Daily Archives: May 9, 2021

"Music for Abolition"is the name of a music video program that three-time Grammy-award winning musician Terri Lyne Carrington has curated over the past year for UCSCs Institute of the Arts and Sciences.

Bringing together musicians across a wide variety of genres, it creates a soundtrack to the shared struggle for abolition and resolution in response to the ongoing history of racism and oppression in the United States.

The program is part of the Institutes extensive Barring Freedominitiative, which highlights the role of art, music, and visual culture in engaging and confronting issues of prisons, policing, and abolition in this country.

On Tuesday, May 18, the Institute of the Arts and Sciences will present a Music for Abolition artist panel featuring Carrington, along with a dozen prominent guest musicians, including Dianne Reeves, Camila Cortina Bello, Nicholas Payton, Lisa Fischer, Orrin Evans, Eric Revis, Nicole Mitchell, Queen Cora Coleman, Maimouna Youssef (Mumu Fresh), Sara Elizabeth Charles, and Cecile McLorin Salvant.

They will all join together for an online conversation about the role of sound and music in the struggle for abolition. Video clips of their work will also be shown. Admission is free and open to the public with registration.

Carrington was invited to curate the music program by UCSC feminist studies professor Gina Dent, co-organizer of the "Visualizing Abolition event series.

Music for Abolition has been such a gift over these last months, enlivening our speaking events and encouraging us through the pandemic, said Dent. The amazing group of musicians that Terri has brought together have provided moving sonic explorations of the embodied and painful history and present of prisons and policing. What we hear in these sounds is the ringing-out of abolition--people working collectively together to reimagine a world filled with beauty and freedom, and allowing us to see and to hear the beauty that has always surrounded us and is in us.

Carrington worked as a New York session drummer in the mid 1980s before gaining national recognition as the house drummer for both the Arsenio Hall Show and Quincy Jones VIBE TV show. In 1989, she released a Grammy-nominated debut CD on Verve Forecast, Real Life Story, and toured extensively with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. In 2011, she released the Grammy-award-winning album, The Mosaic Project, featuring a cast of all-star women instrumentalists and vocalists, and in 2013 she released Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue, which also won a Grammy, establishing her as the first woman ever to win in the Best Jazz Instrumental Album category.

She has performed on over 100 recordings and worked extensively with such artists as Al Jarreau, Stan Getz, Woody Shaw, Clark Terry, Cassandra Wilson, Dianne Reeves, James Moody, and Esperanza Spalding. She is also an honorary doctorate recipient from the Berklee College of Music, and currently serves as founder and artistic director for the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice.

Carrington debuted her new band Social Science in 2019, releasing an eclectic double album, Waiting Game, to confront a wide spectrum of social justice issuesincluding mass incarceration, police brutality, homophobia, the genocide of indigenous Americans, and political imprisonment. It featured guests including MCs Rapsody, Maimouna Youssef (Mumu Fresh), Kokayi and Raydar Ellis, vocalist Mark Kibble (Take 6), and trumpeter Nicholas Payton, along with spoken word artists Malcolm Jamal-Warner and Meshell Ndegeocello, plus words of resistance drawn from recordings of Angela Davis, Leonard Peltier, Assata Shakur, and Mumia Abu Jamal.

It has been a real honor curating the musical contributions for Visualizing Abolition, said Carrington. It has been an enlightening experience for myself and many of my musical colleagues, and has allowed us to look at these issues through the lens of some incredible artists and scholars. To create music having to do with circumstances, realities, and destinies that I could not yet imagine was not only exciting but also quite expansive, for which I am grateful.

"The symposium brought together an amazing cohort of creators whose work can now reflect each other's in some way or another, sharing messages, ideals, hopes, and dreams, she added. In recognizing the bonds of our common humanity as artists and cultural workers, we not only strengthen ourselves and our existing communities, we participate in designing the future.

Terri is an amazing musician and activist, with a commitment to thinking about and advocating for the roles music can play within struggles for social justice, said Rachel Nelson, director of UCSCs Institute of the Arts and Sciences. "As Terri has said, for artists and musicians,to create something thats transformational or helps point us in the direction of a differentfutureI think thats a big part of our roles."

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The Music for Abolition: Artist Panelfeaturing curator Terri Lyne Carrington and guest musicianstakes place on Tuesday, May 18, from 4 p.m. to 5:30. Admission to this online event is free and open to the public with registration.

Read the rest here:

Creating a soundtrack and adding a heartbeat to the struggle for prison abolition - UC Santa Cruz

Political Report

Time is running out for the state Senate to advance a bill repealing the death penalty. Two influential Democratic senators also work as prosecutors, and the states DA association is fighting the reform.

Nevada, a state where district attorneys are fond of death sentences, is close to repealing capital punishment. When the Assembly passed a bill to abolish the death penalty in April, the chambers Democrats, who hold the majority, all voted in its favor, sending it to the Democrat-controlled Senate.

