Matthew Connor

The Stop and Shop strike is over and at least tentatively it looks like the workers won most of what they wanted. The devil is always in the details and I’m having trouble finding much about the chain’s desire to create two-tier contracts. But they did win on wages, health care, and pensions, which is great. Stop and Shop is trying to buy a chain called King Kullen and there’s at least some talk that this the threat to that merger is why they caved.

In any case, this is a solid win in the public relations department and hopefully is another example of how when strikes win, they give courage to other workers to take action to promote their own rights on the job as well.

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When we talk about strikes, it’s very easy to romanticize them. That’s an error. Strikes are scary and they cause a lot of stress upon workers, as they are for the Stop and Shop workers, now a week into their strike. But also do not fret, this strike has been incredibly effective and Stop and Shop is really feeling the pressure:

The Stop & Shop on Newport Avenue in Quincy was eerily quiet Tuesday morning, the hum of refrigeration and chattering of product ads over the intercom among the only signs of life in the largely empty store. The deli and meat departments were dark, their counters mostly bare, and the produce display for bananas was barren.

At the Roslindale store, bakery cases and the hot food bar were empty, kale and mustard greens were nowhere to be found, and the only open lanes were the self-checkout ones. The Hyde Park store was locked, as it has been since the strike began Thursday, according to picketing workers, while one of two Stop & Shops on Nantucket is also closed.The nearly week-old strike by 31,000 unionized Stop & Shop workers is clearly having an impact, with the union contending that at least several dozen of 240 stores in three states are closed, and many shoppers are staying away from those that are still open.

“In nearly 30 years, we haven’t seen a strike as effective and devastating as this one,” said Burt P. Flickinger III, managing director of Strategic Resource Group, a retail consulting firm that has evaluated grocery store strikes for three decades.

That assessment includes the six-week boycott of Market Basket stores in 2014 prompted by employees walking off the job to protest the firing of the company president during a family dispute over control of the chain. The Stop & Shop strike is even keeping shoppers away in wealthy communities, Flickinger said, which isn’t always the case.

Stop & Shop would not provide specifics on closures and supplies, noting only that “the majority of stores are open” and that “there have been some delays” on deliveries. On Monday, Stop & Shop sent a letter to customers from president Mark McGowan noting that the deli, seafood, bakery, and customer service counters are not operational, meat selection is limited, and gas stations are closed. Hours are also now limited to 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

I was out on a solidarity picket at my local Stop and Shop, where I usually do my shopping, last weekend, and I’d say the picket probably got 30-40% of the people to turn around, with another maybe 10% saying they were just using the bank, which given that it was a Sunday there really wasn’t any other option and the workers were OK with that. So that’s critical. But you know what else is critical? Solidarity from the Teamsters, who, as they have done so many times before, provide invaluable service to the labor movement by refusing to cross picket lines.

Inside stores, shortages are evident. Meat and produce are rapidly disappearing from shelves, and aren’t being replaced because truck drivers in the Teamsters union are refusing to cross the picket line. Workers are blocking other trucks from making deliveries.

And unless Stop and Shop’s parent company is willing to lose a whole lot of money, even those who don’t care about unions and are happy to use the scab technology of self-checkout scanners have no reason to shop there if there’s nothing on the shelves.

Despite their pleas, one customer headed in to pick up some fruit. “I feel awful doing this,” said the woman, who would only give her first name, Barbara, saying she was stopping there because she didn’t want to be late for work.

A few minutes later, she was back outside, empty-handed.

“I just felt like a jerk,” she said. Plus: “All the shelves were empty.”

As much as I don’t like him, Joe Biden is showing up tomorrow for a solidarity action, giving this even more attention. Elizabeth Warren popped in a few days ago. This is all very, very good. And it will give courage for other workers to stand up for themselves through the strike.

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Stop and Shop is the largest grocery store chain in the Northeast and where I usually shop unless I want to signify my class status by paying 50% more at Whole Foods which I never want to do. Yesterday, its workers in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, organized in the United Food and Commercial Workers, walked off the job. It’s a big strike, with 31,000 people out, which is probably the largest private sector strike in the U.S. since the Verizon strike in 2016. And it’s for good reason too, as the parent company–which made over $2 billion last year–is asking for huge givebacks on health care.

More than 30,000 grocery store employees in the northeastern US are refusing to return to work for the second day in a row.

Cashiers and deli workers at Stop & Shop supermarkets walked off the job Thursday afternoon at 240 stores in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, saying the supermarket chain is trying to slash their pay by hiking health insurance premiums and lowering pension benefits for new employees.

The workers have been negotiating new jobs contracts with the company since January, according to their labor unions, which are part of the United Food & Commercial Workers Union International. Workers want their paychecks to get larger, not smaller, they say, especially now that Stop & Shop’s profits are growing faster than before.

“They’re a billion-dollar company because of us,” one associate, who was picketing with coworkers outside a Stop & Shop in Middletown, Connecticut, said Friday in a video posted on Facebook by the local union. “We’re out here striking and protesting to show what’s fair and what’s right.”

The company offered across-the-board pay raises, but union reps say the jump in health care premiums and deductibles for employees would end up costing them more than they would get from any pay bump. Stop & Shop executives disagree, saying their latest proposal won’t increase deductibles, and that all workers will end up with larger paychecks.

I swung by my local Stop and Shop–which sadly still had a lot of customers–and honked my horn to give a little bit of solidarity to these workers. Am also glad to see them getting some real support from famous people. This is good:

Arrived at my local grocery store with a long list and learned that the workers had just gone on strike. So I turned around and got back in the car. No way I’d cross that line. They are too good to me and my kids. Good luck on a fair resolution. #AlwaysFriendly #AlwaysHelpful

— Rebecca Lobo (@RebeccaLobo) April 11, 2019

And this is great!

@ewarren brought doughnuts to striking Stop and Shop workers in Somerville today. pic.twitter.com/kPmlDdDkCa

— Amanda Beland (@Amanda_Beland) April 12, 2019

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Once again demonstrating that everything should be written by historians, Donna Murch has a great piece on how we are talking about opioid crisis, especially noting the deep racism underlying it.

In March 2018, President Donald Trump delivered a forty-minute speech about the crisis of addiction and overdose in New Hampshire. Standing before a wall tiled with the words “Opioids: The Crisis Next Door,” Trump blankly recited the many contributors to the current drug epidemic, including doctors, dealers, and manufacturers. Trump droned on mechanically until he reached a venomous crescendo about Customs and Border Protection’s seizure of 1,500 pounds of fentanyl. He brightened as he shifted focus to three of his most hated enemies, first blaming China and Mexico for saturating the United States with deadly synthetic opioids, then moving seamlessly to what he considered one of the great internal threats: “My administration is also confronting things called ‘sanctuary cities,’” Trump declared. “Ending sanctuary cities is crucial to stopping the drug addiction crisis.”

