Daily Archives: March 23, 2021

The Quaker religion openly believes that no man or woman should be a slave. Their involvement in freeing slaves has been estensively documented. At least one Jamestown family, the Mendenhalls, played a large part in that freedom. Shawn Rogers, director of the Mendenhall Homeplace, gave a virtual presentation for the High Point Museum on March 16 outlining how the Mendenhall family worked to abolish slavery.

TOP PHOTO - Richard Mendenhall's home on West Main Street in Jamestown. Photo courtesy Historic Jamestown SocietY

For many years, beginning in 1808, the North Carolina Society of Friends, as Quakers are also known, was one of the largest slaveholders in the area. Many enslaved people became the property of the Friends after members transferred ownership of their slaves to local meetings. These slaves could not be sold. The meetings rationalized ownership by claiming to protect the slave, allowing them to live and work as freedmen.

"From 1777 to the end of the Civil War it was illegal to free, or manumit, enslaved people within North Carolina," Rogers said. "The main reason for that is the threat to the institution of slavery in this area. Slaveowners were threatened by the prospect of having free formerly enslaved people living near their slaves. They were worried about insurrection, worried about the influence they would have on their 'property.'"

This North Carolina historical marker stands at Centre Friends Meeting on Hwy. 62, where the N.C. Manumission Society was formed.

He said that there were permits available to free slaves but these were very expensive.

While helping slaves escape was illegal, a group called the North Carolina Manumission Society worked through legal means to the same end. The purpose of the Manumission Society was to abolish slavery. It was formed by Quakers in July 1816 because of the laws that made it difficult to manumit enslaved individuals. It met at Centre Friends Meeting on Hwy. 62 in Guilford County.

The group also advocated recolonization of willing slaves to places like Liberia and Haiti. The word manumission comes from Latin, meaning to send away from the hand. Slave owners, however, had to voluntarily free their slaves. No slaves could be taken from their owner. The slaves also had to be willing to leave.

Richard Mendenhall of Jamestown (1778-1851) was a co-founder member of the Manumission Society and was later state president. It was noted that he had the best attendance at the meetings which were held alternately at Deep River Friends and Centre Friends in Randolph County.

Existing records of the Manumission Society of North Carolina (mostly papers of Richard Mendenhall) speak of the groups concern of emancipation of slaves and emigration of free blacks and include correspondence arranging for the voyage.

The manumission movement dwindled after 1830 and the last North Carolina meeting was in 1834.

For many years, rumors have circulated that Mendenhall's home in Jamestown was used as a stop on the Underground Railroad, but Rogers said there is "no concrete evidence" that this occurred.

However, Rogers pointed out a half door on the second floor at the Richard Mendenhall house leading to porch roof rafters that was similar to a description given of another house where slaves were hidden. The porch was once covered by bead board and the rafters floored.

"Do we know this was used in the Underground Railroad? No we don't, but it's one of those intriguing things we sometimes happen upon," Rogers said, noting Mendenhall's obituary noted his home had been a safe haven for many people regardless of their legal status. "It really makes you wonder."

Rogers added there also were rumors Richard's son Nereus (1818-1893), once president of what is today Guilford College, harbored slaves at his home known as The Oaks, but nothing has been proven. This house will soon be demolished.

Although not used by the Mendenhall family, the Historic Jamestown Society is caretaker of a false-bottom wagon known to have been used to transport slaves to freedom. It was owned by Abigail and Joshua Stanley and donated to HJS by the Morrow family. As it was common to see teenagers transporting goods, teens Isaac Stanley and Andrew Murrow drove the wagon, visibly laden with straw and pottery, to a location in the North. Unseen and hidden in a secret compartment were slaves seeking their freedom.

The only other false-bottom wagon known to have been used in the Underground Railroad is at the Levi Coffin home in Indiana. Coffin was known as the "president of the Underground Railroad."

Richard's younger brother, George Cameron Mendenhall (1798-1860) married a women, Eliza Dunn, who owned 40 slaves, which she had inherited as a two-year-old child. But Eliza was against slavery.

"She drew up drafts to petition Montgomery County to have standing as a minor so she could free slaves she had inherited," Rogers said. Eliza had not yet reached adulthood.

After Eliza died following childbirth, George married Delphina Gardner, a staunch abolitionist, as was George.

"A lot of people gave her credit for persuading George to free many of the enslaved individuals," Rogers said, but noted George and his first wife Eliza had been working to free these people for years.

The couple trained their slaves in trades to earn passage to the North and to be able to support a family. Since George practiced law, he and Delphina went about legally procuring the freedom. They even took some of the slaves North themselves.

Other members of the Mendenhall family also participated in manumitting enslaved people. But not all

Richard Mendenhall's house still stands at 603 W. Main Street in Jamestown. It is open for tours. Visit the website at http://www.mendenhallhomeplace.com.

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Mendenhall family active in abolition of slavery | Education | yesweekly.com - Yes! Weekly

FEW ARE MOURNED by the post-millennial left like Mark Fisher. If you know anything about us, then it makes perfect sense. We are a weird bunch, displaced on every level, living in a world terrifyingly different from the one we were prepared for. Between climate change and a rising far-right, our future diminishes daily. Fishers work speaks to us through this lens, this alien language of existential displacement.

His short first book, Capitalist Realism (2009), was surprisingly grand in scope. To argue that neoliberalism hadnt just privatized public life but encircled our very imaginations felt earth-shattering, particularly because underneath that argument was the passionate belief that there was still a collective way out. His subsequent works Ghosts of My Life (2014), The Weird and the Eerie (2016), and the posthumously published, mammoth collection k-punk (2018) all attempted to map this exit, to jump-start a mass radical imaginary that had been tamed and confined. That he left his Acid Communism unfinished at the time of his suicide in early 2017 was in a darkly perverse way, and at the risk of making him into a martyr his way of telling us that it is now our project to complete.

Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures is likely as close as we will come to a complete outline of Acid Communisms arguments. It is a cobbled-together work, based almost entirely around the content surviving from the course Fisher was teaching at Goldsmiths College when he died. Were given a rough schematic: transcriptions of the lectures (including conversations with and interruptions from students), and a course syllabus. The material is contextualized by former student Matt Colquhoun, whose own book Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy, and Mark Fisher (2020) and Xenogothic blog have marked him as one of Fishers many heirs apparent.

Fishers aim in these lectures was to map a path from the chaos and deprivations of neoliberalism toward something approaching liberation. Whether we call it socialism, communism, anarchism, or postcapitalism (as he insists on doing), the core features of this liberation are the same. Taking a cue in the first lecture from the works of Paul Mason, Alex Williams, Nick Srnicek, and others, Fisher and his students see postcapitalism as defined by the automation, amelioration, and elimination of work. Rather than viewing technology and egalitarianism as antagonistic (as so many Mister Gotchas do), they envision a world of radical-democratic abundance, in which all humans are free to pursue their ontological vocations and become truly free.

In terms of how this can be achieved, Fisher considers important works of 20th-century Marxist critical theory alongside left-feminist post-mortems of the 1960s: Herbert Marcuses Eros and Civilization (1955) next to Ellen Williss The Family: Love It or Leave It (1979), Gyrgy Lukcss The Standpoint of the Proletariat (1923) next to Nancy Hartsocks The Feminist Standpoint (1983). The apparent aim here is to establish not just a theoretical lineage but an intellectual praxis. The 1960s are, of course, widely known as a time of radical reimagining that touched both the grand-historical and the everyday-quotidian; Willis and Hartsock both say as much. Fishers intention here isnt merely to remind us of that, but to look at these utopian experiments as attempts to awaken participants to the ways in which they had been subjugated by capitalism, as well as by sexism, racial imperialism, and all the other myriad ills in the crosshairs of the New Left and the counterculture.

