Monthly Archives: May 2021

Greek trade unions are angry with the new labor bill. Credit: Facebook/GSEE

Greece unveiled on Wednesday a new labor bill which the government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis says it will increase competitiveness through more flexible working hours.

The bill has been criticized by the left-wing opposition and unions who fear the changes will undermine worker rights.

Labor and Social Affairs Minister Kostis Hatzidakis presented the draft legislation, titled For the Protection of Labor, and said that it was in line with European best practices and groundbreaking labor legislation.

The labor law is antiquated, Hatzidakis told a news conference. The core of the bill goes back to 1982. In 1982 the Internet, let alone teleworking, was a distant dream.

He highlighted the fact that the bill explicitly guarantees the eight-hour work day, and a five-day or 40-hour working week.

The most contentious part introduces flexibility to the eight-hour workday by allowing employees to work up to 10 hours on one day and fewer on another, or take time off.

The bill, Hatzidakis claims, makes it illegal to dismiss an employee for refusing flexible working hours.

Mitsotakis said the bill was intended to protect workers. It strengthens their rights, corrects injustices of the past. In short, it gives power to the employee, he tweeted.

Other innovations include a longer paternity leave, with 14 days paid leave instead of 10, protection of new fathers from dismissal for six months after birth and fewer disincentives for the hiring of women.

It also allows four months parental leave for each parent, with employment agency OAED subsidies for two months.

Other contentious measures contained in the bill are the provisions for the trade unions.

The draft bill has also introduced measures such as a digital labor card, designed to avert social security contribution evasion and unfair competition with businesses that uphold the law.

The government all claims that the card will reduce bureaucracy with abolition of the overtime book and other reports for businesses that adopt the digital card.

The project will be funded by the Recovery Fund and implemented gradually, starting with big businesses.

Issues addressed by the draft legislation include health and safety at work, violence and harassment at work, a work-life balance, remote online work, working hours flexibility, breaks, overtime and work on Sundays, protection from dismissal and digital systems for monitoring the labor market.

The left-wing Syriza opposition has criticized the bill, saying it restricts employee rights at a time when workers risk more job losses due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Syriza leader and former prime minister Alexis Tsipras accused the government of moving against a worldwide trend to improve workers rights.

(It) is trying to use the pandemic as an opportunity to impose the most anti-popular (measure) a Greek government has ever brought against the world of work: the abolition of the eight-hour working day.

Read the rest here:

Greece Unveils Labor Bill with Emphasis on Working Hours Flexibility - Greek Reporter

BEVERLY HILLS, CA DECEMBER 03: Honoree Colin Kaepernick speaks onstage at ACLU SoCal Hosts Annual Bill of Rights Dinner at the Beverly Wilshire Four Seasons Hotel on December 3, 2017 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images)

Colin Kaepernick is stepping into the world of book publishing. The social activist has announced that he is editing and publishing a new book called Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future Without Policing & Prisons. Kaepernicks latest work will feature essays from nearly three dozen activists, scholars and organizers. Each literary piece will reimagine a world in which police or prisons have been abolished and what that would mean for marginalized communities across the world.

The omnipresent threat of premature death at the hands, knees, chokeholds, tasers, and guns of law enforcement has only further engrained its anti-Black foundation into the institutions of policing, Kaepernick told TMZ Sports.

In order to eradicate anti-Blackness, we must also abolish the police. The abolition of one without the other is impossible.

The book will be available in several forms including audio, hardcover and e-book. Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future Without Policing & Prisonsis set to be released on October 12, 2021.

After months of hard work, were excited to announce that well be publishing our first title, ABOLITION FOR THE PEOPLE: THE MOVEMENT FOR A FUTURE WITHOUT POLICING & PRISONS, on 10/12/21. This anthology is edited by @Kaepernick7 & features the contributions of over 30 writers. pic.twitter.com/fj6tuBpYBy

Kaepernick Publishing (@KaepernickPub) May 11, 2021

More:

Colin Kaepernick To Publish Book Examining Police And Prison Abolition - Def Pen

Lyrics of the week:

I mustve been through about a million girlsId love em and Id leave em aloneI didnt care how much they cried no sirTheir tears left me cold as a stone. But then I fooled around and fell in loveI fooled around and fell in love

Elvin Bishop, Fooled Around and Fell in Love

You think love is just fun and games Trying to be a playboy All you do is run around Using hearts as play toys. Youve been playing daddy with every mama in townWhat you gonna do when you look up one dayAnd see your playhouse tumbling down?Im gonna tear your playhouse down pretty soonIm gonna tear your playhouse down room by room

Ann Peebles, Im Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down

Its a bit awkward and pretentious to link the words nuclear weapons and grand strategy, even for a nation like the United States that possesses thousands of warheads, has far-flung alliances to attend to, and practices extended deterrence. This linkage is manufactured because deterrence is part of grand strategy and nuclear weapons are part of deterrence, But the manufacturing process is defective because the battlefield use of nuclear weapons would make a hash of military campaigns, let alone strategy, let alone grand strategy.

Nuclear strategy, as Lawrence Freedman, Robert Jervis, and others have written, is an oxymoron, a stark contradiction in terms.Both deterrence and military strategy would be among the first casualties with the appearance of mushroom clouds. Seven-plus decades of non-battlefield use suggest recognition of these consequences.

Even so, states addicted to nuclear weapons will continue to pay dearly for them. How dearly? Check out the costs of U.S. and Russian modernization programs. For second-tier possessors, see Great Britains decision to deploy the Dreadnought class submarine to carry Armageddon weapons while hollowing out its ability to defend national interests by conventional means.

