while. We must not push them back into invisibility again.

the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. James Baldwin, Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes

Ranjita Mohanty is a Delhi based sociologist

See the original post:

Images of Hunger and Humiliation: The Memory against Forgetting - The Citizen

I HAVE for years felt exceedingly uncomfortable concerning successive UK governments attitudes to inbound immigration, in particular that the country has unashamedly sought to attract "the best and the brightest" from other countries, many of which can ill afford to lose their own homegrown talent, especially in sectors like medicine, life sciences, IT and engineering.

I feel a sense of shame that the UK seeks to plunder the best people from abroad, rather than train enough of our own and pay/treat them sufficiently well to discourage them from seeking better pay, terms and conditions in other better developed nations, although I am not sufficiently naive to believe that seeking international experience in either direction is necessarily a bad thing.

However, reading the UK Governments latest, post-Brexit, points-based system, which the Home Office confirms will include a route for skilled workers (and, by implication, exclude a route for those they consider to be "unskilled workers", presumably including the very hospital porters, cleaners, laundry and cleaning staff who ensured the Prime Minister was kept clean, fed and watered during his recent spell in ICU), my discomfort has turned to revulsion in what could be reasonably viewed as legitimised, 21st century human trafficking ("Immigration rules branded a slap in the face for vital care workers", The Herald, July 14).

And by depleting the professional resources of less well-off nations, especially in the healthcare sector during the Covid-19 pandemic, the hard-right, English exceptionalist flank of what Boris Johnson has the effrontery to call "One Nation Conservatism" (one nation, right enough and the others, it seems, can go to hell) should but wont be utterly ashamed of itself.

Sufficient Thursday nights appear now to have lapsed since his recent near-death experience that the most unprincipled Home Secretary since Theresa May and her "hostile environment" feels able to revisit the classification of care workers invariably on the minimum wage and often at extreme and even deadly personal risk as "unskilled".

The Conservative Party, it would seem, has never shaken off the epithet of "the Nasty Party" given to it by the aforementioned Mrs May; it is clear to me that it still views the plundering of scarce resources of less economically-well-off nations for the UKs own financial enrichment as a legitimate strategy yet again for the procurement of human resources and history, I hope, will judge them, and those who go along with this latest abuse of power as harshly as the moral majority now views slavery.

Mike Wilson, Longniddry.

NICOLA Sturgeon says excluding social care staff from UK's new, points-based visa plan would be devastating.

What about all the retail and hospitality workers who have been probably more devastated by the huge redundancies in their industry?

Surely she could use her jobs quango, Skills Development Scotland, to set up retraining schemes to enable Scottish workers to do these jobs?

Allan Sutherland, Stonehaven.

Go here to see the original:

Letters: Britain's latest immigration policy is shameful and an abuse of power - HeraldScotland

Jul 14th 2020

THE PAST IS never dead. It's not even past, wrote William Faulkner, an American novelist. The observation rings especially true for the agonising problem of race in America. After centuries of slavery and segregation, African-Americans achieved formal legal equality only in the 1960s. Yet discrimination persists and they are far more likely to be victims of police violence than other demographic groups.

Cory Booker is a Democratic senator from New Jersey with bold ideas on how to improve the situation. In an interview with The Economist, he traced the cords of injustice that lay the foundation for todays problems, and offered solutions ranging from baby-bond legislation (giving poor children trust accounts) to removing ageing lead pipes that literally poison the countrys children.

Thats not radical, he says about these sorts of reforms, but common moral sense. The interview below with Mr Booker has been lightly edited.

***

The Economist: When you see a mass movement for racial justice happening again in this country and when you see frustration, not just over criminal justice, but the fact that black and white income gaps and wealth gaps are basically the same since 1968, what does that make you conclude about American society and government? Is it that formal legal equality has failed to guarantee equality of opportunity for black Americans?

Cory Booker: Look, we are a nation that has strong, sort of unbroken cords of racial injustice that have been with us for generations. And where lots of generational wealth has been created through the GI Bill [support to veterans for housing and education] through Social Security, through the Homestead Act, which granted massive tracts of land to new immigrants to this country. These are things that blacks were excluded from, that were barriers to economic opportunity.

We have a nation like that, up into my lifetime. My parents literally had to get a white couple to pose as us in order to buy a home in an affluent area of suburban New Jersey with great public schools. But we still live in a country where this denial of equal education is a part of our national fabric. Even today, we see schools that African-Americans attend receiving dramatically less funding than schools that are predominantly white.

These strong cords of injustice have never been broken. Our prison population has gone up about 500% since 1980 alone. Theres no difference between blacks and whites in using drugs or dealing drugs. But African-Americans were arrested for those crimes at rates three or four times higher than whites.

We have powerful, powerful forces of overt and institutional racism over the years that has really underdeveloped African-American opportunity and equality. It stretches now from the health-care system to issues of environmental justice. The number one indicator of whether you live around a Superfund site [designated a heavily polluted area] or drink dirty water or breathe unclean air is the colour of your skin. All of these things in their totality create a nation that still has such savage disparities and outcomes based upon race.

And I am encouraged that in this momentand I hope it's not a moment, I hope it grows to a greater movementthere is a greater expansion of our circles of empathy for each other. A greater understanding of the injustices that are there. It seems to be the dawning of an expansion of our moral imagination about how we can actually become a nation of equality, a nation of justice, and a nation that honors its highest values with a reality that reflects them.

The Economist: And how do you begin that difficult task of unwinding those deep threads that have not ever been broken? Whether its housing, policing, criminal justice, environmental issueshow do you start that? And do you feel optimistic about the possibility of change on some of those entrenched policy areas?

Mr Booker: Well, in a larger sense, first of all, the personal pronoun you use: I hope it's not a you, I hope its how do we do that? It's very hard in our country for us to create leaps in advancement without there being a greater sense of collective we, and a collective responsibility. The incredible legislation that's passed in our past from the suffrage movement to the labour movement to the civil-rights movement of the 1960s were all movements that happen because large swathes of American people put on personal responsibility to make dramatic change. The progressive movement in the 1920s was fuelled by people who weren't often directly affected by issues, seeing an urgency to change based on a growing consciousness.

It seems to be the dawning of an expansion of our moral imagination about how we can actually become a nation of equality

That is still ongoing: trying to expose the realities that are affecting our country as a whole and black people in particular, so that people feel a sense of moral urgency to address them. There are things that go on in our prison system that most Americans dont realise happen: that we shackle pregnant women when they're giving birth, that we put children in solitary confinement for extensive periods of times, even though our psychological professionals say that its torturous and causes brain damage.

I was encouraged when I heard very learned people telling me they never knew about what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma. [The prosperous neighbourhood of Greenwood, known as Black Wall Street, was destroyed by white residents in 1921.] Where people didn't know about the many places around this country that had seen such racial terror to the point where thousands upon thousands of Americans were lynched, often elected leaders, poor judges pulled out into streets and beaten. These stories have just been whitewashed from our history. I'm hopeful that we are at a period where awareness is growing, and with that, a sense of urgency to address it.

Now, when you talk about me in a particular senseand use that personal pronoun like you, Cory Booker, as a senatorI have an obligation to try to continue to push the bounds of justice as a United States senator and propose things that will actually have a very practical impact on disparities.

For example, baby-bond legislation is not that sexy, but it's this idea that every child, regardless of race, born in our nation, gets a $1,000 savings account. And then based upon their income, just like we base the earned-income tax credit, that child will get up to $2,000 a year placed in an interest-bearing account that compounds interest. By the time they're 18, the lowest-income American kids will have upwards of $50,000 saved.

Columbia University looked at that legislation for young adults and found it would virtually close the racial wealth gap. Policy solutions like that, like massive expansions of the earned-income tax credit [which tops up the wages of low-income Americans] or the child tax credit. These are things that affect poverty overall in our country, but would end poverty for a significant percentage of African Americans.

The Economist: After this period of consciousness-raising, what else might go in a Great Society-like radical programme of change, assuming that Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump were not part of this conversation for the moment?

Mr Booker: I hope that our policies begin to reflect what real public safety is. We know unequivocally by the facts that expanding Medicaid lowers violence. Expanding the earned-income tax credit lowers violence. You can go through these things that you know empower people. There are pilot programmes all over this country that show that dealing with people who are struggling with mental illness with police causes their death.

I hope that our policies begin to reflect what real public safety is

Black folks are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than somebody white. Someone with a mental illness is over ten more likely to be killed by the police than someone whos white. And to think that we actually could have services that help people have [mental] health-care. Thats not radical, that's just common fiscal sense, as well as common moral sense. To have an expansive view of public safety, to start investing as a society into those things that help people, who are hurt and fragile, can lead to greater human flourishing.

Our country is an outlier. We really dont do much for children until they turn five or six. So we lead industrial nations in infant mortality, in maternal mortality and in low-birthweight babies. It would be cheaper to revive at-risk women doula-care than to pay the extraordinary costs of premature birth. Something called nurse-family partnershipswhich is just having a nurse visit a home to be supportive with information for at-risk pregnant womenactually lowers encounters with police dramatically. Every taxpayer dollar you spend on the programme saves four or five taxpayer dollars because it lowers visits to the emergency room for that mother and that child.

Its not like we dont know how to elevate human potential while saving taxpayer dollars, or how to lower our reliance on police, courts and prisons. We know enough already. Its just that were not, as a society, collectively prioritising what would be a much more beloved way to move forward. And so this greater human consciousness, I hope elevates this ideal that, whether youre a fiscal conservative or a progressive liberal, these are things that abide with all of our values. Its why Ive had some success moving criminal-justice reform with strange partners, like the Koch brothers or the Heritage Foundation.

In a globally competitive environment, America is really falling behind those nations that do a better job of elevating human flourishing and human potential. The number China has in their top 10% of their high-school students is relatively close to the number of all of our high-school students. In a global knowledge-based society, your greatest natural resource is the genius of your children.

In a globally competitive environment, America is really falling behind those nations that do a better job of elevating human flourishing and human potential

And were doing a bad job because were a nation that has an astonishingly high level of children whose brains are addled by permanent lead damage. There are over 3,000 jurisdictions where children have more than twice the blood-lead level of Flint, Michigan, and they are disproportionately black and brown children. And so right now we don't even care enough. And I know we have the heart for it, but were not manifesting it in our policies to do something simple, which would have been a fraction of the last covid-19 bill. Why dont we as a country replace every lead service line in America that goes to our schools, to day-care centres and to homes in the United States that would actually pay for itself through the productivity of those children and saving them from the violence associated with lead poisoning.

There are a lot of common-sense things that we can do that should accord with the values of everybody who calls themselves pro-life to everybody who calls themselves a progressive, but we're just not doing it.

And so this is what the echoed words of our ancestors said. Martin Luther King, who wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, was very critical. He actually said Im not as upset with the White Citizens Council or the KKK, I'm far more upset with the white moderates who are doing nothing. And he eloquently said that we have to repent in our day and age, not just for the vitriolic words and violent actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and inaction of the good people.

Well, I fear that we will have to repent in our generation, if more of us who are good peopleand that is the overwhelming majority of Americanslet another generation go by, where we dont correct these persistent injustices with strategies that we know work and that we know will save us taxpayer dollars. Yet we fail to engage in the struggle to make them possible. As the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, If theres no struggle, there is no progress.

