Coronavirus: Is self-catering the best option? – World First Travel Insurance

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29 October 2020 09:25

How safe is a self-catered getaway?

Here's why a self-catered getaway might be the answer...

The hospitality industry is working overtime to implement new safety standards to ensure the highest levels of protection for guests and staff. In the UK, this includes things like the AA's COVID Confident assessment scheme and Premier Cottages' pandemic guidelines, backed by organisations including UK Hospitality, VisitEngland, Visit Scotland, VisitWales and the National Tourism Alliances.

For most accommodation, new guidelines include the following:

Choosing self-catered accommodation with no communal areas will mean you can largely keep your holiday within your social bubble. So whether it's a holiday cottage, seaside apartment or self-catered ski-chalet, being able to keep mealtimes within your own social space will help you minimise contact and reduce your chances of exposure.

In some cases, hosts are leaving rest-periods between guests to help minimise the chance of cross contamination. Studies suggest the risk of catching coronavirus from a hard surface is significantly reduced after 72 hours. Some owners are even allowing up to seven days between bookings to give their guests added peace of mind.

Under current guidelines (as of 22nd September 2020), you can stay overnight in groups of six with members of your own household or support bubble. In some cases, self-catered accommodation may even be able to allow up to 15 people, so long as you can prove you are all one household or bubble.

Visit the gov.uk website for further guidelines.

If you fall ill while staying in overnight accommodation, you should tell your host immediately so they can take measures to minimise transmission. You should also request a COVID test. If you are confirmed to have the virus, you should return home using private transport. If that's not possible, discuss your circumstances with your host.

It's likely that in most cases you will have to cover the costs of any extended stay at your accommodation, unless stated otherwise during booking or in your insurance policy.

All World First policies include our enhanced coronavirus cover, which means you are covered for certain types of holiday disruption caused by COVID-19. You can find out more here.

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Coronavirus: Is self-catering the best option? - World First Travel Insurance

From Lusaka to the world: why travel holds the key to economic recovery – themastonline.com

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[By Mohammad Bin Hafiz]

IT HAS now been well over six months since the world came to a halt, dramatically and in ways hard for us to imagine until it happened.

Global air travel was severely impacted in a matter of weeks soon after governments imposed travel restrictions and closed their borders.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented us all an avenue to get back to the drawing board, and to reflect and reassess what is important. One thing for sure that has been made apparent is the importance of the travel and tourism industries to the global economy.

In 2018, travel and tourism was Zambias fastest-growing national economic sector, contributing as much as US $1,846.9 million (about K19.4 billion at the time) to the national economy, according to a report by the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), and 318,900 jobs to the Zambian economy in 2018, making it the fastest growing sector in the country. In the same year, international visitors alone spent K8.4 billion, representing 8.3 percent of total Zambian exports.

Of course, these impressive statistics have been up-ended this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

From Lusaka to the world

As the new normal takes hold in Zambia, we may see some signs of economic recovery. And this is where the travel industry will play a pivotal role.

Emirates resumed flights direct from Lusaka to Dubai on September 4, 2020, reopening a vital route for the local economy, serving business and leisure travellers. For a landlocked country, the airline functions as a conduit linking Zambia to the rest of the world.

Our service resumption comes with thorough health and safety measures on board and on the ground.

Our network connects Zambia to the rest of the world; to major cities like Dubai, London, New York and Singapore, amongst others. We are connecting Lusaka to the worlds centres of commerce and trade on all continents.

We are focused and committed to our network, and we are working hard to rebuild it. We currently fly to 99 destinations.

Safety first

We are very much aware of the concerns that travellers have flying in the new normal. As Emirates, we have tailored and adjusted our product and service offerings to keep our clients fears at bay.

Emirates has implemented a comprehensive set of measures at every step of the customer journey to ensure the safety of its customers and employees on the ground and in the air, including the distribution of complimentary hygiene kits containing masks, gloves, hand sanitiser and antibacterial wipes to all customers.

To ensure the safety and peace of mind of travellers, visitors, and the community, COVID-19 PCR tests are mandatory for all inbound passengers arriving from the designated countries or/and when the destination country requires it, including UAE residents and tourists. The COVID19 PCR test is no longer required for passengers connecting through Dubai, although it may be required at your final destination.

Emirates has you covered

Customers can now travel with confidence, as Emirates has committed to cover COVID-19 related medical expenses, free of cost, should they be diagnosed with COVID-19 during their travel while they are away from home. This cover is immediately effective for customers flying on Emirates until December 31, 2020, and is valid for 31 days from the moment they fly the first sector of their journey. This means Emirates customers can continue to benefit from the added assurance of this cover, even if they travel onwards to another city after arriving at their Emirates destination.

As we resume flights to more cities, giving customers the same confidence to fly beyond borders is critical to sustaining our hub operations in Dubai.

While the situation surrounding COVID-19 remains uncertain, Emirates is optimistic of the future and economic recovery of our markets. Come on board and fly with us.

Mohammad Bin Hafiz is country manager for Emirates in Zambia.

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From Lusaka to the world: why travel holds the key to economic recovery - themastonline.com

Seasteading – Wikipedia

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The concept of creating permanent dwellings at sea

Seasteading is the concept of creating permanent dwellings at sea, called seasteads, outside the territory claimed by any government. The term is a blend of sea and homesteading.

Proponents say they can "provide the means for rapid innovation in voluntary governance and reverse environmental damage to our oceans ... and foster entrepreneurship." [1] Some critics fear seasteads are designed more as a refuge for the wealthy to avoid taxes or other obligations.[2]

No one has yet created a structure on the high seas that has been recognized as a sovereign state. Proposed structures have included modified cruise ships, refitted oil platforms, decommissioned anti-aircraft platforms, and custom-built floating islands.[3]

As an intermediate step, the Seasteading Institute has promoted cooperation with an existing nation on prototype floating islands with legal semi-autonomy within the nation's protected territorial waters. On January 13, 2017, the Seasteading Institute signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with French Polynesia to create the first semi-autonomous "seazone" for a prototype,[4][5] but later that year political changes driven by the French Polynesia presidential election led to the indefinite postponement of the project.[6] French Polynesia formally backed out of the project and permanently cut ties with Seadsteading on March 14, 2018.[7]

The first single-family seastead was launched near Phuket, Thailand by Ocean Builders.[8] Two months later, the Thai Navy claimed the seastead was a threat to Thai sovereignty.[9] As of 2019, Ocean Builders says it will be building again in Panama, with the support of government officials.[10]

Many architects and firms have created designs for floating cities, including Vincent Callebaut,[11][12] Paolo Soleri[13] and companies such as Shimizu, Ocean Builders[14] and E. Kevin Schopfer.[15]

For a dozen years L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology, and his executive leadership became a maritime-based community named the Sea Organization (Sea Org). Beginning in 1967 with a complement of four ships, the Sea Org spent most of its existence on the high seas, visiting ports around the world for refueling and resupply. In 1975 much of these operations were shifted to land-based locations.

Marshall Savage discussed building tethered artificial islands in his 1992 book The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps, with several color plates illustrating his ideas.

Other historical predecessors and inspirations for seasteading include:

At least two people independently coined the term seasteading: Ken Neumeyer in his book Sailing the Farm (1981) and Wayne Gramlich in his article "Seasteading Homesteading on the High Seas" (1998).[17]

Gramlich's essay attracted the attention of Patri Friedman.[18] The two began working together and posted their first collaborative book online in 2001.[19] Their book explored many aspects of seasteading from waste disposal to flags of convenience. This collaboration led to the creation of the non-profit The Seasteading Institute (TSI) in 2008.

In March 2019, a group called Ocean Builders claimed to have built the first seastead in International Waters, off the coast of the Thai island of Phuket.[20] Thai Navy officials have charged them of violating Thai Sovereignty.[21]

In April 2019, the concept of floating cities as a way to cope with rising oceans was included in a presentation by the United Nations program UN-Habitat. As presented, they would be limited to sheltered waters.[22]

On April 15, 2008, Wayne Gramlich and Patri Friedman founded the 501(c)(3) non-profit The Seasteading Institute (TSI), an organization formed to facilitate the establishment of autonomous, mobile communities on seaborne platforms operating in international waters.[23][24][25]

Friedman and Gramlich noted that according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a country's Exclusive Economic Zone extends 200 nautical miles (370km) from shore. Beyond that boundary lie the high seas, which are not subject to the laws of any sovereign state other than the flag under which a ship sails. They proposed that a seastead could take advantage of the absence of laws and regulations outside the sovereignty of nations to experiment with new governance systems, and allow the citizens of existing governments to exit more easily.[23][26][27]

The project picked up mainstream exposure after PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel donated $500,000 in initial seed capital[26] (followed by subsequent contributions). He also spoke out on behalf of its viability in his essay "The Education of a Libertarian".[28] TSI received widespread media attention.[29][25][30][31][32]

In 2008, Friedman and Gramlich said they hoped to float the first prototype seastead in the San Francisco Bay by 2010[33][34] followed by a seastead in 2014.[35] TSI did not meet these targets.