Money is no object when states convince themselves that that they cant do without symbols of power, status, and deterrence. To avoid Armageddon, one must be prepared for it. Thats the lesson that has been inculcated for three generations of deterrence strategists and counting.

When an addiction is habit forming but not dangerous, like pulling weeds, theres no harm, no foul. When a personal addiction causes self-harm and harm to others, we humans can address the problem by acknowledgement, intervention, gradual withdrawal or by going cold turkey. Alternatively, we can continue addictive behaviors.

What about national addictions to power, status, nuclear weapons, and deterrence? Power and status are not something that are jettisoned willingly. They do change, however, for better or worse, depending on national circumstances. Nuclear deterrence requirements might change as a result, but is dropping out or going cold turkey an option?

If a nuclear-armed state has no plausible strategic competitors, then the answer is yes: dropping out is conceivable, whether willingly or unwillingly. If a nuclear-armed state has a serious strategic competitor, then dropping out isnt very likely.

National addictions are harder to slough off, especially when they relate to power, status, and long-held concepts of deterrence. Strong cases have been made that nuclear weapons are a dangerous and delusionary addiction. Dropping out can, however, have negative consequences for national security unless a strategic competitor follows suit. Even unilateral reductions can produce domestic political and geopolitical blowback unless a competitor buys into our rational analysis. Just as strategic competitors share addictions to nuclear weapons, withdrawal also has to be shared.

A shared addiction to nuclear deterrence has both fictional and real aspects. Its indisputably true that nuclear deterrence has a history of failing in lesser cases. A belief system in nuclear deterrence is therefore partially based on the fiction of its success. We can also make a convincing case that escalation control is likely to be fictional once the nuclear threshold is crossed. War-fighting strategies premised on control and dominance are most likely to prompt the escalation they are designed to prevent. Passing along the hallmarks of human civilization from one generation to the next depends on this recognition.

So, whats real about nuclear deterrence besides its costs and dangers? Its primary value rests, at least so far, in helping to prevent worst cases. There are other reasons for the absence of major conventional warfare and nuclear exchanges reasons that have little or nothing to do with the bells and whistles that deterrence strengtheners advocate. Nonetheless, concepts of national security among nuclear-armed states have become inextricably linked to nuclear deterrence equations.

We can argue until the cows come home that such thinking is illusionary, dangerous, and misplaced, but its a contemporary reality. Going cold turkey isnt an option unless strategic competitors also take the plunge, and we can verify their abstinence.

How, then, do we make progress to arrive at collective assessments among possessor states that these weapons are too deadly to actually use in warfare?One essential way is by continuing to argue this case. The Prohibition Treaty serves this purpose. What distinguishes we humans from other creatures, besides our thumbs, is our power to reason. But reason is insufficient, as are hortatory injunctions.

We cant solve the existential threat that nuclear weapons pose intellectually; like all other existential threats, it has to be solved politically and geopolitically. And because this is a very hard problem to solve, it has to be managed until political and geopolitical conditions point toward solutions.

One form of management is the avoidance of dangerous military practices and harrowing crises. Success on both fronts facilitates the reduction of nuclear excess. Another form of management is by means of threat reduction treaties. A successful track record exists for bilateral nuclear arms reduction, but further reductions from New START will be challenging, given the state of U.S.-Russian relations and the current level of partisanship in Washington, which makes it very hard for a Democrat in the White House to secure treaty ratification. Multilateral nuclear arms reduction treaties will be far more difficult to negotiate.

Numbers still matter greatly. When they increase, someones sense of security decreases, prompting compensatory actions. If arms reduction treaties are out of reach, we can still bring the numbers down, as I have argued elsewhere, by championing and extending norms and codes of conduct.

The most essential form of management is no use. The norm of no battlefield use is reinforced by the norm of not conducting nuclear tests. The norm of nonproliferation is another essential management tool. The longer we can extend these norms, the more we clarify nuclear excess. Since these norms are the hardest to break, they are the easiest for us to defend and extend.

Easiest does not mean easy. Far from it. But success has been possible in the past during hard times and intense crises. Through hard work, it remains possible today. And tomorrow.

If we focus on the end state of abolition, we are likely to be disappointed every day. If we focus on extending norms critical to human wellbeing, we can succeed every day.The implications of success may seem imperceptible on a daily basis, but they can be profound as time passes.

Read more:

Nuclear Grand Strategy (sic) and Abolition - ArmsControlWonk.com

Written by: Pilar Jefferson

Spoiler Alert: Minor spoilers for the first season of Rutherford Falls

What does it mean for a Black woman to be the mayor of a town that refuses to recognize Native sovereignty? This is the question I was left with after watching the first season of Rutherford Falls, a new show from Sierra Teller Ornelas (Navajo), about the fight for the history and future of the titular Rutherford Falls, a small fictional town somewhere in the Northeast founded in the early colonial period and next to/on the land of the also fictional Minishonka Nation.

Over the shows ten episodes we see the various powers that try to out-scheme each other with hilarious, and poignant, results. The cast is stellar including Ed Helms as Nathan Rutherford, the towns manic protector of white colonial history. Then there is Michael Greyeyes as Terry Thomas, the savvy council member and casino director of the Minishonka Nation, and, of course, the incomparable Jana Schmielding as Reagan Wells, bright but beleaguered upholder of Minishoka cultural history. Next to this lineup, we learn next to nothing about Mayor Deirdre Chisenhall, the Black woman in question played by Dana L. Wilson that really fleshes out her motivations in the story, which leads her to fall a little flat.

