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Daily Archives: November 28, 2021
No Progress On John Wall Buyout Return To Rockets Incoming? – NBA Analysis Network
Posted: November 28, 2021 at 10:06 pm
NBA Analysis Network
The Houston Rockets and John Wall came to an agreement where hed sit out while the team favors playing their young backcourt talents during the 2021-22 NBA season. The intent was for Wall to sit out while the team found a trade but theres been no traction on that front.
According to ESPNs Adrian Wojnarowski, Wall has expressed hope to the Rockets organization to be able to return to game action in the near future. Both sides are expected to discuss this possibility on Sunday.
Houston RocketsguardJohn Wallhas expressed his hope to the organization that he can resume playing for the team in the near future, sources tell ESPN.
Wall and the Rockets had agreed on him sitting out until a trade could be found, but the five-time All-Star guard talked to Houston general manager Rafael Stone on Friday about restarting discussions on a return to the active roster, sources said. The two sides are expected to continue talks on Sunday.
LATEST NBA NEWS & TRADE RUMORS: Teams Interested In Trade For Rockets John Wall But With Caveat
With Wall having two-years, $91 million remaining on his supermax contract he signed with the Washington Wizards, its essentially impossible to find a trade suitor for him. He has arguably the least favorable deal in the NBA given the injury history and disparity in cost versus impact.
The Rockets would surely need to be willing to attach draft assets in order to move on from Walls contract. The Los Angeles Lakers proved willing to take on Russell Westbrooks contract after his strong finish to the 2020-21 season with the Washington Wizards, but there just isnt a market for Wall.
LATEST NBA NEWS & TRADE RUMORS: Teams Interested In Trade For Rockets John Wall But With Caveat
It will fascinating to see what the resolution is for John Wall and the Houston Rockets. If he wants to play a regular role with a team, hes surely going to have to entertain leaving a lot of money for the 2022-23 season on the table in a buyout negotiation to do it.
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No Progress On John Wall Buyout Return To Rockets Incoming? - NBA Analysis Network
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Scott Morrison digs in over federal Icac and tries to shift blame to Labor for slow progress – The Guardian
Posted: at 10:06 pm
The government will proceed with its roundly criticised model for a federal anti-corruption commission but has signalled the bill will only come to parliament if Labor backs it.
With Australias parliament entering what could be the last sitting week before the election, the government is under pressure to deliver the federal integrity commission it has telegraphed, but not delivered, for three years.
One of its backbenchers crossed the floor last week to bring on parliamentary debate on a stronger proposal, advanced by the independent Helen Haines. Bridget Archer was the only government MP to back the Haines proposal but a number of other Liberals want the government to toughen up its proposal.
Metropolitan Liberals are facing electoral pressure because independents are targeting incumbent moderates in the governments blue-ribbon heartland. Independents backed by the activist Climate 200 organisation, which has raised $4m in less than four months, are campaigning locally for climate action and a strong national integrity commission.
But efforts by the attorney general, Michaelia Cash, to secure internal agreement to beef up the governments proposal have met fierce resistance in cabinet. Scott Morrison told reporters on Sunday the government would stick with its original model because it was well-designed and well-considered.
Cash was more equivocal when asked if the proposal might be overhauled to include public hearings during political investigations, which would be a significant strengthening of the model. At this point in time, the bill is as it stands, she said.
Haines is unlikely to move again this week to try to suspend the standing orders to bring on her own proposal for an integrity commission but she is critical of the Coalition blaming Labor for any delay. She said on Sunday if Morrison truly believed in his suboptimal integrity commission he should bring it forward and give parliament an opportunity to amend it.
After she crossed the floor last week, Archer was hauled into a meeting with Morrison, the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, and the minister for women, Marise Payne. The Tasmanian Liberal backbencher expressed her displeasure at that treatment. I would have preferred not to have the meeting at that time while I was feeling emotional, she said last week.
But the minister for families and social services, and for womens safety, Anne Ruston, defended the prime minister on Sunday. I think its an entirely reasonable proposition when somebody expresses an opinion different to government policy and then acts on it, that the prime minister would seek to find out what their concerns were in an effort to try to resolve them, Ruston told the ABC.
The minister said Morrison had met last week with the two Liberal senators refusing to pass government legislation until the prime minister moved against vaccination mandates as he would have met, Im sure, with every other Liberal party senator who crossed the floor in the time he has been prime minister.
Morrison last week sought to buffer the government against its obvious lack of action on an integrity commission by criticising the New South Wales anti-corruption commission.
After he faced the internal revolt on his own model, the prime minister accused critics of him and the governments integrity commission of wanting a kangaroo court to oversee the federal parliament. Morrison attacked the NSW Icacs inquiry into the former premier Gladys Berejiklian.
Liberals want Berejiklian to run in the seat of Warringah against the incumbent independent, Zali Steggall. Morrison declared anti-corruption commissions should be looking at criminal conduct, not who your boyfriend is.
On Sunday Morrison tried to shift blame to Labor for the lack of progress. He said the government would like to proceed with its proposal but theres no support for our proposal from Labor, or others.
Our proposal has been consulted on, weve had it out there for a long time, we are interested in a fair dinkum commission that looks at criminal conduct, not at who peoples boyfriends are, the prime minister said.
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Labor and others want to have a system, frankly, that is open to all sorts of abuse and game playing and politicking and weve seen that from Labor over the course of this term time and time matters referred off to the Australian federal police, wasting their time.
Cash told reporters the Coalitions proposed integrity commission was a fair and balanced model: It will deal with instances of the most serious criminal corruption at a federal level.
That is what this bill is all about. Its not, as the prime minister said, a political witch-hunt, which the Labor party seem to want it to be.
We have a bill, if Labor indicated they would support the bill, our situation would be very very different, but at this point in time, we have a bill, they dont, all they have is a statement of opposition. Thats their situation.
It is routine for the government to bring forward legislation to the House of Representatives, whether it is likely to pass or not. But Ruston told the ABC: The last thing we want to do is bring a bill into this place and then find out it wont get through.
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Leatherbury: Meet Greg Abbott: The governor of censorship and double standards – LubbockOnline.com
Posted: at 10:06 pm
Tom Leatherbury| Special to the Avalanche-Journal
To use his words, Texas Gov.Greg Abbott has a problem when it comes to censorship and double standards. Abbottrecently assertedthat Big Tech companies are the ones with a big problem when it comes to censorship and double standards, but those claims could be easily used to categorize one of the host of new laws that the governor encouraged the Texas Legislature to pass to compel speech the government approves and suppress speech the government disapproves the new social media censorship law, House Bill 20.
This unconstitutional law attacks the very companies that facilitate safety and well-being for their users by combating misinformation the same companies that Abbott is courting to bring good-paying jobs to Texas.
Abbott has praised House Bill 20, signed into law on Sept.9, 2021, for protecting Texans from wrongful censorship on social media platforms. The law prevents tech companies with 50 million monthly users or more from banning users based on political or religious viewpoints wherever those viewpoints are expressed. The law also requires multiple disclosures about content moderation practices and processes by these companies, sets a 48-hour deadline for the review and removal of illegal content, and creates nearly insurmountable obstacles for email service providers to block spam and other unwanted messages.
While the bills supporters may claim the law is protecting the First Amendment rights of Americans, in reality, the law tramples the free speech of private American companies. House Bill 20 is even more draconian than a recent Florida law that a federal judge held unconstitutional on multiple grounds and preliminarily enjoined from taking effect.
Judge Hinkles injunction against this Florida law set the record straight, stating that the First Amendment says "Congress"shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. The Fourteenth Amendment extended this prohibition to state and local governments. The First Amendment does not restrict the rights of private entities not performing traditional, exclusive public functions. In short, the First Amendment provides that a state government, like Florida and Texas, cannot abridge the speech rights of a private company, like Google.
The Florida federal court concluded that tech companies are private entities with First Amendment rights of editorial discretion and that state governments do not possess the power to disregard these rights. However, Gov.Greg Abbott and the Texas Legislature do not seem to care about this federal court ruling or the United States Constitution. They disregarded both by passing House Bill 20 and signing it into law.
Texas taxpayers will bear the financial burden of watching House Bill 20 being declared unconstitutional now that NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association have filed a lawsuit against the state of Texas to invalidate House Bill 20.
Aside from infringing on companies constitutional rights, laws like House Bill 20 make it more difficult and expensive for companies to create enjoyable and secure products for users. Technology companies have stepped up and have made robust investments to keep products family-friendly, clean from hate speech and misinformation, and safe from illegal activity.
House Bill 20s drastic measures could easily impose significant additional costs on tech companies. Preventing companies from moderating content might score Texas politicians some cheap political points, but it will cost users and taxpayers severely. Texas officials should be empowering tech companies to continue their efforts to enhance safety from hate speech and misinformation, not disincentivizing them with costly, unfair, and unconstitutional laws and regulations.
Perhaps the largest insult to tech companies and Texans can be attributed to Abbotts double standards. He is using House Bill 20 to target and hurt the very companies that he is actively recruiting to invest in the state of Texas. On one hand, Texas is courting tech companies to bring good-paying jobs and economic vitality to the people of Texas, but on the other, the governor and other Texas officials are on a mission to punish the same companies who could bring those immense benefits to our economy.