Like so many of Trump’s proclamations, this rhetoric is sheer political fantasy. 

Since the late 1990s, yearly rates of overdose deaths from legal “white market” opioids have consistently exceeded those from heroin. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 1999 and 2017, opioid overdoses killed nearly 400,000 people with 68 percent of those deaths linked to prescription medications. Moreover, as regulators and drug companies tightened controls on diversion and misuse after 2010, the American Society of Addiction Medicine determined that at least 80 percent of “new heroin users started out misusing prescription pain killers.” Some data sets point to even higher numbers. In response to a 2014 survey of people undergoing treatments for opioid addiction, 94 percent of people surveyed said that they turned to heroin because prescription opioids were “far more expensive and harder to obtain.”

In the face of these statistics, the claim that the opioid crisis is the product of Mexican and Central American migration—rather than the deregulation of Big Pharma and the failures of a private health care system—is not only absurd, but insidious. It substitutes racial myth for fact, thereby rationalizing an ever-expanding machinery of punishment while absolving one of the most lucrative, and politically influential, business lobbies in the United States. This paradoxical relationship between a racialized regime of illegal drug prohibition and a highly commercial, laissez-faire approach to prescription pharmaceuticals cannot be understood without recourse to how racial capitalism has structured pharmacological markets throughout U.S. history. The linguistic convention of “white” and “black” markets points to how steeped our ideas of licit and illicit are in the metalanguage of race.

Historically, the fundamental division between “dope” and medicine was the race and class of users. The earliest salvos in the U.S. domestic drug wars can be traced to anti-opium ordinances in late nineteenth-century California as Chinese laborers poured into the state during the railroad building boom. In 1914 the federal government passed the Harrison Narcotics Act, which taxed and regulated opiates and coca products. Similarly, as rates of immigration increased in the aftermath of the Mexican revolution, Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which targeted the customs and culture of newly settled migrants. Although “cannabis” was well known in the United States—it was used in numerous tinctures and medicines—a racial scare campaign swept the country and warned that “marijuana” aroused men of color’s violent lust for white women.

As bad as the early drug panics were, they paled in comparison to the carceral regime of drug prohibition and policing that emerged in the years after the civil rights movement. In the 1980s and 1990s, mass incarceration and the overlapping War(s) on Drugs and Gangs became de facto urban policy for impoverished communities of color in U.S. cities. Legislation expanded state and federal mandatory minimums for drug offenses, denied public housing to entire families if any member was even suspected of a drug crime, lengthened the list of crimes eligible for the federal death penalty, and imposed draconian restrictions of parole. Ultimately, multiple generations of youth of color found themselves confined under long prison sentences and faced with lifelong social and economic marginality.

Integrating the opioid crisis with the War on Drugs raises questions beyond familiar narratives and political discourses. In the United States, prohibition of illicit drugs and the mass marketing of licit pharmaceuticals fit together in a larger framework of racial capitalism and deregulation that are deeply intertwined and mutually reinforcing. The opioid crisis would not have been possible without the racial regimes that have long structured both illicit and licit modes of consumption. As we will see, the demonization of urban, nonwhite drug users played a crucial role in the opening of “white” pharmaceutical markets in the 1990s that proved so enormously profitable to companies such as Purdue Pharma and paved the way for our current public health crisis.

decades of drug and incarceration frenzies past, including the threat of the death penalty for drug trafficking (Bill Clinton), Just Say No campaigns (Ronald Reagan), and the reinvigoration of the War on Gangs (Bill Clinton again). “We are all facing a deadly lucrative international drug trade,” warned Trump’s then attorney general, Jeff Sessions. As he spoke before the International Association of Chiefs of Police in the fall of 2017, Sessions laid out a law-and-order platform that promised to “back the blue,” reduce crime, and dismantle “transnational criminal organizations.” He drew so heavily from 1980s anti-drug hysteria, in fact, that he earned giddy praise from Edwin Meese III, Reagan’s attorney general who helped enshrined the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. “Largely unnoticed has been the extraordinary work that . . . Sessions has done in the Department of Justice to create a Reaganesque resurgence of law and order,” Meese opined in USA Today in January 2018.

Over the past two years, Trump and Sessions repeatedly used the threat of drugs and racial contagion for a reactionary portfolio ranging from reversals of modest criminal justice reforms of the Obama era— including reinstating federal civil forfeiture, limiting federal power to implement consent decrees at the local level, and the expansion of mandatory minimum sentencing in the federal system—to the building of a wall along the Mexican border. And, although anti-crime rhetoric no longer has the same purchase as it did in the era of Willie Horton or Ricky Ray Rector—thanks in large part to activist efforts to delegitimize mass incarceration—the reinvigorated machinery of criminalization remains firmly in place.

The whole thing is this great and crucial, but let me also just point out this bit on how these narratives get brought into popular culture, even today.

This “problematic social entitlement” functioned as the flip side of the more familiar story of criminalization and divestment of black and brown populations in the Wars on Drugs and Crime. Prohibition of urban vice required a space of white absolution that enabled the profitable mass-marketing of licit pharmaceuticals. “A focus on pharmaceutical white markets tells a very different story: of a divided system of drug control designed to encourage and enable a segregated market for psychoactive substances,” Herzberg argues. “This regime established a privilege—maximal freedom of rational choice in a relatively safe drug market . . . and linked this privilege both institutionally and culturally to social factors such as economic class and whiteness.”

Cultural logics, as well as criminal justice policy, have also reinforced and animated the racialized boundary between “licit health seekers” and “illicit pleasure seekers” in the popular imagination. Iconic drug films such as Traffic (2000) and Requiem for a Dream (2000) dramatize the tragedy of white women’s descent into illegal narcotic use through pornographic narratives in which “innocent” young white girls are coerced into interracial sex by black male “pushers.” Drawing on the cinematic grammar of D. W. Griffith’s classic KKK paean Birth of a Nation (1915), they reenact the white supremacist ideology that reinforced racial segregation. Viewed in this way, the opioid crisis appears not as an unprecedented phenomenon, but the product of longstanding historical processes.