While network television is slowly realizing that Black women have nuance and depth, the TV mythos of the strong Black woman still wins the day. This archetypal woman is undoubtedly badass and usually in a position of power, but does not get the emotional backstory that her fellow characters do. Though some of the worst strong Black woman stereotypes are avoided here, there arent quite enough good points to keep Deirdre out of two-dimensional territory. And, her motivations really matter because her character on the show can also help us start a conversation about the relationship between Black and Native people in the United States today and why Black people have to name decolonization, with an emphasis on land back, while were fighting for abolition. We cant have one without the other.

The two big things we do learn about Deirdre are, first, that shes ambitious and cares about her personal image as mayor and second, that her family has been in Rutherford Falls for nearly as long as the Rutherfords. Both of these points leave plenty of room for the writers to explore the deep relationship between anti-Black racism and the colonization of Native land, but they never quite get there.

Here are the things they missed that could greatly improve our understanding of Deirdres position in Rutherford Falls:

My third critique ties into what I think is actually really important about Deirdre Chisenhalls character and why she matters to how we think about Black and Native solidarity today. As of the end of Season 1, all weve seen is her paying attention to her personal image, which doesnt sit quite right in this case because Black people, even when in positions of power, are well aware of their own history and dreams for the future. Perhaps the Minishonka Council are happy that Deidre keeps the non-Native weirdos in town on a leash. Thats fine. Her ambition isnt a problem in and of itself, and her cut-throat candor is one of the most fun parts of her character. But when we see Black excellence as only climbing the ladder and achieving roles that our ancestors could never have dreamed of, we need to pay attention to when those roles place us in positions of power within a settler colonial state. If representation matters, sovereignty matters more. Abolition matters more. And, like I said before, its a package deal.

The Black community has embraced the concept of Black ambition, Black excellence, and rightly so. We have so much stacked against us that seeing fictional Black excellence can remind us that there are Black people in the future and that we deserve to thrive not just survive. But we as Black people cannot win by the rules of todays state. Even if every diversity, equity, access, and inclusion committee at every business in America sticks with their 2020 commitments to anti-racism and Black people are finally able to call the shots, we will still be living on stolen land. Capitalism and racism go hand in hand. While I dont begrudge Black peoples financial means or career success, it does not mean the work is over. We will not have truly dismantled the colonial system that brought our ancestors to this land until we return that land to the people it came from.

This past year has been full of interracial reckoning and movement toward solidarity. One conversation that I see starting to happen is where interracial solidarity lies between Black and Native people and what we as Black people need to consider about Native rights as we fight for our own liberty, and vice versa.

So, as much as I want Deidre Chisenhall to be so much more in her name-taking, pantsuit-wearing, Black woman ferocity, I also see that she is a reminder that there is solidarity work with Native folks we desperately need to do. Hopefully, NBC renews Rutherford Falls so we can see the light of that solidarity, and Deirdre in her full glory, blossom on the small screen.

Originally posted here:

Black Women and Native Sovereignty in 'Rutherford Falls' - Black Girl Nerds

David Cassady and Laura R. Levens, Opinion contributors Published 7:58 a.m. ET May 13, 2021

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler recently panned the ordination of three women at Saddleback Church in California, the second largest church in the Southern Baptist Convention. To Mohler, the Southern Baptist Convention is approaching a test. Should women be ordained and hired as pastors, preachers and leaders in the SBC?

Hes right, it is a test, but his approach is failing.

We each left the SBC fold years agoand now work at the Baptist Seminary of Kentucky. Supporting women in ministry is one of our central commitments. We are happy to help our Southern Baptist friends pass this test.

Making decisions about pastoring and ordination of anyone as a church leader, regardless of gender, requires time and effort to understand Gods calling. The process involves a mix of elements Christians have described in various ways: interpreting Scripture, listening to the Spirit, praying, talking with trusted advisers, sensing a direction, recognizing giftsand enjoying the work. It is described with such variety because it involves sensing the work of God, whom Christians believe is greater than human understanding. After all, Gods activities have often mystified and confounded humanity since creation. It is arrogant for anyone to think, like Mohler, that Gods work in this world or a womans testimony of Gods call must fit one limited interpretation of Scripture.

Opinion: Why leaving the pew empty may be the best way for churches to serve God amid COVID

God has and does call women to preach, to pastor, to teach, and to lead churches and seminaries. It is arrogant and insulting to the women God has called to ministry to say they cannot be called. It is insulting to Phoebe, for example, who was likely entrusted to write down and deliver Pauls letter to the Romans. According to Paul, Phoebe was a deacon and a patron, highlighting her leadership position of financial support and oversight of her house church. Paul also included Priscilla, a teacher, and Junia, an apostle. The evidence of women acting as pastors, preachersand teachers in the New Testament is overwhelming, if one looks for it.

The Rev. Laura R. Levens is assistant professor of Christian Mission at Baptist Seminary of Kentucky.(Photo: provided)

Mohler claims ordination and employment of women in ministry only became an issue for the Southern Baptists in the 1970s, but this is historically false. The truth is, women have been doing this work for centuries, and that includes the SBC too. Catholic leaders like St. Hildegard of Bingen founded religious orders and traveled Europe, preaching and counseling spiritual reform and renewal of the church. Sojourner Truth began preaching in 1843 and traveled the abolition circuit with Frederick Douglass. Julia Foote preached and traveled for 50 years before she was ordained a deacon (1894) and then an elder (1900) in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Even Lottie Moon, the most cherished Southern Baptist missionary, taught Scripture and evangelized to both men and women in Pingtu, Chinain the late 1800s.