But a pair of Democratic senators, both of whom work as prosecutors when the legislature is not in session, may derail the effort. Nicole Cannizzaro is the Senate majority leader and has not committed to bringing forward the legislation, Assembly Bill 395. Melanie Scheible leads the Judiciary Committee, which has yet to hold a hearing or vote on the bill. The clock is ticking; the bill would need to pass the committee by next week, and the entire legislative session is winding down at the end of May.

Cannizzaro and Scheible are deputy district attorneys in the office of Clark County (Las Vegas) DA Steve Wolfson. Wolfson is a staunch foe of death penalty abolition who has sought death sentences in dozens of cases over his tenure, testified against AB 395, and is trying to schedule an execution just as this debate is coming to a head in the state Capitol.

Theres an apparent conflict of interest, where the people that are making laws are enforcing laws, Scott Coffee, a longtime public defender in Clark County who has worked on many capital cases, told The Appeal: Political Report. Walking into that office after repealing the death penalty would be kind of like walking into the Red Sox dugout after trading Babe Ruth. Neither Cannizzaro nor Scheible responded to requests for comment for this article.

The Nevada Association of District Attorneys, the states prosecutorial lobby, has been urging lawmakers to reject AB 395. Its president, Elko County DA Tyler Ingram, testified against abolishing the death penalty in the Assembly. Throughout Nevada, prosecutors make the decision to seek the death penalty sparingly and judiciously, Ingram told the Assembly. It is reserved for the worst of the worst.

But Nevada prosecutors have pursued the death penalty so frequently that they have helped make their state an outlier even by national standards.

Nevada has about 70 people on death row. Relative to the states population, that is the second-highest number in the country, behind Alabama. The numbers are completely out of whack with the rest of the country and the rest of the free world, to be quite honest, said Coffee, who blames a culture where DAs seek death sentences in volume because its always been sought in volume.

And state prosecutors have filed notices seeking death sentences in dozens of additional casesbut have either failed to secure them or else dropped their quest. Critics say prosecutors use these notices to gain leverage in plea negotiations.

The Nevada District Attorneys Association, contacted through its president and through two registered lobbyists, did not respond to requests for comment.

For Assemblymember Steve Yeager a Democrat who is a chief sponsor of AB 395, the death penalty gives prosecutors an alarming degree of discretion over someones life.

Yeager worked as a public defender in Clark County for eight years, going up against the countys prosecutors. He says he already opposed the death penalty before that experience, but his resolve hardened when he witnessed the unjustifiable differences in how prosecutors handled similar cases. A disproportionate share of the people on Nevadas death row are Black, and Yeager says last summers protests for racial justice have helped push this bill further than similar measures have gone in the past.

AB 395, as currently drafted, would commute the sentences of people on Nevadas death row to life without the possibility of parolein addition to barring future death sentences.

Nevada has not executed anyone since 2006, in part due to its difficulties obtaining execution drugs from manufacturers. But abolition advocates point to the resurgence of federal executions under President Donald Trump to warn that a pause could end at any moment.

Wolfson, the Clark County DA, is looking to break Nevadas stretch by trying to schedule an execution for Zane Michael Floyd, who was sentenced to death in 2000 for the murders of four people. There is a hearing scheduled in state court for next week, shortly before the deadline by which the Judiciary Committee must act on AB 395, though a federal judge said on Thursday that he may intervene to block the proceedings.

Holly Welborn, policy director at the ACLU of Nevada and a member of the Nevada Coalition Against the Death Penalty, says the DAs involvement in the death penalty debate this year mirrors how theyve torpedoed past criminal justice reform proposals. She regrets that lawmakers let them have such sway in legislative proceedings.

Its almost like they have a veto, that everything has to be signed off by the DAs, by some law enforcement entity, Welborn said. Referencing a 2019 omnibus reform bill that several DAs opposed that was weakened before its final passage, she added, It seems that every change in a bill is at the request of law enforcement, who then still show up and oppose these measures.

This dynamic has played out before, in ways strikingly similar to the current debate on the death penalty.

In 2019, the Assembly overwhelmingly passed legislation to limit civil asset forfeiture. Advocates who supported the bill called on Cannizzaro to allow a Senate vote on the bill, much like they are doing now with AB 395. But the bill never received a vote in the Senate.

The Nevada District Attorneys Association testified against that asset forfeiture bill in the Senates Judiciary Committee. This year, when lawmakers introduced a watered down version that also has yet to get a vote, the association testified against it again. The group has also been resisting a bill that would toughen use-of-force standards for police.

Throughout the country, DAs and their statewide associations play a similar role of adamantly fighting reform, but they are facing a reckoning in some states. Reform advocates in Nevada hope their state can follow suit. This is something that were not tolerating anymore, Wellborn said, describing renewed efforts by criminal justice reform advocates to expand whose voices are heard at the state Capitol.

