Daily Archives: February 7, 2022

Patrick R. Miller is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas.

Conservative politicians across America are promoting state-level legislation aimed at preventing new wind farms from being built in their states.

In Kansas, a conservative legislator from urban Johnson County has proposed three bills that would make it difficult to impossible to expand the Kansas wind industry.

The Kansas Association of Counties labeled one of those proposals an assault on local control. That legislation places an unfunded mandate on Kansas counties, forcing them to change zoning policies and expand regulation of building projects.

That zoning change would also restrict property rights of Kansas landowners, who would no longer have the freedom to contract their land for wind development without the approval of their neighbors and possibly voters in an election.

This kind of big government conservatism that sacrifices local control and property rights plays well with ideological conservative activists, but it poses economic risks for Kansas.

Brian Grimmett atKMUWin Wichita recently documented some essential facts about wind energy in Kansas, compiling data from the United States Geological Survey Wind Turbine Database, the 2021 Land-Based Wind Market Report, and the Annual Economic Impacts of Kansas Wind Energy 2020 report.

Kansas ranks second nationally for the proportion of energy produced in the state coming from windover 40 percent of all electricity produced in Kansas in 2020.

Kansas wind turbines can create over 7,000 megawatts, the 4th highest in the country and enough to power about 1.6 million homes, per Grimmetts report.

Kansas has about 3,500 turbines, which generate about $48 million annually in lease payments to Kansas landowners and almost $660 million in lifetime payments to local governments for existing projects. These dollars flow primarily to Kansass rural counties, many of which are struggling economically.

In the last two decades, Kansas wind farms have generated about 8,600 construction jobs and 560 jobs related to on-going maintenance and operation. Per the U.S. Department of Energy, those projects have also indirectly generated almost 13,000 jobs, ranging from component manufacturing to the service industry.

Since Kansas has such immense capacity to develop wind, how does anti-wind politics make sense? Lets ignore the conspiracy theorists who claim that turbines cause cancer, and focus on the three main flavors of anti-wind politics.

Fossil fuel producers see wind as a competitor threatening profits and the roughly $21 billion they receive annually in direct government subsidies, per the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Rather than seeking coexistence with wind, fossil fuel interests pump huge money into politics to oppose it.

Many conservative activists muster various anti-wind arguments, but also see wind as identity politics. For them, wind is a liberal symbolsomething to defeat for a cultural win rather than economically exploit.

Some individual wind projects also have local opponents representing the unique backyard politics of their communities.

Whatever the flavor of opposition, you dont have to be an environmentalist to see that wind means jobs and dollars for Kansas. If Topeka conservatives successfully squash the Kansas wind industry, that economic impact will hit our rural counties hardest.

The politics industry makes money on divisiveness and turning issues that could generate large consensuslike windinto hyper-divisive fault lines that feed media clicks, donations, and attention. Its profitable for politics to turn wind into just another culture war symbol, but that politicization will cost the Kansas economy.

Patrick R. Miller is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas.

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INSIGHT KANSAS: Anti-wind politics could cost the Kansas economy - Hays Post

What makes Amnesty Internationals new report determining that Israel practices the crime of apartheid against Palestinians any different from those that came before it?

Certainly, Israels hysterical reaction (in the words of one Haaretz headline) to the Amnesty study is notably different from its relatively understated response to similar reports recently issued by BTselem, a human rights group in Israel, and the New York-based Human Rights Watch.

Palestinian human rights groups like Al-Haq, Adalah and Al Mezan have been advancing an apartheid framework for far longer and the reports from the above-mentioned Israeli and international groups build on their work.

Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and BTselem examined Israels system of control throughout historic Palestine that privileges Israeli Jews and marginalizes Palestinians and violates their rights by varying degrees, largely depending on where they live.

And in contrast to the analyses published by Palestinian groups, those three reports, welcomed as groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting, fall short of placing Israels system of apartheid in the context of settler-colonialism. (A keyword search of Amnestys report yields three results for the terms colonialism and colonial found in the titles of works cited in the footnotes.)

Amnesty repeatedly stresses Israels intent to maintain this system of oppression and domination without making the explicit point that apartheid is a means towards the end of settler colonization: removing Palestinians from the land so that they may be replaced with foreign settlers.

The rights group does state that since its establishment in 1948, Israel has pursued an explicit policy of establishing and maintaining a Jewish demographic hegemony and maximizing its control over land to benefit Jewish Israelis while minimizing the number of Palestinians and restricting their rights and obstructing their ability to challenge this dispossession.

Credit where credits due: Amnesty blasts away Israels foundational mythology, acknowledging that it was racist from the beginning a departure from the typical liberal attitude that Israel strayed from its ideals somewhere along the way.