The role of white absolution is even clearer when looking at the disparate consequences for illicit drug use across the color line. Nothing speaks more profoundly to how the state artificially constructed segregated drug markets than federal prosecutions for crack use. Few realize that almost no white people were ever charged with crack offenses by federal authorities. This is despite the federal government’s own data from the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) documenting that over two-thirds of crack users were white. Between 1986, when Congress signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act into law, and 1994, when President Clinton’s crime bill was passed, not a single white person was convicted of a federal crack offense in Miami, Boston, Denver, Chicago, Dallas, or Los Angeles. “Out of hundreds of cases, only one white was convicted in California, two in Texas, three in New York and two in Pennsylvania,” noted Los Angeles Times reporter Dan Weikel. Instead, prosecutors shunted their cases into the state system, which had much lower rates of conviction and shorter sentences.

Again, this is all outstanding and very much worth your time.

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The post And it FEEEEEEEELS like nudity appeared first on Popjustice.

Maybe people should stop talking about how of course it’s impossible for Pete Buttigieg to win, and more about stuff like this:

A true story about @PeteButtigieg. pic.twitter.com/ojFXa8IguU

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) March 16, 2019

Apparently Buttigieg speaks, in addition to English and Norwegian, Arabic, Dari (I don’t even know what that is), French, Italian, Maltese, and Spanish.

Here’s a New Yorker profile of the anti-Trump.

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• The right policy choice for the right reasons:

Gov. Gavin Newsom, arguing that the death penalty overwhelmingly discriminates against racial minorities and the poor, will sign an order Wednesday placing a moratorium on executions in California, according to his office. The move serves as an immediate reprieve for hundreds of prisoners currently housed on the nation’s largest Death Row.

Newsom’s executive order, to be signed Wednesday morning, withdraws California’s lethal injection protocol and immediately mandates the closure of the execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison, in Marin County. While the governor’s order will be a reprieve for 737 prisoners sentenced to death — including 24 who have exhausted all legal appeals — Newsom’s office stressed that his order would not provide for the release of any inmates or alter their convictions or sentences.

California has the largest number of condemned prisoners in the nation, representing one out of every four Death Row inmates in the United States.

“I do not believe that a civilized society can claim to be a leader in the world as long as its government continues to sanction the premeditated and discriminatory execution of its people,’’ Newsom, a Democrat, said in a statement released late Tuesday. “In short, the death penalty is inconsistent with our bedrock values and strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a Californian.”

California’s huge death row, from which a few people are arbitrarily selected for execution, is a human rights disaster, and good for Newsom for ending it.

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Black Mother, Khalik Allah’s latest documentary feature, may be considered something of a homecoming project for its photographer-turned-director. Filmed in Jamaica over a period of two years (during which time he also contributed to Beyoncé’s Lemonade, specifically the New Orleans portions), the film is a return to…

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No wonder Republicans hate the minimum wage, as raising it saves the lives of the poor they are indifferent to. Matthew Desmond has a long story on how this works. It’s very long but here’s an excerpt:

For years, when American policymakers have debated the minimum wage, they have debated its effect on the labor market. Economists have gone around and around, rehashing the same questions about how wage bumps for the poorest workers could reduce employment, raise prices or curtail hours. What most didn’t ask was: When low-wage workers receive a pay increase, how does that affect their lives?

But recently, a small group of researchers scattered around the country have begun to pursue this long-neglected question, specifically looking into the public-health effects of a higher minimum wage. A 2011 national study showed that low-skilled workers reported fewer unmet medical needs in states with higher minimum-wage rates. In high-wage states, workers were better able to pay for the care they needed. In low-wage states, workers skipped medical appointments. Or consider the research on smoking. Big Tobacco has long targeted low-income communities, where three in four smokers in America now live, but studies have found strong evidence that increases to the minimum wage are associated with decreased rates of smoking among low-income workers. Higher wages ease the grind of poverty, freeing up people’s capacities to quit.

Some of the biggest beneficiaries of minimum wage increases are children. A 2017 study co-authored by Lindsey Bullinger, an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Institute of Technology, found that raising the minimum wage by $1 would reduce child-neglect reports by almost 10 percent. Higher wages allow parents working in the low-wage labor market to keep the lights on and the refrigerator stocked; failing to do so can court neglect charges. “These studies show the positive externalities of increasing the minimum wage on serious outcomes, like reducing child abuse,” Bullinger said, issuing an eloquent barb at economists’ obsession with the “negative externalities” of minimum-wage hikes.

The list goes on. Studies have linked higher minimum wages to decreases in low birth-weight babies, lower rates of teen alcohol consumption and declines in teen births. A 2016 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that between roughly 2,800 and 5,500 premature deaths that occurred in New York City from 2008 to 2012 could have been prevented if the city’s minimum wage had been $15 an hour during that time, instead of a little over $7 an hour. That number represents up to one in 12 of all people who died prematurely in those five years. The chronic stress that accompanies poverty can be seen at the cellular level. It has been linked to a wide array of adverse conditions, from maternal health problems to tumor growth. Higher wages bring much-needed relief to poor workers. The lead author of the 2016 study, Tsu-Yu Tsao, a research director at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, was “very surprised by the magnitude of the findings.” He is unaware of any drug on the market that comes close to having this big of an effect.

A $15 minimum wage is an antidepressant. It is a sleep aid. A diet. A stress reliever. It is a contraceptive, preventing teenage pregnancy. It prevents premature death. It shields children from neglect. But why? Poverty can be unrelenting, shame-inducing and exhausting. When people live so close to the bone, a small setback can quickly spiral into a major trauma. Being a few days behind on the rent can trigger a hefty late fee, which can lead to an eviction and homelessness. An unpaid traffic ticket can lead to a suspended license, which can cause people to lose their only means of transportation to work. In the same way, modest wage increases have a profound impact on people’s well-being and happiness. Poverty will never be ameliorated on the cheap. But this truth should not prevent us from acknowledging how powerfully workers respond to relatively small income boosts.

Labor rights aren’t just a policy debate. They are a moral crusade. If you don’t support workers’ rights, you simply don’t have a strong moral compass. This is about saving people’s lives, both in the current generation and our future generations. There is no room for “economic moderates” in the future of the Democratic Party. This is as much of a moral question as reproductive rights and gay marriage. While we can debate around the edges of specific policies, you either support a dignified life for the working class or you don’t.