It's time for Abbott to embrace the economic free market principles that have made Texas attractive to so many businesses and stop encouraging the passage of unconstitutional legislation.
Tom Leatherbury is the director of the First Amendment Clinic at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law and Texas counsel to Electronic Frontier Foundation in NetChoice v. Paxton, the constitutional challenge to House Bill 20. The views expressed are his own.
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Leatherbury: Meet Greg Abbott: The governor of censorship and double standards - LubbockOnline.com
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9 charts to be thankful for this Thanksgiving: Progress on poverty, cancer, vaccines, and more – Vox
Posted: at 10:06 pm
For most Americans, these feel like bleak times. More than 750,000 Americans and 5 million people worldwide have died from Covid-19. A mob tried to violently stop the winner of our most recent presidential election from taking office through an attack on the Capitol. Climate change is exacerbating wildfires and other natural disasters, and we are not on track to avoid large-scale warming by 2100.
This is all real, and truly alarming. But it would be a mistake to view that as the sum total of the world in 2021. Under the radar, some aspects of life on Earth in areas like public health, the economy, science and technology, and animal welfare, among others are getting better, sometimes dramatically so.
Many of us arent aware of the ways the world is getting better because the press and humans in general have a strong negativity bias. To be sure, some objective conditions arent mere spin: This pandemic has been a horror. But it also happens to be the case that negative experiences affect people more, and for longer, than positive ones. Survey evidence consistently indicates that few people in rich countries have any clue that the world has taken a happier turn in recent decades one poll in 2016 found that only 8 percent of US residents knew that global poverty had fallen since 1996.
Its worth paying some attention to this huge progress. The people benefiting arent missing it 50 percent of Chinese respondents in the 2016 poll said they knew poverty had fallen and you shouldnt either.
Nothings permanent, and big challenges like climate change and the fraying of liberal democracy remain. But as dismal as many things are right now, the world has gotten much better on a variety of important, underappreciated dimensions. The progress we have made on these fronts makes me optimistic that we can overcome the setbacks and tragedies of the last couple of years.
In 2020 and 2021, the federal government responded to the economic shock of the pandemic by doing something unprecedented: It shoveled money to most Americans to help them weather the storm.
Unlike stimulus checks passed during the 2001 and 2008 downturns, the 2020-2021 checks were universal at the bottom of the income scale. They had no work requirement, nor were recipients required to have paid federal taxes in the past to get the checks. That means that the stimulus checks should have had a profound effect on poverty this past year or so and thats exactly what researchers are finding.
In March, researchers at Columbia led by Zachary Parolin estimated that as a result of President Joe Bidens American Rescue Plan, the US poverty rate would fall to 8.5 percent in 2021, the lowest figure on record and well below 2018s figure of 12.8 percent. The Columbia authors find that if you compare 2021 to every year for which the US census has data, from 1967 to 2019, and use a consistent poverty line, 2021 is projected to have the lowest poverty rate on record.
That was hardly the expected outcome given the depth of the Covid-induced recession, but its a huge silver lining amid the chaos of the past year.
One of the most important developments of the past few decades of human history is the dramatic decline of extreme poverty, defined by the World Bank as living on less than $1.90 per day. Thats a very, very low bar, and in 1981, 42.7 percent of humans fell below it, living in absolutely dire poverty.
But by 2017, the rate had fallen by more than three-quarters, to 9.3 percent.
Some development experts argue we should be using a global poverty line of $10-$15 a day instead (you can read more in detail about those debates here). But even a higher poverty line shows a big reduction in hardship in 1981, 75.1 percent of humanity lived on less than $10 a day ($3,650 per year); by 2018, that figure was at 62.4 percent.
The Covid-19 pandemic, of course, blunted progress on global poverty; an estimated 97 million people fell into poverty in 2020 compared to the year before, per the latest estimates from the World Bank. The pandemic also increased global inequality, as incomes fell in poor countries like India but rose among the poor and middle class in rich countries due to government support.
But those projections also suggest the world is already reversing this setback. The Banks researchers estimate that the number of people in extreme poverty shot up from 655 million in 2019 to 732 million in 2020 but will fall in 2021, to 711 million. To put those numbers in further context, the 2021 poverty estimate is lower than the number of people in poverty in 2016, and even the elevated 2020 figure was lower than the number of people in poverty in 2015, despite population growth.
Covid-19 certainly interrupted progress on global poverty, and uninterrupted progress would obviously be preferable. But while theres still a lot of work to be done, the world is already showing signs of recovering, and the medium- to long-run trends are positive.
The US is a fairly rich country where maladies that tend to hit later in life like cancer have come to dominate the list of top causes of death. The good news is that in recent decades we have made considerable progress in developing and deploying better treatments for cancer.
A recent study from researchers at the American Cancer Society estimates how many more people would have died between 1991 and 2018 had cancer death rates stayed at their 1991 level. That was the year cancer deaths peaked, in part because thats when lung cancer deaths (mostly from smoking) were peaking for men.
Reductions in cancer death rates since then have averted nearly 2.2 million deaths in men and 1 million in women. Thats a huge number of people who got to enjoy longer lives due to progress in preventing and treating cancer.
That said, experts believe the pandemic hampered diagnosis and treatment of the disease these past couple of years and expect an uptick in advanced disease and mortality from cancer to show up in data in coming years. It doesnt wipe away the progress of the last couple of decades, but its fair to temper our enthusiasm.
Even with decades of progress against smoking, lung cancer still represents over 20 percent of all cancer deaths.
But as of 2018, deaths from lung cancer had fallen from their peak by 54 percent among men and by 30 percent among women. That progress is largely attributable to progress against smoking. Weve come a long way from 1955, when 45 percent of Americans reported smoking in a given week to Gallup, to 2021, when a mere 16 percent do (which is itself a big drop from 21 percent in 2014).
To be sure, some data suggested an uptick in smoking as the pandemic set in but theres evidence that was temporary.
With the FDA working (slowly) on rules that would ban cigarettes with addictive levels of nicotine, traditional cigarettes could soon be a thing of the past in the US. The next frontier in the battle against smoking is in the developing world, where progress has been harder. We also arent fully sure of the risks posed by e-cigarettes, but they remain safer than the cigarettes they have replaced.
One of the big unqualified wins for the world in the last few decades has been the decline in child mortality.
Worldwide, under-5 deaths fell by more than half between 1990 and 2019, with some of the fastest progress in the worlds poorest regions, like sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Childhood mortality tends to be driven by preventable causes like malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia, and the world has made progress on preventing them through interventions like bednets and better water sanitation.
These estimates stop in 2019 global public health statistics take a while to compile and weve obviously had a pandemic in the interim. But as weve now learned, Covid-19 is not very lethal among young children. Yes, there have been deaths, and theyve been tragic, but the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation finds that 11,700 children under 20 have died of the illness worldwide only 0.4 percent of total Covid-19 deaths in their estimate.
The bigger concern is that Covid-related economic slowdowns and lockdowns have disrupted other health and nutrition programs and thus indirectly increased child mortality by increasing deaths from other diseases, like malaria. For malaria-driven mortality, at least, the evidence for such an effect is mixed, with high-malaria countries reporting lower malaria levels in 2020 despite Covid-19, and countries with low levels seeing them rise somewhat.
But we will have to wait for more definitive data to see how child mortality has evolved in 2020-21 and beyond. Whatever the answer, the trends from 1990 to 2019 are worth celebrating, even as early estimates of the pandemics effects should give us pause.
By far the most significant negative trend in the world over the past few decades has been climate change, which may have already cost thousands of lives and may well cost millions more in the future.
To avoid that outcome, the world needs to cut emissions and fast. While rich countries are not making as much progress as they should, one exciting trend to highlight here is that several countries (including the US) have managed to cut per capita emissions relative to 1990 levels while achieving substantial economic growth. In other words, theyve been able to show that fighting climate change need not be at odds with improving economic well-being.
This cuts against the warnings of both conservative opponents of climate action and people on the left in the degrowth movement that action to prevent climate change will necessitate a halt to economic growth (which, realistically, would translate into declining living standards and slowed progress against global poverty). It suggests that a more robust emissions-reduction regime, like the one outlined in the Build Back Better plan, can avert the worst consequences of climate change without making Americans or (more importantly) the global poor worse off.
In some important ways, life has been improving for the billions of sentient farm animals, capable of feeling emotions and pain, living in factory farms in the US and abroad.
By far the most numerous species of farm animal is the chicken, and chickens, both for meat and eggs, have historically been treated very poorly. In 2010, per the United Egg Producers trade group (hardly an organization with an interest in making egg farms look bad), 97 percent of egg-laying hens were confined to what are known as battery cages.
These cages typically hold five to 10 birds each, and United Egg Producers minimum standards state that each bird be given 67 square inches a smaller space than a standard 8.5-by-11-inch piece of paper. And thats for farms that comply with the voluntary standards; many didnt, and offered even less space.
But as the above chart shows, more and more egg producers are transitioning away from battery cages. As my colleague Kenny Torrella explains, this progress was spurred in large part by bans on the cages in states like California, Michigan, and Oregon, and sped along by pledges from egg companies secured by advocates in response to bad publicity. Life on egg farms outside a cage is hardly a picnic, but its a vast improvement, one that represents some 70 million fewer hens living in cages in 2021 compared to 2015.