The Rev. David Cassady is president of Baptist Seminary of Kentucky, which has campuses in Louisville and Georgetown.(Photo: provided)

How do we know God calls women to ministry? They say so, and we believe them. The graduates of our school, Baptist Seminary of Kentucky (BSK), are called by God. They are chaplains, counselors, ministers, and yes, pastors. They are ministering today in Louisville, across Kentucky, and elsewhere. These leaders are doing Gods work.

Bridging the gap: Can this Louisville Institute for Black Church Studies close America's religious divide?

If the SBC wants to pass this test, and it is a test, they will open up to the reality that God is well ahead of us, calling us to humbly love, healand bring peace. God has been and is calling women to lead. Were eager to follow.

The Rev. David Cassady is president and the Rev. Laura R. Levens is assistant professor of Christian Mission at BSK: Baptist Seminary of Kentucky (bsk.edu), which has campuses in Louisville and Georgetown, Kentucky.

Read or Share this story: https://www.courier-journal.com/story/opinion/2021/05/13/al-mohler-and-southern-baptist-convention-face-test-women-pastors/5047228001/

Excerpt from:

Should women be pastors? It's a test Southern Baptists face, and Al Mohler is failing - Courier Journal

It's part of the US Mint's "American Women Quarters Program," which will stamp circulating quarters with the faces of women who have made "significant contributions to the US." (George Washington's face will remain on the quarter's front, albeit with a new design.)

The first two honorees have already been chosen: esteemed poet Maya Angelou and gender-barrier-breaking astronaut Sally Ride.

The rest of the lineup will be decided by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen -- with input from the American public.

The museum welcomes entries of women known for their work in civil rights, science, the arts and abolition, among other areas, with an emphasis on women from "ethnically, racially and geographically diverse backgrounds," according to the US Mint.

Ultimately, Yellen will choose the women who will appear on the coins after consulting the Smithsonian Institution American Women's History Initiative, National Women's History Museum and the Bipartisan Women's Caucus, as per the Mint.

The first batch of coins, featuring Ride and Angelou, will start circulating in January 2022. The Mint will create up to five designs for the tails side of the quarters in the program, which will run through 2025.

The women chosen by Yellen and the public will join a highly accomplished duo. Angelou, also a civil rights activist, is best known for books including "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," considered one of the 20th century's seminal works. Ride, a former NASA astronaut, was the first American woman to go to space.

Ride's partner, Tam O'Shaughnessy, said the astronaut would have been "so moved" to appear on American currency.

"This tribute reflects Sally's legacy not only as a trailblazing astronaut but also as a champion of diversity and inclusion in STEM fields," she said in a statement through the nonprofit Sally Ride Science at UC San Diego.

Read the rest here:

The US Mint wants you to help choose the pioneering women that will appear on its new quarters - The Philadelphia Tribune

The ongoing national discussion about systemic racism holds both challenges and opportunities for people of faith of all racial backgrounds, according to a Washington archdiocesan priest and a Georgetown University law professor, who are both African Americans, and both working to help people understand the issues.

Father Patrick Smith, pastor of St. Augustine Parish in Washington, and Anthony Cook, professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, each pointed to the need to understand unvarnished history as the starting point for people of faith to begin to help root out and move beyond systemic racism.

Following the April 20 conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin of murder charges in the death of George Floyd last May, Father Smith and Cook were asked to discuss how people of faith and church leaders could help the nations reckoning with race-based inequality. They spoke to the Catholic Standard in separate phone interviews.

Cook, author of The Least of These: Race, Law and Religion in American Culture, advocated for small faith groups to start by learning about the longstanding tradition of the faith-based community of being complicit with some of the most horrific racism in American history. That includes slavery, the Jim Crow laws that followed abolition of slavery and ongoing entrenched, intractable poverty, he said.

People of faith certainly played roles in ending slavery, segregation and in working to end poverty and other injustices, he noted. But there also is a legacy of complicity to be faced, he said. Church leaders too often have looked the other way or enabled race-based bias to be built into the way churches and society function, Cook said.

For example, he said, churches developed a theology thats more about individual salvation to get into heaven, without attention to what is needed to bring the kingdom of God to Earth.

Cook noted that Jesus came to the world as a poor man and chose to spend his life among those who were shunned and downtrodden. He even turned down temptations to become powerful.

Jesus decided at every stage of development to be with the marginalized, the outcast, Cook said. He chose to be with the least of these, and preached about how difficult it was for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

A Christian witness would be to truly walk in the steps of Christ, which is so different from what we see in some churches today, Cook continued. We as a church have done a very poor job of conforming to his witness and lifestyle. Instead we have conformed to the status quo that pursues money, status and power.

Father Smith is pastor of the oldest Black Catholic parish in Washington, which was founded in 1858 by free men and women of color, including some who had been emancipated from slavery. He said people should learn history that includes how the Catholic Church has played a role in perpetuating inequality. The priest pointed out that often the Churchs attempts to address systemic racism have come in the form of institutional statements that, as theologian Father Bryan Massingale has said, seem calculated not to make White people uncomfortable.

Father Smith cited the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s Letter from Birmingham Jail, which observed that in the early days of Christianity, the faith was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.