In January 2009, the Seasteading Institute patented a design for a 200-person resort seastead, ClubStead, about a city block in size, produced by consultancy firm Marine Innovation & Technology. The ClubStead design marked the first major engineering analysis in the seasteading movement.[25][36][37]

In July 2012, the vessel Opus Casino was donated to the Seasteading Institute.[38]

In the spring of 2013,[39] TSI launched The Floating City Project.[40] The project proposed to locate a floating city within the territorial waters of an existing nation, rather than the open ocean.[41] TSI claimed that doing so would have several advantages by placing it within the international legal framework and making it easier to engineer and easier for people and equipment to reach.

In October 2013, the Institute raised $27,082 from 291 funders in a crowdfunding campaign[42] TSI used the funds to hire the Dutch marine engineering firm DeltaSync[43] to write an engineering study for The Floating City Project.

In September 2016 the Seasteading Institute met with officials in French Polynesia[44] to discuss building a prototype seastead in a sheltered lagoon.[45] On January 13, 2017, French Polynesia Minister of Housing Jean-Christophe Bouissou signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with TSI to create the first semi-autonomous "seazone". TSI spun off a for-profit company called "Blue Frontiers", which will build and operate a prototype seastead in the zone.[46]

On March 3, 2018, French Polynesia government said the agreement was "not a legal document" and had expired at the end of 2017.[47] No action has been announced since.

A proposal to build a "floating island" with a luxury hotel in Jounieh north of the Lebanese capital Beirut, was stalled as of 2015 because of concerns from local officials about environmental and regulatory matters.[48][49]

Blueseed was a company aiming to float a ship near Silicon Valley to serve as a visa-free startup community and entrepreneurial incubator. Blueseed founders Max Marty and Dario Mutabdzija met when both were employees of The Seasteading Institute. The project planned to offer living and office space, high-speed Internet connectivity, and regular ferry service to the mainland[50][51] but as of 2014 the project was "on hold".[52]

Cruise ships are a proven technology, and address most of the challenges of living at sea for extended periods of time. However, they're typically optimized for travel and short-term stay, not for permanent residence in a single location.

Examples:

Platform designs based on spar buoys, similar to oil platforms.[55] In this design, the platforms rest on spars in the shape of floating dumbbells, with the living area high above sea level. Building on spars in this fashion reduces the influence of wave action on the structure.[36]

Examples:

There are numerous seastead designs based around interlocking modules made of reinforced concrete.[58] Reinforced concrete is used for floating docks, oil platforms, dams, and other marine structures.

Examples:

A single, monolithic structure that is not intended to be expanded or connected to other modules.

Examples:

Criticisms have been leveled at both the practicality and desirability of seasteading.

Critics believe that creating governance structures from scratch is a lot harder than it seems.[64] Also, seasteads would still be at risk of political interference from nation states.[25]

On a logistical level, without access to culture, travel, restaurants, shopping, and other amenities, seasteads could be too remote and too uncomfortable to be attractive to potential long-term residents.[25] Building seasteads to withstand the rigors of the open ocean may prove uneconomical.[64][25]

Seastead structures may blight ocean views, their industry or farming may deplete their environments, and their waste may pollute surrounding waters. Some critics believe that seasteads will exploit both residents and the nearby population.[64] Others fear that seasteads will mainly allow wealthy individuals to escape taxes,[2] or to harm mainstream society by ignoring other financial, environmental, and labor regulations.[2][64]

The Seasteading Institute held its first conference in Burlingame, California, October 10, 2008. Forty-five people from nine countries attended.[65]The second Seasteading conference was significantly larger, and held in San Francisco, California, September 2830, 2009.[66][67]The third Seasteading conference took place May 31 June 2, 2012.[68]

Seasteading has been imagined many times in novels as early as Jules Verne's 1895 science-fiction book Propeller Island (L'le hlice) about an artificial island designed to travel the waters of the Pacific Ocean, and as recent as 2003's The Scar, which featured a floating city, Armada. It has been a central concept in some movies, notably Waterworld (1995) and in TV series such as Stargate Atlantis, which had a complete floating city. And it is a common setting in video games, forming the premise of BioShock and BioShock 2, Brink, and Call of Duty: Black Ops II; and in anime, such as Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet which takes place mainly on a traveling city made of an interconnected fleet of ocean ships.

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Seasteading - Wikipedia

This is why the Thai navy busted a seasteading American

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BANGKOK Thai authorities have raided a floating home in the Andaman Sea belonging to an American man and his Thai partner who sought to be pioneers in the seasteading movement, which promotes living in international waters to be free of any nations laws.

Thailand's navy said Chad Elwartowski and Supranee Thepdet endangered national sovereignty, an offense punishable by life imprisonment or death.

It filed a complaint against them with police on the southern resort island of Phuket. Thai authorities said they have revoked Elwartowskis visa.

Elwartowski said in an email Thursday that he believes he and Supranee also known as Nadia Summergirl did nothing wrong.

"This is ridiculous," he said in an earlier statement posted online. "We lived on a floating house boat for a few weeks and now Thailand wants us killed."

The couple, who have gone into hiding, had been living part-time on a small structure they said was anchored outside Thailands territorial waters, just over 12 nautical miles from shore. They were not there when the navy carried out their raid on Saturday.

The Thai deputy naval commander responsible for the area said the project was a challenge to the country's authorities.

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"This affects our national security and cannot be allowed," Rear Adm. Wintharat Kotchaseni told Thai media on Tuesday. He said the floating house also posed a safety threat to navigation if it broke loose because the area is considered a shipping lane.

Seasteading has had a revival in recent years as libertarian ideas of living free from state interference such as by using crypto-currency including Bitcoin have become more popular, including among influential Silicon Valley figures such as entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Elwartowski, an IT specialist, has been involved in Bitcoin since 2010.

Several larger-scale projects are under development, but some in the seasteading community have credited the Andaman Sea house with being the first modern implementation of seasteading.

"The first thing to do is whatever I can to help Chad & Nadia, because living on a weird self-built structure and dreaming of future sovereignty should be considered harmless eccentricities, not major crimes," Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer who heads The Seasteading Institute, said on his Facebook page.

The floating two-story octagonal house at the center of the controversy had been profiled and promoted online by a group called Ocean Builders, which touted it as a pilot project and sought to sell additional units.

The group describes itself as "a team of engineering focused entrepreneurs who have a passion for seasteading and are willing to put the hard work and effort forward to see that it happens."

In online statements, both Elwartowski and Ocean Builders said the couple merely promoted and lived on the structure, and did not fund, design, build or set the location for it.

"I was volunteering for the project promoting it with the desire to be able to be the first seasteader and continue promoting it while living on the platform," Elwartowski told The Associated Press.

"Being a foreigner in a foreign land, seeing the news that they want to give me the death penalty for just living on a floating house had me quite scared," Elwartowski said. "We are still quite scared for our lives. We seriously did not think we were doing anything wrong and thought this would be a huge benefit for Thailand in so many ways."

Asked his next step, he was more optimistic.

"I believe my lawyer can come to an amicable agreement with the Thai government," he said.

Associated Press journalist Tassanee Vejpongsa contributed to this report.

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This is why the Thai navy busted a seasteading American

Seasteading | Ocean Builders

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Seasteadingis the concept of creating permanent dwellings at sea, called seasteads, outside the territory claimed by any government. The term is a combination of the wordsseaand homesteading.

Modern seasteading began around 2008 when Patri Friedman began highlighting his idea in Silicon Valley to build seastead communities where you could essentially vote with your home. This would allow for more experimentation in governance structures and advance governance in the same way that cell phones progress due to consumers having the ability to choose their cell phone.

Initially Patri teamed up with Peter Thiel to found The Seasteading Institute (TSI). With Mr. Thiels initial donation TSI began exploring ways to make seasteading happen. They did many studies, held contests for various designs and branched off different projects. The plans have usually revolved around building large cities which were very costly and were never able to obtain the financing necessary to get off the ground.

Early designs mainly used oil rigs as inspiration working toward building structures high above the waves. Then around 2012 the idea was put forward to do a phased approach of building in a protected waterway of a host nation under a special economic zone as a Phase 1 approach. This would be followed by Phase 2 where the seastead is moved 12 nautical miles out into the ocean where the seastead could enjoy relative sovereignty (barring oil and mineral rights). The third and final phase would be to move out into the open ocean 200 nm out to sea in international waters.