Fisher is, in these lectures, synthesizing his own version of what Marcuse, in his 1969 An Essay on Liberation, called psychedelic reason. For those who remember Fishers previous, scathing rebukes of the 60s counterculture, this volte face is disorienting. But, as both Fisher and Colquhoun elaborate, Fishers problem wasnt with the drugs or the hippies or even the counterculture writ large. Rather, he was concerned about the way the whole notion of psychedelia could be woefully misinterpreted, both then and now. To strive for the psychedelic, the more lucidly existential parts of human subjectivity as Colquhoun aptly puts it, was a necessary component of human liberation. Fishers aim therefore is to reclaim the psychedelic from the juvenile narrowness that had been imposed upon it. He calls Lukcss famously difficult text trippy, comparing it to Hartsocks effort at consciousness-raising. This discussion strongly implies that a true, fully formed proletarian consciousness must embrace the abolition not only of exploitation, but of work itself. Fishers provocative view is that the American establishment was profoundly anxious about working-class people becoming hippies, mostly out of fear that such an embrace of countercultural, anti-work attitudes would strengthen the New Left. Which, of course, it did, for a time anyway.

But, as Ellen Willis writes in her essay, this rising consciousness, and the cultural-political projects informed by it, were all but extinct 10 years later. Here, Fisher and company turn to Jefferson Cowies 2010 sociological study Stayin Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. The segregation of the US labor movement from the New Left and the counterculture was, in many ways, a deliberately undertaken political project. Despite a rank-and-file rebellion among letter carriers, auto workers, miners, and others concerning their lack of control on the job, union officials cleaved to an innate conservatism. Many supported the war in Vietnam; most sneered at unwashed hippies. None embraced a radical abolition of work itself, in large part because this would have made their own position as mediators between labor and capital irrelevant. Add in a deep recession, increasing automation, factory closures, and the spread of neoliberalism to the reasons why a social compact between workers and bohemians was never fully consummated. Its here that Fisher poses his big what if:

What if this hadnt happened? What if these countervailing forces hadnt managed to assert themselves in the Seventies? What if, instead, this new alliance of workers, the counterculture, etc., had come together in a sustained way? What if the demands about the quality of work had ultimately turned into demands for the abolition of work? These, for me, are some of the key questions posed by this insurgency, this moment, this breakout.

For Fisher, the main takeaway of Libidinal Economy builds on the Freudian-Marxist insight of Marcuse that capitalism has the capacity to create, accommodate, and neutralize all manner of new desires. There is, therefore, particularly in the postwar era, no outside of capitalism, no space apart from it, in which we can build resistance. And, after all, arent there some aspects of capitalism we want to keep? Is it possible, or even desirable, to oppose it tout court?

Thanks to the syllabus, we have some clues as to the courses trajectory. The ongoing line of inquiry falls into three broad categories. First comes a further anatomy of the ways in which the political-countercultural ideas of the 60s were thoroughly uprooted (with a particular emphasis on the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allendes democratic-socialist government in Chile). Next comes an analysis (via the works of Stuart Hall, Jodi Dean, and others) of the transformation of work itself the end of Fordism and the emergence of information economies. Finally, there is a deeper investigation of post-work politics as they manifested in the 1970s (e.g., Italian autonomism), with an eye toward what they might look like today (e.g., left accelerationism, Xenofeminism).

We can only speculate as to how these various ideas and movements might have been discussed, which themes and through-lines would have been emphasized by Fisher and his students. And, in fact, we should. Fishers syllabus dedicates an entire class to discussing the Chilean experience. One of the readings is from Eden Medinas book Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allendes Chile (2011) on Project CyberSyn, the decentralized proto-internet developed by Allendes government to help keep industry flowing. Like everything else smacking of democratic control, it was smashed in Pinochets coup.

On the other side of the world, in a heady era of strikes and unrest, the Italian autonomists developed a strain of libertarian communism that recentered the demand for workers control of the workplace. Their calls found echoes in the theories and actions of Detroit car workers, French Situationists, homeless activists in Brazil. Both autonomia and CyberSyn insist that, if technology can be used to create, accommodate, and block desires, to eliminate the human being from life, then the solution is to reassert collective human control over technology. This would not be an act of primitivist destruction, a Luddite rebellion against the machine, but rather a democratic reconception of the entire relationship between human beings and technology, in the workplace and in public and domestic life (as Xenofeminist writers like Helen Hester and the Laboria Cuboniks collective currently argue).

What would this mean in the context of post-Fordism, when the relatively predictable rhythms of production, and life itself, have been replaced by an anarchic hyper-speed, and where everything from our car to our bedroom has been transformed into sites of capital accumulation? Can we retool these technologies into democratic extensions of our dreams? What if, instead of retreating into Lyotards contradictions, we leaned into them? What if, instead of fearing the ghost in the machine, we became it?

Then all of capitals bets would be off: the divisions between work and life, reality and art, would begin to dissolve. Perhaps there might even be a revival of leftist counterculture, a new popular modernism, along the lines of Fishers understanding of the instinctively socialist or social-democratic British music and arts scenes in the latter half of the 20th century. In its closing pages, Postcapitalist Desire offers a No More Miserable Monday Mornings playlist featuring Sleaford Mods, Kanye West, Spandau Ballet, Sister Sledge, and others, thus demonstrating where we might pick up. From anger and sadness to collective joy, Fishers parting words read, from work that never ends to endless free time. [] Universal Basic Income now!

Leaving us with this joy is a poignant palliative to bitter irony. Here is a writer who dedicated so much of his work to the concept of hauntology, who attempted to (re-)animate past visions and experiments (including those of the 1960s) while leaving his own work eerily unfinished.

Our frustration is underlined by how easily even Fishers ideas can be reified. Spend enough time trawling through Leftbook and you are sure to find countless pages and groups dedicated to Fishers memory and thought. The timbre and content can vary greatly, from genuine attempts to engage with Fishers work, to loopy psychonautical embraces of the acid in Acid Communism, to shitposters derailing discussions with bad memes.

There is little point bemoaning this; people need spaces to debate and inquire, particularly as public life and education privatize, atrophy, and shrink. But Fisher was always acutely aware of the ways in which the internet was enemy territory, as his frequently cited (but much misunderstood) 2013 essay Exiting the Vampire Castle shows. More recent work, such as Richard Seymours 2019 book The Twittering Machine, not to mention numerous congressional hearings and a spate of investigative journalism, have shown just how manipulative and soft-authoritarian, just how neutralizing of our desires and autonomy, a privately owned virtual megaspace like social media can be.

This may very well explain much of the online valorization of Fisher, which often looks more like recitation than exploration, secular catechisms about the cancellation of the future rather than a search for the way out. Colquhoun has deftly critiqued this theoretical freezing-in-time, defending Fisher as less a writer of obituaries and more as a necromancer for not just lost futures but the futures we are continually losing. To be fair, there are online projects that genuinely build and act on Fishers theories. But, when we turn away from our screens, we are still confronted with a world in which technologies of surveillance, including online algorithms, have colonized just about every inch and moment. Illusions of autonomy and freedom give way to impotence. Those of us who try to leave the vampire castle come to realize that it is far bigger than we had previously imagined, and that we had until now only explored its smallest antechambers. Lyotard laughs his evil laugh.

We are, after all, in a world whose specificities could never have been predicted by Fisher. Things are dire, and we can say this without any hint of drama. The prospects of a dynamic radical movement, a vibrant far-reaching counterculture, often feel very dim. Despite having grown numerically by leaps and bounds in recent years, the contemporary left can often feel more like a subculture, in thrall to elitism and doctrine rather than vying for influence. This would only be half the picture, though.