We have many statements, many documents, but what are we doing to educate people on the history? Father Smith asked. How do we become a thermostat, not a thermometer that simply reflects societys trends?

He noted that for the first time in his 30-plus years as a priest, he was invited in January to address a Theological College seminary audience in Washington on the topic of race. Father Smith is a renowned speaker, preacher, revival leader and retreat presenter. While he had addressed seminarians on other topics over the years, racism had never previously been the subject, he said.

Father Smith said the appointment of Cardinal Wilton Gregory as the first African American to head the Archdiocese of Washington in 2019 was a huge breakthrough for an archdiocese that has long had a significant Black Catholic presence.

He recalled thinking: heres someone who knows our story. Father Smith said hes seen changes toward addressing systemic racism since then-Archbishop Gregory came to Washington. For example, he applauded the appointment of a priest chaplain, Father Robert Boxie, to Howard University last summer. We had asked for years, but it wasnt seen as a priority, he said.

In August 2020 at a Mass at St. Matthews Cathedral marking the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington, then-Archbishop Gregory announced that the Archdiocese of Washington was launching an initiative called Made in Gods Image: Pray and Work to End the Sin of Racism that includes a wide range of pastoral activities and outreach, prayer, listening sessions, faith formation opportunities and social justice work.

Father Smith said people of faith who want to address systemic racism should first consider the history of how racism has played out within the Church. For instance, he noted that although the Archdiocese of Washington was ahead of the Supreme Court in desegregating Catholic schools in the early 1950s, its more recent legacy has included closing more than a dozen Catholic schools that primarily served Black communities. Father Smith said that from his perspective, there wasnt enough collaboration with those schools communities.

In his own familys history in Washington, his parents were not allowed to attend Catholic schools. By the time he and his siblings were born, Catholic schools had been desegregated and his parents made sure their children attended them. Now he laments the closure of so many Catholic schools that served Black families and wonders what effect that will have on vocations.

I wonder sometimes, whos following me? he said. ...When it comes to spreading the faith, Catholic schools are one of the most important tools.

Father Smith sees the history of segregation in churches and Catholic schools as a strategic choice, made by Church leaders in keeping with then-contemporary thinking in society. The Church was initially strategically denied to the Black community, he said, and that must be understood for todays people to be able to try to make things better.

Ignorance is not bliss, he said, adding that throughout the American church, bishops, clergy, seminary rectors and key church staff members havent made an effort to understand the history of slavery and its ongoing repercussions.

As to where to start honest conversations about racism, Cook said hes part of plans for two new centers being created at Georgetown that will address racial equity from the lenses of faith and opportunity. One goal is to design a set of materials that can be used by people in the pews or small working groups to consider what White privilege means and the role of religion in perpetuating it, he said.

Change has to be rooted in deconstructing the roots of how people treat each other, Cook said.

See related stories:

Black Catholic Voices: The legacy inspiring St. Augustine pastor's support of Catholic education and racial justice

Black Catholic Voices: Priest chaplain at Howard University says drawing on faith and learning history can foster racial understanding and healing

Addressing lingering effects of slavery calls for looking ahead more than looking back, Georgetown panelists say

See the original post:

People of faith should study history of racism as they work for racial justice, priest and professor say - My catholic standard

Maya Angelou became the second poet in history to recite a poem at an inauguration with her reading of "On the Pulse of Morning" when Bill Clinton was first sworn in as president in 1993. Now, she'll make history again as one of 20 distinguished women set to be honored by the U.S. Mint, appearing on a series of quarters starting next year.

Trailblazing astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman launched into space on the shuttle Challenger in 1983, will also be honored on the coin.Angelou and Ride will be featured on the reverse, or "tails side," starting in January 2022 as part of the American Women Quarters series helmed by project manager Michelle Thompson.

"It's a huge deal, the American Women Quarters program gives the opportunity to have women out there on circulating coins," Thompson told CBS This Morning's Dana Jacobson. "Their legacies, their achievements, they're all going to be captured on pocket change for generations."

The U.S. Mint will oversee the design work, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will approve the nominees and final design.

While the front or "heads side" will continue to feature the likeness of George Washington, he'll be getting a makeover to distinguish the new coins, with several options being considered.

The other 18 honorees who have yet to be announced will come from a wide variety of fields including abolition, suffrage and civil rights movements, as well as the humanities, science and the arts.

"We're looking for a very broad, diverse group of women because that's what we have in America," said Thompson. "And they're the type of women who have shaped where we are as a nation."

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Maya Angelou and Sally Ride will be among the women being honored on quarters - CBS News

Published May 14, 2021 by Ruth Comerford

Flipped eye is launching a new flagship non-fiction imprint, phipl, and is also looking for a new young editor from an underrepresented background, with no...

Flipped eye is launching a new non-fiction imprint, phipl,and is also looking for an editorial internfrom an underrepresented background, with no experience required.

Phipl will launch with a collection of essays by International Dublin Literary Award-winning author Jos Eduardo Agualusa. Agualusa's collection,Paradise and Other Hells, is described as an "irreverent, intelligent and near impish essay collection fizzing with his trademark humour and proboscis-sharp observation". It will be released on 10th June, inaugurating the imprint.

It has been translated from Portuguese by a team including Rahul Bery, Andrew McDougall, Robin Patterson, Francisco Vilhena and Agualusas long-time translator, Daniel Hahn. The essays include: observations on a mugging foiled by laughter;the power of a gesture;the worlds oldest tree;Bob Dylan;Africas estrangement from itself; and aspects of Rio, Lisbon, Luanda andBerlin.