Leslie Turner, an organizer with Mass Liberation, credits AB 395s progress to community organizing. We really focused on getting into impacted communities and empowering our own community members, reducing the stigma and shame about having been impacted by the criminal justice system, she said. And I think that that has created a lot of momentum around criminal justice reform in general.

There is a difference between the emotional satisfaction that comes from revenge, versus actual justice, Turner added about the death penalty. Justice to me is making sure that this doesnt happen in the future. Were having three or four mass shootings a week, because we never actually got to the root cause of why this was happening. We just react over and over again. I think theres just a mass refusal in the community to accept this anymore.

Local elections have also added to the influence of public defenders, sparking new fault lines even within the Democratic Party. In addition to former public defender Yeager, the chief sponsor of AB 395 in the SenateDemocrat James Ohrenschallworks as a public defender in Clark County when the legislature is not in session.

Public defenders also secured a string of victories in judicial races in Clark County last year after running on promises to bring a decarceral outlook to the bench. In response, Wolfson called on the state to move away from electing its judges. Wolfson himself is up for re-election as DA in 2022.

The Nevada Democratic Party has faced broader turmoil this year. A slate aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America took over the leadership of the state party. And Judith Whitmer, the incoming state party chairperson, supports abolishing the death penalty.

Even if the Senate were to pass AB 395, though, Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak has tentatively indicated he may block the legislation. He said he would have a hard time supporting a bill that fully abolishes the death penalty.

Death penalty opponents remain hopeful that the states broad political transformations, combined with the reckoning brought about by protests and the nationwide tide against executions, can outweigh Nevadas propensity for capital punishment.

Welborn invoked the anti-death penalty movements recent triumph in Virginia, another state that long embraced executions. We know that the death penalty system is too broken to fix in the state of Nevada, and anywhere else in this country, she said. Virginia at one time had the highest rate of executions in the country. If they can do it, we certainly can do it here in Nevada.

Originally posted here:

Nevada Prosecutors Are Standing in the Way of Abolishing the Death Penalty - The Appeal

This had changed by the time Kaba left college and returned to New York City to work with survivors of domestic violence. She was befuddled that many of the women she was working with did not want to call the police on their partners. Kaba said, Then I started asking people questions like, Why dont you want to go to the police? And people would look at me, like, What are you talking about? Why wouldnt I go to the cops? Do you not see who I am? The cops dont keep me safe. And so I slowly came to consciousness. In her book, Kaba writes, What happens when you define policing as actually an entire system of harassment, violence, and surveillance that keeps oppressive gender and racial hierarchies in place? When thats your definition of policing, then your whole frame shifts. And it also forces you to stop talking about it as though its an issue of individuals, forces you to focus on the systemic structural issues to be addressed in order for this to happen.

There is no definitive beginning point for prison-abolition politics, but it is clearly connected to a turn, beginning in the sixties, in American imprisonment, in which it went from a method, in part, of rehabilitation to one of control or punishment. During the civil-rights movement, police were the shock troops for the massive resistance of the white political establishment in the American South. By the mid-sixties, policing and the criminal-justice system were being retrofitted as a response to a growing insurgency in Black urban communities. By the seventies, they were being used to contain and control both Black radicals and Black prisoners. The scholar and activist AngelaY. Davis may be the best-known prison abolitionist in the United States today. But, in 1972, she was facing charges of kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy, after guns registered to her were used by the seventeen-year-old Jonathan Jackson, in a botched attempt to free his brother, the Black radical George Jackson, from Soledad prison.

Davis had become a leader of George Jacksons defense committee and had developed a close relationship with him. As a result of their collaboration, and of Daviss experience of spending sixteen months in jail before her acquittal, she devoted her political energies to prisoners rights and eventually to prison abolition. In an interview that she gave while awaiting the outcome of her trial, Davis said, We simply took it upon ourselves at first to defend George Jackson, John Clutchette, and Fleeta Drumgothe radicals known as the Soledad Brothers. But we later realized that the question was much broader than that. It wasnt simply a matter of three individuals who were being subject to the repressive forces of the penal system. It was the system itself that had to be attacked. It was the system itself that had to be abolished.