The phased approach would take decades and is currently being pursued by Blue Frontiers. They are working on getting permission from French Polynesia and have several other countries in the works.

We are taking a different approach with the spar design, taking our inspiration from oil rigs, pursuing the initial idea of being able to vote with your house.

There have been many people working in many different ways to get seasteading moving forward and we hope to include as many people in this wonderful endeavor as possible. It is our hope that our first seastead sends a message to the rest of the world that seasteading is finally happening and that they should come to our seastead to put their ideas into action.

I know that by now you are probably wondering about the waves. You really want to know about the waves right? If so, then move along to the next section to find out how we plan to deal with the waves.

What about the waves!?!

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Seasteading | Ocean Builders

Floating Island Project | The Seasteading Institute

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The Gulf of Fonseca, bordering three Central American nations, was chosen as a test case for the suitability of the design for protected, territorial waters this location selected was based loosely on the criteria we used for selecting host nations, such as proximity to cities and existing infrastructure, and location within an attractive climate, outside the path of hurricanes. However, site selection for this study should not be interpreted as suggesting that we have an agreement to develop a floating city in the Gulf of Fonseca. In a location like this, DeltaSync reports that the platforms could be completely solar-powered, and that this would in fact be more cost-effective than diesel generation, even including the costs of battery storage and distribution via micro-grid. This concept also assesses a scalable method of financing a breakwater, which could eventually surround the city and allow it to move out to the open ocean. Mobility of the individual modules is key from the perspective of guaranteeing autonomy for the city in the event that the relationship with a particular host nation no longer suits either party, the platforms could detach from their moorings and float to a different location. Modularity and mobility also enable dynamic geography and empower citizens of the city to rearrange into more desirable configurations as the population grows and evolves. While more in-depth engineering research is required, the preliminary analysis suggests that concrete platforms in the 50 x 50 meter dimensions strike the best balance between cost, movability, and stability in the waves of the representative region. Future research includes verifying the findings in DeltaSyncs report and honing the assumptions off of which the design is based.

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Floating Island Project | The Seasteading Institute

The Problem with Seasteading | Bottom-up

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I first wrote about seasteading two years ago, shortly after the Seasteading Institute launched. The brainchild of Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton) and others, seasteading is a program for political reform based on a proliferation of self-governing ocean colonies. As I described it in 2008:

A key advantage of seasteads is what Friedman calls dynamic geography, the fact that any given seasteading unit is free to join or leave larger units within seasteading communities. Seasteading platforms would likely band together to provide common services like police protection, but with the key difference that any platform that was dissatisfied with the value it was receiving from such jurisdictions could leave them at any time. [Friedman] argues that this would move power downward, giving smaller units within society greater leverage to ensure the interests of their members are being served.

Seasteading is based on a delightfully bottom-up argument: that the problem with government is the lack of choice. If I dont like my job, my apartment, or my grocery store, I can easily pick up and go somewhere else. The threat of exit induces employers, landlords, and store owners, and the like to treat us well without a lot of top-down oversight. In contrast, switching governments is hard, so governments treat us poorly. Seasteaders aim to change that.

The pragmatic incrementalism of seasteading is also appealing. Friedman doesnt have to foment a revolution, or even win an election, to give seasteading a try. If he can just a few hundred people of the merits of his ideas, they can go try it without needing assistance or support from the rest of us. If the experiment fails, the cost is relatively small.

Yet seasteading is a deeply flawed project. In particular, the theory of dynamic geography is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationships among mobility, wealth creation, and government power. In a real-world seasteading community, powerful economic forces would cripple dynamic geography and leave seasteaders no freer than the rest of us.

To see the problem, imagine if someone developed the technology to transform my apartment building in Manhattan into a floating platform. Its owners could, at any time, float us out into the Hudson river and move to another state or country. Would they do it? Obviously not. They have hundreds of tenants who are paying good money to live in Manhattan. Wed be furious if we woke up one morning and found ourselves off the coast of South Carolina. Things get more, not less, difficult at larger scales. Imagine if Long Island (which includes the New York boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn and a lot of suburbs) were a huge ocean-going vessel. The residents of Long Island would overwhelmingly oppose moving; most of them have jobs, friends, familiy, churches, favorite restaurants, and other connections to the rest of the New York metro area. The value of being adjacent to Manhattan swamps whatever benefits there might be to being part of a state with lower taxes or better regulations.

Successful cities need a variety of infrastructureroads, electricity, network connectivity, water and sewer lines, and so forth. At small scales you could probably design this infrastructure to be completely modular. But that approach doesnt scale; at some point you need expensive fixed infrastructuremulti-lane highways, bridges, water mains, subway lines, power plantsthat only make economic sense if built on a geographically stable foundation. Such infrastructure wouldnt be feasible in a dynamic city, and without such infrastructure its hard to imagine a city of even modest size being viable.

I think the seasteaders response to this is that the advantages of increased liberty would be so large that people would be willing to deal with the inconveniences necessary to preserve dynamic geography. But heres the thing: The question of whether the advantages of freedom (in the leave me alone sense) outweigh the benefits of living in large urban areas is not a theoretical one. If all you care about is avoiding the long arm of the law, thats actually pretty easy to do. Buy a cabin in the woods in Wyoming and the government will pretty much leave you alone. Pick a job that allows you to deal in cash and you can probably get away without filing a tax return. In reality, hardly anyone does this. To the contrary, people have been leaving rural areas for high-tax, high-regulation cities for decades.

Almost no ones goal in life is to maximize their liberty in this abstract sense. Rather, liberty is valuable because it enables us to achieve other goals, like raising a family, having a successful career, making friends, and so forth. To achieve those kinds of goals, you pretty much have to live near other people, conform to social norms, and make long-term investments. And people who live close together for long periods of time need a system of mechanisms for resolving disputes, which is to say they need a government.

The power of governments rests not on the immobility of real estate, but from the fact that people want to form durable relationships with other people. The residents of a seastead city would be no more enthusiastic about dynamic geopgrahy than the residents of Brooklyn. Which means that the government of the city would have the same kind of power Mayor Bloomberg has. Indeed, it would likely have more power, because the seastead city wouldnt have New Jersey a few hundred yards away ready to take disaffected residents.

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The Problem with Seasteading | Bottom-up

Politics Philosophized: The end of slavery Part 2 The Daily Free Press – Daily Free Press

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Part 2: American slavery and the 13th Amendment

It is a common belief that slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment, but a closer look at Section One of this amendment will disprove that idea.

I am not a member of the Black, Indigenous and People of Color community, and would like to acknowledge my privilege as a white person. I have never been impacted in the same way many within the BIPOC community have been by incarceration or forced servitude. But, I want to respectfully shed light on the effects of modern-day slavery on this community.

Slavery has always been constitutionally protected. The Three-Fifths Compromise is an important example of this. The U.S. Constitution allowed for the South to have more members in the federal House of Representatives by counting three-fifths of slaves toward the overall population of the state. The compromise also codified slavery as an American institution, which empowered slave owners.

The first major advancement toward the abolition of slavery was in 1807, when the slave trade was banned. Ending legal trade, however, did not truly impact the institution, as many American slaves remained in bondage and households still relied on their labor.

Traditional slavery continued legally until the 1865 passage of the 13th Amendment, which states that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted is allowed in the United States. So, involuntary servitude aka slavery is still legal for those who are serving time for a crime.

As a result of this amendment, our country still manages to profit off of slavery.

Unpaid labor is rampant throughout U.S. correctional facilities. The Louisiana State Penitentiary, also dubbed Angola, is a perfect example. Once a plantation, Angola is now a prison that forces inmates to work on a large farm, with threats as severe as solitary confinement looming over those who refuse labor.

Even a liberal stronghold like the state of California benefits from the institution of prison labor. Prisoners were paid just $1.45 a day to do life-threatening work fighting the states wildfires their labor was valued over their lives.

The 13th Amendment simply allowed a transfer of slave ownership from the individual to the state. With the highest number of prisoners around the globe, the United States is in turn the largest state-enforced system of modern slavery in the world.

You might be asking why this matters. Why should I care about the plight of the imprisoned?

First, you have to understand that more than 2 million people are currently incarcerated in the U.S. again, the highest number worldwide.

Many of the products you consume were produced by prison labor, and you probably dont even know it. Walmart used prisoners to build a store until 2005, when the company decided it would not support prison labor and even to scrape codes off of products so that they could be resold.