Considerable media attention on Covid-19 has focused, fairly, on the communities of anti-vaxxers whove held out against getting protection against the illness. Some attention has also, correctly, been paid to the inadequate amount the US and other rich countries have pledged to fund Covid-19 vaccination in the developing world.
But its still worth taking a moment to appreciate the largest and fastest vaccination campaign the world has ever seen. Less than a year after US regulators gave emergency approval to the first Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine candidate, over half the world has gotten at least one shot, and two out of five people on Earth have been fully inoculated.
As the chart above shows, there are deep inequities in the allocation of those doses. Africa, in particular, has been neglected in vaccine provision, and rich countries need to do much better in providing doses there.
But South America, hardly the richest region on Earth, has the highest vaccination rates of any continent, and Asia is near European and North American levels (albeit in part because many Asian countries have relied on less effective Chinese vaccines).
Thats an enormous public health success that we shouldnt take for granted, even as we recognize that theres still plenty of work to be done.
Also notable is just how fast Covid-19 vaccines were developed. There are illnesses whose biological origins have been known for over a century like tuberculosis for which a reliable vaccine still does not exist. Malarias underlying parasite was identified in 1880 and the World Health Organization first recommended a vaccine against it this year.
Covid-19, by contrast, was first detected in China in December 2019, and a year later, the FDA had approved Pfizers mRNA vaccine against it.
In some ways, that timeline understates how fast the progress toward a vaccine has been. Moderna designed its Covid-19 vaccine over a weekend in January 2020, two months before the pandemic hit full force in the US. A virologist named Eddie Holmes had tweeted out the genome of the virus on January 10; on January 13, Moderna used that genome to develop a vaccine candidate. It took another 11 months of rigorous testing for the FDA to allow the vaccine to be used. Adenovirus-based vaccine candidates werent developed quite as fast, but the process wasnt too shabby AstraZenecas trials started in April 2020.
Best of all, the speedy development process has shown that mRNA and adenovirus-based vaccine platforms can work at scale, which raises the prospect of more effective vaccines against malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV, especially through mRNA technology. If even a fraction of those efforts succeed, the benefits to global health will be enormous.
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9 charts to be thankful for this Thanksgiving: Progress on poverty, cancer, vaccines, and more - Vox
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‘Project Paycheck’ readers weigh in on what’s driving the jobs gap in Berkshires – Berkshire Eagle
Posted: at 10:06 pm
Grocery stores throughout the Berkshires, including Wild Oats Market in Williamstown, employed measures such as Plexiglass partitions, to keep employees and customers safe during the coronavirus pandemic. Grocery stores are among those looking for help, amid a labor shortage.
In our first Project Paycheck report, I shared theories from local experts (thanks again, folks) on why Berkshire Countys workforce has so dramatically contracted during the pandemic.
Before our next full installment goes online Monday, I want to present early comments weve been getting from readers you know, people who are experts, writ small, in how the pandemic has affected their lives and jobs.
Better pay in other areas than what you get here. Cost to live here and low pay has people traveling to other areas daily to work.
How one Project Paycheck reader answered the question, 'Where did all the workers go?'
Heres a sample that came in through The Eagles Facebook page:
It's not a work shortage. It's a wage shortage.
Why would anyone want to work these days?
"There has always been a shortage of workers in the Berkshires. South county teenagers could pick what they wanted.
"They went somewhere with affordable housing and living wages.
Better pay in other areas than what you get here. Cost to live here and low pay has people traveling to other areas daily to work.
Clearly a theme there, right?
The Berkshire Eagles Project Paycheck explores work life changes in the region driven by the coronavirus pandemic. Led by Investigations Editor Larry Parnass, it probes why Berkshire Countys workforce remains at its smallest size in decades and what that means for the regions economic well-being.
We are also hearing from people who filled out our quick online survey. Ill recap those once Ive had a chance to get back to some people about sharing their comments. (Please consider filling it out! Your views matter. Add your voice to our project.)
In the weeks ahead, Ill zero in on the wage issue. Its clear to me this is a major factor. What will it take for employers in Berkshire County to reconsider, for real, what they pay for jobs they can and cant fill.
To be sure, pay in some fields is moving up. Still, the needle isnt yet moving on workforce numbers, as Jonathan Butler of 1Berkshire told me recently. Are any wage increases to date seen as baby steps, rather than strides forward in compensation?
Not everyone who posted in response to our initial stories was on board with the concept of a labor shortage.
Is this like the B.S. turkey shortage story liberal media pushes?
Democrats must be paying people not to work.
What happened to all the workers? I know so many people receiving food stamps they actually got increases, free health care ... must be nice .
Whats your work life story of 2021? Please take our Project Paycheck survey. You can also offer suggestions and share thoughts by contacting the projects lead writer, Larry Parnass, by emailing him at lparnass@berkshireeagle.com, or by calling him at 413-588-8341.
The sharpest criticism of the project thats come in took aim at the way we described the venture at the start: As with any region, the strength, and resilience, of the Berkshire economy depends on people working and getting paid."
Steve Dew of Williamstown posted a link to our first story and offered a different view on that premise.
This framing is totally backwards. The strength and resilience of our economy here in the Berkshires depends on employers treating their employees with respect and fairnessand, most importantly, paying them suitable wages, Dew posted. One example: Our county's largest employer, Berkshire Health Systems, is notorious for overpaying its administrators and going to war against organized labor over pay and safety for nurses and other frontline workers.
I called Dew to talk about this.
It was fair enough as far as it goes, he told me, referring to the way we described the Project Paycheck mission. But theres another side to that."
I asked Dew to talk about what it will take, in his view, to have employers, as a whole, do more to respect and compensate workers.
Its very simple: a re-invigoration of the labor movement in this country. Employers are not going to do this unless theyre pushed to, he said. To his ear, some of the comments from business about the workforce issue sounds medieval: Theres been an ugly peasants get back to work vibe during the pandemic.
To get on the right side of things, he says, employers should be using this pandemic work crisis to rethink, in a deep way, the entire workplace equation. If we dont hold employers accountable I feel like the message (in The Eagles project description) skirts dangerously close to a 'peasants get back to work' kind of approach.
Dews post drew an amen from Dennis Irvine, who replied that my description of the projects purpose worked to distract from whats obvious. That elephant in the room, he said, is pay. No, more than that. Genuine living wages, Irvine posted.
Everyone deserves enough to shelter, feed, clothe, and maintain their health. Entry level and beyond. I think many people are struggling and local wages are their last resort, he wrote. The frightening message in these sort of articles isn't 'where have they gone' but the implicit 'how long will local employers have to hold out until local workers run out of pandemic resources and can be forced into wage/debt slavery again?' It never seems to occur to the employers who complain about a lack of help to offer better wages and benefits.
Has the pandemic changed where you work? Why you work? How you work? The Eagle's new Project Paycheck series is exploring these issues and invites your help.
One of the most obvious explanations of the Great Reassessment of work, or what some call the Great Resignation, point, of course, to the pandemic.
One reader said that vaccine mandates are keeping people from working, and wrote: Drop the mandates and people will work. If there truly is a worker shortage then why are so many companies firing good employees for not getting the shot?
Amid all the comments came this one from Justin Ellis, whose Facebook account identifies him as the manager of an AT&T retail store.
Im hiring! People can start immediately! he posted.
Naturally, someone replied with a question: What do you pay?
Answer: Minimum wage, plus commission.
Coming next: Behind the scenes at a Dalton restaurant, where the pandemic labor shortage is forcing change.
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'Project Paycheck' readers weigh in on what's driving the jobs gap in Berkshires - Berkshire Eagle
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The United States of Authoritarianism – Palm Beach Post
Posted: at 10:06 pm
Heather Cox Richardson| Letters from an American
On Nov. 22, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, based in Stockholm, Sweden, released its 2021 report on The Global State of Democracy.
Democracy is at risk, the reports introduction begins. Its survival is endangered by a perfect storm of threats, both from within and from a rising tide of authoritarianism. The world is becoming more authoritarian as nondemocratic regimes become even more brazen in their repression and many democratic governments suffer from backsliding by adopting their tactics of restricting free speech and weakening the rule of law.
The report identifies the United States as one of the democracies that is backsliding, meaning that it has experienced gradual but significant weakening of Checks on Government and Civil Liberties, such as Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Association and Assembly, over time.
The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale, the report says.
That fall continues to be pushed by malign foreign actors. An investigation by Jordan Liles ofSnopes.comshows that foreign social media accounts are magnifying right-wing voices. In the wake of the Rittenhouse acquittal, for example, foreign accounts posing as Americans appeared to celebrate the jurys decision.
FrankFigliuzzi, the former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, tweeted that of 32,315 pro-Rittenhouse hashtag tweets from Nov.19-20, 29,609 had disabled geolocation. Of them, 17,701 were listed as foreign, and most of those were in Russia, China, and the EU.