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I’m a little behind in my grave posts because I have been trying to get a bunch of other things done. Unlike what people generally believe, I do not find cemeteries interesting at all for themselves. It’s not out of some interest in them that I go. What I am interested in is finding ways to commemorate the people of the past, good, bad, or mixed. We are surrounded by the collective actions of many people who have shaped the world in which we live, yet by and large we don’t commemorate that history very well. The U.S. actually does a better job with this than probably any other nation in the world, especially because historians here are pretty publicly engaged and are interested in questions of justice instead of exclusively dynastic or high-level political history such as in much of Europe. And yet there is much that we do not discuss at all. That’s the point of the project. But of course the cemeteries themselves tell stories and, moreover, reflect the power structure at the heart of American society. That means, as I have explored at times in the grave series, that black cemeteries are as neglected and impoverished as living black citizens, whereas old white cemeteries are the home of historic tours, Confederate flags (in the South anyway), and well-manicured landscaping. Thus, I appreciated this essay by the historian William Sturkey on a black cemetery in Durham, North Carolina:

In a region inundated with debates over Confederate monuments, Black History Month invites us to refocus our attention to a largely unrecognized section of Durham known as the Geer Cemetery. Tucked away in the northeast corner of the Duke Park neighborhood, the 142-year old cemetery is slowly succumbing to the encroaching forest. More than 1,500 black people are buried there. Those everyday black men and women lived and worked and died in this place long before we arrived. Their labor built much of the world in which we now move. Many of them had no choice. Some were enslaved. Others were poor black people who worked segregated jobs during Jim Crow. All of them deserve to be remembered, and their final resting place deserves better than its current state of neglect.

Our landscape is filled with the names of elite white families. Members of these elite white families fought, even killed, to ensure that white and black remain separated and stratified. As we remember their contributions, let us also acknowledge that they perpetuated slavery and Jim Crow. They used the lives of human beings, both black and white, to build their wealth. And when that fortune was earned, a lot of people in those families simply packed up and moved away. Yet, we unflinchingly celebrate the landscape of statues and named-buildings they left in their wake. Today, some people argue that we must maintain those monuments; and that we must forgive the now-unthinkable historical white supremacy of our region’s forebears because of everything else they gave us. To do otherwise, we hear, would be to erase history, or to make elite white families disappear.

These arguments that you “can’t erase history” mistakenly conflate history with the past. The past includes all the events and people that came before us. The past is inextricable. History, on the other hand, is the study of how we portray the past. As those of us who write and teach it know, the study of history also includes who we choose to forget.

As it turns out, you actually can erase history. You can do so by deeming some people less important; by restricting what is written about them; by segregating schools and professions and archives; and by allowing an urban forest to consume the graves of people who society does not value. As we spend hundreds and thousands of hours and dollars worrying about abstract Confederate monuments and the legacies of wealthy white elites, nary a nickel goes toward maintaining the graves of actual people who built our society. As important as those white families were, it was other people who did the digging, laid the bricks, raised the crops, and cared for their children. It was black people. And today, we allow a forest to silently swallow the bones and headstones of those who have truly been erased from history.

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Association of Flight Attendants president Sara Nelson is calling for a general strike of airline workers to shut down the industry until the government reopens.

Our calling is now. There is a humanitarian crisis unfolding right now for our 800,000 federal sector sisters and brothers who are either locked out of work or forced to come to work without pay due to the government shutdown.

These are real people who are facing real consequences of being dragged into the longest shutdown in history. No money to pay for rent, for childcare, or a tank of gas to get to work. The federal worker stretching insulin through the night and wondering if she will wake up in the morning. The transportation security officer in her third trimester with no certainty for her unborn child. The corrections officer who tried to take his own life because he saw no other way out. The air traffic controller who whispered to his union leader, “I just don’t know how long I can hang on.”

The situation is changing rapidly. Major airports are already seeing security checkpoints closing. Many more will follow. Safety inspectors and federal cybersecurity staff are on furlough, not working. The layers of safety and security that keep us safe are not in place due to the shutdown.

I have a growing concern for our members’ safety and security.

In addition, it is likely days – no more than a week – until the aviation system begins to unravel and massive flight cancelations ensue. When that happens, private jets won’t take off either, and no one will get to Atlanta for the Superbowl.

At best, our members will lose work, at worst ..

As I have said many times in recent days, safety and security is non-negotiable.

The TSA was created for the same reason my friends’ names, along with 3000 others, are engraved in bronze at the 9/11 memorial in New York.

If they can’t do their job, I can’t do mine. Dr. King said, “their destiny is tied up with our destiny. We cannot walk alone.”

Federal workers here tonight – Stand Up.

Flight Attendants and aviation workers – Stand Up.

Nurses who count on the medicine we deliver on our planes – Stand Up.

Everyone who flew to this conference – Stand Up.

Anyone who believes it is a crime to make people work without pay – Stand Up.

Federal workers, We’ve got your back!

…

Now listen to me… We can end this Shutdown together.

Federal sector unions have their hands full caring for the 800,000 federal workers who are at the tip of the spear. Some would say the answer is for them to walk off the job. I say, “what are you willing to do? Their destiny IS tied up with our destiny – and they don’t even have time to ask us for help. Don’t wait for an invitation. Get engaged, join or plan a rally, get on a picket line, organize sit-ins at lawmakers’ offices.

Almost a million workers are locked out or being forced to work without pay. Others are going to work when our workspace is increasingly unsafe. What is the Labor Movement waiting for?

Go back with the Fierce Urgency of NOW to talk with your Locals and International unions about all workers joining together – To End this Shutdown with a General Strike.

We can do this. Together. Si se puede. Every gender, race, culture, and creed. The American Labor Movement. We have the power.

And to all Americans – We’ve Got Your Back!

We can debate whether this is feasible or a good idea or whatever. But this is an absolutely remarkable statement coming from a union president. Union leaders tend to be fairly conservative in act, if not in thought, because of the downsides of radical actions that they know all too well. Usually, these kinds of calls come from union militants who claim the leadership are a bunch of sellouts, or from radicals outside the labor movement without any real connection to workers. I have little doubt that Nelson would say this if conversations between the relevant unions have not been leaning in this direction to some degree.

Were this to happen, well, I don’t know what the result would be. Right now, basically everyone but hard-core Trumpers blame Trump for the racist border wall and the shutdown. There’s a ton of sympathy for the workers who aren’t getting paid. No one should have to work without pay. I think everyone believes that. Yes, this strike would be illegal. But, no, I don’t believe that there would be any reason to believe that these workers would be fired, a la the air traffic controllers in 1981. The reasons to think that is that the government has absolutely zero backup plan on what to do if workers walked out, whereas they had planned for an eventual PATCO strike for years. Moreover, this would be much larger than PATCO. That union was a single small union that often angered its fellow airline unions by not consulting them on any of their militant actions, meaning that their own members were often put out of work or seriously inconvenienced. This is an entirely different deal.