Victorias Secret used prison labor to manufacture its garments and lowered production costs by not adequately paying inmates. TJX continues to exploit prisoners for production and has faced legal ramifications from shareholders, but has since agreed to disclose information regarding its use of prison labor.

What should be done about this issue? Truthfully, I do not know what would reform a system we are so dependent on.

A simple solution is to pay prisoners a fair wage and work on removing the 13th Amendments provision allowing for state-based slavery. But those are just words. We must determine how to deconstruct a powerful American institution so we can enact fundamental change in the criminal justice system.

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Politics Philosophized: The end of slavery Part 2 The Daily Free Press - Daily Free Press

The Movement for Black Lives and Labor’s Revival – Labor Notes

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The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis ignited the most widespread series of protests in U.S. history. Working peoplenot only Black, but people of all raceswere the driving force. Even labor leaders who are usually reluctant to weigh in on hot social issues spoke out.

The challenge now is to bring the militancy and energy of this years revived Black struggle into the workplaceamid the coronavirus-driven economic crisis.

A deep look at U.S. labor history shows that labor can make big steps forward when Black workers are in motion in their communities. In our past, a mobilized Black community has brought the energy and self-confidence of powerful collective action in the streets into workplace organizing. Its also brought a grassroots orientation that challenges top-down conservatism.

Will the same be true for unions today?

The potential could be glimpsed in the early weeks of the pandemic, when union and non-union workers alike took action over unsafe working conditions, in worksites ranging from hospitals to Amazon warehouses to grocery stores. Because so many essential workers are Black and Latino, they were often at the center of the action, from Detroit bus drivers to Pittsburgh sanitation workers to Georgia poultry workers.

What makes the Black Lives Matter protests so important isnt just their size. Its the fact that demonstrators are linking the struggle against racist police violence to the whole racist system. The basketball players walkout in August highlighted the connection between racism in society and at the workplace.

Black workers have never drawn a line between civil rights in the community and worker rights on the job. That has everything to do with the central role Black labor has always played in the U.S. economy, from the unpaid labor of slavery to the low wages paid to Black workers by modern industrialists to boost profits.

Labor history shows that Black workers dont protest in the streets while keeping quiet at work.

Black workers were key to labors 1930s upsurge in many industries, particularly in the South, even if many Southern struggles were ultimately unsuccessful. In the Midwest, the steel, auto, and meatpacking industries could not have been unionized had not rank-and-file organizers, including socialists of all currents, taken on the racism of the companiesand often of their white co-workers.

Many workplaces and unions at the time were Jim Crowbarred to Black workers. In New York City, a Black community boycott of two privately owned bus lines in 1941 forced the companies to hire Black workers.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Black workers were the driving force of the Southern civil rights movement. A key strategist of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56the breakthrough struggle of the civil rights movementwas E.D. Nixon, the Alabama president of an all-Black railroad union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Nixon was among those who worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then a dynamic but largely unknown 27-year-old preacher. The Brotherhood was a key connection between Black union members in Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland and mostly non-union Southern workers.

The Southern civil rights movement prodded the highly conservative AFL-CIO bureaucracy into supporting it, even as nearly all-white building trades unions kept fighting to maintain a color bar into the 1960s. More generally, the level of mobilization in the Black community and the confidence that came with winning the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 reinforced the desire to fight at work as well.

The Southern Black struggle then came North in the form of the Black Power movement. By then Black workers represented big numbers in major industrial unions, such as auto and steel. Black workers were an essential part ofand often a leading force inthe strike wave that began in the mid-1960s.

That period saw a massive expansion of public sector unionism, with Black workers a key component. The welfare rights movement in New York City, with Black women at the center, is one example. That movement was linked to social workers unionization efforts in the Social Services Employees Union, an independent organization that struck in defiance of the law and got the support of King and other civil rights leaders as well as community groups. SSEU helped open the way for AFSCMEs recognition and formal public sector bargaining rights in New York.

The assassination of Dr. King led to street rebellions across the U.S. in 1968. Three months later, in auto, Black workers Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) led a 1968 wildcat over speedup and discrimination, which spurred similar organizations and strikes elsewhere in auto and in other industries. The workers also took on internal struggles in the United Auto Workers. The UAW had been willing to support the Southern civil rights movement and the 1963 March on Washington, but it sought to suppress Black members demands internally.

The 1970 national postal wildcat was strongest in the big cities of the Northeast and Midwest, strongholds for Black workers. Black workers were the absolute majority of postal workers in Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Detroit. That job action was likely the largest-ever Black participation in a strike.

Labor struggles of the late 1960s and 1970s were widespread and certainly not limited to Black workers. But the militancy of Black workers was an essential ingredient. Could that same dynamic emerge today?

Potentially. But this time Black workersand their Latino, Asian, and white co-workerswill have to undertake the basic task of union organization on a much greater scale. In 1970, more than 24 percent of workers belonged to unions. The Black Power movement could therefore find a connection in heavily Black unionized workplaces in auto and the post office. Today the path from protest to the workplace is more difficult.

But the same dynamic still exists. The Fight for 15 movement, even though it did not result in union contracts, won a $15 minimum wage through legislation in some states and cities in large part because of the participation of low-wage Black workers. And Black workers are more likely to be in unions than any other group.

Certainly, Black workers have lost important footholds in the unions over the last few decades, with plant closures and shifts of production to the largely non-union South. And now the pandemic economic shutdown has hammered the hospitality and service economy, leading to layoffs in union hotels that hit Black and Latino workers particularly hard.

But Black workers are still a strong component of labors remaining base in the private sector, such as auto and UPS, and in the public sector, where they are 20 percent of the total. That means Black workers have an outsized role to play in any resistance to pandemic-driven government budget cuts.

The Chicago Teachers Unions strikes of 2012 and 2019 showed how a bold union can win public support for demands that address racist realities. The CTU fought for The Schools Our Children Deserve, for Black teachers facing job loss, for rent control and sustainable housing and services for homeless students, and against evictions. The potential for such connections is much wider after the anti-racism protests of 2020.

Its a huge fight. But it always has been. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 give labor activists the opportunity to revive that tradition.

Tim Schermerhorn is a retired transit worker in New York City and a former vice president of Transport Workers Union Local 100. Lee Sustar is a journalist in Chicago and member of the National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981.

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It is all just a metaphor: The New York Times attempts yet another desperate defense of its discredited 1619 Project – WSWS

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On October 16, New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein issued a new defense of the 1619 Project in which he now argues that its best-known claimthat the year 1619 and not 1776 represents the true founding of the United Stateswas a metaphorical turn of phrase not intended to be read literally. Further confusion is attributed to an editorial error arising from the difficulties of managing a multi-platform media operation. Published under the title, On Recent Criticism of The 1619 Project, Silversteins essay is a convoluted lawyers argument that attempts to palm off historical falsification as merely minor matters of syntax, punctuation, and a somewhat careless use of metaphor.

When the 1619 Project was published in August 2019, to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first African slaves in colonial Virginia, no historical claims were too grandiose for Silverstein and lead writer and project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones. The 1619 Project, the Times proclaimed, would reframe all of American history to show that the past and the present can only be understood through the prism of slavery and the endemic racial hatred of whites for blacks.

In supporting this larger claim, the 1619 Project asserted that the events of 1776 were, in essence, a preemptive counterrevolution aimed at thwarting a British plan to end slavery in North America. Then, in the aftermath of the separation from Britain, black Americans fought back alone, the Times asserted, to make America a democracywithout the assistance of abolitionists, the Union army, Abraham Lincoln, or any other white person, all of whom benefited from slavery and white capitalism.

Furthermore, according to Hannah-Jones and the Times, true history had been suppressed by dishonest white historians hellbent on maintaining their racist founding myth of 1776. After two centuries of a historical narrative centered on the false elevation of 1776, the 1619 Project declared that it was finally time to tell our story truthfully.

In spite of Silversteins deletion of the true founding claim and his other word changes, the Times essential position remains the same: The American Revolution was a retrograde event, in which the defense of slavery was the critical motivation. Yet, to this day neither Silverstein nor any other defender of the 1619 Project has bothered to confront the obvious historical questions that this position raises in relationship to both American and world history:

If the American Revolution was a reactionary event, why was it hailed by contemporaries beyond the shores of the United States as the dawn of a new democratic age? Did the American Revolution play no role in the chain of events that produced the French and Haitian revolutions, as well as the industrial revolution, the working class, and socialism? Why was Tom Paine made an honorary citizen of the new French Republic? If the proclamation of human equality in the Declaration of Independence is only a founding myth, and not a discovery whose revolutionary meaning tears through all subsequent history, how do we explain the fact that every progressive social movement has inscribed this maxim on its banner? How was it that the United States developed, within a generation, a mass anti-slavery movement, and within four score and seven years a great Civil War that destroyed slavery? Were all those who identified the American Revolution with the cause of freedom, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King included, merely dupes of the American founding fathers?