The indie has also launched a separate nationwide search for a young editor from a background underrepresented in the UKs publishing industry. With no previous experience required, applicants need to be UK residents, not in education, able to commit to two days of work a week for a duration of six months. As a paid intern, the successful candidate will receive hands-on editorial training atflippedeyes offices in London or remotely.

Applications for the new editorial internship open today, with a two-week submission window closing 31st May. Applicants should express their interest online, submitting a short bio anda cover note explaining why they're interested in the internship. There is no requiirement for a CV and flippedeyewill be selecting the candidate based on their passion and drive to become an editor, not on any qualification or what they achieved at school.

Nii Ayikwei Parkes, director and senior editor atflippedeye,said: Atflippedeye, we work extensively with our authors to try to understand their unique influences and norms; rather than send instructions, we send questions and more questions and we listen and listen some more as we help writers hone their voices and their craft. We approach our work with a humility that we feel comes not just from our non-traditional backgrounds, but also our working class roots. The working class is massively underrepresented in publishing and much of it is due to the inability of working class persons to forfeit a living wage for long enough to get on the ladder in publishing. We'd like to help change that.

The launch comes as the press, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, prepares to publishpoetry collections byEleanor Penny, Louisa Adjoa Parker and Maia Elsner this summer, in addition to a play by Gabriel Gbadamosi.

Gbadamosi's play"Abolition"is set in 1792, and reframes Britain's role in the abolition of slavery. It follows the journey of the "Blackamoor Jenny" out of Liverpool, through its sixth voyage to Africa.Meanwhile, in the ship of state, the radical abolitionist William Fox and William Wilberforcedebate the urgency of ending the slave trade. It will be published on 17th June.

Parker's collection, She Can Still Sing, will also be released on 17th June, following a virtual bookshop event organised with the Bookbag Bookshop in Exeter, in partnership with Africa Writes. The collection was written while Parker grieved the loss of a friend who took her life after a long struggle with mental illness. The collection is summarised as: "Aeulogy that projects from light one part love letter to the mundane, three parts hymn to the departed, four parts ride of wonderment, these poems celebrate the bonds of friendship and family even as they leave love notes to the departed stuffed into surprising images."

Eleanor Pennyhas been nominated for the Forward Prize for Poetry and twice shortlisted for Young Peoples Poet Laureate for London. She is the founder of the poetry podcast Bedtime Stories for the End of the World, asking some of the UKs top poets to re-imagine their favourite myths, fairytales and legends. Her dbut collection, Mercy,out on 24th Juneincludes poems on cruelty, love and obsession, and how familial and community memory warps and blooms over time.

Finally,Overrun by Wild Boars by Maia Elsner, out 15th July, is billed as a "search for intimacy and survival in the face of persecution and trauma", and is inspired by her family history that brings together two faiths, multiple languages, as well as Polish and Mexican mythologies.

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Flipped eye launches non-fiction imprint and young editor search - The Bookseller

A guard watches a prisoner do field work at Cummins Prison Farm, Lincoln County, Arkansas, 1971 (Eugene Richards).

In the late 1960s, a group of Arkansas prison inmates sued the state Commissioner of Corrections over conditions in what was then called the Cummins Farm, a 16,500-acre Old South-style plantation staffed by gangs of prisoners. Among their claims was one that life on the Farm was slavery, and thus a violation of the 13th Amendment, which prohibits slavery or involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime.

In a 1970 opinion, Federal District Judge J. Smith Henley summarized the evidence before him. The inmates at the Farm worked ten hours a day, six days a week. (The guards and trustees had until 1967 forced this labor by beating the inmates with a four-foot leather strap; a court order blocked the strappings in 1967, however, and now inmates were free to refuse to workand be punished by solitary confinement.) Inmates worked on labor-intensive Southern crops cotton, soybeans, and rice, among othersand raised chickens, pigs, and cattle. Work in the fields went on rain or shinein summer no matter how hot it got, in winter on any day above freezing. The prisoners were not issued rainwear or cold-weather jackets. Some were required to work without shoes.

The prison farm operation generated well over $1 million a year for the state. The inmates received no pay. If they needed money, prison authorities explained, they could make $5 a week as blood donors.

[COVID gives us a chance to close prisons. Heres why andhow.]

Nonetheless, Smith wrote, there was no violation of the 13th Amendment. Life at Cummins wasnt slavery, because [t]he State does not claim to own the bodies of its prisoners. Work on the Farm was servitude, to be sure, he wrote, and there is no doubt whatever that the servitude is involuntary. But it is equally clear that this servitude has been imposed as punishment for crimes whereof the inmates have been duly convicted. The framers of the Amendment must have been aware of generally accepted convict labor policies and practices, and the Court is persuaded that the Amendments exception manifested a Congressional intent not to reach such policies and practices.

Clinching the states case was expert testimony from a former director of the federal Bureau of Prisons. Prison labor, the expert testified, is as old as American penology. One of the best depictions of this traditional Southern practice, the judge noted, is to be found in Margaret Mitchells Civil War novel, Gone With The Wind.

Henley was not a bull-necked Southern judge consigning prisoners to their fate. After dealing with the slavery issue; he actually found that conditions at the Farm (and indeed in the entire Arkansas prison system) violated a different constitutional provision, the Eighth Amendments prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment:

It is one thing for the State not to pay a convict for his labor; it is something else to subject him to a situation in which he has to sell his blood to obtain money to pay for his own safety, or for adequate food, or for access to needed medical attention. However constitutionally tolerable the Arkansas system may have been in former years; it simply will not do today as the Twentieth Century goes into his eighth decade.