So, yeah, this is pretty interesting!

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[NB: Check it ^^^ / ~Rayne]

I don’t have a full post written yet — I will update this post when I have more to say.

What I want to say is this: CALL YOUR SENATORS RIGHT NOW.

Congressional Switchboard: (202) 224-3121

There are only two simple things to tell them:

— Government must be reopened as soon as possible;

— No on the “fucken wall.”

Our nation’s health and security is diminished every moment this unnecessary lockout continues.

Why do you need to call now? Because Mitch McConnell has scheduled a vote for 2:30 p.m. today on Trump’s ‘phony compromise‘ bill.

Right-wing wall proponents (a.k.a. anti-immigrant bigots and faux budget conservatives) have been encouraged to call their senators with a pro-wall message. We must counter this; calls are counted and weighed into consideration.

More later. Just make the call. Share in comments your experience.

The post Day 33+11H: Flood the Zone appeared first on emptywheel.

David Dayen makes a really good point here.

House Democrats had big plans for opening the 116th Congress, with showy votes on cracking down on government corruption and protecting pre-existing conditions. But such plans rarely survive contact with reality. The party’s takeover of the House on Thursday coincides with Day 13 of a partial government shutdown of nine cabinet-level departments, a crisis that takes precedence over every other legislative priority.

Nancy Pelosi, the presumptive House speaker, has outlined a two-bill package to fund the government, which will get a vote on Thursday. It’s not likely to end the impasse, but it does signal an intention to make good on promises to the 800,000 or so federal workers who haven’t received a paycheck since the shutdown. Section 2 of the second bill states that “employees furloughed as a result of the lapse in appropriations … shall be compensated at their standard rate of compensation” for the time that they’ve missed.

But only federal employees would be covered by this back-pay clause. That excludes everyone who toils for a federal contractor, particularly the low-wage workers who clean, secure, and staff federal buildings—around 2,000 of them, according to the Service Employees International Union. When the Smithsonian museums and the National Zoo closed on Wednesday, contract workers who provide concessions and take tickets also got sent home, adding to the ranks.

Contractors are the most vulnerable people in the federal workforce, the ones who can least afford a disruption in their pay. And yet, in the aftermath of government shutdowns, they are the only employees who don’t get compensated after the fact. In 2013, when the government closed for 16 days, federal workers received back pay, but low-wage contractors did not, causing serious financial depression for struggling families in Washington. “When the politicians closed the government, they didn’t think about the impact it would have on our families,” Pablo Lazaro, a cook at a Smithsonian museum, said at the time.

This is an error on the part of Democrats and it should be fixed. I don’t know if it was intentional or the contracted workers just got forgotten about. But either way, it is emblematic of the deep problems with our economy, superficial numbers about unemployment notwithstanding. Subcontracts for service work are so standard today that no one thinks about it. But this is a terrible thing. There was a time when employers themselves hired cooks and janitors. That required full consideration as employees. Now, everything from prisons to school cafeterias are outsourced to contractors. They make minimum wage or close to it. They lack unions. They have no voice. And when the government shuts down, they are forgotten about too. We have to start moving in a different direction on these issues and prioritize the rights and livelihoods not only of the middle class workers who labor directly for the government, but of the low-paid workers who make it all happen.

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Good lord, this is disgusting.

These are dangerous times for undocumented immigrants. ICE has been super-charged by the Trump administration. And ICE’s empowerment has been lucrative for the companies that both cage and employ immigrants like Yesica.

A Daily Beast investigation found that in 2018 alone, for-profit immigration detention was a nearly $1 billion industry underwritten by taxpayers and beset by problems that include suicide, minimal oversight, and what immigration advocates say uncomfortably resembles slave labor.

Being in the U.S. illegally is a misdemeanor offense, and immigration detention is technically a civil matter, not a criminal process. But the reality looks much different. The Daily Beast reported last month that as of Oct. 20, ICE was detaining an average of 44,631 people every day, an all-time high. Now ICE has told The Daily Beast that its latest detention numbers are even higher: 44,892 people as of Dec. 8. Its budget request for the current fiscal year anticipates detaining 52,000 people daily.

Expanding the number of immigrants rounded up into jails isn’t just policy; it’s big business. Yesica’s employer and jailer, the private prisons giant GEO Group, expects its earnings to grow to $2.3 billion this year. Like other private prison companies, it made large donations to President Trump’s campaign and inaugural.

Pinning down the size and scope of the immigration prison industry is obscured by government secrecy. But the Daily Beast combed through ICE budget submissions and other public records to compile as comprehensive a list as possible of what for-profit prisons charge taxpayers to lock up a growing population, and how many people those facilities detain on average. The result: For 19 privately owned or operated detention centers for which The Daily Beast could find recent pricing data, ICE paid an estimated $807 million in fiscal year 2018.

Read the whole thing. The entire system of prison labor is a moral monstrosity. When you add private prison contractors, ICE, and Trumpers to that mix, you have a toxicity at the very heart of the republic. But then finding ways for people of color to labor for free or nearly free for white people is in fact the founding ideology of this nation, all the fancy words of the Declaration of Independence notwithstanding.

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In the wake of Trump’s announcement that the US will withdraw from Syria and James Mattis’ subsequent resignation, Jeremy Scahill captured the ambivalence of the moment this way:

I agree with much of what Scahill says: I welcome withdrawing troops from overseas. We should never forget that Mattis earned his name, Mad Dog, nor that he got fired by Obama for being too belligerent. The panicked response of a bunch of warmongers is telling. Trump cannot be trusted.

But I think Scahill is too pat in saying “the chaos presents opportunity,” in part because (as he suggests) there doesn’t yet exist “an alternative vision for US foreign policy.”

And while I appreciate that Scahill really does capture this ambivalence, far too many others welcoming a potential troop withdrawal are not recognizing the complexity of the moment.

While we don’t yet fully understand the complex dynamics that led to it, Trump decided to withdraw from Syria during a phone call with a man who has spent two months embarrassing Trump, Trump’s son-in-law, and the corrupt Saudi prince whose crackdown Trump has enthusiastically backed by releasing details of how that prince lulled an American resident dissident to a third country so he could be chopped up with a bone saw while still breathing. And even while Erdogan was embarrassing Trump with those details about Khashoggi’s assassination, he was pressuring Trump to extend the same favor to him by extraditing Fethullah Gulen so he could be chopped up in some grisly fashion.

It is a mistake to think we will get peace from men who dismember dissidents alive.

All that said, Trump will do what he wants and unless the simmering revolt at DOD changes his mind, he will withdraw from Syria and drawdown in Afghanistan.