One the most intriguing snippets in Postcapitalist Desire, a section you wish were longer, occurs during the discussion of Cowies book, when Fisher describes the brand of populism espoused by the recently elected Donald Trump as an example of class without class consciousness. Its a thought-provoking formulation. The size of Trumps working-class support has always been overblown; at the same time, the 2020 elections saw him expand his base in communities hit hardest by de-industrialization, by the smashing of unions. Neoliberalisms dismantling of the historic avenues of class struggle has allowed for what Fisher calls the identitarian capture of class, a reified vision of what class is.

Returning to the Lukcs-Hartsock discussion, whats missing from this new nexus is the proletarian urge for the abolition of work. (Unless we count the anti-lockdowners who demanded that others be put back to work so they could have ice cream and golf outings. Which we shouldnt.) Today, working class has been reduced to a style, ultimately perpetuating the same old subjugation. The inevitable question, then, is where we might find true class consciousness, glimmers of worlds in which the present hopeless grind of everyday life is swept away. To this end, Fisher briefly mentions Black Lives Matter:

We also have to bear in mind the weirdness of the US, given the situation around race. The Civil Rights struggle had only recently succeeded [in getting] legal recognition of black people [as equal citizens within society]. [] That legal recognition, as we can see today, is not always adhered to by any means. Thats why it needs something like Black Lives Matter as a corrective. The fact is that the practice in everyday life is the non-recognition of black lives; the idea that black lives dont matter as much as white lives.

Anyone who missed the crucial class component of these uprisings wasnt paying attention. The assertion of the priority of ordinary peoples lives over private property was evident throughout the BLM rebellion: from the refrain that we say their names to the boldness with which young people tagged walls, smashed windows, and, in some instances, availed themselves of the consumer products that have either been forever beyond their reach or seen as more worthy of protection than their own lives and safety. Looting, as Vicky Osterweil and others have argued, should be seen in exactly this light, as a tear in the fabric of how things should be.

Those at the marches who witnessed groups distributing food, water, masks, and other supplies often asked why it is we need private interests or the cops to maintain a society. With tens of millions out of jobs, businesses deemed essential or non-essential, and all manner of bailouts promulgated, questions about the necessity of work, and other supposedly indispensable institutions, become inevitable. Cars slowly rolled alongside those marching on foot, demonstrators sitting on their roofs with signs, blasting soul and hip-hop. Boarded-up shops were covered in bright paint: graffitied slogans, memorials to Breonna Taylor or George Floyd, colorful murals offering tribute to the heroes of Black liberation.

The BLM protests were a defiance emerging from struggle and pain, to be sure, but they also expressed a potent desire for freedom that transcended the mundanity of our algorithmized and over-policed life. They were as close as many of us have ever gotten to a true freeing of our collective consciousness. It felt, at moments, like a future not one created from the outside, but one exploded from within, reconfiguring everything around it.

It is only natural to wonder what Mark Fisher might have thought about these events, the words he might have used to describe them, the ways he might have seen them posing a threat to an increasingly zombified capitalist realism. Just as we wonder how Postcapitalist Desire or Acid Communism might have been shaped in the end, if he had lived. But as he (or his ghost) might say, these questions matter far less than how our own lives and possible futures might be shaped by us, right now, in our imaginations and actions.

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Giving Up the Ghost: On the Legacy of Mark Fisher - lareviewofbooks - lareviewofbooks

Business leaders from different sectors and spanning multiple continents are joining forces to call for an end to the death penalty, urging governments to commute death sentences, impose moratoria on executions and support ballot initiatives to end capital punishment for good.

The Business Leaders Declaration Against the Death Penalty, unveiled on Thursday by the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice during a South by Southwest Festival virtual event, is a call to action signed by 21 business titans.

Led by Virgin Groups founder Richard Branson, the group has pledged to accelerate the work of anti-capital punishment advocates, activists and lawyers.

Other signatories include Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of Thrive Global; Anne Wojcicki, CEO of 23andMe; Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, co-founders of Ben & Jerrys Ice Cream; Mike Novogratz, founder and CEO of Galaxy Investment Partners; and Strive Masiyiwa, founder and executive chairman of Econet Group, among others.

The death penalty is at a tipping point, both in the United States and globally, Celia Ouellette, chief executive of the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice, told Al Jazeera.

The commitment from business leaders to utilise their voices and reach to help end capital punishment comes at a time when the private sector and corporations are increasingly speaking out on issues related to human rights and social and racial justice.

The ancient Colosseum is lit up to show solidarity with a global campaign against the death penalty, in Rome, Italy [File: Yara Nardi/Reuters]Business leaders are major contributors to the global economy and we need to step up and use our voices to create systemic change, Merck Mercuriadis, CEO of Hipgnosis Songs Fund, said in a press release announcing the campaign.

The declaration from business leaders also comes at a time when support to abolish the death penalty is growing worldwide.

The United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution in December on a moratorium on executions with 123 member states voting in favour. Thats an increase from the first time the resolution was proposed in 2007, when only 107 countries voted in favour.

According to Amnesty International, 106 countries had completely abolished capital punishment by the end of 2019. That same year, 657 people were executed globally the lowest number of executions that Amnesty recorded in at least a decade. But that figure excludes China, Amnesty said, because even though thousands of people were likely executed in China in 2019, the official toll is hard to confirm as the numbers remain classified.

Protesters against the death penalty in Iran gather at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany [File: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters]Amnesty reports that China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Egypt carried out the most executions in 2019. Capital punishment methods include beheading, electrocution, hanging, lethal injection and shooting.

In some countries, children under the age of 18 are executed, even though it is a violation of international law.

In addition to ending the practice, abolishing capital punishment is a critical step towards racial and social equality, the declaration emphasises. In many countries, ethnic minorities and the poor are still more likely to be sentenced to death and ultimately executed.

The death penalty has a long and very ugly history with racial bias in the US, Ouellette said. And abroad, it is a very secretive practice. Its used as a political tool and has a cruel and unjust element that fits very squarely within what businesses are increasingly being called upon to speak out against.

UN human rights experts recently condemned the flawed form of punishment which disproportionately impacts African-Americans and people living in poverty, and called on US President Joe Biden to take action at the federal level after he campaigned on a platform of criminal justice reform.

The administration of former US President Donald Trump carried out 13 executions in the span of a few months following a 17-year hiatus on federal executions. No US president in more than 120 years had overseen as many federal executions.

Reverend Sylvester Edwards, president of the Terre Haute NAACP, kneels as other protestors hold signs near the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, the US, to show their opposition to the death penalty [File: Bryan Woolston/Reuters]Attitudes in the US towards the death penalty are changing as well. A recent Gallup poll found that fewer than six in 10 Americans favour capital punishment for convicted murderers the lowest favourable rating since 1972, when 50 percent of Americans supported the practice.

The tide is also changing at the state level. The governor of Virginia is expected to sign an abolition bill next month after both houses of the states general assembly voted to end state capital punishment in February.

If signed into law, it will make Virginia a state that has executed more people than any other the first southern US state to abolish the death penalty.

Tipping points are amazing places to be because you can actually change something once and for all.

Celia Ouellette, chief executive at the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice

Ouelette believes the world is at a critical moment for abolishing capital punishment.

Tipping points are amazing places to be because you can actually change something once and for all, but theyre also quite dangerous in that you can go backwards, she said.

Ouellette hopes between Thursdays launch day and October 10 World Day Against the Death Penalty more business leaders will sign onto the declaration and put the final gallon of gas in the tank to end the death penalty once and for all.

If a business did something similar to what Coca-Cola did in apartheid South Africa and said, Were going to pull our investment in this country unless something changes, I think that would have a considerable impact, Ouellette said.

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Is the world at a tipping point to abolish the death penalty? - Al Jazeera English

Were not saying that people are not responsible for the harm that they commit. What were saying is that prisons arent the way to resolve those harms. Kim Wilson, Ph.D., Co-host and producer, Beyond Prisons podcast

Last summers racial reckoning was the first time many people in the United States ever heard of concepts like prison abolition and defund the police. In fact, there was a spike in online searches for the phrase prison abolition in early June 2020, according to Google Trends.