The Economist: A programme like baby bonds, which would do a lot on the racial wealth gap, would take 18 years for those accounts to accrue. And in the present day, theres a strong racial child-poverty gap. What do you see as the tools to fix that problem?

Mr Booker: The two very obvious tools are a massively expanded earned-income tax rate by more than half and a massively expanded child tax credit, like a lot of our peer nations do. But there's other tools that wed have to use to catch us up to the rest of the industrial world, like having affordable child care. We have a country in which child care in most states is more expensive than state-college tuition. It is unconscionable that we are doing that.

These are insane things that go on in this country that in our peer nations do not

We have something called the mortgage-interest deduction, for example, that is overwhelmingly used by the higher income. That tax expenditure goes to the wealthy in our country overwhelmingly. Why dont we do something for working people in America and have a rental tax credit if youre paying more than a one-third of your income on rent, which would cut poverty by the millions in America and give people security? One of the things that so undermine student performance are families who face evictions and are jumping from apartment to apartment. So theyre facing issues of fairness in our tax code like the ones I just mentioned, while also dealing with issues like paid family leave or child care that would take America so far in ending racial gaps.

A friend of mine named Natasha who worked a minimum-wage job couldn't afford housing. Her son was sick with asthma. Again, a black child is about ten times more likely to die of asthma complications than a white child. And she had to make a terrible decision of whether to stay at her job and get a pay-cheque that she really needed to keep a roof over the head of her kid, or to leave and go across the street and be with her child in the emergency room who was gasping for breath. I mean, these are insane things that go on in this country that in our peer nations do not. And we put our families in deep levels of stress and anxiety that ultimately undermines their overall flourishing.

We in this generation can end those things if we are committed to making real the ideals of our country and the laws of our countrythat we really are a nation that believes in life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that believes in human flourishing; that believes in equal justice under the law. And these are things that I think are long past [due]. Time has come. And, interestingly, they poll really well on both sides of the political aisle. But our people in elected office need more of a push to make them the law of land.

The Economist: You remain the optimist.

Mr Booker: Thank you. Forever, a prisoner of hope. And if anything, our nation's history is testimony, the triumph of hope, often under insurmountable conditions and odds.

Link:

Making real the ideals of our country - The Economist

Few places represent the calamity of the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the Life Care Center of Kirkland.

Starting in February and escalating into early March, the nursing home in a Seattle suburb became one of the diseases first hot spots in the United States. By March 9, more than a week before any state had issued a stay-at-home order, the Kirkland facility already had 129 cases (81 among residents; the rest among staff and visitors) and 23 deaths from the novel coronavirus, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.

Before long, it became clear that practices at the Kirkland facility contributed to the spread of the virus there, according to federal inspectors. A Washington Post investigation found that the problems were endemic to the Life Care Center chain of nursing homes: Dozens of Life Care homes received below-average staffing ratings or were flagged during inspections for not having enough nurses to properly care for patients.

But for all the problems with the Life Care Center chain, it would soon become clear that its experience would not be unique. While the Kirkland facility may have been the first known US nursing home hit, it would not be the last.

Estimates vary, but analysts Gregg Girvan and Avik Roy found that as of June 29, 50,779 of the 113,135 US deaths from Covid-19 (or 45 percent) were deaths of residents of nursing or long-term care facilities. Their numbers suggest that about 2.5 percent of all nursing home residents have been killed by the disease; in New Jersey, which is particularly hard hit, the share is over 11 percent.

This is partially due to the disease being particularly lethal among older people, and an early acute shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) like masks across the board. Death rates have been high for seniors in general, not just those in nursing homes. A CDC report found that as of July 1, more than 80 percent of Covid-19 deaths were among people 65 and over.

But investigations have since revealed that the conditions at too many nursing homes were conducive to the coronaviruss spread, abetted by both state and federal policies. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) ordered nursing homes to take in Covid-19 patients discharged from hospitals, contributing to superspreader events like one in Troy, New York, documented by ProPublica. Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D) also signed executive orders offering partial legal immunity to nursing homes during the crisis, limiting families abilities to seek redress when the states strategies failed.

An important context for these events, however, is federal policy. Since well before the coronavirus pandemic, the Trump administration has been targeting regulations in the nursing home industry, pushing a deregulatory agenda that advocates say has worsened conditions for residents and will make them worse still in the pandemic era.

Covid-19 is a once-in-a-lifetime health crisis that is catching almost all institutions and politicians, regardless of party ill-prepared. But there is no question that the administration, at the prodding of industry, has enacted and proposed moves aimed at easing regulations on nursing homes moves that patient advocates have said were increasing health risks for residents well before Covid-19 came to the US.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency that oversees Medicare and Medicaid, is in charge of regulating and overseeing the nursing home industry. (The large majority of funding for nursing facilities comes from Medicaid or Medicare, meaning that CMS certification is a key prerequisite for most to function.) The agency outsources the job of conducting inspections to state surveying agencies, operated by state governments. Together, CMS and its surveyors are the main system of accountability for the 15,600-odd nursing homes in the US and their 1.3 million inhabitants.

The Trump CMS moved to curb fining nursing homes that were found violating regulations in particular, regulations meant to prevent the spread of infectious disease. Infection control deficiencies are by far the most cited regulatory failing in nursing homes, and the Trump administration has acted to reduce the amount of money fined, and to move away from a system of daily fines that experts say is more effective at changing facility behaviors. (In the face of the coronavirus outbreak, the administration last month announced it would increase fines; more on this below.)

If the move to cut fines worries experts, future changes heralded by the Trump administration are even more concerning. Under the Obama administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued a rule requiring all facilities to employ a dedicated infection prevention specialist at least part time. CMS Administrator Seema Verma has proposed rolling back that rule and only requiring such specialists to serve as consultants, potentially covering many different nursing facilities.

At the time it was proposed, trade publications and some advocates for seniors and people with disabilities took note of the new rule, but it was largely ignored. It wasnt until March, when the pandemic hit, that the proposed rule change got attention in the mainstream press. The rule still hasnt taken effect, but will, barring unexpected changes to administration policy, if Trump is reelected.

The administration has also sought cuts to Medicaids budget that could negatively impact nursing homes, reduce funding for infection control, and likely worsen protections for residents. These changes, like the Obama rule rollback, have not taken effect yet but could with a second Trump term.

I think the pandemic has revealed a lot of these serious problems, Toby Edelman, senior staff attorney for the Center for Medicare Advocacy and a veteran resident advocate on nursing home issues, says. But whether the country will do better going forward I dont know.

The primary tool the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has for enforcing care standards at nursing homes is civil money penalties. These are essentially fines for facilities found not to be in compliance with CMS care standards. These violations are identified through an annual, unannounced surveying process, conducted by state-level agencies with information then reported up to CMS.

Under the Trump administration, the average fine levied has fallen to $28,405, from $41,260 in Obamas final year in office, according to a 2019 analysis by Jordan Rau of Kaiser Health News.

Moreover, average fines for incidents involving immediate jeopardy the most serious designation have fallen, Rau found, to about 18 percent less in Trumps first year than they did in 2016. A finding of immediate jeopardy is just like the name implies: a situation in which noncompliance with regulations has placed the health and safety of recipients in its care at risk for serious injury, serious harm, serious impairment or death, per CMSs guidelines.

One example highlighted by a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog agency, illustrates what an instance of immediate jeopardy looks like:

A New York nursing home experienced a respiratory infection outbreak that sickened 38 residents. The nursing home did not maintain a complete and accurate list of those who were sick, did not isolate residents with symptoms from residents who were symptom-freenor did it isolate staff members helping sick patientsand continued to allow residents to eat in the community dining room.

Civil money penalties ideally provide a strong financial incentive for nursing homes that put residents at risk of infection to change practices. For that reason, toward the end of the Obama administration, CMS began requiring regional offices to impose penalties whenever residents were found to be in immediate jeopardy, instead of letting regulators decide whether to levy a fine.

Under Trump, CMS has gone to a system of giving regulators discretion to levy fines for immediate jeopardy violations. Instead of an automatic fine, a regulator may just instruct the nursing home to change its practices or do a training. (The June 1 rules removed some discretion around fining for infection control practices specifically, but civil money penalties are only allowed if facilities also had a previous infection control deficiency.)

In a newsletter for its Patients Over Paperwork initiative, meant to publicize deregulatory efforts, CMS explained that reduced fining came because of complaints that civil money penalties are not applied consistently or fairly to nursing homes found out of compliance.

The decline in fining can have serious implications for public health especially in a pandemic. By far the most common infraction identified in state-agency surveys is a failure of infection prevention, according to a recent report from the GAO. From 2013 to 2017, 82 percent of all surveyed nursing homes had an infection control deficiency in at least one surveyed year. (The second most common deficiency, related to ensuring the environment is free from accidents, was identified in 37 percent of homes.)

As it happens, the new rule requiring fines for immediate jeopardy late in the Obama administration meant that the total number of fines imposed actually went up at the beginning of the Trump administration: 3.5 percent of inspections resulted in fines in 2016, compared to 4.7 percent in the early Trump administration. On June 15, 2018, the Trump administration formally reversed this enforcement change.

Raus data analysis also highlighted an even more meaningful shift in policy under Trump: from per day fining to per instance fining. Per-instance fines became much more common under Trump as the result of a CMS policy change in July 2017. Per-day fining means that facilities have to pay up for each day they were found to be out of compliance with Medicare and Medicaid regulations. Per-instance penalties, by contrast, apply to each time they get caught by surveyors.

The difference is easier to grasp with some examples. The Unique Rehabilitation and Health Center, a nursing home close to Union Station and the Capitol in Washington, DC, was fined a total of $110,448.65 in 2017 on a per-day basis. Among other problems, the districts inspectors found that the home failed to do proper wound follow-up with a patient, leading to emergency surgery when the wound deteriorated. That penalty was imposed on a per-day basis for 77 days, meaning the home was fined an average of $1,434.40 per day it was in violation of proper wound care and other policies.

By contrast, the BridgePoint Sub-Acute and Rehabilitation National Harbor, a nursing home in southwest DC, received a per-instance fine of $17,820.25 in 2017. District surveyors found that the home had placed residents in immediate jeopardy of harm by failing to properly freeze fish and beef, with puddles of bloody juices dripping onto the freezer floor. Instead of issuing penalties for every day the freezer was not at a low enough temperature, producing rancid meat for residents, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services fined the company once on a per-instance basis.

The result was a much lower fine than Unique Rehabilitation received, even though both were found to be putting residents at risk of serious harm. Tellingly, Unique Rehabilitation was fined before the July policy change by the Trump administration (on February 8, 2017) and BridgePoint was fined after (on October 20, 2017).

Some experts in the nursing home industry argue that per-instance fining provides a weaker incentive for nursing homes to improve.

The idea behind daily compliance is, if you dont have a fire extinguisher, say, youd be fined until you get it in place, and then the fines would stop, David Grabowski, an economist at Harvard Medical School who studies long-term care, told me. Its an effort to hold the facilities feet to the fire in terms of improving something thats out of compliance. The shift to per-instance fining weakens that regular incentive.

In a group letter to Congress in 2019, a coalition of patient advocates including the Center for Medicare Advocacy, Justice in Aging, the Long Term Care Community Coalition, and the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care denounced CMS for lessening fines, arguing, These changes are counterproductive. The threat of fines is a critical deterrent to abuse and substandard care, particularly when they are large enough to impact a facilitys actions.