And if that happens those who would like peace had damn well be better prepared  for that “opportunity” than by simply hoping a future alternative US foreign policy arises. It will take immediate tactical actions to prevent any withdrawal from creating more chaos and misery both in the US and overseas. After all, Trump says he wants to bring troops home, but he has already come perilously close to violating posse comitatus by deploying troops domestically, and that was even with Mattis pushing back against that campaign stunt.

At a minimum, those who want peace need to answer some of the following questions immediately:

What person would both be willing to work for Trump and pursue a policy of peace?

I could not think of any person who could be confirmed by the Senate — even one where nutjobs like Marsha Blackburn have replaced people like Bob Corker — that would be willing to work for Donald Trump and might pursue some kind of alternative foreign policy.

In fact, the only person I could think of for the job (ruling out Erik Prince for a variety of reasons) would be Tom Cotton.

So job number one, for people who hope to use this as an opportunity, is to start coming up with names of people who could replace Mattis and anyone else who quits along with him.

How to prevent the refugee crisis from getting worse?

Multiple accounts of the events leading up to Trump’s decision make it clear that Erdogan would like to use US withdrawal to massacre the Kurds. It’s possible we’ll see similar massacres in Assad-held Syria and Afghanistan as those left try to consolidate their victory.

For all the years the refugee crisis has been mostly a political prop here in the US, it has posed a real threat to the European Union (indeed, I went to several meetings with EUP members in the weeks before Trump’s election where they said it was the greatest threat to the EU). So we need to start thinking seriously about how to prevent genocide and other massacres and the inevitable refugee crises that would result.

How to counter Trump’s fondness for fossil fuels and arms sales?

No withdrawal is going to lead to “peace” or even a retreat of the US empire so long as Trump exacerbates an already unforgivable US addiction to fossil fuels and reliance on arms sales. Particularly with Saudi Arabia but also with Turkey, Trump has excused his fondness for authoritarianism by pointing to arms sales.

And on these issues, Trump actually agrees with the “war party in DC,” which will make it far harder to counter them. Yes, many of the new Democrats entering Congress — most of all Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — don’t have these horrible habits. So what can you do to make sure her Green New Deal not only isn’t squelched by party leadership, but is seen as the alternative to Trump by centrists?

Nukes. How to prevent Trump from using them?

It’s not that Trump is opposed to violence. He’s opposed to engagement and complexity and long term engagement.

Which means, particularly as more and more so-called adults leave, the chance he’ll turn a tantrum into a nuclear strike skyrocket. Mattis won’t be there to stop him.

How to balance accountability for the mistakes that got us here with accountability for Trump?

The movement that brands itself as “The Resistance” has long made a grave mistake of embracing whatever warmed over anti-Trump centrist wanted to loudly denounce the President.

As a result, the mistakes of many of those people — people like John Brennan and Jim Comey and David Frum and David Brooks — were ignored, even when those mistakes created the vacuum that Trump (and Vladimir Putin) have filled.

Trump would not be President if George Bush had not invaded Iraq, abetted by Frum’s nifty tagline, Axis of Evil. Trump would not be President if the banks that crashed the economy in 2008 had been accountable by people like former Bridgewater Associates executive and HSBC board member then FBI Director Jim Comey.

Again, this is about complexity. But so long as those who would keep Trump accountable ignore what made Trump possible, we will make no progress.

How to preserve democracy long enough to pursue a new foreign policy?

Finally, an increasingly real challenge. Trump sides with Putin and Erdogan and Mohammed bin Salman and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi not because it serves US interests (which is the excuse American politicians usually offer for tolerating Saudi and Egyptian authoritarianism). He does so because he genuinely loves their authoritarianism.

And as Republicans in the Senate begin to push back against Trump, Democrats in the House try to hold him accountable, and the so-called adults leave his Administration, it raises the chances that Trump will embrace increasingly desperate measures to implement his policies. We can’t just assume that Mueller and SDNY and NY State will prevent a Trump authoritarian power grab, particularly not as he continues to pack the courts.

While numerous State Attorneys General and NGOs are having reasonable success at constraining Trump, thus far, in the courts, eventually we’re going to need a bipartisan commitment in DC to constraining Trump. Eventually we’re going to need to convince a bunch of Republican Senators that Trump is doing permanent damage to this country. That’s going to take building, not severing, relationships with some Republicans, even while finding some means to persuade them that Trump can no longer benefit them.

To some degree, we have no choice but to find answers to these questions, one way or another. It is especially incumbent on those celebrating a withdrawal to acknowledge, and try to answer, them.

The post We Will Not Get Peace from the People Who Dismember Dissidents Alive appeared first on emptywheel.

Given what the U.S. has done to nations such as Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, which has very much contributed to the large-scale migration we are seeing today, the only morally correct position is to have completely open borders to people from these nations, not to mention open borders for Mexicans, considering we stole half their nation in an unjust war to expand slavery.

The flow of migrants trying to cross the border illegally is not all blowback from US foreign policy. Much of the poverty, injustice and murder in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras is homegrown, harking back to the age of Spanish conquest. Small criminal elites have long prospered at the expense of the populations.

Experts on the region argue, however, that when politicians or activists have come forward on behalf of its dispossessed, the US has consistently intervened on the side of the powerful and wealthy to help crush them, or looked the other way when they have been slaughtered.

The families in the migrant caravans trudging towards the US border are trying to escape a hell that the US has helped to create.

Sometimes it has been a matter of unintended consequences. Enforcement measures targeting migrants have multiplied the cost of smugglers’ services. Desperate customers take out big loans at high interest in order to pay. The only hope of paying off those loans is to reach the US, so even if they fail at their quest, they have no choice but to try again, and again.

“Where it used to cost around $1,000 to make the journey from Central America, it now costs up to $12,000, making shuttle migration impossible,” said Elizabeth Oglesby, an associate professor at the centre for Latin American studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “The only way for families to stay together is for women and children to migrate.”

More often US intervention in the affairs of these small and weak states has been deliberate, motivated by profit or ideology or both.

“The destabilisation in the 1980s – which was very much part of the US cold war effort – was incredibly important in creating the kind of political and economic conditions that exist in those countries today,” said Christy Thornton, a sociologist focused on Latin America at Johns Hopkins University.

Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquín, who died of septic shock and cardiac arrest in US border patrol custody, came from Alta Verapaz, in the northern Guatemala highlands, where small-scale farmers are being driven off their land to make way for agro-industry producing sugar and biofuels.