From a practical lawyers point of view, it probably didnt make much difference to the outcome that the court cited one amendment rather than anothercruel and unusual punishment rather than slavery or involuntary servitude.

Half a century later, Cummins is still a hellhole, despite persistent attempts to reform it. In a long article last year, Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker described the feeble and sadistic response of staff at the facility to the onset of the COVID crisis. Inmates told of being jammed into barracks with no social distancing, being falsely told they were negative so they could go on working, and, in some cases, being shunted into solitary confinementto live or diewhen they became too sick to work. As of April 2020 (when cases peaked), 670 inmates had tested positive (the prison holds up to 1725). On one day, April 21, 2020, the entire state reported a total of 304 new cases of COVID. Of those 304, fully 262 were at the Cummins Unit.

[How the 14th Amendment can bar ex-presidents from office.]

Is it possible that this treatment of human beings is not slavery because [t]he State does not claim to own the bodies of its prisoners? That the brutal involuntary servitude at Cummins is constitutional because it matches something in Gone With the Wind? That, in other words, the Thirteenth Amendmentwhich Americans revere as a shining moment of American freedompermits forced labor without pay, in dangerous and inhumane conditions? What is most infuriating about Judge Henleys opinion is that, as a matter of law, it was probably right.

When the Thirteenth Amendment was proposed in 1864, Abraham Lincoln portrayed it as a Kings cure for all the evils [of slavery]. It winds the whole thing up. But did it? Cool heads in the slave states did not agree. Seven months after Lincolns deathdays before the Amendment in fact was actually even ratifiedChicago Tribune correspondent Sydney Andrews reported a trip to Savannah, where he met a politically connected Georgia lawyer. He warned Andrews of what was to come: [T]here ll be private talk this session, even if there isnt open effort, to make the penal code take [Black Southerners] back into the condition of slavery. Itll be called involuntary servitude for the punishment of crime, but it wont differ much from slavery.

So it provedand, some argue, so it proves today. Soon after ratification, the all-white legislatures of the South enacted statutes that required Black Southerners to work for white planters under punitive year-long contracts; leaving a contracted job was a crime, and the offenders were to be jailed and then leased out as hired labor to other whites. An apprenticeship program even covered school-age children, who in some states could be sold back to their former owners. As the demand for cheap labor increased (and federal protection of civil rights faded), the use of vagrancy or other mock offenses became a system of convict leasing, by which Black Southerners convicted of crime could be leased like property to Southern planters. Michele Goodwin, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, recounted this history in a 2019 article, The Thirteenth Amendment: Modern Slavery, Capitalism, and Mass Incarceration. These various types of slaveries transformed from one to another and back again, she wrote. Debt peonage morphed into convict labor, convict labor turned into convict leasing, and these transformed to chain gangs.

Prisoners built and repaired roads, laid railroad tracks, toiled in coal mines, and tended brutal state-run prisoner-run plantationsnotorious hell-holes like Angola in Louisiana (1901), Parchman in Mississippi (1901), and Cummins Farm (1902).

As it had been in the old South, the unfree labor of Black people became, after the end of Reconstruction, crucial to the Southern economy. Goodwin noted that the practice of leasing convicts became so corrupt that it embarrassed even the Jim Crow governments of some Southern states. Alabama was never known for being progressive, she said in an interview, but even the Alabama legislature had to investigate wardens who were just collecting men and women and boys and shoving them down coal mines.

Goodwin, and others who have studied the issue, link the punishment clause of the Thirteenth Amendment to the growth of prison labor and the rise of mass incarceration and private, for-profit prisons. In the era of mass incarceration, convict labor has gone national without losing its racial character. The modern masks of slavery: mass incarceration, pay to play probation, modern chain gangs, and the exploitation of cheap labor emerge along the color line just as Antebellum slavery was anchored in the same, she wrote.

[Bryan Stevenson Says Slavery Didnt End; It Just Evolved.]

Today, prison labor abounds in both state and federal prisons. The federal Bureau of Prisons maintains its own for-profit corporation, UNICOR, or Federal Prison Industries. In a report last November, UNICOR said that it has agricultural, industrial and service operations at 63 factories and 2 farms located at 52 prison facilities that employed 9,452 and 10,998 inmates as of September 30, 2020 and 2019, respectively. In fiscal 2020, the company lost $473 million and recorded a loss of $2.9 million, largely because of the pandemic. In 2019, revenues were $ 466,747,000, with net income of nearly $21 million.

Many states also maintain extensive systems of inmate labor, and some systems contract with private companies to produce goods to be sold to the public. In some systems, inmates staff private call centers handling sales or complaints. Some state prisoners, even today, receive no pay for their work; many others are paid well below the market rate for their jobs. California state prisoners who battle the hellish wildfires of the past several years are paid, depending on skill level, between $3 and $5 an hourplus good time credits to reduce their sentences. They are trained as firefightersbut this training was, until recently, worthless to them upon release, as they were not eligible for civilian firefighter jobs. (A state law passed last year now permits released inmates to petition courts to lift this restriction.)

Prisoners staff the state capitols and governors mansions in a number of state capitals. As First Lady of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton recalled managing a household staff on loan from state prisons: we had far fewer disciplinary problems with inmates who were in for murder than with those who had committed property crimes.

For-profit prison companies have also been found to be extorting labor from individuals detained for immigration violationswho have, thus, not been convicted of any crime and thus may not lawfully be subjected to involuntary servitude.