And after President Biden issued four executive orders on Jan. 26, 2021one of which specifically designed to end the use of privately operated prisonsmanycritics of the measure felt it did not go far enough, including prison abolitionist, Kim Wilson, Ph.D.

Getting people out the prisons should be the goal. And it is radical, said the co-host and producer of the Beyond Prisonspodcast. There are currently over two million people who are incarcerated in the United States.

Wilson says collectively we have normalized the idea that prisons are about accountability, though they are not, similarly to how police cannot provide accountability in their role.

We have been trained over decades of watching every cop show, every murder mystery, where the bad guys always end up in prison and the good guys are like, yay! They get to go free, she said. All of those things really feed in to how we think about prisons, incarcerality, and policing and surveillance in our own communities.

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In spite of this, Dr. Wilson emphasizes that abolition is in the present and affects us all across the board, referring to Ruth Wilson Gilmores stance on internationalism.

This work is globally linked because of all the things that are that are wrong in society, whether were talking about capitalism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy and on and on and on. But the work begins locally, she said.

Watch in the video above as Dr. Wilson explains why decarcerationnot reformshould be the goal, how prison is being used to solve social problems, what people-centered and community work looks like, and more.

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'Kinder, Gentler Cages Are Still Cages': How Prison Abolitionists Are Working Towards a Less Carceral Future - The Root

When we imagine the four horsemen of the apocalypse, we think of War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death operating together to devastate human populations. But the current pandemic has shown there is a fifth rider in this malevolent troop: Work. From Singapore to Paris, COVID-19 has become entrenched in communities of precarious, low-wage workers. Unsafe working conditions and ongoing labor casualization have facilitated the spread of the virus across the world.

While we associate these conditions with the latest phase of capitalism, the interwoven dynamic of pandemics, labor regimes, and class struggle dates back seven centuries. There have been three major cycles: the Black Death hammered a stake through the heart of European feudalism in the fourteenth century; the European invasion of the Americas, with its accompanying wave of pandemics, aided in the birth of capitalism; and the last two centuries have seen a sequence of global pandemics accelerate alongside deforestation and the expansion of industrial capitalism. At every stage of this seven-hundred-year saga, the outcomes of class conflicts have been influenced by how workers and rulers respond to pandemics. The aftermath of the current crisis will be no exception.

Between 1347 and 1352 the bubonic plague ravaged Europe, sending the creaking feudal system into its final death spasms. The plagues spectacular spread throughout Europe, where it killed at least a third of the population, and up to two-thirds in many areas, can be attributed in part to the already poor health of the regions inhabitants. Under late feudalism, the combination of grueling agricultural labor, famine, and inter-lordly warfare led to high levels of malnutrition among European peasants, making them more susceptible to the plague when it arrived. Work, the unsung horseman, was always at hand to assist his more famous accomplices, Famine, War and Pestilence.

The subsequent demographic collapse had unexpected consequences. With labor suddenly scarce, and land plentiful, peasants in many regions found themselves in a better position to take on the power of their feudal overlords. Peasants organized collectively to free themselves from feudal obligations, conducted rent strikes, and escaped to unoccupied land, ushering in what Silvia Federici and others have described as the Golden Age of the European Proletariat.

While this period shouldnt be idealized, the available evidence suggests that over the next century, both peasants and urban workers were able to demand higher wages, cheaper food, and more days off for feasting and revelry, with the gap between men and womens wages also dropping significantly. In the wake of the Black Death, it was the workers rather than the feudal lords who had made the most of the social crisis.

In response, the European ruling classes sought to regain their dominance over labor. Demography alone did not determine the result of this conflict: these responses differed according to the balance of class forces in each region of Europe. In 1349, at the height of the bubonic plague, England introduced the Ordinance of Labourers. In a move that would warm Boris Johnsons heart, the ordinance declared that wages could not exceed pre-plague levels, and all those under the age of sixty who refused to work would be imprisoned.

Due to peasant revolts, these measures failed, and it took later reforms such as the enclosure of common land in England to rob agricultural smallholders of their independence. In the Mediterranean, as the Black Death decimated the populations of Cyprus, Crete, and other sugar-growing islands, Italian sugarcane plantation owners turned to slavery to guarantee a controllable supply of labor. The Portuguese and Spanish would continue this brutal experiment in the Americas, aided in their endeavors by a new cycle of pestilence.

The biggest windfall for the European ruling classes in their fightback against labor was the invasion of the Americas. The Iberian conquests unleashed a series of rolling epidemics on Indigenous populations, including smallpox, measles, influenza, dysentery, and more. The exact population of the Americas in 1492 is a source of contention, but most current estimates assume a mortality rate of over 90 percent between 1492 and 1650, implying a total death toll of anywhere between 50 and 90 million. This cataclysmic loss of life was exacerbated by the imposition of European work regimes, which used Indigenous labor to open new silver and sugar commodity frontiers. Once again, Work, the fifth horseman, aided his accomplice Pestilence.

This demographic implosion created the same problem for the conquistadores that the feudal lords of Europe faced with the Black Death: a diminishing population who used a variety of methods to resist the labor demands placed on them. Various Guaran leaders in the Atlantic rainforest of South America allied with Jesuit missionaries to publicize their conflict with Spanish colonists. In their denunciations, they explicitly linked exploitation in their workplaces to the spread of disease in their communities:

The Karai (Spaniards) dont pay us for our exhaustion. What we bring from [the worksites] is fatigue; sickness is what we bring. Of our people, many frequently die on the road, others as they arrive, others stay sick forever . . .

But the missionaries were often as exploitative as the conquistadores, and many Indigenous communities in the Atlantic rainforest, the Amazon, and elsewhere chose social isolation over negotiation, retreating from colonized areas and minimizing contact with invading forces. Just as our options are limited today as we try to defend our labor rights during a pandemic, these Indigenous communities worked within the narrow range of choices available to them: some attempted to negotiate their work conditions while others refused to work at all.

The pandemics in the Americas also helped create the conditions for the transatlantic slave trade. In response to the difficulties of controlling Indigenous labor in the midst of multiple disease outbreaks, the European powers began abducting young people from the coasts of Africa. The profits from new commodity frontiers using enslaved labor in the Americas, such as sugar, cotton, and gold, were channeled back into Europe and helped kickstart the Industrial Revolution.

While there are ongoing debates about how, when, and where capitalism began, two commonly mentioned factors are the establishment of the plantation slavery system in the Americas and the growth of a market-dependent working class in England, forced into the cities by the enclosures and other events. Both these new labor regimes came about, in part, through ruling class attempts to reassert their power over rebellious workers in the wake of pandemics.

To tip the balance of forces back in their own favor, the governing classes had to create new, interlocking systems of oppression, with the veiled slavery of the wage-earners in Europe built on slavery, pure and simple, in the New World, as Karl Marx put it. While this is only one part of the story, amid the broader complexities a clear thread runs between the pandemics in Europe and the Americas, the subsequent labor conflicts in both regions, and the birth of capitalism.

But the contest between labor and capital didnt end here. Even on the plantations, enslaved workers found ways to weaponize diseases against their oppressors. The slave trade had also enabled the transfer of new mosquito-borne illnesses to the Americas, such as malaria and yellow fever, which rapidly became endemic in the tropical zones of the Caribbean and the mainland. During the slave revolts on Saint-Domingue, the revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture used his knowledge of these diseases to overcome his French and English adversaries.