Plenty of Americans are along for the authoritarian ride, too. A story by David A. Fahrenthold, Josh Dawsey, Isaac Stanley-Becker, and Shayna Jacobs in theWashington Postthis week reveals that the Republican National Committee (RNC) is using party funds to pay some of former president Donald Trumps legal bills. Allies of RNC chair Ronna McDaniel note that since Trump is the biggest draw the party has for fundraising, it is important to cultivate his goodwill.
This dumps the RNC into the Jan.6 insurrection mess by aligning the partys central organization with Trump.
That mess is deepening. Today the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol issued five new subpoenas to people involved in planning the rallies in Washington, D.C., on Jan.6 and the subsequent march to the Capitol.
Committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said: We need to know who organized, planned, paid for, and received funds related to those events, as well as what communications organizers had with officials in the White House and Congress.
Two days ago, Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who sits on the committee, toldCNNthat many of the people theyve interviewed so far more than 200 have been Trump officials who testified voluntarily and wanted to be subpoenaed for cover.
In Washington, D.C., today, at a hearing for one of those charged in the riot at the Capitol that day, U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, sought to define what it means to interfere with an official federal government proceeding. About a third of those charged in the attack on the Capitol have been charged with this crime, which carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison. Nichols asked a prosecutor today whether calling Vice President Pence to seek to have him adjudge the certification in a particular way would be obstruction.
Thats a key question.
Trumps influence took some hits today. Sean Parnell, the Trump-backed candidate for Pennsylvania senator, suspended his campaign after losing a custody battle with his ex-wife. She accused him of physical and emotional abuse of her and their children.
Today, conservative columnist Max Boot called out Republican lawmakers for fomenting violent extremism and noted that they have also become hostage to the extremists in their ranks because they fear for their safety should they stand up to the Trump loyalists. Right-wing extremists have threatened the lives of the 13 Republicans who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Two long-standingFox News Channelcontributors, Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, quit the enterprise today over Tucker Carlsons three-part seriesPatriot Purge. That series, they wrote, is presented in the style of an expos, a hard-hitting piece of investigative journalism. In reality, it is a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions.
They say they could no longer work at theFox News Channelbecause we sincerely believe that all people of good will and good judgment regardless of their ideological or partisan commitments can agree that a cavalier and even contemptuous attitude toward facts, truth-seeking, and truth-telling, lies at the heart of so much that plagues our country.
Heather Cox Richardson is a professor of American History at Boston College and author of the blog, Letters from an American.
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The United States of Authoritarianism - Palm Beach Post
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Chief Justice John Roberts is at the epicenter of an abortion dispute before the Supreme Court – KTVZ
Posted: at 10:06 pm
By Joan Biskupic, CNN legal analyst & Supreme Court biographer
Since his first job as a young lawyer in Washington, John Roberts work has been entangled with Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that gave women a right to end a pregnancy.
He helped hoist the banner against Roe in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. But years later, during 2005 Senate hearings for the chief justice post he now holds, Roberts testified that Roe should be respected as precedent, particularly after being affirmed in 1992. And he has largely held to that.
Now, Roberts, the Supreme Court and the country face a pivotal moment for abortion rights. And Roberts action in a dispute the court will take up this week, over Mississippis 15-week abortion ban, could be his most consequential. He leads a conservative bench that, since last years succession of Amy Coney Barrett for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has appeared on the precipice of reversing Roe v. Wade.
Dueling parties in the Mississippi case known at Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization have laced their briefs with lines from Roberts opinions regarding abortion rights and the value of adhering to precedent or, alternatively, discarding it. The chief justice writes with care, never leaving himself in cement, which lets both sides emphasize the words that suit their purpose.
Roberts represents more than one vote among the nine. As chief, he steers the discussion. If he is in the majority, he also assigns the opinion that will speak for the court. Further, Roberts has tried to inspire public confidence in the federal judiciary and repeatedly argued that its opinions reflect justices neutral, impartial views rather than any political instincts.
Polls show that public approval of the court has dropped in recent months, notably since September 1 when the majority allowed a Texas ban on abortions after roughly six weeks of pregnancy to take effect even as litigation over the law that plainly conflicts with Roe v. Wade was underway. Roberts broke from his colleagues on the right wing in that case, dissenting as he wrote that the court should at least temporarily suspend the ban while courts assessed the validity of the law. The court heard oral arguments on November 1 and has yet to rule.
Unlike the distinct procedural dispute in the Texas case, the Mississippi abortion controversy goes right to the heart of abortion rights, testing whether women nationwide have a right to end a pregnancy before viability. That is, when a fetus can live outside the womb, at 22-24 weeks.
Both Roe v. Wade, nearly a half century ago, and the decision that affirmed it two decades later, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, declared viability to be the cutoff line for when the pregnant womans interest could be eclipsed by protection for the fetus.
Casey reaffirmed the most central principle of Roe v. Wade, a womans right to terminate her pregnancy before viability,' Roberts wrote in a 2020 Louisiana case as he quoted the 1992 decision.
The question now is whether that line will hold.
After graduating from Harvard law school and completing a Supreme Court clerkship with then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist, Roberts joined the Reagan administration in 1981.
Reagan had campaigned on a platform against Roe v. Wade and a declaration of the sanctity of innocent human life. His administration worked against reproductive rights in its policy agenda and court filings.
Roberts, who was a junior lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department and then White House counsels office, assumed more responsibility for the administrations legal agenda when the first President Bush came to office in 1989. Roberts became deputy US solicitor general, representing the federal government before the high court.
Roberts shepherded the 1991 case of Rust v. Sullivan, as the administration argued it could forbid family planning clinics that received federal funds from providing abortion counseling. The case tested whether that prohibition impinged the free speech of physicians and other health care providers.
We continue to believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled, the Bush administration asserted in the brief signed by Roberts. It contended Roe v. Wade lacked any support in the Constitutions text or history. The high court had grounded the right to end a pregnancy in the Fourteenth Amendments due process guarantee of personal liberty and relied on past cases affirming personal privacy rights.
The Supreme Court ruled narrowly for the Bush administration in Rust v. Sullivan, letting the government forbid abortion-related counseling at federally funded clinics, but forgoing any new review of Roe.
The following year, in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey case, justices in the majority highlighted at the outset that the Reagan and Bush administrations had argued in a total of six cases over the previous decade for reversal of Roe: Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt. Yet 19 years after our holding that the Constitution protects a womans right to terminate her pregnancy in its early stages, that definition is still questioned. Joining the respondents as amicus curiae, the United States, as it has done in five other cases in the last decade, again asks us to overrule Roe.
During Senate hearings when President George W. Bush chose him first for a US appellate court and then elevated him to the Supreme Court, Roberts said his arguments on behalf of past administrations reflected his professional advocacy and not necessarily his personal views. He also said Roe was entitled to respect under principles of stare decisis, that is, adherence to precedent.
Unlike fellow conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, Roberts has declined to publicly press for reconsideration of Roe in his writings as a justice.
He also has not voted as rigidly against abortion rights as Justice Brett Kavanaugh or been as personally outspoken as Barrett. Before becoming a judge, Barrett, a Notre Dame law professor, was a vocal critic of Roe v. Wade, including signing a statement that denounced Roes barbaric legacy and called for the unborn to be protected in law.
Roberts is a lifelong Catholic whose wife, Jane, provided pro bono legal counsel to anti-abortion nonprofit Feminists for Life. Roberts told senators in 2005 that his faith would not be a factor in his rulings.
Two years after his confirmation, Roberts helped forge a five-justice bloc to rule that the federal government could ban an abortion procedure in which the womans cervix is dilated and the fetus is removed intact. Critics called it partial birth abortion. The 2007 Supreme Court decision essentially reversed a 2000 ruling that had invalidated a similar prohibition on the procedure under Nebraska law.
The Supreme Courts next major abortion case came nearly a decade later, in 2016, and Roberts dissented as the majority struck down Texas requirements that physicians who perform abortions obtain admitting privileges at a local hospital and clinics convert to costly, hospital-grade facilities.
But in a 2020 dispute over similar physician credentialing requirements in Louisiana, Roberts voted against the law based on that 2016 precedent. Roberts said he still disagreed with the 2016 decision but would follow it as precedent. His rationale and key decisive vote in that case of June Medical Services v. Russo would, however, bolster states ability to defend abortion regulations.
The Mississippi case stands to transform reproductive rights. It centers not on a discrete regulation of abortion but a wholesale ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The state wants the high court to reverse the holding of Roe that protects a womans decision to end a pregnancy before viability.
Mississippi officials assert that Roe and Casey are indefensible, and they retrieve lines from Roberts opinion in the 2020 Louisiana case suggesting the balancing of government interests and womens reproductive rights should be left to legislators, not judges.
Mississippis lawyers highlight Roberts vote and concurring opinion in the 2010 case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, when the justices by a 5-4 vote reversed precedent and lifted regulations on corporate independent expenditures in election campaigns.
Stare decisiss greatest purpose is to serve a constitutional ideal the rule of law,' the Mississippi state lawyers write, adopting Roberts phrasing from 2010 and arguing that adhering to Roe and Casey does more to damage this constitutional ideal than to advance it.'