How did we get here? Why does the text of an amendment aimed at freedom include words allowing slavery as a punishment? This language, it turns out, was first written by Thomas Jefferson. In 1784, Jefferson drafted a land ordinance for disposal and management of the Western lands that were being ceded by the original states to the new national government. As historian Eric Foner notes in his bookThe Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, as a devotee of Enlightenment prison reform, Jefferson felt that labor was good for the character.

His draft Land Ordinance provision read: [A]fter the year 1800 of the Christian era, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States [formed from the Western Lands], otherwise than in punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted to have been personally guilty. The final Northwest Ordinance flowing from this draft kept the punishment language. It eliminated Jeffersons 16-year extension of slaverybut added a provision that required slaves escaping from the original states to be lawfully reclaimed by their masters.

By the 1860s, this language had acquired a patina of reverence among politicians and intellectuals. That reverence came to the fore during the last months of the Civil War when it came time to write an amendment ending slavery. Sen. Charles Sumner, the most radical abolitionist member of the Senate, in 1864 offered an amendment providing that, everywhere in U.S. territory, all persons are equal before the law, so that no person can hold another as a slave.

Brown University historian Michael Vorenberg writes in Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment, and the Abolition of Slavery that Lincoln and his congressional allies knew the Amendment would not pass without the votes of War Democrats, who had stayed loyal to the Union but were less than enthusiastic about emancipating slaves, much less equality before the law. Some of these conservatives saw Sumners language as a potential threat to the status of husbands as masters of their wives and children.

Opponents attacked Sumners draft because it drew on the wording of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Sen. Jacob Howard said he preferred the good old Anglo-Saxon language employed by our fathers. The punishment clause was included without much further debate. The textual result is that slavery is prohibitedbut also that, for the first time, it is recognized by name in the text of the Constitution, and apparently (depending on how you read the sentence) is actually permitted for some Americans duly convicted of crime. (This being why Judge Henleys opinion might be correct.) And it is pungently ironic that the kings cure for slavery retains words first written by an American Founder who wrote that all men are created equal, but who was also, as historian Paul Finkelman notes, a creepy, brutal hypocrite in his treatment of his roughly 200 slaves.

With the 21st centurys new movement against mass incarceration has arisen a desire to cleanse the Constitution of this affirmation of slavery. In December 2020, as the 116th Congress dragged to its contentious and violent end, Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, joined by Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), along with Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO) introduced a joint resolution proposing a 28th constitutional amendment: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude may be imposed as a punishment for a crime. The proposal was backed by a coalition of criminal justice and reform groups, including the Constitutional Accountability Center, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Color of Change. A statement issued by Merkleys office said that [t]his amendment would close this loophole that has been used for a century and a half to perpetuate mass incarceration and allow others to profit from the forced labor of their fellow Americans, disproportionately Black Americans and people of color.

In an email, Merkley said that [l]ike a lot of people, I never really thought about that one except clause in the 13thAmendment until I saw Ava DuVernays incredible documentary, 13th, which documents the post-Civil War history of prison labor and mass incarceration as an outgrowth of the antebellum slave system. He later consulted with Goodwin, the UCI law professor, in formulating a proposed constitutional amendment.

[Americas Twentieth-Century Slavery]

The aim of the amendment, proponents say, is not to prevent prisoners from working. Work, and work experience, are clearly valuable in prisonboth as preparation for re-entry and as a means of staying sane while still inside. Instead, they say, work programs would have to be voluntaryand would have to pay genuine market wages.

Historians differ about how much harm the punishment clause has caused. Michael Vorenberg, author of Final Freedom, told me in an email that the state of racial mass incarceration todaya genuinely serious and systemic problemdoes NOT have its origins in the exceptional clause of the Thirteenth Amendment.

In 2016, Patrick Rael, a historian at Bowdoin College, wrote in the Black Perspectives history blog that the punishment clause was not an important source of the Jim Crow labor system: To justify their oppression, white supremacists usedmuch more powerfulandovert legal devicesthan slippery language in the Thirteenth Amendment.Jim Crow and mass incarcerationwouldve happened with or without the exception clause. In an impassioned reply in the same blog, Dennis R. Childs, a literature professor at the University of California at San Diego and the author of Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary, responded, white supremacist law refabricated slavery in both old and updated forms using the exception clause as legal cover. The fact is that a major catalyst of southern industrialization after the Civil War was a product of neo-slave labor in the form of convict leasing, chain gangs, and prison plantations.

Its hard to imagine that changing the punishment clause by itself would put an end to the open scandal of prison labor. (Remember Judge Smith, who didnt see the big deal, slavery-wise, about Cummins.) But Merkley wrote that having this conversation at the national level can help encourage states to remove similar provisions from their state constitutionsas we are already seeing with red and blue states across the nation. A nationwide advocacy group, the Abolish Slavery National Network, reports that, as of today, 19 states have punishment language in their constitutionsbut that since 2018, Colorado and Utah have both removed punishment clauses from theirs. A similar change is pending in New Jersey.

Goodwin also offers slavery abolition as an issue that might bring left and right together even in 2021: If there is any issue where there should be immediate bipartisan support it should be doing away with slavery in the U.S. Constitution, she said. And the change in wording itself would be a good thing: This is a nation that is heavily invested in its symbols. Symbolically we should not want to be linked with slavery.

The rest is here:

The War Over the 13th Amendment and Modern Day Slavery - Washington Monthly