Louverture and the other black Jacobins took advantage of the differential immunity between local rebel populations and the incoming European soldiers, drawing their opponents into protracted guerrilla conflict during the rainy season. Haitis independence in 1804 can be attributed in large part to the success of this biological warfare. The fear of Haitian-style uprisings spreading elsewhere then played a significant role in the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, this was only a partial victory for the global forces of labor. During this same period, the European powers embarked on a new wave of colonization in Asia and Africa, unleashing new pandemics in the process.

Over the last two centuries, fossil-fuel powered capitalism has fast-tracked the expansion of commodity frontiers into tropical rainforests alongside the rise of industrial-scale agriculture, with these dual developments opening a Pandoras box of pestilence. International trade networks have then aided the transmission of these diseases between exploited and exhausted populations across the planet.

As Mike Davis has pointed out, while this process has accelerated since the Second World War, precedents for the current crisis can also be found in the wave of pandemics instigated by nineteenth-century imperialism in Asia and Africa. The British invasion of India led to the transmission of cholera around the globe after 1817, through British naval and commercial networks. This is how a disease that first proliferated on the rice fields of the Ganges delta came to provide the backdrop for Gabriel Garca Mrquezs Love in the Time of Cholera, set on the coast of Colombia.

Similar forces were at play with the spread of a new round of bubonic plague from Yunnan in China, where the Qing dynasty had opened a copper-mining frontier. In the provinces dense montane rainforests, Yersinia Pestis, the bacterium that causes the plague, had been circulating among local rodent populations. By 1855, the disease had infected the encroaching miners, then spread to the coast and out of China along opium trade routes set up by the British, who were trying to crack open the Chinese market by peddling drugs to local workers. The third plague, as it came to be known, killed over twelve million people and was considered active by the WHO until the 1960s.

In the twentieth century, the advance of commodity frontiers in the rainforests of central Africa has been a key vector for the emergence of new diseases, with HIV/AIDS being the most devastating example so far. The European scramble for Africa inaugurated a rush of ivory and rubber extraction, with distant monarchs such as King Leopold of Belgium and the German Kaiser wringing a surplus out of unpaid local workers, at the cost of millions of lives.

Recent studies suggest that bushmeat consumption, most likely in the Congo or German Kamerun, led to the transmission of Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV) from chimpanzees to humans, resulting in the appearance of HIV-1. It is possible that this bushmeat was consumed by workers on forced labor expeditions, with the virus subsequently travelling by ferry and by rail along ivory and rubber export routes. From 1920s Kinshasa in the Belgian Congo, the virus then leapt over to Haiti after the Second World War before finally being identified in the United States in the 1980s.

In the decades since, the continued advance of fishing, mining, and other commodity frontiers in central Africa have aided the transfer of a growing list of pathogens from animals to humans, including the Zika, Chikungunya, Ebola, and Marburg viruses. Simultaneously, the factory farming of huge numbers of livestock has provided a breeding ground for influenza viruses, with multiple flu outbreaks between 1957 and 2010 driven by the interaction between humans, swine, and birds.

While the exact origin of the 191819 Spanish flu pandemic remains a source of contention, it is possible that it also transferred to humans from livestock, then spread through the ranks of weary young men carrying out military work for their European rulers before inflicting even greater carnage on populations in India and Iran worn down by British occupation. As always, brutalizing work regimes played their part alongside pestilence, war, and famine. It was no coincidence that this period also saw an astonishing array of strikes and protests, run by everyone from anti-colonial activists in Amritsar to anarchists in Buenos Aires and dressmakers in New York.

The origins of COVID-19 are also uncertain, but one frequently mentioned hypothesis is that it spread from bats to humans via captive pangolins. As Andy Liu has argued, the large scale consumption of pangolin scales and meat in China is a recent phenomenon, a gastronomic spectacle that serves as a marker of privilege in the midst of an economic boom. The fifth horseman fans workplace competition, status-seeking, and the breakdown of class solidarity by providing ever more extravagant luxuries for the well-waged. Like the growing worldwide appetite for pork and beef, the consumption of exotic wildlife in China has been fueled by the frenetic expansion of the capitalist world economy. And the unchecked growth of these commodity frontiers is sure to bring further plagues down upon us.

There is no truth to Australian prime minister Scott Morrisons clueless claim that the current pandemic is a once-in-100-year type event. On the contrary, the latest scientific reports predict that if deforestation continues at current rates, we might have to endure five to six new epidemics a year. Commodity supply chains are driving this process at every step. The pigs in China and Europe that could be incubating the next influenza pandemic are fed on soybeans from plantations that are erasing the savannas and rainforests of South America. These are precisely the areas where new infectious agents, such as the Machupo virus (an arenavirus hosted by Amazonian rodents), have emerged in the last seventy years. The destruction of the Amazon rainforest, in turn, would accelerate global warming, leading to the further melting of Arctic permafrost, where anthrax and other long-dormant diseases are already being unleashed from the thawing carcasses of reindeer.

But there are steps we can take to avoid this nightmare scenario. For one, we need to break down the false divide between campaigns for workplace safety, Indigenous land rights, and environmental conservation. We shouldnt just defend biodiversity because we think monkeys and pangolins are cute: we should defend it because we dont want monkeys and pangolins to infect us with horrific new viruses. The best way to do this is to reduce deforestation and the illegal wildlife trade through the implementation and maintenance of well-protected ecological reserves and Indigenous territories.

It is in the health interests of urban workers to support the struggles of Indigenous peoples living in tropical rainforests and other biodiverse regions to prevent the further encroachment of commercial loggers and poachers into these areas. This means supporting Indigenous groups who are still resisting incorporation into capitalist extraction regimes, who are refusing to work for the fifth horseman. The COVID strikes in urban warehouses and the Indigenous campaigns against mining in the Amazon are two sides of the same struggle over health and labor.

We can also build solidarity by recognizing that the last seven hundred years of pandemics and labor conflicts have affected both paid and unpaid workers, in the Global North and South. Each wave of illness has exploited the weaknesses inflicted by the work regime of the day, but the resultant crises have also created opportunities to overthrow these regimes.

As Naomi Klein notes, government technocrats, allied with Silicon Valley billionaires, are using COVID-19 to usher in a screen new deal, papering over the cracks in the current system by forcing students and employees to learn and work at home, on call and under surveillance 24/7. If the horseman of Pestilence doesnt assail you on the street, the horseman of Work will trample you before youve even stepped out the door.

To push back and invent our own alternatives to this B-grade cyberpunk novel, we can look to past struggles across multiple continents. We can take inspiration from how medieval peasants in England, Guaran communities in Paraguay, revolutionaries in Haiti, and dressmakers in New York fought for both the right to better-paid work, and the right to not work at all, amid devastating disease outbreaks.

The ongoing global wave of strikes by workers protecting their health amid the coronavirus pandemic, the campaign by Brazilian Indigenous peoples to install check points near their communities to maintain social isolation, along with international demands to de-commercialize aged care, are the modern continuation of this global tradition. Rather than forgetting these past generations, we can draw strength from their victories as we enter our own battle against the five horsemen of the capitalist apocalypse.

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For Hundreds of Years, Pandemics Have Reshaped the Way We Work - Jacobin magazine

When eight people, six of them Asian and Asian American women, were killed in a mass shooting at three massage parlors in the Atlanta, Georgia area last week, we learned that a white man targeted these parlors to get rid of a temptation. His reasoning made transparent the disregard for the lives he took.

He made human beings mothers, sisters, daughters into something less than human, said Kai Zhang of the Asian Pacific American Taskforce in New York and co-founder of Red Canary Song during a vigil to mourn lives lost.

We know so little about these women. Information is passed in trickles and spurts, heavy with silences, unknowns. In the days following the attack, we slowly learned some of their names. However, we dont know many of the stories that their lives hold. There are things well likely never know, nor should we have access.