These changes in how nursing homes are fined have not happened in a vacuum. The American Health Care Association, the biggest lobbying group for the nursing home industry, sent a letter to President-elect Trump in December 2016 urging him to reverse many Obama administration initiatives, like requiring fines in immediate jeopardy cases. We request that [the fine requirement] be repealed and that [civil money penalties] and other remedies be halted from being applied retrospectively, Mark Parkinson, AHCAs president and CEO and a former Democratic governor of Kansas, wrote to Trump in the letter.

AHCAs voice on this issue is powerful. It dramatically ramped up its lobbying spending in the late Obama administration, per OpenSecrets, and spent about $23 million on lobbying from 2014 to 2019, during the period of Obamas regulatory ramp-up and Trumps drawdown.

Its time to recognize that when nursing homes receive citations, its a failure of CMS and the survey process. Citations andfineswithout assistance will not help us keep residents and staff safe from this virus, AHCAs Cristina Crawford told Vox in a statement. Independent research shows COVID-19 outbreaks in long term care are not related to quality of care, past infection control and many other factors. It is a critical point to include in any piece along these lines. This research shows the prevalence of COVID-19 in skilled nursing facilities is correlated to the COVID-19 rate in the community, the size of the facility, and proximity to an urban area.

(The research AHCA refers to is preliminary: Some studies have found no relationship between a facilitys star rating from CMS, an indication of its quality based on past violations, and its Covid-19 record, while others have found a relationship between facility quality and Covid-19 deaths.)

Its important to note that the fall in fining might not have caused a decline in infection control at these facilities. The situation was dire before Trump took office. But patient advocates agree that in normal times, fining, in particular per-day fining, can be a powerful tool to get facilities in line and particularly useful in heading off something like the coronavirus pandemic.

Indeed, as the Covid-19 pandemic continued, the Trump administration embraced fining for infection control. And while that seems like a good move on paper, even experts who embrace per-day fines argue that compared to other things CMS could be doing to protect patients like supporting increased staffing, testing, and PPE availability fining is the wrong priority right now, even if it was the right priority during a non-crisis time.

CMS should be doing two things. First, they should be providing facilities with testing and personal protective equipment. Second, they should be looking to provide education and guidance to facilities on best infection-control practices, Grabowski of Harvard Medical told Skilled Nursing News. If the goal is to save lives and protect residents, then this is not the right enforcement action. Facilities have limited resources right now.

Weak fining is one of the deregulatory actions most under the control of the Trump administration itself. But it has also pushed changes to rules, laws, and appropriations that could exacerbate the infection control problem at nursing homes.

These changes, proposed before the pandemic, have not taken effect yet, and Covid-19 may yet change the administrations mind. But taken together, the proposed rules suggest an administration determined to ease infection control and public health regulations on nursing homes.

The most significant of these is rescinding the rule requiring part-time infection control specialists at nursing homes. The requirement was an Obama-era initiative only issued as a final rule in September 2016. The measure would require that every nursing home have an infection control staffer (most likely a registered nurse with specialized training on infection prevention) on at least a part-time basis. The Trump administration would instead allow homes to hire consultants spending much less time in each facility, potentially weakening infection control oversight.

Grabowski notes that because the measure is so recent, we have no empirical work on whether requiring an on-site infection preventionist (the Obama approach) works better than allowing contractors who work at multiple facilities (the Trump model).

But Edelman of the Center for Medicare Advocacy argues the Obama requirement was an overdue reaction to a longtime failure of CMS to police infection control failures, as evidenced by the vast majority of facilities being cited for deficiencies on infection prevention.

I really thought this was one of the best things done in the final rules in 2016, Edelman says. Most of it was pretty much what [Medicare advocates] had said for 25 years. Rescinding it, he says, was a step backward.

The Trump administration has also proposed weakening protections in the Nursing Home Reform Act, the 1987 law that serves as the primary basis for CMSs regulation of the sector. CMSs 2020 and 2021 budget requests both include an ask for Congress to end the mandate that nursing homes be surveyed annually. Instead, top-performing nursing homes would only be required to be surveyed every 30 months. Verma, CMSs administrator, has referred to this as a risk-based survey model, arguing that annual surveys are overly costly.

The danger here is that even top performers can have deep weaknesses, a fact underlined by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Citys Susan Jaffe analyzed New York states inspections in March and April of New York City nursing homes, and found that 600 people have died of Covid-19 in nursing homes that were given a perfect record by surveyors. Surveys of their infection control happened as the pandemic progressed and yet did not identify any failures. That should serve as a reminder that even low risk facilities can see failures, especially during pandemics like Covid-19, and probably shouldnt go without any oversight.

Finally, the Trump administration is also pushing for budgetary changes that affect nursing homes and could be deleterious for infection control efforts in those settings.

The administrations efforts to defund Medicaid are less directly part of an effort to spare nursing homes from onerous regulations, but they could weaken access to care and harm quality at facilities all the same. In particular, the administration has tried to convert Medicaid into a block grant. A report by the Commonwealth Fund suggests that a block grant as designed by the Trump administration would reduce Medicaid spending by $110 billion over five years, or about 10 percent. As the Center for Medicare Advocacy has noted, such a shift could reduce access to nursing care and increase risk to patients by eliminating consumer protections.

For instance, nursing homes that choose to accept Medicaid are currently required to accept Medicaid reimbursement as their full payment and not demand additional funds from patients; that rule goes away with a block grant. Rules requiring adequate training for staff (including training in infection control) could also go away, as could rules guaranteeing eligibility for qualifying residents.

Lowering funding for nursing homes can also put pressure on staffing, reducing the number of staff available and lowering their pay. Nursing homes tend to be understaffed as it is, and a squeeze on Medicaid, already the least generous payer they take, could make matters even worse. The payments side of this has some shortfalls, which leads to real workforce shortages, Grabowski says. Many of these buildings lack staff and pay their staff, the direct caregivers, close to minimum wage. Thats just a huge part of the expenditures 60 to 70 percent of expenditures are labor.

In a period when we need workers in hot spots to observe public health guidelines closely, such shortages could cut against those efforts.

Economist Krista Ruffini has used changes in the minimum wage to estimate that nursing homes with higher wages have fewer health code violations, fewer incidences of bedsores among residents, and lower mortality; she estimates that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage could prevent 15,000 to 16,000 deaths a year. Lower wages, by contrast, could lower care quality at the potential cost of lives. Other studies have found staffing levels at nursing homes are also related to mortality, suggesting that Medicaid cuts that cascade down to nursing homes could also be deadly.

Lowering wages can also be particularly dangerous for infection control in another way: It could force staff to take other jobs to get by. At the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington, CDC researchers have specifically cited the phenomenon of staffers working at multiple nursing homes as contributing to the pandemic. Lower reimbursements that lead to lower wages could exacerbate this problem.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services June 1 announcement of ramped-up enforcement of infection control violations was only one item in a string of policy changes the Trump administration has announced through the agency as Covid-19 ripped through the country.

On March 20, CMS announced it would halt all state surveys of facilities. Instead, it would only conduct targeted infection control surveys, and surveys in cases involving immediate jeopardy to patients, during the pandemic. These targeted surveys found major failings. (On March 30, they reported that 36 percent of facilities surveyed failed to follow proper hand-washing and a quarter failed to use PPE properly.)

On April 15, they increased payments for Covid-19 tests to try to accelerate testing availability at nursing homes. On April 19, they announced a new requirement that nursing homes report any Covid-19 cases and deaths. By May 18, they were already providing guidance about how to relax restrictions on visitation amid the crisis. And on June 1, they announced the new heightened infection control penalties.

The administration has painted these as ramping up enforcement and oversight. But experts say these decisions have overall translated to less oversight and regulation.

Initially I was very supportive of the pivot that CMS did from the typical survey and certification to focus only on infection control, Grabowski says. But as time has worn on, hes grown concerned over the lack of in-person access to facilities, either by state surveyors or by an even more important monitoring source: family, who along with staff members are the most frequent source of complaints and referrals of nursing homes to regulators. Due to Covid-19 concerns, these family members are usually barred from facilities, which makes failures of infection control and other regulatory lapses invisible to residents biggest outside advocates.

Edelman notes much of the surveying during the pandemic has been done remotely, through videoconferencing software, which greatly limits what staff can pick up.

But her biggest concern is that the federal government and CMS are not pairing surveys on infection control with an effort to get testing and other resources to nursing homes in a timely manner, a failure that continued with the June 1 announcement of more penalties but not more aid for testing and PPE.

In terms of getting testing to facilities or making sure everyone has equipment, setting standards for Covid-only facilities, the feds pretty much say the states are on their own, Edelman explains. Our contact at CMS has said this twice: that the pandemic is locally executed, state-managed, and federally supported. Theyre pushing responsibility onto the states.

Shunting responsibility is a theme when it comes to managing nursing homes. In 2010, the moral philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah made a list of practices that he believed people in the distant future will condemn our generation of humanity for, much as people in the 21st century condemn slavery or the denial of womens suffrage. The abandonment of older Americans in nursing homes was near the top of his list.

When we see old people who, despite many living relatives, suffer growing isolation, we know something is wrong, Appiah wrote. But the situation is worse than isolation. Its one of neglect in the face of real, life-and-death dangers faced by residents in these facilities every day. Bioethicist Charles Camosy has cited nursing homes as a place where our throwaway culture thrives, only with human lives rather than consumer goods.

The Trump administration is not solely responsible for the pandemics ravaging of nursing homes. But it has certainly contributed to the neglect that Appiah laments.

Continued here:

Trump reduced fines for nursing home violations. Then Covid-19 happened. - Vox.com

Fast fashion giant Boohoo is facing an investigation into accusations of modern slavery after it emerged garment workers at factories in Leicester, UK were being paid just 3.50 an hour.

An investigation carried out by The Sunday Times last week found textile workers producing clothes for Boohoo's suppliers were being paid far below the UK minimum wage (8.72), while working in unsafe conditions.

Boohoo issued a statement on Wednesday, saying it was "shocked and appalled" by the claims in The Sunday Times.

The company faced criticisms earlier in the lockdown, as workers' rights group Labour Behind the Label reported that staff at the Leicester factories were "being forced to come into work while sick with COVID-19."

Leicester was the first British city to face a local lockdown, after a rise in coronavirus cases. The spike has been associated with the city's textile industry, which has continued to operate throughout the pandemic.

Fast fashion factories in Leicester are a long-standing issue, with authorities often struggling to find evidence of modern slavery, despite the prevalence of sweatshops in the city.

After recording extraordinary sales in the early weeks of lockdown, as the Manchester-based company capitalised on its customers' desire for comfortable clothing, Boohoo's market value has dropped by more than a third since The Sunday Times expos was released.

The fall-out has seen the brand dropped from other online retail platforms, with Next, Asos, and Zalando all cutting ties with Boohoo and its subsidiary brands, Nasty Gal and PrettyLittleThing.

Boohoo's management has launched an independent review of its UK supply chain and pledged an initial 10 million "to eradicate supply chain malpractice."

Environmental experts have long been calling for a "total abandonment" of fast fashion in order to prevent an ecological disaster. The fashion industry is one of the most significant polluters in the world, responsible for 10 per cent of global carbon emissions.

As the public grows increasingly aware of the human and planetary costs of fast fashion, more and more ethical alternatives are emerging. Project Cece, for example, founded by Noor Veenhoven and sisters Melissa and Marcella Wijngaarden, is a tech start-up which has recently become Europe's largest sustainable clothing platform.