A group of constitutional law scholars backing the Jackson Womens Health Organization counter those arguments with other lines from Roberts Citizens Union opinion, noting he wrote that Fidelity to precedentthe policy of stare decisisis vital to the proper exercise of the judicial function. Even as he voted to overturn precedent, Roberts had observed in that case that stare decisis promotes predictable development of the law, fosters reliance on rulings and contributes to perceptions of judicial integrity.
Jackson Womens Health Organization itself briefly cites Citizen United as it asserts that while some may disagree with past rulings, it is critical that judicial protection hold firm absent the most dramatic and unexpected changes in law or fact, so justices not be seen as merely exercising their own preferences.
Other supporters of Jackson Womens Health Organization, including the Department of Justice, represented by the administration of Joe Biden, revive Roberts assertion from the June Medical Services case that for precedent to mean anything, the doctrine (of stare decisis) must give way only to a rationale that goes beyond whether the case was decided correctly.
And that is the essence of the Supreme Courts loyalty to precedent. The principle goes beyond whether a decision can be called correct or incorrect, to whether it remains so central to the fabric of American law and sufficiently relied on to in the end preserve.
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The Fight for Italian Reunification Inspired the International Left – Jacobin magazine
Posted: at 10:06 pm
On November 27, 1871, Italys King Vittorio Emanuele II gave an impassioned speech at the Italian parliament, finally ushering in the complete unification of his country. For centuries, the peninsula had been divided into a patchwork of regions, mostly dominated by the monarchies of Austria, France, and Spain. Napoleon had worked to change this arrangement after the French Revolution, but, after Habsburg diplomat Count Klemens von Metternichs reversal of his reforms at the Council of Vienna in 1815, the three foreign dynasties largely regained their strongholds.
In reaction came an aggressive Italian political movement, reintroducing the long-held concept of Risorgimento national resurgence. In the 1830s, it was spearheaded by Genoa-born intellectual Giuseppe Mazzini, attracting thousands of young Italians at home and abroad. Above all, they wanted to see the European empires leave the country. Giuseppe Garibaldi, an important disciple of Mazzinis and a member of the Young Italy secret society, stayed in touch with the Genoan for many years and, in 1848, heeded his call to return home and fight. In the meantime, Garibaldi made his name as an important guerrilla leader in South America a man who knew how to lead a large merchant crew, or an army.
But things didnt go as Mazzini had forecast. He had written Garibaldi that the huge Austrian army in the north of Italy was in a state of near collapse. Traveling through the north months afterward, Garibaldi found just the opposite was true, and the Italian forces were heavily defeated in the Battle of Novara against Habsburg opposition. As for Mazzini, by March 1849, he was appointed to the three-man tribunal running a radical republic in Rome that had just been created. From the start, everyone agreed, Mazzini was very much the lead man.
The battle of Rome would set the radical defenders of the republic, including forces coming from the north with Garibaldi, against a highly disciplined French army intent on reinstalling the runaway Pope. Garibaldis men almost all volunteers, arriving from numerous countries were celebrated for their bravery in forays against the French army that stunned newspaper readers in Europe and America. But as the monthslong battle unfolded, Garibaldis view of Mazzini, his longtime mentor, drastically changed.
Garibaldi had been appointed a general not commander in chief. Yet his military dexterity gave him a high-profile, if short-term, victory on April 30, 1849, as his troops made their way into the city. When Garibaldis Legionnaires entered Rome, writes biographer Christopher Hibbert,
the people looked at them with astonishment . . . their bearded faces shaded by the brims of high-crowned, black-plumed hats, were covered with dust, their hair was long and unkempt; some carried lances, others muskets and all of them wore in their blackbelts a heavy dagger . . . and there was no mistaking the broad-shouldered figure on the white horse. Despite the freckled skin burnt red by the sun and the flamboyant black felt hat with its high plume of ostrich feathers, Garibaldi, to some, looked like the Messiah.
Yet by June 30, 1849, an exhausted Garibaldi appeared before the republican assembly to say that he would have to surrender to the French siege. Mazzini, meanwhile, demanded that they keep fighting strongly suggesting that having martyrs would help their cause. Disgusted, Garibaldi resigned his command and promptly left Rome with his army of four thousand men. Garibaldi would, sometime later, form an alliance with Vittorio Emanuele to complete the fight for Italian reunification now under the Savoy monarchy.
The embattled Roman Republic had attracted much attention in the United States. The most important mainstream media in mid-nineteenth-century America was the countrys largest newspaper, the New York Tribune, known for its antislavery editorial stance. The editor in chief, Horace Greeley, six years younger than Mazzini, had become a major public intellectual after starting the Tribune in 1841. A passionate supporter of social reform, by 1857, Greeley would be a leading figure in the new Republican Party.
The Tribune was a major conduit through which Americans learned about 1848 in Europe, explains Greeley biographer Mitchell Snay. Greeley had accurately predicted that his audience would be fascinated by the revolution going on in Italy in the late 1840s. As the dismal issue of slavery increasingly obsessed the United States, he said yes to his front-page columnists request to move to Europe and report from there. Margaret Fuller would capture the interest of Greeleys readers and remind them of their own revolution, just three-quarters of a century earlier.
Mazzini and Greeley who would never meet shared a political philosophy that was common to their class in the first part of the nineteenth century. Utopian socialism preached the union of classes to solve social problems. Both men were dedicated to curtailing turmoil between the working and upper classes. At times, Mazzini had called himself a socialist. His definition, though, was wildly different from the Marxist socialists who would soon play a major role in the second half of the nineteenth century at least in Europe. Noted Italian historian Gaetano Salvemini would define Mazzini as one who hoped for social reform but carefully eschewed any talk of class conflict. This, too, defined Greeleys politics. On both sides of the Atlantic there were various forms of this ism: communitarianism, Fourierism, Associationism, and others. They all involved social reform, not revolutionary action.
Margaret Fuller had spent all her professional life among the utopian socialists. A blue blood New Englander from Cambridge, Massachusetts, she had authored a feminist book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and edited Ralph Waldo Emersons literary publication the Dial before being hired by Greeley to write for the Tribune in 1844.
Eighteen months later, she headed for London, where she was introduced to Mazzini, who thoroughly mesmerized her from the very beginning. Fuller would have been stunned at Eric Hobsbawms description of Mazzini, in his own Age of Revolution more than a century later, as the woolly and ineffective self-dramatizer. Fullers initial description of him was a man of beauteous and pure music.
They kept in touch, especially after Fuller returned to Rome, just before Pope Pius IXs prime minister, Count Pellegrino Rossi, was brutally knifed to death in the middle of an angry crowd. The pope quickly fled south. Over the next several months, until July 1849, Fuller would cover the ongoing battle of radical troops against the French forces trying to reinstall the pope. And she would use Mazzini as her major source of information.
At the same time, Fuller, close to forty, was experiencing her own personal crisis. Much to Greeleys consternation, Fuller had disappeared for six months in the early spring with hardly a word about where and why she was not writing. Alone and afraid in Aquila, she had given birth to a son. Soon afterward, the father, a young member of the Roman Civil Guard, the Marchese Giovanni Ossoli, had joined her in a quiet marriage ceremony. A friend in Massachusetts counseled her to stay in Italy and not return home. She hired a wet nurse and returned to Rome to cover the war.
The European revolutionary movement which Fuller embraced and then saw crushed, emerged out of very real and widespread social misery, write Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith, editors of a collection of her writings. The Europe Fuller encountered on her travels during 1846 and 1847 teemed with unemployment, famine, and social unrest, as well as . . . despotic governments unable or unwilling to fashion solutions to these problems.
Solutions were being proposed by others. Friedrich Engelss The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845, and the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, were pointed out to Fuller by a German journalist, though she did not write about either for the Tribune. In this period, Fuller, who had had a long interview with the writer George Sand, began calling herself a radical. But academic Margaret V. Allen concludes, her columns show that she implicitly believed that knowledge of wrongs or evils led to their correction. Poet Elizabeth Browning had claimed that Fuller became one of the out and out reds, but Reynolds and Smith write that Fullers militancy had its limits doubting that she had become a red at all.
Fuller certainly was a steadfast admirer of Mazzini writing that he was immortally dear to me a thousand times dearer for all the trial I saw made of him in Rome. Her idolatry seemed to increase as the siege went on. But, as Italian American historian Roland Sarti former department chair of history at the University of Massachusetts writes, while many feminists in England were inspired by Mazzini, One suspects that, in some cases, he cultivated them for the sake of the men they were close to. Fuller, he commented, was an important figure among the Transcendentalists, which would have interested Mazzini. But he adds, She was of minor importance to Mazzinis life. Tragically, Fuller and her small family died in a shipwreck off the coast of New York on July 1, 1850.
The fall of the Roman Republic, a hairbreadth from the midpoint of the nineteenth century, was quickly followed by Mazzinis profound change in direction once back in London, where he would live as an migr for the rest of his life.
He was still heavily involved in advocating for the unification of Italy. But over the next twenty years, he would become obsessed by a ferocious hatred of the up-and-coming Marxist socialists. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels emphatically denounced his and similar brands of reactionary socialism, by which they meant conservative critiques of capitalism, writes scholar Jonathan Sperber in his authoritative Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life. They made short shrift of bourgeois socialism what we would today call social reform the amelioration of the condition of the working class within the capitalist society.