In 1995, the radical theorist Mike Davis wrote a cover story for The Nation describing a new prison-industrial complex being established in California, with no pretense that the exponential growth of prisons was tied to the rise and fall of crime. Indeed, according to the scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in her pathbreaking book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, even though the crime rate peaked in 1980, between 1984 and the early two-thousands, California completed twenty-three major new prisons, at a cost of two hundred and eighty to three hundred and fifty million dollars each. By contrast, the state had built only twelve prisons between 1852 and 1964. Bodies were necessary to justify the rapid growth of the prison sector, and the Crime Bill of 1994, along with Californias three-strikes legislation, passed that same year, provided them. Gilmore writes that the California state prison population grew nearly 500 percent between 1982 and 2000. The three-strikes law, which mandated twenty-five-years-to-life sentences for a third felony, had an especially severe effect on Black and Latinx communities. Mike Davis reported that, during the first six months of prosecutions under the new law, African-Americans made up fifty-seven percent of the three strikes filings in L.A. County, even though they made up only ten per cent of the state population. This was seventeen times higher than the rate at which whites were being charged under the new law, even though white men were responsible for at least sixty percent of all the rape, robberies, and assaults in the state.

The three-strikes law was an accelerant to what would come to be called mass incarceration, but it was also the makings of a new movement against prisons and against the means and methods by which they became populatednamely, policing. In 1997, in Berkeley, Davis, Gilmore, and others formed the organizing group Critical Resistance, which brought together activists, the formerly incarcerated, and academics to build an international movement to end the prison industrial complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people make us safe. Ten years later, Gilmore published Golden Gulag, which she describes as the culmination of research projects undertaken with Black mothers of incarcerated persons in California state prisons. She wrote, What we learned twice over was this: the laws had written into the penal code breathtakingly cruel twists in the meaning and practice of justice. This produced new questions, extending far beyond the passage of new laws. The mothers, along with Gilmore, asked, Why prisons? Why now? Why for so many peopleespecially people of color? And why were they located so far from prisoners homes? In this sense, although academics have been important to formulating the movements arguments, the journey toward abolition is not an academic or intellectual exercise. Instead, it has been gestated within the communities deeply scarred by the disappearing of sons and daughters by the state.

By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the cumulative, devastating effects of twenty years of increasing policing and incarcerationinaugurated by Reagan but abetted by the policies of the Clinton Administrationcame into greater focus, as new conversations opened up about structural inequality in the United States. Michelle Alexanders book The New Jim Crow, published in 2010, offered a breakthrough analysis of continued Black inequality as a product of years of policing and imprisonment in Black communities. Kaba identifies the failure to stop the execution of the Georgia death-row inmate Troy Davis, in 2011, as catalyzing the emergence of an abolitionist consciousness among what Elizabeth Alexander has described as the Trayvon Generation. Five months after Daviss execution, Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman. Kaba noted that the call, when Trayvon Martin was killed, was to arrest and to prosecute and to convict Zimmerman. In 2014, after Michael Brown was killed, the push was to indict Darren Wilson, and for body cameras. Zimmerman was acquitted, and a grand jury failed to bring charges against Wilson. Kaba said, And, because so many of these young folks were actually mobilized in the organizing, they could see the futility of the demands that they were making and the limits of those demands, and wanted and were ready to hear something new.

That generations maturation in the world of police reform became apparent last summer, when many young activists and organizers began to embrace a demand that funding for police departments be redistributed to other public agencies and institutions. The demand originated in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, and where the city council briefly committed to defunding the police department. But, Kaba said, its important to note that local Black radical organizationsBlack Visions Collective, Reclaim the Block, and MPD150had been campaigning for years to divest from the police department and invest in community groups, battling the police over the citys budget. She explained, Youve already got folks on the ground over there that have had two cycles of budget fights around defunding the police based on divestment. So the part of this people dont understand is the continuity of these ideas. They dont just come out of nowhere. People arent just yelling stuff randomly. It got picked up nationally because people were, like, This makes sense.

Although the demand to defund the police may have had its specific origins in Minneapolis, Kaba understands that the growing curiosity about abolitionist politics is rooted in something much broader. She said, People are frustrated by the way that the welfare state has completely been defunded. People dont have what they need to survive. And yet the military and prisons keep getting more and more and more. Contrary to the beliefs of their critics, abolitionists are not impervious to the realities of crime and violence. But they have a fundamental understanding that crime is a manifestation of social deprivation and the reverberating effects of racial discrimination, which locks poor and working-class communities of color out of schooling, meaningful jobs, and other means to keep up with the ever-escalating costs of life in the United States. These problems are not solved by armed agents of the state or by prisons, which sow the seeds of more poverty and alienation, while absorbing billions of dollars that might otherwise be spent on public welfare. The police and prisons arent solving these problems: they are a part of the problem.

At its core, abolitionist politics are inspired by the necessity for what Martin Luther King,Jr., described as the radical reconstruction of the entirety of U.S. society. They intend to promote systemic thinking instead of our societys obsession with personal responsibility. Derek Chauvins conviction was premised on the idea that he was personally responsible for George Floyds murder. The emphasis on his accountability distracts from a system of policing that administered his continued employment, even though eighteen complaints had been lodged against him during his nineteen-year career. Moreover, Chauvin was a field-training officer, who had trained two of the other officers who will face trial for participating in Floyds murder. Chauvin may be held to account for the killing, but neither the Minneapolis Police Department nor the elected officials charged with overseeing the M.P.D. will be held to account for allowing someone like Chauvin to be on the streets, let alone responsible for training others.