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An act of spectacular violence brought these six women into our collective awareness and exposed many other everyday forms of violence that often go unnoticed: the moments of rupture, war, and geopolitical upheaval that prompted their migration; the harassment and vitriol that service workers face daily; the compounded indignities brought about by housing insecurity and precarious immigration status.

The targeted killing of Asian American women in a claimed attempt to eliminate sexual temptation is bound up in politics of race, gender, and sexuality. Asian American women and femmes being killed and attacked because of toxic masculinity, which is a form of racist, classist, and heterosexist entitlement that brings together white supremacy and rape culture, is not new.

The long history of U.S. racism and imperialism creates forms of violence that draw people in and out in different ways.

The U.S. permanent war and military occupation in Asia at different points in history including the Philippine-American War, World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam War to ongoing geopolitical tensions with China in the presentis connected to long-standing violence against Asian women. The targeting of Asia as a foreign threat and an enemy to be eliminated alongside U.S. desires for dominance over Asia work in tandem with the imagination of Asian women as submissive fantasies to be conquered.

Military encounters were often first encounters U.S. soldiers had with Asian women. Local sex industries were created through military occupation. Soldiers presumed sexual access to womens bodies.

The desires for Asian submissiveness are also connected to fears of Asian women as dangerous and deviant with regard to the norms of white society. The regulation of race, gender, and sexuality through restrictive immigration measures creates ongoing precarities and vulnerabilities for Asian working-class migrant women.

For example, the Page Act of 1875 was introduced to target Chinese women as sex workers and prohibit entry of immigrants deemed to be undesirable. Or, while many migrants from Asia were formally barred from entering the United States, policies such as the War Brides Act enabled women to migrate with U.S. soldiers. Later, the 1965 Hart-Celler Act would allow large numbers of Asian migrants into the United States, primarily through family reunification provisions and sponsorships.

However, these conditions of migration created economic vulnerability and dependency, often exposing women to abuse and violence. Roadblocks to naturalization, such as two-year waiting periods and the loss of immigration status for separating from U.S. citizen spouses enabled and incentivized and continues to enable and incentivize intimate partner violence by criminalizing attempts to leave. Meanwhile, the U.S.s lack of adequate social safety nets, such as aid for food and housing, forecloses possibilities for migrant women to independently sustain access to care and safety.

The collapse of social safety nets and the expansion of carceral systems have worked in tandem to expose working-class Asian migrant women to everyday violence.

In 1996, the passage of three federal laws further criminalized working-class migrants: the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA); the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA); and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). First came AEDPA, which expanded local law enforcements authority to make arrests for immigration law violations and expedited processes of detention and deportation. It has been devastating to Southeast Asian communities just a week prior to the murders in Georgia, 33 Vietnamese community members were deported. AEDPA also extends U.S. counter-terrorism measures by giving the FBI more jurisdiction to surveil organizations.

Later, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) passed, further repealing welfare provisions with a sweeping $54 billion in budget cuts, almost half of which came out of denying benefits to immigrants. This included cutting off undocumented immigrants from federal funding and barring immigrants from benefits during their first five years. Paired with the 1994 Crime Control Act and expanded criminalization of drugs, this also removed benefits for anyone convicted of felony drug offense. (Notably, the Violence Against Women Act is included as part of the 1994 Crime Bill, effectively linking mainstream feminist anti-violence movements with law enforcement. VAWA affirms law enforcement as the default response to gender-based violence.)

Additionally, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) worked to curtail family migration by raising the minimum income guidelines for sponsors as a barrier to petitioning. It also limited immigrant access to temporary public assistance. IIRIRA has also been devastating in its expansion of detention and deportation.

With reforms to welfare, migration, and policing, technologies of surveillance and punishment once applied to domestic welfare recipients also became routinely leveraged against migrants, with the double threats of deportation and detention close at hand.

Death is deployed through different systems of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference. Feminist scholar Grace Kyungwon Hong reminds us that our current structures of disavowal means that existing forms of protecting and preserving life, such as access to benefits, care, and safety, co-exist with the dispersal of death.

The U.S. use of military force globally, the militarism of policing, and white supremacist attacks on people of color are all intertwined. Thus, police are not the solution for safety from anti-Asian violence. In the wake of the Georgia murders, some cities are deploying specialized police forces and increasing patrols into Asian American communities. However, the presence of heightened policing in Asian American communities has long been tied to ongoing violence against Asians, especially massage parlor workers and other working-class Asian migrants, who have been harassed and targeted by police and also resulted in deadly raids.

In their public statement, members of Red Canary Song, a New York City-based collective of Asian and migrant sex workers, emphasize, The criminalization and demonization of sex work has hurt and killed countless people many at the hands of the police both directly and indirectly.

We must direct our energy away from systems of police and punishment and towards alternatives to what justice can be. While it may seem we have limited options to respond in moments of loss, grief and tragedy, we can work more expansively and creatively to change our systems to prevent future forms of violence.

We need ongoing feminist solidarities to address the intertwining of movements for abolition, demilitarization, and sex worker rights. This means continuing to work toward ongoing efforts to end policing; for the decriminalization of sex work; for safe and accessible housing; and for building stronger social safety nets. If the Biden-Harris administration means to make good on its promise that hate can have no safe harbor in America, it must begin by dismantling the carceral and punitive system that undergirds our immigration policies, many of which they are responsible for.

As Yves Tong Nguyen of Red Canary Song says, I want you to care when people are still alive.

Note: As of publication on Tuesday, March 23, we are not publishing a full list of the womens names to respect families and loved ones wishes. This may change in the future as we get updated accounts from those on the ground. Readers who wish to support families can donate directly.

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Attacks on Asian Women Are Fueled by Criminalization, War and Economic... - Truthout

On February 22, Governor J.B. Pritzker signed HB 3653 (also known as the Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity Today or SAFE-T Act) into law. The massive criminal justice reform bill sprawls across 764 pages and makes changes to some three dozen existing Illinois laws as well as introduces new ones. It's been decried as an "anti-police" bill by law enforcement groups, and the president of Chicago's police officer union called it "nightmare legislation" that was intended as an "attack on law enforcement in this state." But the Black Caucus-backed measure had input from hundreds of community organizations, researchers, advocates, and law enforcement groups in Illinois over several years. It amounts to the most significant course correction on policies and practices that exacerbate racial and economic inequality in the state.

You may have heard that the bill abolished cash bail, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Here is a digest of the important changes to state law that are included in HB3653, which focused on reforming elements of policing, pretrial procedures, sentencing, and incarceration as well as prison gerrymandering and crime victims' rights. Most of the provisions in the bill take effect on July 1, 2021, unless otherwise noted.

The law paves the way for the creation of statewide use of force standards for all law enforcement agencies.

Warrants

The rules around the use of no-knock search warrants are tightened, including wearing of body cameras, and plans to protect children and other vulnerable people during the search.

Body cams

All law enforcement agencies statewide are required to equip officers with body cameras by 2025.

Qualified immunity

The state has created the "Task Force on Constitutional Rights and Remedies" which has until May 1, 2021, to research and generate a report on qualified immunity for law enforcement officers in the state. The state's qualified immunity standards currently shield officers from lawsuits and financial liability for misconduct on the job.

Officer training

There will now be minimum standards for law enforcement training curricula for mental health screenings, crisis intervention, implicit bias, the Fourth Amendment (protecting people from unreasonable search and seizure), use of force, de-escalation, and racial/ethnic sensitivity.

Officer decertification

The Illinois Law Enforcement Training Standards Board will now have the power to suspend and limit (in addition to revoking) any officer's certification.

A new Illinois Law Enforcement Certification Review Panel will be created to make recommendations on the decertification of officers. Databases to track officer certification status and investigations will be created. Law enforcement agencies will be obligated to check the existing (and now expanded) Officer Professional Conduct Database before hiring an officer.