The most obvious error made by the 1619 Projectthat the American Revolution was waged to stop British abolition of slaverybecame indefensible after the Times own fact checker, Leslie Harris of Northwestern University, felt compelled to admit that she had vigorously opposed it. Silverstein tried to manage this exposure of the Times dishonest suppression of the fact-checkers objection with a clever cut and paste modification of Hannah-Jones false claim. The original categorical denunciation of pre-1619 Project historiography had read:

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. [Emphasis added]

Silverstein added two words so that the amended version now reads:

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. [Emphasis added]

In the original version, the defense of slavery is presented as one of the primary reasons the colonists decided for separation from Britain. In the 1619 Project version 2.0, the concern over the fate of slavery motivates only some ofHow many? Who? Where?the colonists. Presto! Problem solved. Or so Silverstein thought. But the modified statement is still false. Far from being conflicted over slavery, until 1833 the British Empire maintained its own lucrative slave plantations in the Caribbean, where Loyalist slaveowners fled, human property in tow of His Majestys Navy.

As for the Projects quietly-deleted true founding thesiswhich was emblazoned on the Times website and repeated again and again by Hannah-Jones on social media, in interviews, and her national lecture tourSilverstein now claims that this was the product of nothing more than a minor technical error, the sort of snafu that is an inevitable outcome of difficulties for modern-day editors, such as himself, in managing a multiplatform publication and figuring out how to present the same journalism in all those different media. With all of these formats to tend to, the beleaguered editors of the Times just couldnt get the story straight! Silverstein does not seem to grasp that the criteria of objective truth do not change as one moves from printed newspaper to website, or from Facebook to Twitter. What is a lie in one format remains a lie in another.

In addition to chalking up the mistaken true founding claim to his far-flung editorial responsibilities, Silverstein attempts to defend Hannah-Jones by implying that readers failed to appreciate the sense that this was a metaphor. He should have been more attentive, he says, to online language [that] risked being read literally. This is among the most inspired of Silversteins excuses. From here on in, whenever Times correspondents like Judith Miller are caught lying, its editors may claim that the journalists are writing in metaphors that are not to be read literally.

Silverstein cites the original, metaphorical, version of the 1619 Project. This is the version that was sent out to school children. It read, with emphasis added:

1619 is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our countrys history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nations birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the countrys true birth date, the moment that our defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?

He then quotes the revised passage, that has been made to the online publication only:

1619 is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our countrys history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nations birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that the moment that the countrys defining contradictions first came into the world was in late August of 1619?

Perhaps Silverstein hopes his readers will carelessly jump over this scissors-and-glue work. He writes that the difference in the two passages is to the wording and the length, not the facts. But actually, there to be read literally in black and white, the first passage refers specifically to an allegedly false fact. If a metaphor is being employed in the original version, it is very well concealed.

Silverstein repeats Hannah-Jones conceit that historians have ignored the African American experience. Such a claim exposes both Silversteins and Hannah-Jones ignorance of historical literature. The 1619 Project is as much a falsification of historiography as it is of history.

In Depth

The New York Times 1619 Project

The Times Project is a politically-motivated falsification of history. It presents the origins of the United States entirely through the prism of racial conflict.

Since the 1930s, an enormous body of scholarship has developed on the periods of American history that the 1619 Project breezes through as so many turnstiles in the unfolding history of white racism: the colonial era and the emergence of slavery; the American Revolution and the entrenchment of slavery in the antebellum South with the development of cotton production; the development of the free labor North, antislavery politics and the destruction of slavery in the Civil War; the struggle for and ultimate failure of Reconstruction; and the replacement of slavery by sharecropping, Jim Crow segregation, industry and wage labor. These vast subjects have attracted the attention of significant historians, and fascinating and intense debate among them and their studentsW.E.B. Du Bois, Eric Williams, Kenneth Stampp, Stanley Elkins, C. Vann Woodward, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, Eugene Genovese, Don Fehrenbacher, David Potter, James McPherson, Herbert Gutman, David Montgomery, Eric Foner, David Brion Davis, Ira Berlin, Barbara Fields, and James Oakes, to name only a few.

This scholarship has been ignored by the 1619 Project. There is no evidence that Hannah-Jones passing acquaintance with American history extends beyond her reading of two books by the black nationalist Lerone Bennett, Jr., the longtime editor of Ebony magazine.

In an attempt to buttress the claim that the 1619 Project is finally bringing to light suppressed history, Silverstein cites a recent study of US history textbooks by the Southern Poverty Law Center that found popular history textbooks do not provide comprehensive coverage of slavery and enslaved peoples. As if it aids his cause, he points to one of the studys key findings, that only 8 percent of high school seniors were aware that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War.

No doubt it is true that American students know little about slavery and its centrality to the Civil War. But this speaks to a larger crisis of historical consciousness. The public schools, starved of funding, have shifted limited resources away from social studies and the arts to practical pursuits, a process pushed forward by Barack Obama, who said in office that folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree. The same shifting of resources away from history has taken place at the universities. There were over 19 million Americans enrolled in college in 2017, but only 24,255 graduated with degrees in historya 33 percent decline since 2001while 381,000 degrees were awarded to business majors.

Under these conditions, is it really any wonder that high school seniors know little about the causes of the Civil War or even precisely when it took place? But what share of American high school and college graduates can explain the causes of either World War I or World War II, or even correctly identify the years during which these wars were fought? What percentage of American students could state with even approximate accuracy the years of the American involvement in Vietnam, let alone explain the reasons underlying its intervention?

The lack of knowledge is even greater when it comes to the subject that is virtually absent from public discussion in the United States: the history of the working masses and the class struggle that they have waged against American capitalism. This is a subject that involves the fate of the vast majority of the population, including the countless millions of impoverished immigrants who arrived on the shores of America and then fought to raise the dignity of labor, to use an old phrase. This history finds not the slightest echo in the 1619 Project, which does not acknowledge the existence of class struggle in the United States.

There is plenty of oppression and suffering in the history of what John Brown called this guilty land to go around. The United States has long been the country with the most powerful and ruthless capitalist class on the planet. Before that it was home to the richest and most powerful slave owning class. But the explosive development of industrial capitalism in the aftermath of the Civil War gave rise to the most polyglot working class. Under these conditions the great challenge confronting the socialist movement has always been to unite workers across innumerable racial, national, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and regional barriers to confront their common antagonists.

The 1619 Project has been a case study in historical ignorance and dishonesty. Silversteins latest exercise in self-justification continues the pattern of falsification and evasion. When the 1619 Project was criticized as poor journalism, Silverstein claimed it was history; and when it was criticized as bad history, he claimed it was mere journalism. Now, when it is proven that the 1619 Projects central thesis is false, Silverstein announces that the argument was merely metaphorical and not meant to be taken literally.

In the end, the New York Times argument is a variation of a crooked politicians age-old evasion: We know that you think you know what we said. But what you read is not what we meant.

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It is all just a metaphor: The New York Times attempts yet another desperate defense of its discredited 1619 Project - WSWS

Save the election, resist the hate – NationofChange

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Its clear how the Republicans intend to steal the election. To paraphrase James Carvilles oft-paraphrased line, Its the courts, stupid! The pathetic Judiciary Committee hearings supposedly intended to test Amy Coney Barretts fitness for the Supreme Court were conducted with all the smug Republican aplomb of bureaucrats who knew the fix was in. The real prize for the extremists has always been the courts. Ever since the 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education decision ushered in the era of desegregation, and Roe vs. Wade in 1973 effectively legalized abortion, the extremist right has fought to implant the courts with fanatics, reactionary white males, homophobes, racists, and misogynists, and blatantly un-American theocrats who want to impose their own narrow, often lunatic beliefs on the rest of the country.

The Republicans know they cannot regain the House, at least not unless millions of electronic voting machines are hacked (which with Russian help could happen) and paper ballots dumped. And if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris win convincingly, Republicans may well concede the presidency. However, even if the Democrats to win the Senate, key races will be very close.