To approach harm systemically is to imagine that, if peoples most critical needs were met, the tensions that arise from deprivation and poverty could be mitigated. And when harm still occurs, because human beings have the propensity to hurt one another, nonlethal responses could attend to itand also to the reasons for it. To be sure, these are lofty aspirations, but they are no more unrealistic than believing that another study, expos, commission, firing, or police trial is capable of meeting the desire for change that, last summer, compelled tens of millions of ordinary people to pour into the streets. Indeed, the trial of Derek Chauvin could not even conclude before a Black man was killed at a traffic stop.

Our current criminal-justice system is rooted in the assumption that millions of people require policing, surveillance, containment, prison. It is a dark view of humanity. By contrast, Kaba and others in this emergent movement fervently believe in the capacity of people to change in changed conditions. That is the optimism at the heart of the abolitionist project. As Kaba insists in her book, The reason Im struggling through all of this is because Im a deeply, profoundly hopeful person. Because I know that human beings, with all of our foibles and all the things that are failing, have the capacity to do amazingly beautiful things, too. That gives me the hope to feel like we will, when necessary, do what we need to do. Abolition is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Even the guiding lights of the movement are embedded in campaigns for short-term reforms that make a difference in daily life. For Kaba, that has meant raising funds for mutual aid during the pandemic and campaigning for reparations in Chicago. For Gilmore, it has meant working with incarcerated people and their families to challenge the building of prisons across California. For Angela Davis, it has meant lending her voice to movements for civil and human rights, from Ferguson to Palestine. The point is to work in solidarity with others toward the world as they wish for it to be. Hope is a discipline, Kaba writes. We must practice it daily.

Excerpt from:

The Emerging Movement for Police and Prison Abolition - The New Yorker

Recently freed workers on a sugar plantation in the West Indies in 1849. Their progress is watched by a white supervisor with a whip.

Image: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The current blizzard of stories about a worker shortage across the U.S. may seem as though its about this peculiar moment, as the pandemic fades. Restaurants in Washington, D.C.,contendthat theyre suffering from a staffing crisis. The hospitality industry in Massachusetts says its experiencing the same disaster. The governor of Montana plans to cancelcoronavirus-related additional unemployment benefits funded by the federal government, and the cries of business owners are being heard in the White House.

In reality, though, this should be understood as the latest iteration of a question thats plaguedthe owning class for centuries: How can they get everyone to do awful jobs for them for awful pay?

Employers anxiety about this can be measured by the fact that these stories have erupted when there currently is no shortage of workers. An actual shortage would result in wages rising at the bottom of the income distribution to such a degree that there was notable inflation. Thats not happening, at least not now. Instead, business owners seem to mean that they cant find people wholl work for what the owners want to pay them. This is a shortage in the same sense that there is a shortage of new Lamborghinis available for $1,000.

To understand whats truly going on, its necessary to look back at how this question has been settled in different ways through the history of capitalism.

As Europe colonized the Western Hemisphere, the initial solution was simple: slavery. It began with the enslavement of Indigenous people from Canada to Cape Horn. This happened on a larger scale than is generally understood today, with one estimate finding that between 2 and 5.5 million Indigenous people were subject to slavery throughout the Americas.

Enslaving Indigenous populationsdid not go as well as Europeans hoped, however. If they were forced into bondage near where theyd previously lived,Indigenous people understood the land and could easily escape back to their tribe. (This problem was sometimes addressed by shipping them far away, often to the West Indies to work on extraordinarily brutal sugar plantations.) Britain and France, battling for supremacy in North America, were loath to alienateIndigenous people who might then ally with their rival. And Europeans and their diseases killed so manyIndigenous people that often there simply werent enough around left to enslave.

This was the first worker shortage. It contributed to the expansion of the African slave trade, which, over 350 years,caused the kidnapping of approximately 12.5 million people, with perhaps 2 million dying on the way to the so-called New World.

But what were employers going to do when it was no longer possible to directly force people to labor? This was the subject of startlingly frank planning in British colonies after the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

In 1836, Lord Glenelg, the British secretary of state for war and the colonies, sent a dispatch to all the governors of the West Indies. Formerly enslaved people were about to be fully emancipated after serving a required period of apprenticeship for their former masters. This, Glenelg wrote, was going to cause problems for plantations:

During slavery, labour could be compelled to go wherever it promised most profit to the employer. Under the new system it will go wherever it promises most profit to the labourer. If, therefore, we are to keep up the cultivation of the staple productions, we must make it in the immediate and apparent interest of the negro population to employ their labour in raising them. Where there is land enough to yield an abundant subsistence to the whole population in return for slight labour, they will probably have no sufficient inducement to prefer the more toilsome existence of a regular labourer.