The list of misdemeanor offenses for which a law enforcement officer can be decertified is expanded to include 20 new offenses (like domestic battery, transmission of obscene messages, and solicitation to meet a child). The types of conduct that can lead to both automatic and discretionary officer decertification is expanded.

The criminal offense of "law enforcement misconduct" is created and includes:

The Freedom of Information Act will not apply to officer misconduct records in the Officer Professional Conduct Database. Officer misconduct records about state police officers and all other law enforcement officers in the state (held by the Law Enforcement Training Standards Board) will not be subject to FOIA. However, the records will still be open to FOIA from the local law enforcement agencies that supply them to these bodies.

Deliberations for decisions by the state's Certification Review Panel, State Police Merit Board, and Law Enforcement Training Standards Board (which decide on decertifying law enforcement officers) will not be subject to the Open Meetings Act when these bodies go into private session. All votes on decertification by these bodies have to be conducted during the public portion of the meeting.

State police

The Illinois State Police will now be required to:

There are new grounds for automatic and discretionary termination of State Police officers that mirror the standards set for other law enforcement. The State Police Merit Board is required to report to the Officer Professional Conduct Database. This will help eliminate loopholes that used to allow former State Police officers to get jobs at other state law enforcement agencies without being tracked.

Police misconduct complaints

No one will be required to submit an affidavit when filing a complaint against any officer in the state. State law no longer requires law enforcement agencies to inform officers of the names of the people accusing them of misconduct before an administrative hearing begins. The state Law Enforcement Training Standards Boardwhich considers officer decertificationis required to create an anonymous complaint process. The requirements to inform officers of the identity of those assigned to investigate them is removed.

Retaliation against whistleblowers for reporting improper law enforcement officer conduct is prohibited.

All police misconduct records (both public and non-public) have to be permanently retained by law enforcement agencies.

Deflection

State funding will now be available for the development of deflection co-responder programs, allowing non-police responses (including by EMS and community-based behavioral health providers) to crisis and non-crisis situations involving mental health and substance abuse. Deflection programs are designed to steer people with drug or mental health issues away from the criminal justice system. Funding for communities disproportionately impacted by the War on Drugs or disproportionately impacted by the lack of behavioral health services will be prioritized.

The Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (ICJIA) can now fund more non-law enforcement first responder programs that use behavioral health professionals as alternatives to police responders.

Civil rights violations

The Attorney General's office will now be able to investigate and bring lawsuits in state court based on police departments' pattern and practice of violations of the Illinois Civil Rights Act. Previously the AG's office could only investigate patterns and practices of discrimination under the Illinois Human Rights Act, which narrowly defines the types of discrimination public officials aren't allowed to engage in.

Military equipment

The Illinois State Police, Sheriff's departments, and local police departments will now be banned from requesting or receiving certain military equipment, such as armored vehicles, weaponized aircraft, high-caliber firearms, grenade launchers, and bayonets decommissioned by the armed forces. Requests for allowable weapons have to be announced on agencies' websites within 14 days of being made.

(An exhaustive explainer of the Pretrial Fairness Act has been compiled by the Coalition to End Money Bond and can be found on their website endmoneybond.org.)

Arrest

Arrested people must be able to make three phone calls within three hours of arriving at a law enforcement facility. People also have the right to retrieve phone numbers saved on their phones.

Diversion

Instead of arrest, law enforcement officers will now have the ability to issue citations and release people charged with Class B and C misdemeanors (which include common offenses like criminal trespass to land and disorderly conduct) unless the person is a threat to public safety or has "obvious medical or mental health needs."

Detention

Cash bail is abolished beginning January 1, 2023.

The state will now collect and publish data on the outcomes of bond hearings and defendants' bond statuses in every county jail.

People will receive custodial credit (or time served) for the days they spent on electronic monitoring pretrial.

Any person ordered to pretrial detention at home (with or without an electronic ankle bracelet) must have freedom of movement spread out over no fewer than two days per week. This will allow people to take care of basic needs such as grocery shopping, work, education, health care, and attending religious services. To be considered guilty of violating the terms of electronic monitoring (i.e. escape), a person had to be in violation for at least 48 hours and not based on the technical malfunction of the monitoring device. Approving changes to a person's residence also can't be unreasonably withheld.

Judges will now have discretion about whether to issue an arrest warrant when a defendant misses a court date. The process of determining violations of pretrial release conditions will be standardized. Until now, people on electronic monitoring or other forms of court supervision could be thrown in jail to await trial for violations as varied as being late to court, having a positive drug test, or being arrested for another crime. These determinations were subject to individual judges' whims without a chance for defendants to contest them or due process.

Habitual criminals

Convictions that occur when a person is between the ages of 18 and 21 will no longer count toward defining someone as a "habitual criminal" during sentencing. This makes the law more deferential to established science on brain and cognitive development. Until now, people experienced severe escalations in their sentences due to convictions that might have happened decades earlier in their lives.

Mandatory minimums

Judges regain discretion over sentencing in some casesthey'll be able to ignore mandatory minimum sentences in favor of probation, or other lesser terms if:

The state's three-strikes law is narrowed: The types of convictions that will count toward a person's "three strikes" under Illinois's mandatory sentencing rules (which require judges to impose a life sentence upon the third conviction for one of a broad array of offenses) will no longer include drug crimes. Only so-called forcible felonies will be tallied as "strikes."

Sentencing credits (i.e. when convicted people receive time off of their sentence)

What counts toward "time served" will be expanded beyond days in jail pretrial and electronic monitoring to include home detention and curfew that restrict movement for 12 or more hours per day.

Judges will now have guidance about how to factor in risk assessment scores.

The law will now specify which forcible felony convictions can include sentencing credits, and demonstrated commitment to rehabilitation will be taken into account.

People serving longer sentences will be able to earn proportionally higher credit. Those serving less than five years can earn 180 days off their sentence; those serving five or more years can earn up to 365 days.

There will now be a clearer, more transparent structure around credit revocation, and behavioral incentives will be in place for people who have lost credit to get it restored.

There will be more uniform access to sentencing credits for everyone in the Illinois Department of Corrections. It will allow people to earn credit for self-improvement programs, volunteering, and work outside of correctional industries. People who start but are unable to complete programs due to illness, injury, or transfer will be eligible for partial credit. Those who are on waiting lists for programs when they're transferred to a different facility won't lose their spot in line.

Felony murder

The scope of Illinois's felony murder law is narrowed. Felony murder is a type of first-degree murder conviction that results when someone dies while a defendant was commiting any forcible felony. Until now Illinois used a sweeping theory of accountability for felony murder cases. As a result people were getting convicted for murder even in situations when the police killed someone while trying to stop a suspect for a much lesser crime. Now, a person can no longer be convicted of felony murder if a third party does something to cause someone's death (e.g. if a cop runs someone over with their car while chasing a suspect, if a store owner tries to shoot a robber and kills a bystander). This brings Illinois closer in line with the majority of states' understanding of felony murder.

Resisting arrest

To be found guilty of resisting arrest a person must be shown to have been committing an underlying offense that was the initial reason for arrest.

Drivers license suspensions

The Secretary of State will restore driving privileges to people whose licenses were suspended or revoked due to failure to pay fines. This affects more than 10,000 people in Chicago alone. The provision will eliminate a significant trigger for personal bankruptcy.

Decarceration

Expanding decarceration program eligibility: People with prior felony convictions for possession of small amounts of drugs, who were previously barred from some diversion and probation programs (such as the Offender Initiative Program and the Second Chance Program) will now be eligible to participate. Thousands with prior low-level felony drug convictions will now have access to alternatives to prosecution and incarceration for new nonviolent offenses.