Lets say five seats are won by the Democrats by 3% or less, i.e., 51.5%-48.5%. Immediately, Republicans claim mail-in ballot fraud. Al Gore and the Democrats did the nation a tremendous disservice in 2000 by not fighting the stealing of the election in Florida; John Kerry followed suit in 2004 by ignoring the highly suspect Ohio returns. Today, if an election in Red-Land is remotely close, we expect the Republicans to steal it. Texas, in fact, is not a red state: it is deep purple but between voter suppression, gerrymandering, and local good ol boy manipulation, Republicans control the legislature and the electoral votes. Florida is a blue state; not by much, but it is. Suppression of black voters has a long history in Florida; Florida police are supposedly taking steps to prevent the Trump campaign to intimidate voters by showing up at the polls armed to the teeth. On the national level, the Republican campaign to suppress the vote is backed by many of the partys major funders. It is a racially driven policy to undermine our basic electoral rights and install the right wing as the permanent party in power. It can only succeed if the courts, and Supreme Court especially, are on board.

Race. Abortion. Gay marriage. Those are the red flag issues. Guns get the loonies all worked up but racism, misogyny, and homophobia mobilizes the Republican rank and file. And that hatred drives the extremist takeover of our judiciary. Strip away the coded language and the cries of save the babies and at bottom, its about hate.

The media has been forced by the Black Lives Matter movement to address racism more openly than at any time since the heyday of the civil rights movement, 1954-1965. After the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed in 1964 and 1965 a century after the Civil War, many Americans felt we had turned the corner on racism. The laws were steered through Congress by a Texan, President Lyndon Johnson, and a leading member of the House of Representatives, Harlems Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., known for his militant stands against racism and segregation. America basked in the liberal afternoon warmth of FDRs legacy, the victory over fascism in World War II, the tragically lost dynamism of the Kennedy years, and LBJs smashing presidential victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964. What could go wrong?

A lot, actually. The Vietnam war had its genesis in a deeply held American racism that equated whiteness with superiority and the right to raise the worlds backwardprimitivesavage brown, black, and yellow people to the level of our enlightened free market, wage-slave, finance-driven civilization. The indiscriminate bombing and napalming of villagers in Korea and Vietnam would likely have been immediately decried were the victims white Europeans (World War II excepted). Racism is not simply a cancer in our society, it is knit into the fabric of our domestic policies and foreign relations.

It doesnt take a malicious majority to destroy a nation or any community. A neighborhood with 5% of its people engaged in some form of violent crime would in effect be a war zone (1250 of 25,000 inhabitants). If a significant percentage of Americans are racist, whether aggressively so or in a more passive-aggressive manner, the impact on our society will be immense.

The lynch mobs of the first half of the 20th century comprised the children and grandchildren of those Confederate soldiers who, by the Civil Wars end, were massacring freed slaves and assassinating black leaders who took Emancipation and Reconstruction seriously. Racism never died, it didnt even go underground. Once Reconstruction ended in 1877, the white South turned to figuring out how to impose slavery within the law. (Not to mention widespread racial discrimination in the rest of the country). They came up with feudal tenant farming; the theft of more than one million farms from southern black owners; minimal appropriations to infrastructure and services in black communities; prison chain gangs for the most minor offenses; and unrestricted violence against black men and women and, yes, children too.

Those who devised the strategy for the rights resurgence kept their eye on the prizethe courts. And now with the Supreme Court tamed, with three awful Trump appointees finally turning it into an extremist rubber-stamp that can overturn elections, weve reached the natural outcome of a nation that never gave up hatred as a driving engine at its core. Most of us may not hold these beliefs, but enough do to create a critical mass of fanaticsthe zombies of TV-landwho can destroy a nations culture the way a violent mob can destroy a community.

Lets say those five hypothetical Senate races mentioned above mean the difference between the Senate being 52-48 Democrat versus 53-47 Republican. They are challenged through various judicial channels, each court like a gate on a computer chip. Whenever an impartial judge blocks the challenge, it is routed on to the next gate until an amenable judge upholds it. Meanwhile, Republican state legislatures go through legal contortions to declare the election already decided for their candidates. Finally, all five challenges reach the Supreme Court. As a tactical ploy, the Court decides early for one Democratic candidate. See how impartial we are! But then in rapid succession, it upholds the four remaining Republican challenges by throwing out hundreds of thousands of votes. 52-48, Republicans. They can live with that.

And what will we do? What if Biden and Harriss election is stolen as well? No semblance of American democracy will remain.

The only thing that can work against a hijacked election is mass citizen action. A General Strike. Millions laying siege to statehouses and D.C. With all our purported freedoms, Americans have allowed unions and strikes to fade into a quaint relic. Along with strike- and union-busting, restrictive laws against unions, and a steady stream of anti-union propaganda denouncing them, nothing worked better than shipping manufacturing jobs overseas. Americans in the service economy view themselves as powerless or, if higher up the ladder, privileged. They are oblivious to the immense benefits unions brought to their grandparents and parents. But we dont have time to revive unions per se. If the election is clearly being stolen, Democrat leaders should declare a General Strike and they should be prepared to lead mass demonstrations.

Bring it all to a screeching halt. Let Wall Street plunge and freak out. Let the billionaires watch their fortunes evaporate. Let the supply chains dry up and inventories disappear. Force the generals to decide whether they will kowtow to illegitimate power or do their jobs and protect democracy. Scare the bastards so bad that Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Barrett will be summoned to a meeting of the real honchos and told its time to stop the charade. Then have Biden lead the charge for a thirteen member Supreme Court with 18 year terms; term limits on judges throughout the judiciary; a major recall campaign for the most law-abusing judges; and a restoration of a semblance of law and order to our legal system. Then we may have a fighting chance against racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other malicious biases, because that hatred, along with untrammeled greed, is whats driving the Republican agenda. Without resistance, were finished.

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Act’s David Seymour calling for ‘hard-left’ Human Rights Commission to be abolished – New Zealand Herald

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Politics

29 Oct, 2020 12:09 AM5 minutes to read

Act leader David Seymour wants the Human Rights Commission abolished. Photo / Michael Craig

Act leader David Seymour wants the Human Rights Commission abolished because of its "left-wing manifesto".

"The Commission is a hard-left organisation masquerading as a government department," Seymour said.

The Human Rights Commission today called for the new government to honour human rights and laid out 39 issues it wants politicians to adopt.

Included are creating a written constitution that honours Te Tiriti o Waitangi, makes the minimum wage the living wage, creates more employment opportunities for disabled people, builds decent and affordable homes and a formulates national action plan against racism.

It also wants a national strategy to deal with family violence, an end pay discrimination, for police to collect hate crime data and to make the health and disability system work for all disabled people.

Chief Human Rights Commissioner Paul Hunt said successive governments had made these promises over many years and it was time for the new government to deliver them.

"Human rights place responsibilities on governments. They also place responsibilities on individuals to embrace diversity, support vibrant communities and not be racist or homophobic."

Seymour said the manifesto showed the commission was "no longer interested in helping real people with actual human rights issues, but simply advancing a left-wing agenda".

"The commission has become irrelevant, and even dangerous, when it cannot defend our most basic human right.

"The commission has become a highly politicised, left-wing organisation, and when it comes to actually helping people with human rights, it doesn't help at all.

"Act sees no purpose for it and would abolish it completely," said Seymour.

The Human Rights Commission's 39 human rights issues were collected from all four commissioners and are:

Chief Human Rights Commissioner Paul Hunt

Everyone should have a warm, dry, safe, decent home Look after the environment as kaitiaki (guardian) for our children and grandchildren We not only have rights, we also have responsibilities to our communities Rainbow communities can express who they are and be respected and safe A community-based health system (physical and mental health) for everyone Public officials must respect the human rights promises governments have made toall of us The welfare system should ensure a secure and dignified life for everyone Honour and implement the growing partnership between kwanatanga (Crown) andrangatiratanga (hap and iwi) Establish a Human Rights Commissioner for Older People Getting the balance right between freedom of speech and the right to be safe Treat people who are deprived of their liberty with respect A written Constitution that honours Te Tiriti o Waitangi

Disability Rights Commissioner Paula Tesoriero MNZM

Respect for disabled people by upholding our dignity and celebrating ourcontributions Give disabled young people a fair go in our education system Make houses, transport and public places accessible so everyone can use them Services respect and work in partnership with tngata whaikaha (Mori disabledpeople) More and better employment opportunities for disabled people Better services for those experiencing violence and abuse Make the health system work for all disabled people Public information provided in ways, such as te reo Mori, NZ Sign Language, andbraille, so that everyone can understand Collect better information about disabled people so services can be better designedfor them

Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner Saunoamaali'i Dr Karanina Sumeo

Ensure government contracts have job targets for Mori, women, disabled people,55+, vulnerable youth, Pacific Peoples and ethnic minorities End pay discrimination Free early childhood education Establish fair employment contracts for all Make the minimum wage a living wage Establish a safe and trusted process to deal with sexual harassment and bullying Eliminate modern slavery and exploitation in the workplace

Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon

A National Action Plan Against Racism Teach Te Tiriti o Waitangi, local histories and human rights in schools Police to collect hate crime data Make government systems work for Mori e.g. health, justice, education, OrangaTamariki, welfare and housing A public anniversary to commemorate the New Zealand Wars Support Mori to take part in the political process Equal rules for creating general wards and Mori wards Establish a national action plan for the implementation of the UN Declaration onthe Rights of Indigenous Peoples Appoint an Indigenous Rights Commissioner at the Human Rights Commission A government Ministry for ethnic communities Develop a national strategy to deal with family violence

The Human Rights Commission's call was welcomed by the Public Service Association, the Child Poverty Action Group, the Citizens Advice Bureau, the Disabled Persons Assembly and Community Housing Aotearoa.