"We want to really show fast fashion brands like there's money in [sustainability]," explains Veenhoven, "then we can change the industry. We want to be a platform that will be useless in the future because everything will be sustainable."

The rest is here:

Inside the Leicester sweatshops accused of modern slavery - Euronews

The Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority says it has found no evidence of modern slavery in visits it has made to Leicester textile firms in the past week.

The Government anti-slavery agency is one of the bodies investigating conditions in some of the 1,000 plus garment manufacturers in the city.

It follows reports that some workers in the trade were being exploited and paid as little as 3.50 an hour - below the minimum wage.

In a statement, the GLAA said it has been working to ensure that regulations are being followed in factories in Leicester during the coronavirus pandemic.

A spokesperson said: It follows concerns about how some businesses in the city have been operating before and during the localised lockdown introduced by the government at the end of June.

Multi-agency visits involving officers from the GLAA, Leicestershire Police, Leicester City Council, National Crime Agency, Health and Safety Executive, Leicestershire Fire and Rescue and Immigration Enforcement have been carried out over the last week.

Officers from the different agencies spoke to business owners and workers to discuss concerns and provide advice around how protect workplaces from the risk of coronavirus.

Further visits will be carried out in the coming weeks.

The GLAA said no enforcement has been used during the visits and officers have not at this stage identified any offences under the Modern Slavery Act 2015.

The HSE has however said it issued an improvement notice to a factory that was found not to working in Covid-secure conditions and is investigating two others.

GLAA Head of Enforcement Ian Waterfield said: We are committed to working with partners to ensure that workers in Leicester are safe during the coronavirus pandemic and are not having their employment rights eroded or abused.

Allegations of labour exploitation are something we take extremely seriously and we will continue to take appropriate action to safeguard potentially vulnerable workers.

We would also encourage the public to be aware of the signs of labour exploitation and report their concerns to us, by calling our intelligence team on 0800 4320804 or emailing .

Management at the Boohoo fashion giant have said they are grateful to the Sunday Times for highlighting alleged sweatshop conditions at a Leicester factory apparently making items for it.

The Manchester-based online retailer has been hit by suggestions that suppliers to it in Leicester were paying workers below the minimum wage - and making staff work through the lockdown.

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Anti-slavery authority updates on Leicester textile trade investigation with more factory visits are planned - Leicestershire Live

When we see an easy consensus under Trentons golden dome it has been my lived experience that more scrutiny is usually required.

Upon closer inspection, such a call to action may reflect the desire to ride the wave of change rather than actually doing something that might be radical but necessary. The open-ended need for campaign cash to ensure incumbency acts as a throttle for just how fast real reform is permitted to proceed.

And, so it is with the call by Governor Phil Murphy, Senate Majority Leader Stephen Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin to change the title of County Freeholder to County Commissioner. It was floated amidst the Black Lives Matter moment and a national pandemic that is killing people of color at a shockingly disproportionate rate.

This bit of window dressing will be a windfall for sign painters, graphic designers and auto detailers in all 21 counties but wont address the accelerating wealth inequality we are experiencing amidst a further notice public health crisis without precedent.

Theres no doubt that by being the state that hung on to the Freeholder term the longest, we betrayed just how entrenched white male property owner supremacy has always been in our politics.

But the Freeholder nomenclature is the least of it. It stuck for so long because protecting wealth and its privilege were the core function of our state for so long.

New Jersey was at best ambivalent about slavery, voting along with Mississippi, Kentucky, and Delaware to initially reject the 13th amendment abolishing the institution.

We only signed off after Lincoln was dead and the Civil War was over in 1866. (Delaware waited until 1901.)

While New Jerseys great white men of the 19th century were reluctant to hurt slave owners bottom line, they also wanted to make sure creditors could enforce their terms with the full force of the law including depriving debtors of their liberty, no matter how small the debt.

As historian Peter J. Coleman notes in his seminal accountDebtors and Creditors in America the state saw itself as the essential enforcer for all creditors.

By 1829 one New Jersey prison held five times as many debtors as criminals, and of the 117 prisoners in the Belvidere and Flemington prisons, about a quarter owed less than five dollars and more than half had been in custody for over thirty days, Coleman writes.

According to the Boston Prison Discipline Society, the incidence of imprisonment for debt was higher in New Jersey than in any other state, and prisoners were commonly held in filthy and neglected conditions for the most trifling of debts.

Into the 20th century, the State of New Jerseys energetic promotion of corporations over the public interest prompted Lincoln Steffens, one of the original muckrakers, to call us the traitor state.

While other states attempted to push back on the corrupting influence of big money that defined the Gilded Age and made anti-labor abuses of the Robber Barons possible, it was New Jersey that granted them legal sanctuary to avoid accountability through the proliferation of trusts.

EVERY loyal citizen of the United States owes New Jersey a grudge, wrote Stephens in McClure Magazine in 1905. The state is corrupt; so are certain other states.But this state doubly betrays us. Jersey has been bought and sold both at home and abroad; the state is owned and governed today by a syndicate representing capitalists of Newark, Philadelphia, New York, London, and Amsterdam.

He continued. The offense which commands our special attention, however, and lifts this state into national distinction, is this: New Jersey is selling out the rest of us. New Jersey charters the trustsAnd the point to fix in mind at present is that when, a few years ago, the American people were disposed to take up deliberately and solve intelligently the common great trust problem, New Jersey, for one, sold to the corporations a general law which was a general license to grow, combine, and overwhelm as they would, not in Jersey alone, but anywhere in the United States.

To this very day, our state carries forward racially discriminatory policies that disadvantage workers of color to the benefit of corporations, even as our elected leaders describes themselves as progressives.

Consider New Jerseys minimum wage increase passed last year with great fanfare. It included a two-tier track where agricultural workers pay was permitted to lag behind most other non-farm employees who would see $15 in 2024. For farmworkers, that happy day does not come until 2027.

This discriminatory abuse of farmworkers can be traced back to President Franklin Roosevelts need to win southern votes for his New Deal by exempting farmworkers from the Fair Labor Standards Act which lifted so many other workers out poverty.

According to New Jerseys Department of Labor website, twenty years into the 21st century, New Jerseys farmworkers are still not entitled to overtime.

As the essential workforce, including farmworkers and their families, face the ongoing threat from COVID19, the practice of continuing such regulatory exemptions must end.

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Dropping the Freeholder Title Even as We Continue to Codify Pay Discrimination for Farmworkers - InsiderNJ

(Reuters) - Republican President Donald Trump and his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, have contrasting views and records on criminal justice and the U.S. racial divide, issues that have risen in prominence in the 2020 election.

FILE PHOTO - U.S. President Donald Trump arrives on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, U.S., from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, July 11, 2020. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

Here is a look at their stances and backgrounds:

Biden has said he was motivated to run for president by Trumps comments that both sides were to blame for violence between white supremacists and counterprotesters at a 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, comments that fit into what critics see as a pattern of race-baiting by Trump.

The president has very few Black Americans among his advisers and White House staff. Biden, who was vice president for the first African-American U.S. president, Barack Obama, has pledged that his Cabinet, judicial appointments and running mate will reflect the countrys diversity.

Trump has responded to protests over the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody by urging a militaristic response.

He signed an executive order taking steps toward police reform, including encouraging police to use the latest standards for use of force, banning chokeholds unless an officers life was in danger, and called for legislation to do more.

But Democrats faulted the order for allowing some exceptions to the chokehold ban and placing no restrictions on warrants that let police enter a suspects property without knocking. The party has put forward a sweeping bill with a more categorical ban on both practices.

Biden has accused the Trump administration of lax oversight of police departments accused of civil rights violations. He also has said he supports reforming qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that shields officers from victims lawsuits. Trumps spokeswoman has said he would not support ending that immunity.

The former vice president has resisted activist calls to defund the police, instead promising to invest $300 million in a program that gives grants to hire more diverse officers and train them to develop less adversarial relationships with communities.

Trump in 2018 signed into law the First Step Act, a bipartisan measure reducing mandatory-minimum sentences, expanding drug treatment programs for prisoners and allowing some prisoners to finish their sentences early with good behavior.

Trump also has supported some tough-on-crime policies that disproportionately affect minorities, including seeking to restart executions of federal death row inmates.

Biden wants to eliminate the death penalty, solitary confinement and jailing accused criminals until they pay a cash bail. He has pledged $20 billion in grants for states to reduce social ills like illiteracy and child abuse in exchange for scaling back mandatory-minimum sentences.

Trump often touts Black unemployment, which hit the lowest levels on record before the coronavirus pandemic, when talking about his policies on race.

Biden has called for laws making it easier to sue over wage discrimination. He would create new fair-lending and fair-housing protections, provide $300 million in grants to cities that reduce discriminatory zoning regulations and create a task force to address why Black people disproportionately die from COVID-19. He also would have a group study the feasibility of paying cash reparations to Black people as a result of slavery and segregation.

Both candidates have voiced support for historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Trump signed a law that the White House said made $255 million in funding for the institutions permanent and increased money for the federal Pell Grant program. The administration also touts a relaunched HBCU Capital Finance Board, legislation adding money for scholarships and research at HBCUs, and forgiving $322 million in disaster loans to four such institutions in 2018.

Bidens plan making public colleges and universities tuition-free to most students would apply to public HBCUs, and he would also invest more than $70 billion in the schools to start research institutes and for tuition support.

Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt in New York and Jeff Mason in Washington, Editing by Soyoung Kim and Diane Craft

See the article here:

Factbox: Trump and Biden divided on race, criminal justice policies - Reuters

A Leicester fashion expert has called on shoppers to take more responsibility in choosing the clothes they buy.

Shirley Yanez, who runs a pre-loved shop and also sells new clothes made in Leicester, spoke out after police and government anti-slavery officials launched a major investigation into working conditions at clothing factories in the city.

The probe followed reports that some workers in the trade were being exploited and paid as little as 3.50 an hour.

People as consumers have to take some degree of personal responsibility in this matter, she said.

Shoppers need to think long and hard about how a top or a pair of leggings that costs them a few pounds can be made for that very low price.

Surely they most know that there is a possibility that someone somewhere has suffered or been exploited in some way to produce the item, for that price.

That is what fast fashion gives the consumer. Very cheap throwaway clothes that cost very little but at what human price? We need people to make a change. We need them to stop buying cheap throwaway clothes which only end up in a landfill site anyway."

Shirley is the boss of Venus Cow Ltd and runs her pre-loved designer label clothing shop in Francis Street, Stoneygate, and sells newly-made clothes online.

We have our leggings and other cotton staple products manufactured ethically on Saffron Lane in Leicester, she said.

We are proud to say that our Perfect Black Leggings cost 8 to produce and we sell them for 30. There needs to be more transparency like this in the business. Proper honest accountability.

We need the same sort of movement in fashion that we have seen in the food industry. There consumers rightly demanded to know who has produced their food and where it has been produced.

The Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA) said it has found no evidence of modern slavery in visits it has made to Leicester textile firms in the past week.

The Government anti-slavery agency is one of the bodies investigating conditions in some of the 1,000 plus garment manufacturers in the city.

It follows reports that some workers in the trade were being exploited and paid as little as 3.50 an hour - below the minimum wage.

In a statement, the GLAA said it has been working to ensure that regulations are being followed in factories in Leicester during the coronavirus pandemic.