Obviously the answer couldnt be paying laborers more. Instead, Glenelg explained, it would be necessary to prevent the former slaves from obtaining any land they could work themselves by fixing such a price upon Crown lands as may place them out of reach of persons without capital.

In a then-famous speech, a member of Parliament named William Molesworth said it as straightforwardly as possible: The danger is, that the whole of the labouring population of the West Indies should, as soon as they become entirely free, refuse to work for wages and that thus capitalists should be left without labourers.

Several years later, the Scottish polemicist Thomas Carlyle jumped into the fray, in an article with the viciously racist title you might assume. With a few changes, the substance of its argument could appearin National Review today:

The West Indies, it appears, are short of labour. Where a Black man, by working about half-an-hour a-day can supply himself, aid of sun and soil, with as much pumpkin as will suffice, he is likely to be a little stiff to raise into hard work! Sunk to the ears in pumpkin, imbibing saccharine juices, and much at ease in his creation, he can listen to the less fortunate white mans demand, and take his own time in supplying it. Higher wages, massa; higher, for your cane crop cannot wait; still higher, til no conceivable opulence of cane crop will cover such wages.

Glenelgs recommendations were largely enacted. This, together with the importation of indentured servants from India, saved plantation owners from experiencing the feared worker shortage.

The same dynamics played out in various permutations as the Industrial Revolution developed. In the U.S., slavery formally ended but was mostly restituted as sharecropping for almost 100 years. At home, the British government passed a series of enclosure laws, which privatized common lands on which landless peasants had farmed. Now unable to survive in the countryside, these tenants moved to cities, where their desperation prevented new factories from experiencing a worker shortage.

Many European countries instituted unemployment insurance programs in the early 20thcentury over the ferocious objections of the business world, which opposed them for obvious reasons: They allowed workers to eke out a bare-minimum survival without jobs. This changed the power equation between employers and employees, forcing businesses to raise wages and improve working conditions.

Despite large-scale working-class agitation in America, the U.S. federal government did not institute unemployment insurance for decades.

Despite large-scale working-class agitation in America, the U.S. federal government, even more dominated by business than the governments of Europe, did not institute unemployment insurance for decades. In 1922, the National Association of Manufacturers made a straightforward pronouncement: Unemployment insurance of any kind is economically unsound. Later, an NAM representative informed Congress that its plan for unemployment insurance was unconstitutional and also wouldnt work. The media of the time was as solicitous then as it is now of the perspective of employers. One supporter of unemployment insurance testified in congressional hearings during the Great Depression that the idea was enormously popular but lamented that even with all this mass support, it is extremely difficult to get any mention of this in the public press.

Unemployment insurance finally was created as part of the Social Security Actof 1935. With that battle lost, business turned to a two-fold strategy: first, lobbying to keep unemployment benefits at the lowest level possible, and second, preventing the unemployment rate from ever getting too low. It may seem counterintuitive that businesses would not want the economy operating at full capacity. But low unemployment alters the balance of power between owners and workers just as unemployment insurance does and when workers can easily quit and get another job across the street, the dreaded worker shortage simply appears again in a different guise.

The battle against low unemployment was eventually cloaked in scientific jargon. In 1975, two economists announced the existence of the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, or NAIRU. If unemployment fell below NAIRU, inflation would start rising uncontrollably as businesses were forced to pay workers more and more. At the time, NAIRU was purportedly 5.5 percent, while later estimates placed it somewhat higher. This meant that whenever unemployment was getting too low, the Federal Reserve had to step in and strangle the economy until lots of people were thrown out of work.

The problem with NAIRU was that, while there is presumably some level of unemployment so low that it will lead to inflation, the official estimates were clearly far too high. The unemployment rate dropped to 3.8 percent in 2000 and dipped to 3.5 percent at the start of 2020, with no accelerating inflation in sight.

Today, with the additional unemployment benefits from the recent Covid-19 relief bill, business owners are living their greatest nightmare: workers with genuine leverage over their wages and working conditions. The owner of a Florida seafood restaurant recently explained this straightforwardly: You need to have incentives to get people to work, not to stay home. Youve got the hard workers who want to have a job, but the others need that motivation.

In theory, there are many possible such incentives: better pay, better working conditions, even a slice of ownership of the company. But the owning class hasnt been interested in those incentives at any point in the last few centuries. Theres only one incentive that makes sense to them: You work or you starve.

Here is the original post:

You Must Work or Die: The Long History of Worker Shortages - The Intercept

The University of California (UC) Cops Off Campus coalition is organizing a nationwide day of refusal to advocate for the dismantlement of college police on all UC and California State University (CSU) campuses. The day of refusal asks the community to not attend synchronous or asynchronous classes, meetings, or do any other forms of university-sanctioned labor.