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Act's David Seymour calling for 'hard-left' Human Rights Commission to be abolished - New Zealand Herald

Husband sentenced to more than 15 years for mistreating workers from India – newsindiatimes.com

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Following the sentencing of his wife Sharmistha Barai, to more than 15 years in prison, Satish Kartan, 46, of Sacramento, was sentenced Oct. 22, 2020, to 15 years and eight months in prison for forced labor violations, the same term as his wife.

In addition, U.S.District Judge Morrison C. England Jr. ordered $15,657 be paid in restitution to three victims, all workers brought from India as domestic labor, in part to cover their back wages and other losses.

On March 14, 2019, after an 11-day trial, a federal jury found Kartan and Barai, 40, guilty of conspiracy to obtain forced labor and two counts of obtaining forced labor. Kartan was also found guilty of one count of fraud in foreign labor contracting. On Oct. 2, Barai was sentenced to 15 years and eight months in prison for forced labor violations.

Kartan earned his sentence by the systematic abuse and exploitation of vulnerable women for the benefit of his wife and family, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of California McGregor W. Scott is quoted saying in the press release. He verbally abused multiple victims, withheld basic sustenance from them, and physically intimidated them. Todays sentence will send a loud message to others engaged in human trafficking and labor. Moreover, it will give Kartans victims the peace of mind that he will never be able to abuse them again.

The United States abolished slavery and involuntary servitude more than 150 years ago, said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the Justice Departments Civil Rights Division. Yet, inhuman forced labor and deprivations of liberty and dignity persist because human traffickers proliferate modern-day slavery, and endeavor to exploit their fellow human beings for profit and other gruesome purposes.

Those engaged in the heinous crime of forced labor will face severe consequences for their actions, said Special Agent in Charge Matthew Perlman of the Diplomatic Security Service, San Francisco Field Office. The Diplomatic Security Service and our partner agencies will continue to aggressively pursue and prosecute those who commit visa fraud to exploit others for their own personal gain.

Authorities appealed to the public to report alleged human trafficking to law enforcement or submit a tip to tips.fbi.gov.

According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, between February 2014 and October 2016, Kartan and Barai hired workers from overseas to perform domestic labor in their home in Stockton. In advertisements seeking workers on the internet and India-based newspapers, the defendants made false claims about the wages and conditions of employment, the press release said.

Once the workers arrived at the defendants Stockton residence, Kartan and Barai compelled them to work up to 18 hours a day with limited rest and nourishment. Few of them were paid any wage. As part of the conspiracy, the couple kept the domestic workers from leaving and coerced them to continue working by threatening them, by creating an atmosphere of fear, control, and disempowerment, and at times by physically hitting or burning them. When a victim resisted or expressed a desire to leave, the threats and abuse became worse, the court documents quoted in the press release said.

This case was the product of an investigation by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the FBI, and the State Departments Diplomatic Security Service.

The Eastern District of California (Sacramento) is one of six districts designated through a competitive, nationwide selection process as a Phase II Anti-Trafficking Coordination Team, through the interagency ACTeam Initiative of the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Labor, the press release said.

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Husband sentenced to more than 15 years for mistreating workers from India - newsindiatimes.com

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

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

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

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

For more on poverty and inequality priorities.

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

For more on racial justice priorities.

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

For more on criminal legal system priorities.

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

For more on women's rights priorities.

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

For more on immigration and border policy priorities.

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

For more on LGBT rights priorities.

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

For more on technology and human rights priorities.

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

For more information on environment and human rights priorities.

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

For more information on children's rights priorities.

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

For more information on workers' rights priorities.

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

Journalists Pick Sides When They Call Adding Justices ‘Court Packing’ – Common Dreams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Floating Offshore Wind Turbines Set to Make Inroads in U.S. – Scientific American

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A second phase of offshore wind development is about to get underway in the U.S., starting in Maine, a state that sees its energy future built on a new type of wind turbine. It is one that can float in deeper waters and that may be built more cheaply than existing wind turbines being constructed or planned along most of the U.S. East Coast.

One of the main beneficiaries of what are called floatersturbines that are held by mooring lines attached to anchors in waters deeper than 160 feetwill likely be the U.S. West Coast, where California and Hawaii are planning wind farms and Oregon and Washington are expected to follow.

This will be a global industry, predicted Walter Musial, the leading expert on offshore wind for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. At the moment, the business is in its infancy, but he noted that 80% of the worlds offshore waters suitable for wind turbines near major population centers are deep.

The major type of offshore turbines built in Europe and just beginning to rise along the East Coast are installed in shallower waters on fixed foundations that may be too expensive to build in deeper waters. But floaters, which have the added cost-saving advantage of being assembled in nearby ports and then towed out to sea, Musial predicted, will be close to or near to being cost competitive with them by 2024.

Floaters are likely to give a major boost to what has already become a large, capital-intensive renewable energy business. According to an estimate by the University of Delaware, the existing fixed-bottom offshore turbines underway or in advanced planning in seven East Coast states involve capital costs of $70 billion and would result in 18.6 gigawatts of electricitythe equivalent output of 18 average-size nuclear power plantsbetween 2020 and 2030 (Climatewire, July 30).

Unlike fixed-bottom turbines, a business now dominated by European companies, floaters have been pioneered by U.S. innovators, including a team of researchers at the University of Maine. They went to work in 2009 to find an energy source that could save the state from a looming economic crisis because the price of heating oil had risen to $4 a gallon.

If that persisted, noted Habib Dagher, executive director of the University of Maines Advanced Structures and Composites Center, it would mean a $10,000 annual heating bill, pushing families and communities in northern Maine into poverty during its frozen winters. It was not sustainable and a big crisis in the state, he recalled in an interview.

So the team plunged into a plan for a potential solution: Daghers dream of a turbine sitting on a base made with hollow, bucketlike concrete floats.

Backed by Maines Legislature with one vote short of a unanimous approval and financial help from the U.S. Department of Energy, the team erected a model wind turbine, one-eighth the size of a conventional turbine, and put it on a float. Then the team had a tugboat tow it out to an offshore site.

It was small but strong enough to stand up to powerful winds and crashing waves, and made history in 2013 as the first floatable wind turbine to feed electricity into the U.S. power grid.

On paper that looked impressive because Maines offshore wind-making potential is 36 times greater than the states total electricity demand. In the following years, not much happened, but recently two serious industry players joined Maine in a $100 million partnership to build a full-size floating turbine near the site.

They are Diamond Offshore Wind, a subsidiary of Japans Mitsubishi Corp., and RWE Renewables, a subsidiary of a large German electric utility and the second-largest offshore wind company in the world. Maine also has begun meeting with the U.S. Interior Department, Massachusetts and New Hampshire to explore the possibility of other offshore sites that could supply clean power to upper New England.

Now what started as Daghers dream has turned into a larger one: The strength of Maines economy, the preservation of our natural resources, the long-term health and well-being of our communities and of future generations depend in great part on our transitioning to clean energy and tackling the threat of climate change, said Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) in announcing the RWE-Mitsubishi partnership.

The U.S. pioneer on the West Coast is Alla Weinstein, now CEO of a company called Castle Wind, which is proposing to build a floating wind farm with as many as 100 turbines spinning offshore in Morro Bay in central California. When Weinstein, an immigrant from Russia who arrived in 1974 with little command of English and a half-finished college education, first proposed the idea in 2008, the reaction was underwhelming.

Floating offshore wind? they asked. Come back in 15 years, recalled Weinstein in an interview. Two years later, we had a demonstration project.

While Dagher had the state of Maine behind him, Weinstein found only tepid support in California. But she did find two investors willing to finance a demonstration project, a full-size wind turbine on a floating platform to be located offshore from Portugal. It began generating electricity in 2011.