It is an example of why it is often hard to distinguish between security and economic reasons for migration. The men behind the land grabs are often active or retired military officers, who are deeply involved in organised crime.

“When communities fight back against land-grabbing, their leaders can be killed. We’ve seen just in the past year almost two dozen community leaders assassinated,” Oglesby said. “There is a legacy of impunity.”

Guatemala’s long civil war can in turn be traced back to a 1954 coup against a democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, which was backed by the US. Washington backed the Guatemalan military, which was responsible for genocide against the native population. An estimated 200,000 people were killed between 1960 and 1996.

“The point was to root out anything that looked like communist subversion, but it was really a scorched earth policy against the indigenous people,” Thornton said.

The issue of impunity for violence remains central to Guatemala’s chronic problems. Jimmy Morales, a former comedian and the country’s president since 2016, has announced he is going to close down the UN-backed International Committee against Impunity in Guatemala (Cicig). Cicig has investigated corruption cases against Morales, his family and his political patrons, and links between organised crime and politicians like himself.

In September Cicig headquarters were surrounded by US-donated military jeeps, but there was no complaint from the Trump White House. On Tuesday, the government announced it was withdrawing diplomatic immunity from 11 Cicig workers.

And this is only touching the surface. Between the long histories of U.S. interventions, the nation’s insatiable drug habit, and the guns flowing south, the U.S. holds tremendous responsibility for what is happening. We owe it to these people to open our borders to them entirely without restriction.

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It has been twenty months since Viktor Orban’s Fidesz government launched their legislative attack on Central European University. Today, CEU officially announced that it will move all US-accredited programs to a new campus in Vienna.

Over the course of 20 months, CEU has taken all steps to comply with Hungarian legislation, launching educational activities in the U.S. that were certified by U.S. authorities. Nevertheless, the Hungarian government has made it clear it has no intention of signing the agreement that it negotiated over a year ago with the State of New York, which would ensure CEU’s operations in Budapest for the long term.

As an academic with close personal ties to Budapest and to CEU, this is heart-breaking. As the CEU press release acknowledges,

Arbitrary eviction of a reputable university is a flagrant violation of academic freedom. It is a dark day for Europe and a dark day for Hungary. “The government has done an injustice toward its own citizens – Michael Ignatieff said – the hundreds of Hungarians who work and study at CEU, and thousands of Hungarian alumni and their families.”

Orban’s government has successfully shut Hungary out of giant sections of the global intellectual community.

CEU is a graduate institution accredited in the U.S. and Hungary with 1200 master’s and doctoral students in the humanities, social sciences, business, law, cognitive and network science. The university employs 770 staff and faculty and contributes 25 million Euros (8 billion forints) to the Hungarian economy each year in taxes, pension and health contributions, and payments to suppliers. It is Central Europe’s most successful applicant for competitive European Union research grant funding, with more than 19 million Euros awarded for the 2018-2026 period.

These are massive losses for the country, its students and citizens, and the surrounding businesses. Hungarian university students regularly rely on CEU’s library holdings–which far outpace their own institutions’ in terms of content, access, and usability. Public events on the campus bring world-class visitors and speakers into reach for those in the region. Faculty and programs have vibrant collaborations with local institutions. The surrounding neighborhood has boomed in the past decade–and I am selfishly concerned that my favorite restaurants and cafes will suffer from the lack of CEU patrons (indeed, many of these openly displayed pro-CEU messages when LexCEU first passed).

The real consequences remain to be seen. In a personal message to the broader CEU community, Ignatieff clarifies that

CEU retains its Hungarian accreditation and will strive to retain its teaching and research activity in Budapest for as long as possible. CEU will be here for you – as you have stood by it – for the foreseeable future… We plan to keep as many activities as possible in our Budapest home, while establishing a permanent campus at our new Vienna home.

But there is a far larger story here. Ultimately, CEU’s formal departure from Budapest ultimately attests to the weakness of the US and its EU allies in the face of a mortal attack on fundamental values.

“CEU has been forced out,” said CEU President and Rector Michael Ignatieff. “This is unprecedented. A U.S. institution has been driven out of a country that is a NATO ally. A European institution has been ousted from a member state of the EU.”

Washington Post coverage from this weekend highlights the failures of US and European leaders to stop this from happening.

European Union leaders warned that it was a red line, and dared Hungary not to cross it. The U.S. ambassador pegged the issue as his top priority. In the streets of Budapest, tens of thousands marched.

But in the end, there was nothing to stop Prime Minister Viktor Orban — who calls all the shots at home and increasingly does the same with his supposedly more powerful allies in the West — from driving Central European University into exile.

…

Reaction from E.U. officials on Monday was muted. In an interview with The Washington Post last week, U.S. Ambassador to Hungary David B. Cornstein confirmed that he had never tried to use either incentives or threats to sway Orban, despite proclaiming upon arrival in Budapest in June that his top mission was to keep CEU in the country.

And just to drive home the idea that petty political rivalries trumped commitment to supposedly foundational values of the liberal West:

With that effort having failed, [Cornstein] blamed the university’s founder — Hungarian American financier George Soros — for the school’s departure and refused to criticize Orban.

Far from Making America Great or even placing America First, the Trump administration allowed a minor wanna-be dictator from a small country evict a US-accredited institution that stood as both a triumph of post-Cold War open society and a globally respected intellectual force.

If Hungary today is darker, we in the US are diminished.

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Read the new Michael Cohen plea agreement and criminal information, which implicates both President Trump and his family.

[NB: Check the byline – this is Rayne. Updates appear at the bottom of this post.]

Look, these Senate Democrats will explain why they will vote NO on Thomas Farr for federal judge better than I will:

Amy Klobuchar

Elizabeth Warren

Richard Blumenthal

Sherrod Brown

Kirsten Gillibrand

Cory Booker

Chuck Schumer says the Democrats are united and voting NO.

But here’s the thing: Shit happens. People slide when they think they have cover, when nobody’s watching.

CALL YOUR DEMOCRATIC SENATORS AND TELL THEM NO ON FARR.

You have a GOP Senator or Senators?

CALL THEM AND TELL THEM NO ON FARR because we are watching their votes closely when it comes to Trump’s policies and nominees. We are watching for senators who aren’t supportive of civil rights and voters’ rights.