This social reform was at the very heart of Greeley and Mazzinis definition of early socialism. But little by little as the proletarian movement assumed a more revolutionary character, writes Salvemini, and the word socialism became removed from the idea of a simple, cooperative form of democracy and grew to be identified with that of the class struggle as happened from 1848 to 1851 under the impulse given by [Louis Auguste] Blanqui and Marx Mazzini became profoundly antagonistic towards this new movement, with ideas differing so widely from his.
Mazzini blamed the French socialists for frightening the bourgeoisie and bringing Louis Napoleons reactionary imperial regime to power in Paris. Thus began the systematic campaign against socialism which he was to wage until the end of his life. When the Paris Commune raised the red flag over the French capital in 1871, Mazzini viciously attacked the Communards, turning many former disciples against him. Mazzinis social system, from the practical point of view, no longer corresponded with prevailing social and political realities, summed up Salvemini.
In contrast to Mazzini, Greeleys political philosophy, also eschewing class conflict, remained very much intact and popular in the United States. His own career, from teenage printing apprentice from a poor farming family to editor of the countrys most successful newspaper, was often used as an example by Republican Party leaders.
The Tribune did expose shocking working conditions in many New York City shops, writes noted Columbia historian Eric Foner in Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. Indeed, unlike many other Republicans, Greeley supported a legislative limit on hours of labor . . . [but] strikes were a form of industrial war, the antithesis of the labor-capital cooperation which Greeley desired. If Greeley recognized the social barriers to economic advancement, he also insisted on confronting intemperance, licentiousness, gambling and other vices, in the lowest class. As Snay points out, Greeleys persistent emphasis on the essential harmony between classes underscored his deep aversion to Marxist socialism.
In the U.S. . . . particularly in the large Eastern cities, where large-scale immigration was increasing class stratification and holding down the real wages of all workers, the prospect for rising to self-employment was already receding . . . we know today, of course, writes Foner, that in spite of the wide acceptance of the ideology of social mobility, the years after 1860 saw a steady diminution of the prospects for a worker or farm laborer to achieve economic independence. Yet at the time, Abraham Lincoln would insist that the North had no class who are always laborers. This came out of an ethos from colonial times that involved a decades-long stigma against being a wage slave. In the Republican Party, being a wage slave was only a temporary existence; so organizing workers was not necessary.
This then would remain a key part of Republican ideology. Paradoxically, writes Foner, at the time of its greatest success, the seeds of the later failure of that ideology were already present. In the 1860s, Greeleys party was advocating an economic system that had already begun to lose power. By then, it was estimated that almost 60 percent of the American labor force was employed as wage workers, demonstrating that the new political party, from its inception, advocated for a system that was already a part of Americas past.
Despite the profound problems of the Mezzogiorno, in Italy as in the rest of Europe, at the end of the nineteenth century a mass labor movement emerged for the first time in history. Nineteen socialist and labor parties were founded . . . between 1880 and 1896 along with a nationwide trade union federation, writes Sperber. By then, the shift between utopian socialism and Marxist socialism was complete, while in the United States, that moment never really occurred. While Mazzini died with a much-diminished following, Greeleys celebration of economic independence remained very much alive. And it would bear a lasting influence in the enduring split between the US and European Left.
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The Fight for Italian Reunification Inspired the International Left - Jacobin magazine
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Why the Labor Movement Has FailedAnd How to Fix It – Boston Review
Posted: at 10:06 pm
Measured by the course of history over the last half century, the arc of the economic universe has bent badly toward injustice.
It has been more than eighty years since the National Labor Relations Act offered the first significant federal protections of industrial workers rights to organize and the Social Security Act laid the basis for an attenuated welfare state. New Deal policies were hardly panaceas; African Americans, immigrants, and women never enjoyed their fruits on an equal basis with white men. Yet over time the struggles of unions and the civil rights and feminist movements widened the protections workers were able to win from the law and from organizing. Between World War II and the mid-1970s, as union density crested at 35 percent of the non-agricultural workforce in the 1950s and then spread through the public sector in the 1960s, the United States experienced a broadly shared prosperity.
The arc of the economic universe has bent badly toward injustice.
But over the last four decades, we have witnessed the near total destruction of this promise of worker empowerment. Beginning with Reagan, the U.S. economy was reorganized wholesale. Having failed to build up political leverage to ensure that private economic power remained accountable to the common good, workers saw private interests progressively shred the limited social bargain of the postwar years. Union membership has plummeted to 10.5 percent overall and only 6.4 percent in the private sector. Even more telling is the near disappearance of strikes. In the 1970s there were, on average, about 289 annual work stoppages involving at least 1,000 workers. As bargaining power shifted decisively to employers, that average has plunged, reaching only 13 per year over the last decade.
The result today is a staggeringly unjust global economy in which just eight men own as much wealth as half the worlds population. We now face a perverse concentration of wealth among the super rich, pervasive financialization of the economy, an upsurge of low-wage and precarious work, and the heightened power of monopolistic tech firms. These transformations have relentlessly undercut worker bargaining power, triggered an explosive rise in inequality, and continue to undermine what remains of democratic governance. And even as they tighten their grip, the architects of inequality seek to control the alternatives we envision for our future. In recent years they have promoted fevered Future of Work scenarios that imagine the disappearance of jobs before sweeping waves of automation and artificial intelligence, hyping visions of the future of work that place capitals needs at the center.
The left is alive with creative energy not seen in many decades. We must exploit it to make the future of workers, not the future of work, our central concern.
Despite this grim turn of labor history in the United States, there are many new reasons for hope. Interest in unions is surging, and worker organizing is gaining ground in influential sectors, including new media and higher education. Young people have begun to question some of the central assumptions of capitalism and have revived interest in democratic socialism. The attention that activists have given to the intersectional nature of most struggles for justice has diminished the conflicts that once pitted advocates of a universalistic, majoritarian left against those who feared that the voices of minorities and the excluded would be marginalized in such a movement. The left is alive with creative energy not seen in many decades. We must exploit it to make the future of workers, not the future of work, our central concern.
This new labor energy is partly reflected in the encouraging extent to which national politicians are acknowledging the need to rebuild worker power. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have each offered bills that would empower workers. Warrens Accountable Capitalism Act would require that all corporations designate 40 percent of seats on their boards of directors for representatives elected by employees and that those with more than $1 billion in annual revenue to obtain charters from the federal government. Sanderss Workplace Democracy Act would ease union organizing and legalize secondary boycotts.
Although legislative initiatives such as these are clearly necessary, we believe they are also insufficient. Laws will not save us. Workers struggles and organizations must play a central role in shaping the twenty-first century if we are to win the changes we need. But workers will not be able to do that by clinging to strategies of the past. The world that gave rise to the New Deal and the Great Society in the United States and to social democracy in Europe no longer exists. The strategies that arose in response to twentieth-century capitalism, from traditional collective bargaining to co-determination, are therefore unlikely to be sufficient to the needs of the future.
This new labor energy is partly reflected in the encouraging extent to which national politicians are acknowledging the need to rebuild worker power.
The outlines of new labor thinking are visible in the recent efforts of unions and their allies to remake collective bargaining and organizing campaigns for the twenty-first century. These efforts have given rise to a conscious rethinking and broadening of the participants, processes, and purposes of organizing and collective bargaining.
First, while twentieth-century collective bargaining was generally binary and involved only employers and unions, recent efforts have attempted to broaden participation to give the community and other stakeholders a place at the bargaining table.
Second, while traditional collective bargaining was generally conducted behind closed doors by seasoned professionals who haggled over details, recent efforts have infused the processes of bargaining with greater militancy, opened it up to greater transparency, and employed political action as a form of bargaining.
And third, while traditional collective bargaining was focused on winning a serviceable contract that would signal a demobilization of the unions membership, recent efforts have undertaken contract campaigns as steps in a long-term strategy of worker empowerment. They try to build enduring alignments between unions and their allies that accumulate lasting power through campaign victories, a shared and increasingly fleshed out infrastructure, and a common vision and narrative.
Labor activists willingness to experiment can be traced to a conjuncture of developments triggered by the Great Recession. President Barack Obamas agenda was derailed by the 2010 midterm elections, which sidelined the unions hoped-for labor law reform (the Employee Free Choice Act), propelled to power antiunion Republican governors such as Wisconsins Scott Walker, and tightened the grip of austerity politics on all levels of government. Union leaders increasingly recognized that they needed a bigger vision if they hoped to turn back the union assaults that gathered strength. Having secured Obamas reelection, they embarked on new initiatives.
Laws will not save us. Workers will not be able to build a better futureby clinging to strategies of the past.
In 2013, for instance, President Larry Cohen of the Communications Workers of America helped launch the Democracy Initiative, an alliance of labor, civil rights, and environmental groups to counter the corrosive influence of corporate money on politics, fight voter suppression, and address other obstacles to significant reform. Meanwhile, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka moved to involve worker centers and other non-union worker organizations in the planning for the 2013 AFL-CIO convention.
The most significant catalysts for change were the emergence of new models of mobilization and organizing. A turning point for these came in 2011, with the launching of three such models, each of which in their own way signaled new departures.