The demonstration helped Weinsteins first company, Principle Power Inc., build two more floaters in Portugal and another off the coast of Scotland. And Weinstein was selected to be the first president of a new trade association, the European Ocean Energy Association, where new contacts helped her sharpen her next goal, which was to go back and jump-start construction in the deep waters of offshore California.

She left Principle Power in 2015 and later formed Castle Wind, a joint venture with EnBW North America, a subsidiary of one of Germanys largest energy companies and among the global leaders in offshore wind. Her unsolicited proposal to build a floating wind farm 30 miles off the central California coast has stimulated interest from 13 other potential bidders likely to participate in a federal auction for the lease site early next year.

California offers one of the nations biggest renewable energy markets. It has set goals for 50% renewable energy by 2025 and 100% by 2045. It is considering proposals for a second floating wind farm offshore from Humboldt County, 270 miles north of San Francisco.

Weinsteins old company, Principle Power, located in Emeryville, Calif., is among the companies that hope to sell turbine bases to her new company and others preparing to bid on Californias leases. Alla is a great client of ours, and we look forward to working with her, said Joo Metelo, who succeeded her as the CEO of Principle Power.

Unlike other offshore wind turbine technologies, which have been mainly designed in Europe, Principle Powers patented WindFloat bases were invented in Berkeley, Calif. They operate on a system that distributes water to each of the turbines three floating ballasts to keep the spinning turbine upright regardless of the pitch and roll of the ocean.

The technology has matured into wind farms in waters off Portugal, Scotland and France, and Metelo now expects the worlds biggest projects to rise in the deeper waters off the West Coast and Hawaii. Shes made great things for the industry, Metelo said, referring to Weinstein.

Offshore wind, even in deeper, more remote waters off California, is not a business for the fainthearted. Fishing groups have raised objections in California. So has the U.S. Department of Defense, which is concerned about offshore pilot training areas and the spinning turbines interference with radar installations.

Weinstein, who got her electrical engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., and then worked as an aeronautical engineer for several years, decided that a career as an entrepreneur in renewable energy was worth the risks.

Its more that you kind of feel what you want to do, and when it comes in front of you, you feel right. As long as youre not afraid of doing something that you dont have the manual for, then those things happen, she explained in an interview.

While floaters are currently more expensive than wind turbines with a fixed foundation in the ocean, Musial of NREL believes they will remove a big economic barrier in the offshore wind business because wind turbines are growing larger, and a U.S. law called the Jones Act requires very large and very expensive U.S.-owned ships to install them at sea.

But floaters can be assembled in local seaports, towed out to sea for installation and even towed back to port for major repairs, if necessary, he explained, reducing labor costs.

There is a third stage in offshore energy now developing in Europe, which applies to both fixed and floating wind turbine farms. As demand for renewable energy has grown, companies have begun considering ways to reduce power line congestion by making and storing excess energy offshore. One way is by using electrolysis to split hydrogen out of seawater and storing it in underwater bladders near wind farms.

Germany has begun experiments. The Dutch government recently announced Crosswind, an unsubsidized offshore wind farm being built by Royal Dutch Shell PLC, an oil major, and Eneco, a local utility. It will test a variety of ways of making and storing excess offshore energy, including floating solar arrays, temporary battery storage and an electrolyzer.

A letter sent to the Dutch parliament by the minister of economic affairs titled Offshore Wind Energy Roadmap 2030 explained that so-called green hydrogen could prevent the price of electricity generated at sea from becoming too low to support further offshore investment. That would be accomplished by making more hydrogen at sea and shipping it to shore for a variety of purposes. They include supplying hydrogen for fuel cell-equipped electric cars and for heating buildings as the Netherlands continues in its planned phaseout of fossil fuels.

Despite the renewable energy ambitions of various states, the U.S. is not ready for this yet, Musial pointed out. But my crystal ball says that in 10 years well be worrying about green hydrogen. Right now it might be a little early.

Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news atwww.eenews.net.

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Floating Offshore Wind Turbines Set to Make Inroads in U.S. - Scientific American

Vestas to Acquire Full Control Of Offshore Turbine Business – Greentech Media News

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Global leading wind turbine manufacturer Vestas has taken full ownership of its offshore turbine joint venture, MHI Vestas.

The Danish companyrevealed Thursday that it has acquired Mitsubishi Heavy Industries half of the offshore business. MHI will take a 2.5 percent stake in Vestas and a seat on the board in return. The all-stock deal is valued at around 709 million ($832 million).

Vestas istargeting market-leading status in offshore wind by 2025 and will launch a new technology platform imminently.

We wont achieve market leadership with the current turbine, said Henrik Andersen, group president and CEO of Vestas, during an analyst call.

Rival supplier Siemens Gamesa is the market leader for offshore wind turbines. In May SGRE revealed a new 14 MW turbine, whileGEs Haliade-X platform, now scaled up to a 13-megawatt turbine, has provided it with fresh momentum in the offshore sector too.

MHI Vestas largest turbine is currently rated at 10 MW. In a statement, the company said its new tech would improve efficiency and drive the levelized cost of energy further down.

Vestas also said it would be eyeing savings and synergy in sales, technology, manufacturing footprint and procurement to sustain customer relationship [and] lower costs.

When were sitting with two entities, were not going to maximize the value creation, Andersen said on the call with analysts and investors.

Work on thatintegration begins immediately and Andersen said efforts on bringing together procurement is also underway now the acquisition is public. That process will accelerate once the deal closes, which is expected in Q4 2020 or Q1 2021.

Vestas and MHI will create a sales JV for both on and offshore turbines in the Japanese market.

Global offshore wind deployment is poised for growth with the biggest markets getting bigger and a raft of demand emerging in new locations too. The global offshore wind project pipeline has grown 50 percent in 2020, according totrade body RenewableUK.

Developer rsted is tracking as much as 30 GW of tenders in the next 15 months. Asia-Pacific is building momentum in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. The U.S. will host seven tenders during that period. The largest end-market so far, the U.K., has committed to deploying 30 GW on its own between now and 2030. It currently has an installed capacity of around 10 GW.

Were very well localized and taking orders in Taiwan, said Andersen. Were well-positioned in Europe on the Isle of Wight [off the south coast of England] and Im sure as the U.K. expands we can take advantage of the localization there.

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Vestas to Acquire Full Control Of Offshore Turbine Business - Greentech Media News

Global Offshore Wind Pipeline Up Nearly 50 Per Cent in 2020 – RenewableUK – Offshore WIND

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The total pipeline of global offshore wind projects has grown by 47 per cent since January, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, new research published by RenewableUK shows.

RenewableUKs latest Offshore Wind Project Intelligence report reveals that the total capacity of offshore wind projects worldwide which are operational, under construction, consented, in planning, or in development currently stands at 197.4 GW, up from 134.7 GW in mid-January. Just over half of the pipeline, 99.6 GW or 50.5 per cent, is in Europe.

The UK retains its top spot with a total pipeline of 41.3 GW, up 12 per cent since January when it stood at 36.9 GW.

China has leapt from fourth place into second with an 80 per cent increase from 14.5 GW to 26.1GW.

The USA retains third place with 10 per cent growth from 16.2 GW to 17.8 GW.

Brazil has emerged from nowhere to go straight into fourth place with 16.3 GW. The South American countrys ten offshore wind projects have all been announced since the start of the year, RenewableUK said.

Taiwan stays at number five with a 65 per cent increase from 9.2 GW to 15.2 GW.

Germany has dropped from second to sixth place due to a 29 per cent decrease in its pipeline from 16.5 GW in January to 11.7 GW in October. The Netherland is in seventh position with a 58 per cent increase from 7.2 GW to 11.4 GW. In eighth place, Irelands pipeline expanded by 44 per cent from 6.3 GW to 9.1 GW. Poland is in ninth position with 72 per cent growth this year from 5.3 GW to 9.1 GW.

Vietnam was outside the top ten at the start of the year but is now in tenth place with 8.6 GW.

The global appetite to develop new offshore wind projects remains enormous, despite the pandemic this year, as this research proves. The UK and many other countries are counting on the rapid growth of the offshore wind sector to be a key driver in the worldwide green economic recovery, RenewableUKs Deputy Chief Executive Melanie Onn said.

The UK remains the biggest market for offshore wind in the world and our capacity is set to quadruple over the course of this decade following the Prime Ministers landmark commitment to power every UK home with offshore wind by 2030. As well as providing clean, low-cost power, our industry will continue to revitalise coastal communities, grow the UK supply chain and export our offshore wind goods and services around the world, as our unrivalled expertise is now in huge demand globally.

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Global Offshore Wind Pipeline Up Nearly 50 Per Cent in 2020 - RenewableUK - Offshore WIND