On May 3, the UCSD chapter of the coalition will hold a protest at the Audrey Geisel University House to call for the abolition of campus police.

This protest comes at the beginning of Abolition May, a month-long series of actions dedicated to the removal of campus police. Abolition May will begin with the nationwide day of refusal on May 3 and end on May 25, the one-year anniversary of the death of George Floyd.

The coalition will demand their respective college systems to divest from campus police and instead invest and improve other viable community alternatives that keep students safe and support students mental health.

Saiba Varma, an assistant professor in the Anthropology department and representative of UCSD Cops Off Campus, said UCSD has had problems with campus policing in a statement to The Triton.

There have been several incidents of students experiencing mental health crises, where, because the only possible response is calling 911, they have been arrested and criminalized, she said.

She reported that other UCSD departments, including the Critical Gender Studies Program, Anthropology, Communication, and Ethnic Studies, are planning to stand in solidarity with the coalition and have released statements in support of divesting from the police.

In a panel hosted by CalMatters and KQED on April 21, student leaders, faculty, and representatives from both the UC and CSU systems discussed the issue of campus policing.

UC Regent John Perez said hes willing to discuss reducing the number of police officers allowed on campus by 40%.

I dont think [that] 40% number is wildly out of the range of possibility, Perez said at the panel.

However, Perez and the UC Davis Chief of Police, Joseph Farrow, argued that it was necessary for the UC campuses to sustain their respective police departments.

One of the reasons we need police on campuses is because campuses arent free from violent crime, and theyre not free from other expressions of crime that are appropriately responded to by police, Perez said.

Naomi Waters, a UC Riverside student and UC Student Association (UCSA) chair for racial justice, spoke at the panel regarding the tense relationship between students and UCPD while discussing the state of campus policing.

The UCs police department has been involved in numerous incidents of flagrant abuses of authority while publicly engaging in conversation with students, Waters said at the panel. Its like youre saying one thing but doing another. We havent even reached the tip of what were trying to do. Theres so much more work to be done.

Waters also called to light the common goals shared by UC and CSU campuses. She argued that defunding campus police would aid in the fund reallocation process for mental health services. In the 2018-2019 school year, UCSD spent approximately $15 million on UCPD. The UC system overall spent $138 million.

UCPD are often dispatched as first responders to mental health crises. For students experiencing mental health emergencies, however, the presence of police can make this a traumatizing experience.

In an op-ed to The Triton, fourth-year student Tajiri Neuson recalls feeling unsettled when UCPD officers were dispatched to his home. At UCLA, another undergraduate student wrote in The Daily Bruin about being handcuffed and involuntarily hospitalized by UCPD after speaking with a therapist. Both these instances occurred after calls were made to Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS).

According to the Cops Off Campus Coalition website at UCSD, a Bureau of Justice survey conducted in 2011-2012 showed that in four-year institutions with 2,500 students or more, 92% used armed officers in public universities, about 94% were authorized to use chemical or pepper spray and a baton, and 40% were permitted to use tasers. In 2015, over 100 university police forces also acquired military equipment and weapons.

In the Bay Area, the Peralta Community College District was able to abolish police on their school campus by ending its contract with the Alameda County Sheriffs Department. When the school comes across a violent crime at school, outside police officers are called in.

UCSD Cops Off Campus previously organized a series of protests on campus during the coalitions official launch on October 1, 2020. This included a banner drop at multiple sites and a live-streamed protest at Price Center. Protests also took place on the nine UC campuses as part of the launch day.

We are committed to building community controlled resources for care and campus security that do not rely on punitive or carceral systems. The Cops [O]ff Campus coalition at its core believes that we can take care of each other, and we do not need the threat of violence to do so, said Varma in her statement to The Triton.

Those interested in participating in the national day of refusal on May 3 can sign up here.

Vanessa Gaeta-Munoz is a staff writer for The Triton.

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UC Cops Off Campus Coalition to Hold Work Stoppage and Protest - The Triton

This last April, the violence of prisons and policing has been fully on display. Protests erupted in Minnesota and Chicago after the police killings of 20-year-old Daunte Wright and 13-year-old Adam Toledo during the trial of former Minneapolispolice officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. The police have continually used excessive force when responding to protests.

Meanwhile, the ongoing humanitarian crisis of COVID-19 in prisons became visible on April 4 when those incarcerated in the St. Louis City Justice Centerled a protest where they broke windows, started fires, and hung signs out of windows that read, Help Us. That protest was inspired by the failures of theprison system to respond to COVID-19 outbreaks in a humane way. These failures are not unique to the St. Louis City Justice Center but typical of prison systems around the world,especially in the United States.