A spokesperson said: It follows concerns about how some businesses in the city have been operating before and during the localised lockdown introduced by the government at the end of June.

Multi-agency visits involving officers from the GLAA, Leicestershire Police, Leicester City Council, National Crime Agency (NCA), Health and Safety Executive, Leicestershire Fire and Rescue and Immigration Enforcement have been carried out over the last week.

Officers from the different agencies spoke to business owners and workers to discuss concerns and provide advice around how protect workplaces from the risk of coronavirus. Further visits will be carried out in the coming weeks.

The GLAA said no enforcement has been used during the visits and officers have not at this stage identified any offences under the Modern Slavery Act 2015.

The National Crime Agency says it will pursue offenders and protect victims in its investigation into modern slavery in Leicesters textile trade.

We can confirm that it has received information regarding allegations of modern slavery and exploitation in the textile industry in Leicester," said an NCA spokesman.

Tackling modern slavery is one of our highest priorities, and we are committed to working with partners across law enforcement, the private, public and charity sector to pursue offenders and protect victims wherever they may be.

The HSE has however said it issued an improvement notice to a factory that was found not to working in Covid-secure conditions and is investigating two others.

Management at the Boohoo fashion giant have said they are grateful to the Sunday Times for highlighting alleged sweatshop conditions at a Leicester factory apparently making items for it.

The Manchester-based online retailer has been hit by suggestions that suppliers to it in Leicester were paying workers below the minimum wage - and making staff work through the lockdown.

Leicester retail giant Next and Asos have dropped Boohoo clothes from their websites.

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Leicester fashion expert calls on shoppers to stop buying 'cheap throwaway clothes' - Leicestershire Live

Garment workers around the world experience low wages and exploitation. This is nothing new, but Jessica Simor QC, a barrister at Matrix chambers who has worked extensively on issues of fair pay and human rights in fashion, says: Covid has thrown a much brighter light on the inequity of the whole system. [It] has exposed the incredible imbalance between the worker, the factory owner and the retailer the biggest force lying with the retailer.

The Covid-19 pandemic has created fresh injustices. Throughout lockdown, garment workers in countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam have faced destitution and starvation as big-name fashion retailers have cancelled 20bn in orders. A lot of these fast fashion companies have pulled contracts where fabric has been ordered, received, cut and sewn, said Raakhi Shah, CEO of the Circle, at an emergency panel the not-for-proft organisation held this week on fast fashion and slavery. The brands havent fulfilled their side of the agreement. And these thousands of garment workers have been left destitute.

In Leicester, where exploitation has been known about for years, the context of the coronavirus has refocused attention on garment workers forced to work throughout lockdown, despite high levels of infection.

It is easy to feel helpless but, says Shah: There are lots of ways that you can make a difference around this.

Speaking of whether change is possible to what, at times, seems an intractable problem, the Circles founder, Annie Lennox (formerly the Eurythmics frontwoman), dialling in from Los Angeles, said: Its like climbing a mountain, its not going to be overnight, but it is possible.

Some things, such as donating to funds for garment workers facing destitution, can make an immediate difference. Others involve collective action and require longer term, structural change.

Throughout the pandemic, organisations such as the Clean Clothes Campaign, Labour Behind the Label and Remake have put pressure on brands to pay factories for cancelled orders. Some brands have paid, some have refused to pay and some, according to the environmental journalist Lucy Siegle, who chaired the panel, are saying that they have, [but] they havent quite in the way that we need them to, for instance delaying payments or paying for parts of orders but not others.

Expecting factories to foot this bill when factories dont necessarily have any accumulated wealth is outrageous, says Siegle.

The Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) has created a tracker to show which brands have paid in full and which havent. It gets its intelligence from factories and workers, says Siegle, and is a good way to put pressure on those companies that have yet to pay up. Primark, for instance, according to WRC, pledged to pay for about $460m in orders it had previously cancelled, but did not, however, disclose what percentage of its total unpaid commitments this figure represents. C&A, which reinstated some orders after initially cancelling them, is delaying delivery and payment for as long as a year on some of the orders it has nominally reinstated.

Individual action needs to feed into structural reform, says Siegle, who suggests people should join Labour Behind the Label or support the Clean Clothes Campaign. She also advises emailing brands to call on them to pay up. Remake has a #PayUp petition calling on brands to pay suppliers, in full and in a timely manner, for all orders that were paused or cancelled because of the pandemic each time the petition is signed, executives from the brands who have not paid receive an email notification.

The Circle launched a fund, called The Women and Girls Solidarity Fund, which is supporting female garment workers 80% of the workforce are women at the start of lockdown. These women are often the sole breadwinners for their families and the fund provides them with emergency food packages and supplies such as face masks and soap.

Just 20 buys a food parcel and they have already managed to help thousands of families. While Shah calls the Circles emergency fund a sticking plaster in the short term, it is vital, given that, without it, many garment workers might have faced starvation.

Remake also has a number of funds it has set up to allow people to donate to garment workers in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Los Angeles.

Time and again fast fashion brands defend their actions by saying its what the consumer wants. Shah says those with purchasing power should be at the forefront now.

One way to disrupt the system is by voting with your wallet. Speaking at the panel, Livia Firth, the founder of Eco-Age, says consumers actions can send a strong message. Only by slowing down will we send a very strong signal that we are not going on like we have for the last 20 years. Lets show them that the consumer doesnt want it.

Siegle, though, believes the situation has gone beyond advising people how to shop more responsibly: This is an emergency, she says. She thinks individuals should question their stance. Whether its about warehouse staff in the UK or garment workers in Bangladesh or Leicester, its about who you stand with. A lot of people are so loyal to brands and are always giving them the benefit of the doubt. [The brands] are not going to change. Go and stand alongside the garment workers and warehouse staff, the workers in Leicester who have been denied union representation for years, not just now.

She says people need to be more informed: If you usually spend a portion of your day on social media looking at clothes on Pretty Little Thing or Boohoo, could you devote some of that time to reading the Clean Clothes campaign liveblog and might that cause a liberation and cognitive shift?

The long-term work needs to be on structural reform and holding these brands and retailers to account, says Siegle.

She advises going back and reading reports, from those by the Circle on the living wage to the Environmental Audit Committees 2019 report Fixing Fashion, none of the recommendations of which, including a suggested 1p per garment levy to tackle fast fashion, were taken up. Why werent those recommendations taken up? asks Siegle. We need to demand that they are.

Referring to Leicester, she says: These are illegal working practices and you have a right to contact your MP and call for a transparent inquiry into working practices around fast fashion companies.

Simors concern now is that criminal proceedings follow holding those responsible who should be held responsible. She is concerned that the victims will be further victimised and we will end up with the victims suffering more because it is quite possible that a number of them were here unlawfully, were trafficked or were asylum seekers. It is important, she says, that we keep an eye on this story.

What has happened in Leicester is shocking, and there are hopes that the reaction to the exploitation of workers there may have some positive knock-on effects for how we react to abuses of those working in the garment industry around the world.

Its always a bit shocking when this race to the bottom happens in our context, says Firth. We always consider the lives of people close to us more precious than the lives of those in far away countries.

As Siegle puts it: Even out your response to it. It might sound obvious, but its about having the same outrage for what is happening to those making clothes for fast fashion in Cambodia or Pakistan as those in Leicester.

Simor wants us to take note of the use by Priti Patel of the word slavery in reference to exploitation in Leicester. It is extremely important, she says, that the home secretary has used the word slavery about these practices. If the home secretary is willing to recognise this as slavery in Leicester, then the question arises as to how this can be acceptable anywhere in the world? Thats something that has to be challenged and we have to take ministers on.

Obviously, UK laws apply in Leicester, but in other countries where garments are being produced for consumers in the west, the UK has no jurisdiction. But, says Simor: We need corporate responsibility to extend to where products are made. We have to somehow come up with some kind of controls within our jurisdiction that have an impact on those other jurisdictions.

She cites cases of the EU legislating for actions and inactions outside of the EU, such as those involving conflict diamonds, data breaches, bribery and even the food supply chain.

Most of those areas are simply concerned with money or data and what were saying is theres no reason you cant extend those ideas and principles to human beings, she says. While she is working on a project to develop law that takes some of the ideas from those bits of legislation and apply them to wage laws, EU law isnt necessarily something individuals can have an impact on.

What individual action needs to do, says Siegle, is feed into structural reform its the same as climate. For starters, we can be more aware: Its great if someone wants to inform themselves and if they want to become a barrister, that would be great!

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Seven ways to help garment workers - The Guardian

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People vote in the Michigan primary election at Chrysler Elementary School in Detroit, Michigan, on March 10, 2020. - Voters in Michigan and five other states headed to polls early Tuesday in the latest slate of primaries that will decide whether Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders will face President Donald Trump in November. Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota and Washington state also vote Tuesday. (Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY / AFP) (Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images)

Over the Fourth of July weekend, President Trump made a calculated decision to give two incendiary speeches depicting a culture war in America. Painting a dark picture of us versus them, the president exploited our national holiday as an opportunity to defend Confederate symbols that are synonymous with racism.

Trump declared at Mt. Rushmore that efforts to remove Confederate statues wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values. The next night at the White House, he continued, We will never allow an angry mob to tear down our statues, erase our history, indoctrinate our children or trample on our freedoms.

Donald Trump is on the wrong side of history in defending these symbols of hate and emboldening white nationalists, and hes speaking to a dwindling number of supporters. Recent polls indicate that 15 million to 26 million people in the United States have participated in Black Lives Matter demonstrations, making it the largest movement in American history.

Calls for racial justice responding to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and too many other Black Americans are not just about statues erected during the Jim Crow era. These statues have become a symbol of the real issue racism and police brutality stemming from the dark legacy of slavery in our country.

Last month, I proudly marched alongside those calling for racial justice in front of the White House. The only history that demonstrators like me are seeking to rectify is that of systemic racism, the symptoms of which were portrayed so blatantly and horrifically when George Floyd was suffocated to death by a police officer.

One step toward reconciling our countrys original sin of slavery is to remove statues of Confederate leaders that serve as shrines for white nationalists. But this is hardly enough to end racism in America, and its not all that protesters are demanding. The Black Lives Matter movement is about transformative change to our laws, systems, policies, and values of those we elect. Its about working to undo racism.

Jewish Americans like me have expressed solidarity with Black activists fighting for racial justice because its consistent with our values. Importantly, partnership between Black and Jewish Americans did not start with the murder of George Floyd or resistance to Donald Trump. It is not defined solely by this moment, nor will it end on November 3.

Our partnership predates the Civil Rights movement and is entrenched in our history and who we are as a people. It reflects our own struggle for freedom throughout history and is exemplified by our values and teachings, which include the concept of pikuach nefesh the primacy and sanctity of human life equality, and the pursuit of justice.

We cannot look away as three-plus years of racism emanating from the White House have opened the wounds of inequality, bigotry and injustice in America targeting communities of color, low-wage families, immigrants and refugees, Muslims and Jews. Since Trump was elected president, hate crime violence has reached a 16-year high according to the FBI, and violent acts of anti-Semitism reached an all-time high last year.

Instead of combating this deeply disturbing trend, Trump has embraced it and appears to be running for re-election on a platform of four more years of hate. In case his speeches werent evidence enough, he recently amplified calls for white power and is even campaigning with merchandise and ads that invoke Nazi symbols.