In January the executive board of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) approved an ambitious campaign called the Fight for a Fair Economy, which saw SEIU commit tens of millions of dollars to organizing projects among low-wage workers in multiple cities. That effort would spawn local campaigns such as Minnesotans for a Fair Economy (MFE) and ultimately lead to the Fight for 15, a national movement to gain a living wage for fast food workers.
In July, Jobs with Justice, the national network of unions and community allies, joined with the National Domestic Workers Alliance to create the Caring Across Generations campaign, a national initiative to transform the long-term care system and empower care workers. Over time it built an alliance that united over 200 organizations, networking among care workers, families whose loved ones need care, and care recipients who wish to live at home with dignity and independence.
Finally, in September came the seemingly spontaneous eruption of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which seeded new and unexpected alliances among unions and their allies in many cities and spurred a discussion of inequality and the predatory nature of financialized capitalism that resonated well beyond the participants in its encampments.
Recent years have seen a conscious rethinking and broadening of the participants, processes, and purposes of organizing and collective bargaining.
A year later, in September 2012, a precedent-setting strike by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) against the austerity regime of Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel attracted the attention of the entire labor movement and foreshadowed new approaches to bargaining. Led by Karen Lewis, whose Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators slate was elected to the CTUs top posts in 2010, the union prepared an innovative bargaining campaign in partnership with community groups and parents. It called for smaller class sizes, improved facilities, and a host of other items that went beyond the confines of wages, hours, and other narrowly defined work issues about which the union was legally permitted to bargain. The union also documented the schools financial mismanagement. It showed how tax-increment funding that could have helped schools was instead lavished on private entities such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and it exposed risky interest-rate swap deals, in which Chicagos school system ended up squandering more than $100 million. By making the financial industrys exploitation of the school district an issue, the CTU earned public support for its call for adequate school funding.
Although the CTU did not win all of its demands, its campaign inspired others to take on austerity politics. In 2013 the St. Paul Federation of Teachers (SPFT) mounted a contract campaign that resembled the CTUs. It patiently built an alliance with parents and community groups, and with them jointly drew up twenty-nine demands, including one insisting that the school district cease doing business with banks that foreclose on their students families. The union refused to back down when the school district refused to negotiate over many of them.
After rallying broad community support, the St. Paul teachers won most of what they sought. I had negotiated almost a dozen previous contracts for the SPFT, explained the unions president, Mary Cathryn Ricker. But, for the first time, I felt that signing a contract was just one step in building a larger movement. Meanwhile, SEIU Local 503, which represents homecare, childcare, and university and state workers inaugurated a campaign called In It Together that built alliances with the community by calling for a broad investigation into the ways in which banks were ripping off Oregonians, and demanding a state lawsuit against banks to recoup millions that were lost from retirement funds due to the secret manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR).
A new strategy of bargaining and alliance building emerged from these campaigns. In May 2014 many of the activists involved convened in Washington, where they gave that strategy a name: Bargaining for the Common Good (BCG). Soon that style was spreading to new settings such as Los Angeles, where the citys leading public-sector unions and their community-based allies launched the Fix L.A. Coalition in 2014. That coalition brought SEIU, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and other public-sector unions together with community groups, and faith-based organizations. They exposed the fact that more taxpayer money was spent paying fees to the Wall Street firms that marketed L.A.s municipal bonds and other financial services than on maintaining the citys streets. Furthermore, they demanded that L.A. use its $106 billion worth of assets, payments, and debt issuance as leverage to demand better deals with Wall Street, so that it can invest more in our communities.
At the outset, BCG campaigns were meticulously planned. In some cases the groundwork was carefully laid over a period of more than a year before they were launched. Yet the basic principles of that approach have proven to be adaptable in more spontaneous struggles, as the teachers mobilizations of 2018 illustrated. Beginning in West Virginia in January 2018, and spreading to such union-averse states as Oklahoma and Arizona, those mobilizations were, in effect, organizing, bargaining, and political campaigns all at once.
The workplace-centered economism of New Deal America is yielding to broader forms of organization, social bargaining, and democratic experiment.
Teachers across the country gravitatedtoward a common good framework, linkingtheir struggles to the needs of their communities and targeted the most powerful economic forces in their states. In West Virginia, teachers in all of the states 55 school district walked off the job, called attention to the fact that the states wealthiest were paying scant taxes, and refused to return to work until all state workers had received a pay increase equal to the one the state legislature granted them. In Oklahoma they protested the states failure to fairly tax wealthy oil and gas interests. In Arizona they demanded that the state enact no further tax cuts until the states per-pupil spending on education reached the national average (and briefly succeeded in getting an initiative on the 2018 ballot that would have taxed the wealthy to fund schools before the Arizona Supreme Court had it removed on a technicality).
Since the vast majority of strikers were not union members, these walkouts were both massive organizing campaigns and democracy campaigns as well; they posed explicit political demands (such as raising taxes) to fund public schools more adequately. They instinctively adopted a BCG approach in that they were not just about wages or benefits but also about improving education and fighting for fairer taxation. The teacher walkouts ensured that more workers walked out on strike in 2018 than any year since 1986.
In January 2019, United Teachers of Los Angeles extended that militancy. The strike it launched was not only the eighth major U.S. teachers strike over a twelve-month span, but also the largest one yet, and the one most explicitly employed a BCG approach. With strong community support, teachers stayed off the job for a week. They settled for the same raise that the school district had offered at the outset, and instead used their strike to win the hiring of a nurse in every school, a reduction of class sizes, the extension of a program that exempts schools from administering random searches of their students, and a cap on the spread of charter schools.
Innovative organizing and bargaining initiatives have not remained confined to the public sector. By 2016 the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the Committee for Better Banks, and allied organizations laid the groundwork for organizing to improve pay and benefits for the nations more than one million non-union bank workers. Employing a common good approach similar to that pioneered by teachers unions, this coalition positioned itself as a defender of consumers and an opponent of predatory financial practices.
It began demanding an end to the sales goals and metrics that force bank workers to sell predatory financial products as a condition of employment, and more broadly to reform the finance system so that it serves the people instead of operating as a driver of inequality. Wells Fargo workers connected to this campaign acted as the whistleblowers who exposed the banks cheating scandals in 2016. Bank workers at Santander, a Spanish-based multinational bank that is the leader in the U.S. subprime auto loan market, have helped expose their employers predatory practices. These campaigns show how bank workers can help regulate their industry from below, exposing and stopping banks from cheating consumers and engaging in practices that threaten the broader health of the economy.
Innovative organizing and bargaining initiatives have not remained confined to the public sector.
Two recent victories illustrate this. Tim Sloan the CEO of Wells Fargo was forced to resign after congressional hearings where he was confronted by Wells Fargo workers who blew the whistle on Wells Fargos reinstitution of toxic sales goals. The was followed by Bank of American increasing the minimum pay for bank workers to $20.00 an hourmeeting one of the dmands of CWA and the Committee for Better Banks.
The titans of private equity have also presented a promising target for labor activists, particularly since such firms control a range of companies in multiple sectors and nations. Consider the Blackstone Group, the worlds largest private equity firm that controls 150 companies with a combined value of more than $400 billion and 600,000 workers. Blackstone is the largest owner of office space in the world, the worlds largest private owner of real estate, the largest owner of logistics companies in Europe, and the worlds largest investor in hedge funds.
Activism around Blackstone offers an example of how diverse campaigns targeting one such firm can be run at once, tying together a variety of issues and organizations to challenge the full scope of the companys activities. Organizers are planning campaigns that would mount drives at the non-union companies Blackstone owns, form a tenant union of Blackstone renters, and prevail on union pension funds to use their leverage to prevent Blackstone from foreclosing on homes in post-hurricane Puerto Rico. At the same time, union allies are preparing legislation in several states that would tax private equity executives to recover the states shares of the billions in tax revenue that are lost to the carried-interest loophole that protects the hyper-wealthy executives of private equity giants.
Even Amazon has not been impervious to pressure from workers and their allies. Perhaps the most difficult problem workers have faced in recent years is how to cope with the power of monopolistic corporations . Researchers have found that the rise of huge employers has led to the emergence of a monopsony in many labor markets, where those employers set wages artificially low without fear of competition for workers. No big employer has come to symbolize the problem more than Amazon, which pays its warehouse and delivery workers poverty wages even as it wrings tax incentives from the local communities where it builds its distribution centers.
Creative challenges to Amazons power began to emerge by 2018. Somali immigrants make up a huge slice of Amazons warehouse employees in the Twin Cities. In 2018 many of those workers began organizing through the Awood Center, an East African workers center, to demand a voice in determining their workload, regular consultations with community representatives, prayer time on the job, among other things. In October 2018, Amazon announced their minimum wage increase to $15. The company didnt have a set wage beforehand, so the raises for workers ranged from a few dollars to nothing. And as it raised the minimum wage, the company also cut bonuses and stock options for existing warehouse workers. The wage increase still does not address core issues leading to very high turnover, including excessive hours and pace of work.
At the same time, activists in many of the cities Amazon induced into bidding for the siting of Amazons HQ2 facility actively opposed tax giveaways and subsidies that their city leaders were offering to the nations richest company, contending that Amazons arrival would drive up housing costs and increase inequality. They also objected to the undemocratic and secretive process through which cities courted Amazon. Opposition was so great to Amazons announcement that it would cite one of its HQ2 centers in Long Island City, New York, that the company felt compelled to reverse its decision in February 2019.