All during the COVID-19 pandemic, prison officials have been either negligent or blatantly irresponsible in protecting people from getting infected. For example, in California bureaucratic negligence led to an outbreakatSan Quentin State Prison, resulting in the deaths of 28 human beings incarcerated in the prison.

The Federal Board of Prisons denied 98 percentofrequests for compassionate release for incarcerated people who feared COVID-19 complications due to already poor health. In the twisted world of prisons, even attempts to provide safety from COVID-19 have led to unbearable conditions for incarcerated people. Family visits and educational or religious programming have been suspended in most jails and prisons due to COVID-19. One jail in Washington, D.C., has held its 1500 prisoners in solitary confinement for almost 400 daysto prevent COVID-19 infections solitary confinement, which the United Nations suggestsis akin to torture, and those whove experienced it describe it as being buried alive.

In 1 John 3:15, the writer says, Anyone who hates a brother or sister becomes a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in them. Our failure to have pity on our brothers and sisters in need facing these inhuman conditions in jails and prisons is tantamount to murder (1 John 3:17).

The horrific conditions in prisons are made possible by the inescapable realities of incarceration. Prisons are secretive, which fosters violence behind closed doors. The retributive impulse of our society to punish those in prison leads to a denial of their human dignity. In Tennessee, for example, while prison officials knew vaccinating incarcerated people was an imperative, because of their risk of being infected by COVID-19, they delayedvaccinations because they were afraid of the public outcry. They had reason to fear, as our society is built to ensure prisoners do not get medical care or the humane treatment they deserve.

Criminalization, incarceration, and exclusion from society construct an underclass of people who are not viewed as deserving of care, love, or community. We are all implicated in the construction of this underclass because criminalization, incarceration, and exclusion fall disproportionately and, as Michelle Alexander has argued, intentionally, along racialized lines. We are all participants in this violence because it is done on our behalf in the name of safety but not safety for all. Conditions in our prisons from solitary confinement to the negligent disregard for COVID-19 precautions that led to 34 percent of incarcerated people getting infected, as opposed to 9 percent in the US overall all of this is state violence, done in our name. Separating parents from their children is another feature of state violence in the U.S. carceral system. Prison Policy Initiative has reported that 80 percent of incarcerated women are mothers. The separation of children from parents in the prison system has devastating results on the children, who have not been convicted of anything.

In 1 John 1:89, the writer says, If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, God who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. What does it look like for U.S. Christians to confess our complicity in the racism and violence inherent in the carceral system?

In the wake of protests last summer, Episcopal Bishop Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows wrote a powerful appealfor Christian to stand as witnesses against white supremacy, including that inherent in the U.S. legal system, saying: I want our church to be that clear in its opposition to systems of violence against Black and brown people.

I want the church to be that clear, too. I want the church to be clear in its opposition to the white supremacist systems of policing and prisons because those systems are an affront against human dignity.

Not only should Christians be clear about their opposition to this system, but they should also work toward repair.

As Christians, we are called to resist systemic racism and state violence against people who are marginalized. Thats why we support defunding, disarming, and abolishing the U.S. carceral system, including the police.

As Christians, we are called to do for prisoners what we would do for Jesus (Matthew 25:3146). We would not leave Jesus in a cruel and inhumane prison. Thats why we reject incarceration, which dehumanizes people by turning them into prisoners and tormenting them.

As Christians, we are called to love our enemies, forgive as we have been forgiven, and take part in Gods ministry of reconciliation (Matthew 5:44,Ephesians 4:32,2 Corinthians 5:18). Thats why we seek to address all harm and violence through restorative and transformative justice.

As Christians, we are called to maintain the hope that such alternatives are possible. This hope is not foolish; this hope is grounded in the work that restorative and transformative justice practitioners are already doing. Around the edges of the violence of the state, groups like Creative Interventions, the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, Generation Five, Incite! Women of Color against Violence, Common Justice, and many others are building new community-based ways to respond to harm and violence through compassion for both the ones who have hurt and the ones who have been hurt. Accountability depends not on punishment but on making amends, seeking transformation and healing. As Christians, we should rededicate ourselves to learning about and joining this work where it is already occurring.

Ultimately, our Christian hope for a world without prisons rests on the promise of God. Throughout scripture, God promises freedom for prisoners (e.g. Psalm 146, Isaiah 61:1,Luke 4:1721). Also throughout scripture, God promises a just reign of liberation and reconciliation in community (Isaiah 61:410, Jeremiah 31:3134, Matthew 18:1214).

Look at the suffering and violence promoted by the U.S. carceral system, and ask yourself: Does our current justice system represent the reign of Gods justice?

If not, then let us follow Jesus into the coming reign of God. Let us be clear in connecting our Christian commitments of love, hope, and justice to our resistance to criminalization, policing, and incarceration in our society. May we Christians be known for our support of abolition.

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Abolition Is the Embodiment of God's Justice - Sojourners