Parole

Illinois has not had parole that incarcerated people can apply for since the 1980s, but most prison sentences are accompanied by a period of "mandatory supervised release," which in practice functions similarly to parole for the convicted person. The law will be changed to:

Places of confinement

The IDOC will be able to offer more people electronic home detention, Adult Transition Center placement, and other options for people who have less than four months of their sentence to finish for Class 3 and 4 felonies (not including violent crimes).

Pregnant prisoner rights (applies to all Sheriff's departments and IDOC, which means both jails and prisons statewide)

Corrections officials have to receive medical and mental health care training related to treatment of pregnant women. Facilities have to offer pregnant women education on prenatal care, parenting skills, and postpartum recovery. Postpartum recovery time is required for 72 hours after birth and women can no longer be placed in solitary confinement for 30 days after birth or be placed in a bed that's more than three feet above the floor.

Deaths in custody

Information on deaths in custody will now be collected and reported by the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (ICJIA) within 30 days. It will be unlawful for law enforcement agencies not to report to ICJIA. This rule applies to deaths as a result of officers' use of force. Detained people's relatives must now be notified about deaths and IDOC will create a dedicated family liaison to communicate with them.

The law includes the "No Representation Without Population Act" to stop prison gerrymandering. Currently prison populations count toward the electoral districts that host the prisons, but incarcerated people don't get to vote and aren't represented by the officials elected there. The law requires the State Board of Elections to make reports for redistricting that reflect incarcerated people at their last residential address before they went to prison, leading to better access to elected representation in communities most heavily impacted by mass incarceration (most of the state's prison population comes from Cook County). Incarcerated people who were homeless before going to prison, or who came from outside Illinois, will not be counted toward the prison's district either. This change to the law will not affect the current redistricting cycle; it's set to take effect in 2025, and would be implemented in the 2031 redistricting process.

The Crime Victims Compensation Act (which applies to victims of violent crimes, be it misdemeanor or felony) was amended to improve upon existing policies and practices:

Victims can apply for compensation through the Attorney General's office through a more streamlined process that doesn't involve lengthy coordination with the Court of Claims.

Anyone "in a relationship that is substantially similar to that of a parent, spouse, or child" and living in the same household as a person who is killed or injured is defined as a victim and is eligible to receive compensation.

Maximum compensation to victims for funeral and burial expenses is increased to $10,000 and cash benefits for victims are increased to $2,400 per month.

A felony conviction or other criminal history will not disqualify a victim from compensation, but the person still cannot receive compensation while incarcerated.

People now have five years instead of two to apply for victim compensation funds after an incident.

The requirement for victims' "cooperation" is changed so that it is sufficient to report the incident when seeking medical care for any injuries within seven days of the incident.v

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Bail abolition is just the tip of the iceberg - Chicago Reader

Agreeing on legislative strategy will be the next step for Biden and the two Democratic congressional leaders. Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Securing congressional approval of most elements of Joe Bidens American Rescue Plan was not only a great start for the Democratic trifecta that controls both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. It was also a fine example of legislative craftsmanship and leadership needed to enact such a large and complicated bill with virtually no Democratic defections (including none at all in the Senate).

What comes next will be harder.

The contents of that first big bill were known well before Biden took office, the timing was dictated by its packaging as a COVID-19 emergency relief and stimulus package, and the legislative strategy for enacting it became clear the moment Senate Republicans made a puny opening compromise offer. Democrats had the luxury of being allowed two uses this calendar year of the budget reconciliation process that bypasses the Senate filibuster; under the Congressional Budget Act one per fiscal year is allowed, and none were enacted last year. So technically the COVID-19 bill was the budget reconciliation bill for Fiscal Year 2021 (which began last October), and Congress can now enact another one for Fiscal Year 2022.

Assuming Senate Democrats cannot muster unanimous support for abolishing or restricting the filibuster, passage of any significant legislation will have to go through one of two avenues: reconciliation or a bipartisan deal with at least 10 Republicans. The latter approach is inherently problematic, for all the reasons associated with partisan polarization. And even if Republicans become interested in a specific Biden proposal an infrastructure package, for example they will likely object to any effort to pay for new spending with tax increases rather than the domestic spending cuts most Democrats are certain to oppose.

According to the New York Times Jim Tankersly, the White House is indeed planning to propose a big infrastructure plan offset by tax increases:

The first legislative piece under discussion, which some Biden officials consider more appealing to Republicans, business leaders and many moderate Senate Democrats, would combine investments in manufacturing and advanced industries with what would be the most aggressive spending yet by the United States to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change.

It would spend heavily on infrastructure improvements, clean energy deployment and the development of other high-growth industries of the future like 5G telecommunications. It includes money for rural broadband, advanced training for millions of workers and 1 million affordable and energy-efficient housing units. Documents suggest it will include nearly $1 trillion in spending alone on the construction of roads, bridges, rail lines, ports, electric vehicle charging stations and improvements to the electric grid and other parts of the power sector.

Thats the dessert. Heres the broccoli:

Officials have discussed offsetting some or all of the infrastructure spending by raising taxes on corporations, including increasing the corporate income tax rate above the current 21 percent rate and a variety of measures to force multinational corporations to pay more tax in the United States on income they earn abroad. That strategy is unlikely to garner Republican votes.

Barring some unexpected breakthrough, then, the infrastructure package will have to either languish or go into a second reconciliation bill. But then there will be other Biden agenda items (like the infrastructure plan, they are associated with his campaigns Build Back Better talking points) that will probably need to proceed via reconciliation as well:

The second plan under discussion is focused on what many progressives call the nations human infrastructure students, workers and people left on the sidelines of the job market according to documents and people familiar with the discussions. It would spend heavily on education and on programs meant to increase the participation of women in the labor force, by helping them balance work and caregiving. It includes free community college, universal pre-K education, a national paid leave program and efforts to reduce child care costs. That plan would also extend or make permanent two temporary provisions of Mr. Bidens recent relief bill: expanded subsidies for low- and middle-income Americans to buy health insurance and tax creditsaimed at cutting poverty, particularly for children.

This plan would apparently cost up to $2 trillion, and would also require the kind of revenue offsets that will make significant Republican support as unlikely as Mitch McConnell coming out for abolition of the filibuster.

But even if all of the above represents the outer boundaries of Team Bidens legislative ambitions for 2021, congressional Democrats could have other ideas, as Politico suggests:

Influential factions within the Democratic caucus are also making the case to include more provisions using the budget process. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus wants to include the White Houses immigration bill, which would offer a path to citizenship for 11 million people who have been living in the U.S.

Like the $15 minimum wage that was originally part of the American Rescue Plan, immigration provisions would be vulnerable to a Senate parliamentarians exclusion based on the arcane Byrd Rule limiting reconciliation bills to budget-germane provisions that dont produce net costs after a decade. They could still be included in a House version of a reconciliation bill, but that would be politically risky since it would increase pressure on the White House and Senate Democrats to overrule the parliamentarian, which Biden clearly does not want to do (and which centrist Senate Democrats might oppose as well).

So figuring out whats in the second reconciliation bill this year is a complicated, politically fraught, and highly consequential decision that requires careful coordination between the White House and Democrats in both congressional chambers (with careful attention to both progressive and centrist sentiments).

Some key pieces of legislation (particularly those that are unlikely to affect economic indicators) can, of course, simply be postponed until next year, when a new, Fiscal Year 2023 reconciliation bill will become available. But there is a reason for the ancient maxim in Washington that controversial legislation is rarely enacted in an election year. And the more sobering reality for Democrats is that if important items on the party wish-list arent accomplished this year or next, they may recede into the far distance, given the historical likelihood of Republican gains in the 2022 midterms.

There is a lot riding, then, on the strategic decisions Democrats make in the next few weeks. If they go big on a reconciliation bill, Republicans can be expected to go very loud in attacking them. And at every step in the road ahead, the risks incurred by miscalculation grow larger and more expensive.

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What Will Be in the Next Big Democratic Bill? - New York Magazine