These GOP Senators are particularly at risk — if they don’t retire — because they are up for reelection in 2020:

Dan Sullivan (AK)
Tom Cotton (AR)
Cory Gardner (CO)
David Perdue (GA)
Jim Risch (ID)
Joni Ernst (IA)
Pat Roberts (KS)
Mitch McConnell (KY)
Bill Cassidy (LA)
Susan Collins (ME)
Steve Daines (MT)
Ben Sasse (NE)
Thom Tillis (NC)
Jim Inhofe (OK)
Lindsay Graham (SC)
Mike Rounds (SD)
Lamar Alexander (TN)
John Cornyn (TX)
Shelley Moore Capito (WV)
Mike Enzi (WY)

MAKE THE CALLS RIGHT NOW — the Senate is supposed to invoke cloture any time now on Farr.

Congressional switchboard: (202) 224-3121

ADDER — 1:30 PM EST — In case you’re  not up to speed on Farr’s background and you don’t want to listen to the Senate Dems’ speeches linked above, here’s a backgrounder by Ari Berman at Mother Jones. In a nutshell, Farr exemplifies everything wrong with North Carolina’s politics — utterly racist and dishonest to boot.

UPDATE — 2:06 PM EST — Cloture was invoked; the vote is tight, forcing VP to cast the deciding vote. (Time stamp on tweet below is PST for some reason.)

CALL YOUR SENATORS ESPECIALLY GOP ONES. Make them own this vote when they finally confirm Farr.

_________

Treat this as an open thread.

Alas, it’s not literally Goldwater’s seat, but still good news:

Democratic Senate candidate Kyrsten Sinema scored a win in Arizona over Republican Martha McSally, flipping a longtime Republican seat and narrowing the GOP’s majority in the upper chamber.

Sinema, a three-term congresswoman, overcame attacks on her more liberal record as an Arizona state legislator and committed to a bipartisan approach in a race that hinged on issues such as health care and illegal immigration. Her defeat of McSally will make her the first woman senator in Arizona’s history.

I wouldn’t say that those lazy “these midterms were excellent news for Donald Trump!” takes are looking any better.

And yes, this is a direct rebuke to Trump:

AP calls it. Remember, this state served as a kind of Ground Zero for Trumpism. He gave his big immigration speech there in 2016. He pardoned local racist Arpaio. This seat was open precisely because Flake was hounded out of the Senate for not being worshipful enough of Trump. https://t.co/79g21wQxdg

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) November 13, 2018

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Remember these halcyon days?

Mr. Trump is now the leading candidate for president in the Republican primary, which has traditionally been dominated by hopefuls eager to show how deeply conservative they are on social issues like gay rights and marriage.

But Mr. Trump is far more accepting of sexual minorities than his party’s leaders have been. On Thursday, he startled some Republicans by saying on NBC’s “Today” show that he opposed a recently passed North Carolina law that prohibits people from using public bathrooms that do not correspond to the gender they were born with, striking down a Charlotte ordinance.

Two and a half years later, the same newspaper publishes the following revelations:

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times….

…“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

The new definition would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who have opted to recognize themselves — surgically or otherwise — as a gender other than the one they were born into.

There is no reason for this other than spite: the Trump administration will leave no stone unturned in its efforts to wipe the memory of Barack Hussein Obama. Yet even if Obama had ignored the transgender population the political appointees in the Trump Justice Department and Department of Education would’ve done the same. A President Rubio or President Jeb! too.

Wipe them out.

In part because of our 24-hour media culture, every political act is defined in terms of winners and losers, with each loss seemingly devastating. There is good reason for that–many of the losses these days are in fact devastating. But the only answer to losing is to keep trying. Most of the time, we are going to lose. That’s the reality for anyone who studies labor history as I do and it’s the same for those who study other social movements. The forces of injustice are strong. It is hard to beat them. One way to deal with this, including dealing with it mentally after we lose, is to understand that we are playing a very long game, one that will last our whole lives. One big mistake that liberals have made in the last few decades is thinking that battles were won. But of course no battle is ever won. The Voting Rights Act is now effectively lost. The legal right for an abortion soon will be lost and barely exists in much of the country anyway. There is no guarantee gay marriage will continue to be legal. Nothing is ever won because evil never sleeps and they have all the money.

Blair L.M. Kelley, a historian of the early roots of the civil rights movement, makes this point better than I can, in terms of what we can learn from these failed struggles of the past in the wake of the Kavanaugh confirmation.

But in the end, these turn-of-the-20th-century African-American activists could not stop Jim Crow’s advance. Their suits, sit-ins, letter-writing campaigns, boycotts, marches and impassioned pleas to lawmakers failed to make a difference when legislators were determined to segregate no matter the costs. Segregation or exclusion became the law of the land in the American South, and remained so for many years, separating black and white Southerners not only on trains and streetcars but also in schools, neighborhoods, libraries, parks and pools.

Progressives, liberals and sexual assault survivors and all those who desire a more just and decent America and who feel they lost when Kavanaugh was confirmed despite their protest should remember Mitchell, Plessy, Walker and Wells, along with Elizabeth Jennings, James Pennington, Lola Houck, Louis A. Martinet, Rodolphe Desdunes, P.B.S. Pinchback, W.E.B. DuBois, Mary Church Terrell, J. Max Barber and many others, including those whose names we do not know. All of these men and women were on the side of justice and lost. None of these people, who fought for full and equal public access as free citizens on trains and streetcars, stopped fighting. None abandoned what they knew was right. They all tried again. Most would not live to see things made right, but they continued.

Those who see Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a lost battle in the larger war for gender equality and dignity for women — and sexual assault survivors, specifically — should emulate the activists of generations past. They should keep organizing, connect with like-minded people, volunteer for organizations that advocate for survivors, consider running for office, and work on the campaigns of those they believe in. A week after his confirmation, a reminder is in order: Movements are about more than moments; they are about thoughtful networks of dissent built over time.

My scholarship has taught me that activism requires a certain resilience, and the willingness to be long-suffering in pursuit of the cause. I hope people remember this. I hope they keep going.

Given the increasingly clear Republican desire to reinstitute segregationist policies, we may need to start thinking in these century-long time frames of struggle. But that doesn’t mean we can ever give up. We have no choice but to continue the fight.

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In my most recent mixtape, exploring the noble art of the remix, i included a track by Björk – ‘Crave (Odd Duck Mix)’ – that i mentioned had been made available as a download back in 2001, but which was no longer available. There were in fact four tracks that Björk released as downloads at that time, and since three of them have been unavailable for over a decade, i thought it would be interesting to revisit them. It’s worth saying … →

The post Björk – Crave (Odd Duck Mix); Hearts & Bones; Undone appeared first on 5:4.

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The anthemic R&B single will appear on Emily King's brand new record due out Feb. 2019, her first for ATO Records.

(Image credit: Bao Ngo/Courtesy of the artist)