These campaigns are in their earliest stages. They are as yet insufficient in scale, scope, and resources to challenge and win against the richest and most powerful corporate monopolies in history. Winning real power for workers at powerful giants such as Amazon and Walmart is likely still years away. Nonetheless, these campaigns are first steps that offer a taste and glimpse of the role workers and their organizations could play in redistributing wealth and power and moving us toward real democratic socialism.Taken together they show that even as union density trended downward in the decade after the Great Recession, and even as unions absorbed blows like the Supreme Courts decision in Janus v. AFSCME last year, new and promising labor initiatives have been proliferating.
The traditionally bifurcated approach pursued by the U.S. labor movementbargaining on one hand, political action on the otheris failing on every level.
Most importantly, these campaigns have begun the work of radically re-imagining and redefining the goals and mission of unions. They have either implicitly or explicitly broken with the traditionally bifurcated approach pursued by the U.S. labor movement for more than a century. That approach held that workers should organize and bargain collectively to improve their wages, benefits, and working conditions, and that they should pursue political and legislative action to win what they could not gain through collective bargaining. It has become obvious that this approach is failing on every level.
Having been largely blocked from winning significant gains either through organizing and bargaining or through the pursuit of pursuing electoral and legislative strategies, workers and their organizations have increasingly turned to a more unified approach, tying bargaining more closely to politics. Bargaining for the Common Good campaigns have shown that by consciously politicizing their organizing, bargaining, and strikes workers can start to feel and demonstrate the potential power of a movementthat is committed to democracy at work, in our communities, states and country as a whole. The teacher strikes have shown workers that they might win through job actions what they do not win through legislative or political action. And the Amazon HQ2 campaign subverted the long-standing assumption that secret taxpayer-funded corporate subsidies were effective tools to promote economic development. They suggest that the idea of collective bargaining that had emerged in the twentieth century is being redefined and repurposed in promising ways that challenge the erosion of democracy and the rise of inequality.
In the years to come we believe that the workplace-centered economism that was characteristic of trade unionbased social democracies or New Deal America will yield to broader forms of organization, social bargaining, and democratic experiment. The inescapable fact that work relations in twenty-first century capitalism are intimately connected to the structure of communities, social institutions, and lived environments points in that direction. So do efforts to win justice for workers across lines of gender, race, and citizenship status. Winning bargaining power for workers and raising wages will inevitably be connected to efforts to defend public schools and mass transit, create affordable housing, repulse predatory finance, and combat climate change.
These campaigns have begun the work of radically re-imagining and redefining the goals and mission of organizing.
This is a vision with deep American roots. Recent efforts recall the vibrancy that characterized U.S. labor struggles in the era before the twentieth-century institutionalization of unions and traditional collective bargaining. From the Lowell Female Labor Reform Associations resistance to wage slavery in the New England factory towns of the early nineteenth century to the community-based assemblies of the Knights of Labor that took power in small towns like Rochester, New Hampshire, in the 1880s, to the sewer socialism of Milwaukee or Schenectady in the Progressive era, unions of the past had concerned themselves not merely with wages and hours of their members but with a defense of the common good, and the construction of a cooperative commonwealth. Labors crisis is leading unions to rediscover elements of that American heritage and update it for the needs of this century.
It is now for us to take up that urgent work. Democracy cannot co-exist with the overweening power of the likes of Amazon, Walmart, and Blackstone, any more than it could co-exist with what Lincoln-era Republicans called the slave power. As Louis D. Brandeis is said to have observed, and as we have relearned painfully in our time, We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cant have both.
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Why the Labor Movement Has FailedAnd How to Fix It - Boston Review
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Child Abuse and Trafficking: The Modern Day Slavery of Children – Al-Bawaba
Posted: at 10:06 pm
We were all once children, and it is not hard to agree that every child deserves to be loved, provided for and given a safe space to live and grow. However, for many children, that was and still is not the reality they live in. In fact, WHO reports that around 1 billion children between ages 2 and 17 have experienced some kind of abuse in the past year alone. And that number does not even include the unreported cases that can go unnoticed or are never spoken about.
Child abuse can be in the form of mental, physical, sexual or emotional abuse. While these different types of abuse might appear to be different, they are all inhuman acts that can result in deep distress, injuries and even, in some cases, death. On a personal level, what abuse does to a child is that it initially rips the child from their right to be just what they are: a child.
Children whoare exposed to abuse can also end up becoming violent themselves and turn to substance abuse. Not only that, but the mental and emotional impact that abuse entails can be devastating and may result in mental illnesses, risky behavior or even an impaired and disoriented perception of life. But the impact of abuse goes far beyond just affecting the childrenthemselves, because it can also result in major social issues, such as increased violence, inequality, disoriented definition of love, safety and relationships, as well as poverty. While many people might be aware of the disastrous outcomes of abuse, not many know how to cope with it, fight it or even prevent it.
The reality of the situation is that before people can understand how to fight abuse, and child abuse in particular, they should acknowledge thegreat responsibility that having children brings in the first place. What the world needs to understand is that children are not brought into this world to suffer and be abused, but instead they should be given their basic human rights and have the a healthy childhood.
The thing with child abuse is that it can occur everywhere, especially in a childs house. And what was initially meant to be a place where kids can feel safe and loved becomes a child's worst nightmare.
However, the issue with abuse extends far beyond the immediate violence done to the child in the moments they are abused, because in many cases, abusive content of children can be shared online. For instance, there has been an increase in the trade of child sexual abuse material over the past year. It is reported that The National Center For Missing & Exploited Children in the US reviews more than 480,769 images per week each year.
The issue with sexual abuse of children, and really child abuse as a whole, is one that requires a high level of urgency and should be addressed with the utmost importance. It is pivotal that online platforms become more proactive in order to not only take down any harmful content but also to work on preventing it from being shared in the first place. This is a hard conversation that has to be highlighted and spoken about loudly and clearly.
The neglect, injustice and abuse that happens to kids does not stop just there, because the world can be a far uglier place than that. Victims of trafficking are either sold by family members, kidnapped or coaxed into thinking they will get a better life. According to the International Labor Organization, there were about 160 million child laborers aged between 2 and 17 in 2021 alone.
Around 25% of all human trafficking victims are in fact children, most of which are trafficked for forced labor. But trafficked children are not only forced to work for minimum wage and under hazardous conditions, because some also experience sexual exploitation, forced marriage, and slavery.
Globally, there are around 5 million sex trafficking victims, of which 1 million are children. Furthermore, it is reported that women and girls make up 99% of sex trafficking victims. The reason is that traffickers tend to approach socially and financially vulnerable women and girls with the idea that they can offer them a better life.
Let us take the famous master manipulator Jeffrey Epstein, who was a registered sex offender and was accused of sex trafficking when he started paying girls aged 14 to 18 to have sex and bring in their friends for the same thing. The thing about sex trafficking is that it can go on for years without being noticed, and this is largely due to the fact that not enough is done to raise awareness and educate people about it.
While sex trafficking can really happen to anyone, refugees are among the most vulnerable groups due to the difficult circumstances they have to endure. Traffickers prey on their hopes of having a better education and life so that they can more easily trick them in with all these false promises.
Unfortunately, girls are even more affected by trafficking than anyone else, and that is because of gender-inequality and gender-based violence. In fact, girls are more likely to be denied access to education or good opportunities simply because they are girls.
Save The Children even reports that 120 million girls experience sexual exploitation worldwide. Girls are twice more likely to become a trafficking victim and they are usually either trafficked for forced marriage or sexual slavery. It is also important to shed light on the fact that children living in conflict zones are more prone to trafficking and exploitation.
Therefore, the problem of child abuse and trafficking stems from more than just having criminals looking for money, because it also comes from conflict, government corruption and wars.
The first and direct impact of child abuse and trafficking is possibly the psychological distress it can cause. Whether it is PTSD, depression or any other mental illness, going back to living a normal life will be more challenging than ever for those kids.
In addition, kids who had to work under hazardous conditions might lose their chance of getting a real education and thus be trapped in poverty and the vicious cycle it entails. Not to mention the ripple effect that violence, abuse and trafficking can have on the world as a whole. Therefore, it is crucial that more is done to protect children and make this world a safer one for them and future generations.
While we all might feel helpless sometimes and like our voice will not make a difference, this cannot be any further from the truth. Every voice, talk and donation can help save a childs life. The least we can do is talk about it, raise awareness and report any incident we might come across or hear about.
Raising awareness is the most important and crucial step to shed light on the urgency of what children are facing. We owe it to them to work towards making this world safer and better. Talking is always the first step in making something seen and heard.
By talking and raising awareness, you are also educating people and even children about any red flags that can signal potential harm. The reality is that child trafficking can be prevented if enough resources and knowledge is put into fighting it.
Talk, talk and talk about it. Educate others. Donate. Do not turn a blind eye. Do not wait to fight it, when we can do something to help prevent it from happening in the first place.
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Child Abuse and Trafficking: The Modern Day Slavery of Children - Al-Bawaba
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