His campaign just sent a letter to supporters peddling an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory accusing prominent Jewish Democrats of rigging the election, and its not the first time. Trump invoked similar anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in the 2016 election and again in the 2018 midterms.

Jewish Americans have had enough. Over 70% of Jewish voters disapprove of the way Trump has handled the rise of anti-Semitism and nearly the same number feel less secure than they did two years ago, according to a national poll commissioned earlier this year by the non-partisan Jewish Electorate Institute.

Our rising insecurity is directly tied to Trumps emboldening of white nationalists who have targeted our institutions and places of worship. Its also because Trump professes to be protecting the values and freedoms of white nationalists, which are anathema to a majority of Jewish Americans. In his alternate reality, Donald Trump sees himself as the President of the red states as opposed to the United States. He is governing for a small subset of Americans who are white, Christian, and above all else, loyal to him.

The president has repeatedly demonstrated that hes unwilling to serve as a leader for all Americans, and hes made racism and hatred an issue that will drive votes in the 2020 election. The more Trump does to incite his base with bigotry, the more he inspires the rest of the country to support Joe Biden, who rightfully identified this dynamic as the battle for the soul of our nation after neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville three years ago. This battle rages on today, and those of us fighting for racial justice, equality and an end to bigotry will take our fight straight to the voting booth.

The majority of Jewish Americans are fighting for Black lives, just as were fighting for an end to anti-Semitism, and well soon have the chance to translate our advocacy into votes. What is happening in our country under Donald Trump is a far cry from the values imparted by our religion and others, and it must change.

Its because of our values that many Jewish voters are compelled to take action to ensure that Trump and hatred he incites are defeated in November.

Halie Soifer is executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA). She previously served as national security adviser in the Senate and House, and as a senior policy adviser in the Obama administration.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward.

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Racial justice will drive Jewish votes in November - Forward

Rich Fairhead/Prospect

There is nothing like an emergency to make you realise the value of practical ideas. When the chips are down, and death rates are up, the world wants answersespecially from its sharpest thinkers.

As Prospect revisits the task of identifying the leading minds of the moment, in the intellectual hit parade which we have produced in varying formats since 2004, that test of immediate and real-world relevance looms large. As we compiled our longlistdrawing on the advice of distinguished experts in various fields who have written for us over the yearsand then whittled it down towards 50, we were struck by how different the list looked from 2019s. It was at the point where we had around 35 confirmed names that we noticed not one of them was a holdover.

A measure of churn was expectedwe put a premium on new books and recent interventions, after allbut not a wholesale changing of the guard. Having previously been sceptical of those claims that Covid-19 would change everythingwhy would it?I suddenly felt there was something in them. We decided to make a virtue of the disruption, and produce an entirely new list for a shaken world that is beginning to reset.

The immediate relevance of some of our thinkers to the Covid-19 era speaks for itself: vaccinologist Sarah Gilbert and science writer Ed Yong being prime examples. Just as interesting, however, are those who work in fields a mile away from medicine, but who have nonetheless acquired a new salience in the dark and peculiar circumstances of 2020.

In economics, after the sudden stop followed by all the stimulus and bailouts, we are plainly going to need to talk about debt. Having something to say on that helps two of our big brainsStephanie Kelton and Thomas Pikettyearn a place on the list. In public policy, with a staggering proportion of the workforce furloughed, there is a sense that the hour of the godfather of the Universal Basic Income movement, Philippe Van Parijs, might at last have come. Likewise, the polymathic thoughts of Ari Ezra Waldman on the problems of privacy in a digital age rocket up the agenda when governments everywhere are grappling with intrusive track-and-trace schemes. And in politics, while New Zealands prime minister Jacinda Ardern had already shown creativity in developing a governing ethos of kindness, it always sounded rather airyuntil she showed how it could be put to practical effect in the coronavirus context, and achieved some of the worlds best results.

So all-encompassing has been the disruption that many varied and otherwise unrelated minds have found new ways to shine: Sally Rooney moved from the page to the TV screen, and kept us culturally (and tearfully) engaged in lockdown; Eric Yuan Zoomed in from relative obscurity as his video platform became the virtual meeting room, as well as the substitute pub.

Othermore enduringimplications will eventually flow from the chance the lockdown gave us to reset. In the arts, different sorts of names come to the fore: names like Jenny Odell, for example, who uses discarded everyday objects to invite mindful meditation on the transience of our day-to-day lives and how they this fit (or dont fit) with nature.

This year we have produced an entirely new list for a shaken world that is beginning to reset

Spending time away from the usual bustle, and perhaps in the garden, has raised environmental consciousness. So, too, has the jolt to reflect afresh on how all the life, health and happiness that civilisation affords hangs by a thread. We duly hail all manner of minds that engage with ecology, whether that be through the critical thinking of Timothy Morton, the rigorous popularisation of David Attenborough or Carlota Perezs thoughts on how the economy can be steered in a greener direction as it splutters back into life.

A spell of enforced solitude will also turn the mind to the question of who we really areand prompt it to interrogate all the old stories about where we come from. Although it was catalysed by police brutality in the US, it may be no coincidence that the history wars over statue-toppling took hold this year. Thaddeus Metz, Angela Saini, Cornell West, Olivette Otele and William Dalrymple are all top thinkers with things to say about the many warped consequences that can result from one culture subjugating another; Ross Douthat, meanwhile, is a thoughtful conservative voice who cautions us against allowing frenzied arguments about identity to silence discussion.

There are some names here whose special interest it would be contrived to put down to Covid-19. But even herecoming back to my starting pointamid a mood of anxious uncertainty, they have to earn their place by way of practical relevance, even if that is relevance to the big contemporary challenges that existed before the virus. Challenges like, say, the rise of China (Julia Lovell), the decline of the west (Anne Applebaum), the politics of personality (Hilary Mantel) or the twin threats to the rule of law and sound constitutional governance (Bruce Ackerman, Dahlia Lithwick, Philippe Sands).

The diversity of the list is rich. It contains a preponderance of women for the first time ever, and pleasingly mixes brilliant young minds (Lisa Piccirillo) with a couple of nonagenarians.

While it also includes a good mix of liberal, socialist and conservative voices, I can anticipate one objection in the absence of any thinker who can truly be said to have emerged from within the global populist insurgency associated with Donald Trump. We have thought long and hard about this. We have run and will continue to run pieces by nostalgic writers who reject globalisation. We make space for serious minds who rage about all the communities it has left behind (see Paul Collier). But as the Trumpian project becomes ever-more nakedly anti-intellectual and anti-reason, we struggle to regard even intelligent individuals who choose to defend it as serious thinkers. Some readers may take a different view, and see more substance in nativism. But for me, Steve Bannon and his like are cynics; the value of ideas for them is purely instrumental, for use in power play.

With that one caveat, the mix is something to marvel at. The range of intellectual endeavours is a reminder of the breadth of human genius. I hope youll enjoy finding out more about the thinkers who strike us as most pertinent to our age as much as we on the inside of Prospect did. Salute them and take the chance to cast a vote (details at the end of the package) to help crown a top thinker for 2020. Well publish the full results in our next issue. Oh, and please dont miss the chance to tell us who we missedtheres a space on the voting form. Because with the liveliest minds and the biggest questions, there is never a final answer. Long may human beings continue to discuss, disagreeand think!

Tom Clark is editor of Prospect

Bruce Ackerman

The turbulence of the last few years will eventually settlebut into what? The shape of tomorrows politics depends on how this moment constitutionalises. If Boris Johnsons prorogation wheeze sets a precedent, or Donald Trumps judicial bench-packing continues much longer, liberal democracy is in trouble. Its defenders need to swot up on how constitutions can go wrongand right. Bruce Ackerman, a Yale professor whos just as informed on De Gaulle, Mandela and Waesa as he is on Americas founders, is a sure guide. His popular sovereignty initiative to rationalise the process for amending the US constitution could put principled reformers back on the front foot.

Elizabeth Anderson

She started out in economics before abandoning a field she had come to view as ethically barren, and has since combined philosophy with the social sciences to analyse the power structures around usand, as an excited New Yorker puts it, redefine equality. Her interest in race and gender is urgently relevant in 2020, and her refreshing take on the Protestant work ethic (which she insists has a progressive pro-labour side as well as a conservative materialism) underpins a powerful account of modern workplace relations. Always confronting the world as it truly is rather than how we would like it to be, she won a MacArthur genius grant in 2019.

Anne Applebaum

The American international order is crumbling. Its opponents always suspected it was mere cover for US imperialism, and the sudden swerve of many former enthusiasts to support the narrow chauvinism of Trumps America First slogan encourages that dark view. Applebaum, long an authority on the abuses of Communist and post-Communist Eastern Europe, in her new book Twilight of Democracy is unsparing in exposing the moral bankruptcy of Trumpian Republicanism. Her sharp pen is as persuasive as any in presenting the idea of the west as a morally serious projectand one whose loss we may come to mourn.

Jacinda Ardern

By bringing her baby to the UN General Assembly she grabbed the worlds attention, but over three years in office Ardern has proved to be more than a media favourite. Her ethos of kindness sounded a vague way to transcend neoliberalism, but shes steadily shown what it means in fields from child welfare to the environment. Her instinctive, bridge-building leadership after the Christchurch mosque massacre was an inspiration. And her Covid-19 strategydevised in lockstep with chief scientist Juliet Gerrardbuilt with intelligence and empathy on a foundation of unflinching honesty to achieve some of the worlds best results.

David Attenborough

Not all climate-change activists are Swedish teenagers. At 94, David Attenborough is one of the countrysif not the worldsmost influential thinkers on the environment. Just as the Extinction Rebellion protests were taking off last year, Attenborough presented the hour-long documentary Climate Change: The Facts, which relied on his authority to convey the truth about what were doing to the planet. For decades his documentaries have alerted millions to the precious wonders of the animal and plant kingdoms, and the threat that humans pose to them. No longer confined to the BBC, his eight-part Netflix series Our Planet brought him even closer to truly global domination.

William Dalrymple

The Scottish historian, long resident in India, has made it his lifes work to reckon with the legacy of the British Empire in the subcontinent. His recent book The Anarchy is a barnstorming account of the East India Company, the corporation that launched the hostile takeover. Dalrymple describes Robert Clivewhose newly-controversial statue remains next to the Foreign Officeas a man of extreme aggression and devil-may-care-audacity. But Dalrymple also points to Indian complicity with the British, as well as to the many atrocities of local princes. In polarised times, in which one side acquits the Empire of its crimes, and the other blames imperialism for every last human wickedness, his work is an important corrective.

Jared Diamond

Twenty-three years ago in Guns, Germs and Steel, the polyglot professor (whose scholarship has ranged from human physiology to ornithology and anthropology) drew our attention to how far disease had shaped world civilisations. In Upheaval last year, he looked at how societies can recover from catastrophes such as invasion, political collapse or mass death. Just as individuals need to develop strategies of resilience, he argues, so too should countries. The challenge, for nations as for individuals in crisis, is to figure out which parts of their identities are already functioning well and dont need changing, and which parts are no longer working and do need changing. Within months, Covid-19 made his argument urgent.

Ross Douthat

The opinion pages of the New York Times have become a battleground in the culture wars. In June, a Republican senators provocative call to Send in the troops on Black Lives Matter protesters caused a newsroom revolt. The most eloquent conservative voice in the NYT is Ross Douthat, whose cogent analysis of the farrago was a qualified defence of the papers liberal valuesstrident, even unpalatable views need to be aired, he argued. Douthat, a traditional Catholic, is also a critic of modern secularism, as he argues in his new book The Decadent Society. But he is no fan of the US president. In a recent op-ed, he argued that Trump will be an accelerant of the rights erasure, an agent of its marginalisation and defeat.

Esther Duflo

Economics is often caricatured as being more interested in pounds than people and derided for getting lost in theoretical dead-ends. This Frenchwoman rescues the discipline from both charges. Duflo applies randomised trials to urgent policy questions with huge human significance in the developing worldquestions such as how to encourage decent basic education, keep malaria at bay and, pertinently for our Covid-19 world, boost vaccine take-up. (She suggests incentives as modest as a bag of lentils.) At just 46 when she claimed the Nobel Prize in economics last yeartogether with husband and co-author Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremershe is an exceptionally young but richly deserving winner.

David Frum

Although still registered as a big-R Republican, David Frum is much less interested in party politics than little-R republicanismhis concern is the spirit of American democracy and the health of its republic. In his journalism the former George W Bush speechwriter has, from early on, been one of the clearest-sighted conservative critics of Trumphis personal lack of principle and venality, certainly, but also his potential to trash the standing of his office and the possibility of compromise. Frums biggest worry, outlined in his book Trumpocalypse, is less the disastrous 45th president winning in November than his political poison lingering for many years after his defeat.

Greta Gerwig

Originally known as a Hollywood actress and muse to Marriage Story director and partner Noah Baumbach, Gerwig has since proven herself to be a masterly screenwriter and director. Her 2017 coming-of-age drama Lady Bird won universal critical acclaim. That led to her most recent project adapting Louisa May Alcotts classic novel Little Women for the big screen. At a time when everyone has been locked down with family, her work invites searching questions about our closest relationships. Her snubbing in Hollywoods recent awards season attests to stubborn sexism in the industry, but the success of her films shows that things are changing.

Sarah Gilbert

Decades of work on malaria, flu and then Mers readied this Oxford vaccinologist to do battle with the new coronavirus pandemic. Just as important was the preparatory thinking she had done about how to handle an unknown potential disease X, and the way she has galvanised her team. Moving beyond the old reliance on antibody responses, she pursues a proactive approach to vaccine designtapping recombinant DNA techniques and homing in on T-cell responses. With safe-to-handle viral vectors speeding research, Gilbert energetically seeks a smart way through the slow protocols of academic medicine to speed up the application. Her work couldwith lucklead to a successful inoculation programme within months.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Could we live in a world without prisons? For lifelong abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore the answer is an emphatic yes. A seasoned campaigner against the prison-industrial complex, who now works in academia, Gilmore has spent the best part of 30 years developing the field of carceral geography: the study of the interrelationships across space, institutions and political economy that shape and define modern incarceration. Shes helped shift the conversation about responses to crime from one of punishment to rehabilitation. As the failings of the US justice system come once again to the fore, Gilmores radical ideas have never felt more relevant.

Jrgen Habermas

Having come of age listening to the Nuremberg trials, Habermas, now 91, has always been seized by the urgency of defending fundamental notions like an open public sphere and the idea of truth, through post-modern decades during which the academy grew complacent and self-indulgent. The last of the generation of Rawls and Foucault, both of whom he sparred with, his breathtaking range is on show in a new history of philosophy. Despite warning that a post-truth democracy would no longer be a democracy, in dark times he still retains faith in the ability of human discussion to advance the common good.

Martin Hgglund

Can you lead a spiritual life without being religious? The Swedish atheist thinker takes up the challenge in his book This Life. For Hgglund, the meaning of existence does not lie in an imaginary afterlife but in the fact of death: the apprehension that we will die makes meaningful the question of what we do with our time on earth. Erudite and provocative, Hgglunds philosophy aims to plug the God-shaped hole gap in the lives of atheists, and has become more relevant as death once more stalks the developed western world. The Prospect review of his book wondered, though, whether the questions he asks have really been as foreign to religious thinking as he imagines.

NK Jemisin

Science-fiction writer NK Jemisin broke records when all three novels in her Broken Earth trilogy won a prestigious Hugo Award for best novel between 2016 and 2018. Her work creates a fully-imagined universe to explore some of the great themes of our timesclimate change, racial oppression and split identities. Jemisin, remarkably the first African American to win the Hugo, has criticised the publishing industry for not being diverse enough in genre fiction. Her new novel, The City We Became, is a love letter to a New York under threat from alien invasion.

Bong Joon-Ho

The South Korean filmmaker captured headlinesand hearts and mindswhen he swept this years Oscars. He won four trophies, including best director and best picture for Parasite, an upstairs-downstairs tale about a poor family meeting a rich one. Bongs cinemawhich also includes dystopian train drama Snowpiercer and Netflixs Okjahas long dealt with class conflict and the problems of contemporary capitalism, mixing the political with a playful mastery of tone and genre. In an industry dominated by superhero blockbusters, Bongs global success proves there is widespread appetite for something new.

Stephanie Kelton

Respectable monetary policy died when central banks turned to the printing presses to battle the Great Recession, pursuing so-called Quantitative Easing (QE). Will the Covid-19 crisis see fiscal policy go the same way? Stephanie Kelton hopes so and is finding an audiencenot only because theres little appetite for more austerity. With interest rates and inflation on the floor, its harder to argue that governments directly creating money for social programmes would necessarily spell ruin. But a free lunch today will mean inflation tomorrow warn respectable economistsincluding some Keynesians. Like Keynes himself, though, Kelton resets the frame and goads conventional wisdom.

Igor Levit

At just 33 years old, Russian-German pianist Igor Levit is a superstar interpreter of the classical canonhis complete Beethoven Sonatas came out earlier this year. Hes also unafraid of political gestures: at the 2017 Proms he played Ode to Joy, the European national anthem, in what was seen as a riposte to Brexit. In lockdown, he has pioneered live-streaming concerts on Twitter, dressed down in jeans and T-shirt, with explanations in German and English beforehand. (Check out his performance of Schuberts late B-Flat Sonata.) Few others have done as much to democratise classical music while still maintaining the highest of standards.

Dahlia Lithwick

Lithwick is the outstanding scrutineer of the US Supreme Court, but qualifies as a true world thinker because of her subtle and penetrating analysis of the rule of law. Should Novembers election descend into foul play and end up thrown over to the courts (like Bush vs Gore in 2000) Lithwick will be a must-read. But she qualifies as a true world thinker because of her subtle and penetrating take on the rule of law. She has written, including in Prospect, on how that ideal consists as much in a web of mores and codes as it does in any procedure or chain of command. Trump violates these, but soincreasinglydo other rulers on a planet where political corruption could become a second pandemic.

Julia Lovell

Rejecting earlier revisionism, Chinas Xi Jinping has ruled that the Mao years and the reorientation towards state capitalism that followed are all one glorious chapter in the nations history. With China risen, does that make the brutal revolutionary newly-relevant not just at home, but also across the world? As Cambridge historian Lovell describes in her fine book Maoism: A Global History, the after-effects of his ideology spread across the planet, from Vietnam to Zanzibar. Also the author of a superb account of the Opium Wars, Lovell is an acute observer of the way history is used and abused by current regimes. Xi is no sincere believer in the dictums of Maos Little Red Book, but he does admireand emulatehis authoritarian power play.

Hilary Mantel

One of the most acute analysts of the 21st centurys often alarmingly personal politics is a novelist writing about Tudor England. In the concluding part of her Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, Mantel continues her investigation into Thomas Cromwell, a canny practitioner of Machiavellian statecraft who attempted to align England with the Protestant princely states in Europe. That, as much as Henry VIIIs unpredictable sexual tastes, was the reason Cromwells career eventually unravelled. Mantel is also an eagle-eyed observer of the current royal family: her famous lecture on the Duchess of Cambridge is one of the works collected in a forthcoming collection, entitled Mantel Pieces.

Helen McCarthy

The deepest assumptions shape day-to-day life without us noticing. Take a longer view, and you can spot themand grasp how they can change. McCarthys work exposes the oppressive power of the housewife ideal. Many mothers have long been in paid employment, but in the years between commonplace domestic servants and ubiquitous domestic appliances, they were vilified for falling short as angels in the house. Only in the last 40 years, with the help of nurseries and other childcare, have working mothers ceased to be deemed aberrant. In the lockdown, all responsibility for children was thrown back to parents, and reports suggest the burden was unequally sharedunderlining the enduring power of the tropes McCarthy identifies.

Thaddeus Metz

This professor of philosophy at the University of Johannesburg is reimagining what it might mean to teach his subject in an African context. As well as the traditional syllabus (Plato etc), Metz has championed native African philosophy as an object of equal worth to study. He has defended the idea of a distinctive African moral theory based on ubuntu, one which values harmonious relationships and human solidarity. It should, he argues, be taken just as seriously as the work of Kant or utilitarianism. That Metz is a white American makes the project, often described as decolonising the curriculum, all the more intriguing.

Branko Milanovi

Bean-counting can narrow horizons, but not for this Serbian-American number cruncher. Inequality used to be measured country-by-country, but he has pioneered analysis of the global income distribution, which he likens to an elephant, with a high back (fast wage-rises in mid-table China), low head (squeezed working-class wages in the west) and a rising trunk (the runaway pay of the pre-financial crisis global elite). Unlike many leftists, he diagnoses no general crisis of capitalism, instead focusing on its varieties, and the surprising way the restless insecurity of Chinas political economy works to bolster growth. As Covid-19 accelerates Chinas eclipse of the US, he is an indispensable guide.

Timothy Morton

Living in the Anthropocene turns out to require a new, less anthropocentric, vocabulary. Mortonan English professor at Rice University, Houstonprovides one. A proponent of object-oriented ontology (OOO), Morton argues that nature or the environment does not, in fact, exist as we think of it, as something separate from or encompassing of civilisation. He suggests instead that all objects, from rocks to trees, live in equal and interdependent co-existence with humans. Counting singer Bjrk, artist Olafur Eliasson and curator and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist among his fans and collaborators, he is exerting a rare and a far-reaching impact on our intellectual and cultural imagination.

Jenny Odell

ACalifornian whose exhibitions have spotlighted objects discarded at landfills and the manufacturing roots of our everyday items, Odell calls us to observe the commonplacewith undivided attention. Her interests culminated in How to Do Nothing, a bestseller about the pleasures of resisting Big Techs commodification of our attention spans. Its a philosophical meditation on what it means to live mindfully with nature at a time when powerful corporations want us to do anything but. When billions were suddenly confined to their homes this year (with nothing but social media to connect them with others), the need to rediscover how to be content doing nothing became self-evident.

Olivette Otele

Born in Cameroon and raised in France, Olivette Otele was appointed professor of the history of slavery at Bristol University last autumnhaving become, at Bath Spa, the UKs first black female history professor just the year before. She has been a keen analyst of Bristols impassioned debate over its long associations with slavery. In reaction to the pulling down of Edward Colstons statue, she wrote, many other slave traders are still celebrated in Bristol, while poverty, racism and all forms of inequalities are, more than ever, in urgent need of being tackled. Her book African Europeans: An Untold Story will be published this October.

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The world's top 50 thinkers 2020 - Prospect

By Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.

America celebrates July 4, 1776 annually in the name of a tea-dumping party but leaves Black folks uninvited to the party.We dont see our history or ourselves in the celebration.

No, we can come to the nations Capital and enjoy the music and pageantry on the Mall.But America leaves us out of our history because of the big lie of white supremacy and Black inferiority. The idea that whites are the host and Blacks are the parasites still lives in the psyche of many whites and is present at the celebrations even today.Theres nothing on July 4, as currently celebrated, that speaks to our history or presence during this day.

Slavery was a worldwide phenomenon. The year 1772 was a watershed of sorts in the history of slavery.It could be called the beginning of slaverys end, because the legal framework upon which it was based began to crumble in England with the landmark decision inSomerset v. Stewart.

James Somerset was a slave bought in Virginia by Charles Stewart, a Scots merchant and customs official with quite close Chesapeake ties.Stewart left Virginia for England in 1768, taking Somerset with him.In 1771, Somerset took his leave of Stewart and refused to return to a state of permanent servitude.He was soon arrested and imprisoned, but his case was taken up by Granville Sharp, an inveterate opponent to the institution of slavery as antithetical to the British constitution and English common law.

In a decision handed down by William Murray, (Baron later Earl) of Mansfield and Chief Justice of the Court of Kings Bench, the court narrowly held that a master could not seize a slave in England and detain him preparatory to sending him out of the realm to be sold and thathabeas corpuswas a constitutional right available to slaves to forestall such seizure, deportation and sale because they were not chattel, or mere property, they were servants and thus persons invested with certain (but certainly limited) constitutional protections.

Although Mansfield took great care to phrase his holding in such a way that it could not be used for a broader precedent in determining the legal status of slaves or their rights, it was widely perceived quite differently on both sides of the Atlantic. Many, including many slaves, understood Somerset to have effectively abolished slavery in England (Somerset himself believed so).Its impact was profound in the American colonies as some slaves invoked it to seek their own freedom.

In America, by July 4, 1776 African Americans had been here since 1619, already in slavery for 157 years.The international slave trade and our free labor had made cotton king and America rich. What made Britain determined to hold on to its American colonies was the profitability of the slave trade and the free labor of Black slaves in the production and harvesting of cotton, tobacco, rice and indigo.

As we reflect back, for us the American Revolution of 1776 only meant that our lack of humanity would be denied for another 75 years after ratification of the Constitution by Rhode Island on May 29, 1790 and 85 years until the 13thAmendment ending slavery was ratified on December 18, 1865.

After the 1776 revolution and the failure of the Articles of Confederation to form a strong enough central government, in 1787 the Founding Fathers came together in the Philadelphia Convention and were wrestling with many governing issues, including what to do with the slaves and the slave states in their new U.S. Constitution.They came up with three compromises: (1) the North was significantly outnumbered in the southern slave states in population so the South proposed to count their slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional representation in the U.S. House to better balance their lack of congressional power; (2) they agreed to continue the international slave trade for another 20 years until 1808; and (3) they continued to augment southern slave power in the slave-holding states by creating the Electoral College to elect our president.

In 1820, the Missouri Compromise occurred admitting the slave state of Missouri and the free state of Maine simultaneously in order to keep the free-and slave-state balance of power in the U.S. Senate and, except for Missouri, prohibited slavery above the Mason-Dixon line.

In 1822, an educated and skilled carpenter in Charleston, South Carolina, Denmark Vesey, was accused of plotting a slave revolt the rising for July 14, but whites discovered it and executed him on July 2.

Rev. Nat Turner destroyed the idea that slaves were content with their status by leading a slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia in 1831 that killed more than 50 whites and took two months to put down.

The Compromise of 1850 following the Mexican-American War temporarily settled the issue of the spread of slavery westward into the newly acquired Texas territory by using the idea of popular sovereignty, possibly delaying the start of the Civil War.It also included a strengthened northern hated Fugitive Slave Law, allowing slave owners to hire bounty hunters to track down escaped slaves and return them to their southern masters.

Frederick Douglass gave his speech, What Does Your 4thOf July Mean To Me, on July 5, 1852 in Rochester, New York, where Douglass had made his home after escaping from slavery and becoming the pre-eminent anti-slavery spokesman of his day.Douglasss condemnation of slavery was brutal and unsparing.

Hisspeech was just two years before Sen. Stephen Douglas introduced the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act around the idea of popular sovereignty, allowing settlers to decide whether slavery would exist in a new state, and that rekindled Abraham Lincolns interest in politics. The Kansas-Nebraska Act also led to the 1854 founding of an anti-slavery Republican Party in Ripon, Wisconsin; it was five years before theDred Scottdecision denied Black citizenship and said we had no rights a white must respect. The speech eventually led to the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates in the Illinois senate race; it was given seven years before the 1859 John Brown Raid at the Harpers Ferry munitions plant to give guns to slaves to fight for their freedom; eight years before Lincoln was elected the first Republican president; and just nine years before the start of the Civil War in 1861 after the secession from the Union of 11 Confederate states.

Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation as a propaganda piece on January 1, 1863 freeing the slaves and allowing him to enlist Colored Troops to fight the Confederates and change the course of the war; the Civil War was followed by three Reconstruction Amendments, the 13th, 14thand 15th; the compromise of 1877 removed federal troops from the South leaving the freedmen unprotected. An 1896Plessy v. Fergusondecision established 58 years of apartheid; aBrowndecision in 1954 that ended legal apartheid; and a Civil Rights Movement that delivered a 1964 Public Accommodations Act, a 1965 Voting Rights Act and a 1968 Open Housing Act.

Even today the coronavirus has exposed African American lifethat we are dying the most because we have the most pre-existing conditions of diabetes, heart and lung disease, obesity and more, making us more vulnerable; that we have many of the most essential, but lowest paying jobs as workers at senior homes, as ambulance, bus, cab, Uber and Lyft drivers, meat packers and chicken processors; and we are the people most in need but without health insurance.

The protestors are saying, what is your Independence Day to me when I can have a knee put on my neck and lynched in public view with the camera rolling like George Floyd, shot in my bed like Breonna Taylor, shot in the back like Rayshard Brooks or shot by extra judicial racist forces like Ahmaud Arbery.

I cant celebrate a day when the Black unemployment rate, even in good economic times, is twice that of whites. Its hard to celebrate public inner-city schools filled with Black, brown and poor white students who arede factomore segregated today than in 1954 when Brownwas decided, because whites moved to the suburbs and took their taxes and jobs with them.Its hard to celebrate when you cant afford the rent because the minimum wage has been $7.25 for over a decade or a bank wont give you the same home loan they give to a white with similar income and credit.

But I see hope on the horizon. Never has the cause of Black Lives Matter and equality for African Americans been so widespread with whites, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans marching in the streets together for justice.Removing the Confederate statues and military base names and the names of people like Woodrow Wilson from buildingswhose white race supremacy views are offensivegives me hope.

It has become increasingly clear that Blacks are not the bottom of the economy in America; were the essential foundationof the nations economic strength.

I look forward to a 4thof July when Blacks, too, can celebrate the riches and all the benefits of our 400 years of labor.

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What Does July 4th Mean To Me? | The Crusader Newspaper Group - The Chicago Cusader

As many as 10,000 people could be working in slave-like conditions in textile factories in Leicester.

Leicestershire MP Andrew Bridgen has told Sky News a "conspiracy of silence" has allowed factories in the city to continue to exploit workers over many years.

"You've got a systemic failure of all the protections in Leicester that would prevent this from happening," Mr Bridgen said.

"I've estimated it's around 10,000 individuals who are effectively in modern slavery providing garments for internet retailers."

The claim comes on the same day a report based on police records found that across Britain there are at least 100,000 slaves.

The study by the Centre for Social Justice think-tank and the anti-slavery charity Justice and Care claims the issue is likely to intensify in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

A spike in COVID-19 cases in Leicester that led to the first local lockdown has drawn attention to the city and claims of widespread exploitation.

Leicester City Council estimates there are around 1,500 textile factories across the city.

Most are small businesses - workshops housed in crumbling buildings that are in desperate need of repair.

Smashed windows are patched up with cardboard. Fabric is draped so it's impossible to see inside.

For decades there have been claims some factories pay workers well below 8.72 per hour, the national minimum wage.

The government's Health and Safety Executive is investigating allegations some factories forced people to work in unsafe conditions during lockdown.

"The internet retailers have flourished during the COVID crisis because their competition has been shut down. So we've seen a huge extra demand for the products," said Mr Bridgen.

Many of the factories lie within the Leicester East constituency of MP Claudia Webbe.

She says she has been contacted by anonymous workers who are too scared to speak out publicly because many are in the country illegally.

"Machinists are being paid 3 an hour, packers are being paid 2 an hour. That is what seems to be the standard," she said.

Outside one factory a worker who asked not to be named told Sky News she is paid between 5 and 6 an hour.

"Very little money" she said, in broken English.

Immigration officers patrol the streets outside the factories and a multi-agency investigation is under way.

Many feel it is long overdue.

When asked if claims of widespread exploitation in the city are an "open secret", deputy mayor Adam Clarke replied: "You call it an open secret. It's just open.

"There are doubtless workplaces in the city that are unsuitable.

"We've been aware of this for a very long time and have been working with enforcement agencies to try to ensure that there is effective regulation enforcement.

"The network of agencies that have responsibilities is just too complex.

"There are just too many organisations, HMRC [HM Revenue & Customs], the GLAA [Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority], the HSE [Health and Safety Executive] and others have enforcement responsibilities. There needs to be one enforcement body and that needs to be set up as quickly as possible.

"This is a systemic issue that is borne out of poor regulation, poor legislation and exploitation at every level.

"You have to ask yourself who actually has the power to change this? And that buck stops with government."

A Home Office spokesperson said: "We take all allegations of modern slavery extremely seriously and are determined to ensure ruthless criminals who exploit vulnerable people face the full force of the law.

"The National Crime Agency and others are looking into the appalling allegations about sweatshops in Leicester and the home secretary has been clear that anyone profiting from slave labour will have nowhere to hide."

Immigration vans patrol the streets. The atmosphere is tense.Becky Johnson, Midlands correspondent

On East Park Road in Leicester among a row of shops, cafes, a bank and a police station stands the imposing Imperial Typewriter building.

At first glance it looks like a run-down relic of a bygone era.

But as you walk into the courtyard behind the building, it's like entering a land that time has forgotten.

Many of the windows have been smashed and patched up from the inside with cardboard. Fabric is draped across any windows that still have panes of glass. It's impossible to see in.

There's rubbish everywhere. The fact it's raining doesn't help.

Some people appear on a staircase, only to see me and run back inside.

There are several doors into the building, each with multiple names of clothing manufacturers above them.

I venture through one of the doorways and find myself on a rickety metal staircase.

I go up several floors before I find a door to knock on. When a man answers and I tell him I'm from Sky News he doesn't want to talk to me.

Other doorways lead to a maze of corridors. It's not clear which doorway belongs to which business.

It's the same story at the other factory buildings.

People are on edge as soon as they see we have a TV camera. They start to film us on their phones.

"The workers are all frightened," a delivery driver told me.

When I try to ask workers what they're paid, most simply reply that they don't speak English.

A Home Office immigration van patrols the streets. A police officer in plain clothes and an inspector from the city council leave a factory. The atmosphere is tense.

A man stops me and tells me he has information for me, then darts a look over his shoulder, sees something and runs off.

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Leicester: Up to 10,000 could be victims of modern slavery in textile factories - Sky News