Amnesty even points out that many elements of Israels repressive military system in the OPT [West Bank and Gaza] originate in Israels 18-year-long military rule over Palestinian citizens of Israel, beginning in 1948, and that the dispossession of Palestinians in Israel continues today.

Amnesty also acknowledges that in 1948, Jewish individuals and institutions owned around 6.5 percent of Mandate Palestine, while Palestinians owned about 90 percent of the privately owned land there, referring to all of historic Palestine prior to the establishment of the state of Israel.

Within just over 70 years the situation has been reversed, the group adds.

And that is Israels aim the system of oppression and domination stressed by Amnesty is the means by which it has usurped Palestinian land for the benefit of foreign settlers.

After all, Zionist settlers didnt come to Palestine from Europe for the purpose of dominating and oppressing Palestinians; they came with the intent of colonizing their land.

As the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center, a Palestinian group, states, any recognition of Israel as an apartheid state should be situated within the context of its settler-colonial regime.

Amnesty also refrains from examining and discussing Zionism, Israels racist state ideology around which its settler-colonialism project is organized.

As Adalah Justice Project, an advocacy group based in the US, asked Amnesty on Wednesday, Is it possible to end apartheid without ending the Zionist settler colonial project?

Despite these critical shortcomings, Amnestys study lays a solid groundwork for holding Israel accountable within the flawed framework of international law and makes forceful recommendations towards that end.

Amnesty joins Palestinian groups urging the International Criminal Court to investigate the commission of the crime of apartheid and for its prosecutor to consider the applicability of the crime against humanity of apartheid within its current formal investigation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Given that the ICC doesnt have territorial jurisdiction in Israel, Amnesty calls on the UN Security Council to either refer the entire situation to the ICC or establish an international tribunal to try alleged perpetrators of the crime against humanity of apartheid.

Amnesty adds that the Security Council must also impose targeted sanctions, such as asset freezes, against Israeli officials most implicated and a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel.

Reiterating its longstanding call on states to suspend all forms of military assistance and weapons sales to Israel, Amnesty also calls on Palestinian authorities to ensure that any type of dealings with Israel, primarily through security coordination, do not contribute to maintaining the system of apartheid against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Amnesty also states that Israel must recognize Palestinian refugees right of return and provide Palestinian victims full reparations, including restitution for all properties acquired on a racial basis.

These demands by Amnesty, which claims to be the worlds largest human rights organization, go much further than those made by Human Rights Watch and BTselem.

This goes some way toward explaining why Israel and its proxies and apologists attempted to pressure Amnesty to pull its report ahead of publication and, having failed to achieve that, are now resorting to the usual baseless accusations of anti-Semitism.

Yair Lapid, Israels foreign minister, attempted to discredit Amnestys report by saying it echoes propaganda and the same lies shared by terrorist organizations, referring to prominent Palestinian groups recently declared illegal by Israel.

If Israel wasnt a Jewish state, no one at Amnesty would dare make such a claim against it, Lapid added.

In its report, Amnesty observes that Palestinian organizations and human rights defenders who have been leading anti-apartheid advocacy and campaigning efforts have faced Israeli repression for years as punishment for their work.

While Israel brands Palestinian human rights groups as terrorist organizations, it subjects Israeli organizations denouncing apartheid to smears and delegitimization campaigns, Amnesty adds.

Israel may find that such tactics when employed against the worlds largest human rights organization may not convince anyone beyond its choir.

Its attempt to get ahead of the story, reportedly spearheaded by Naftali Bennett, Israels prime minister, along with Lapid, by preemptively attacking the Amnesty report has only served to reinforce the association of Israel with apartheid.

It also ensured that the report got a lot more exposure than it would otherwise receive, as one Haaretz columnist observes.

There is another key difference between the Amnesty report on apartheid and those that came before it.

Amnesty International is a campaigning organization with millions of members and supporters who, the group says, strengthen our calls for justice.

Amnesty has supplemented its report with a 90-minute online course titled Deconstructing Israels apartheid against Palestinians.

It also produced a 15-minute mini-documentary available on YouTube that breaks down the question of whether Israel practices apartheid for a mass audience:

So far Amnestys action items only include sending a polite letter to Naftali Bennett, Israels prime minister, opposing home demolitions and expulsions hardly inspiring stuff.

Amnestys US chapter meanwhile has made bizarre disclaimers distancing itself from the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and even stated that the organization doesnt take a stance on the occupation itself, instead focusing on Israels obligations, as the occupying power, under international law.

Meanwhile, its chapter in Germany has distanced itself from the report and stated that the Germany section of Amnesty will not plan or carry out any activities in relation to this report because of the legacy of the Holocaust and ongoing anti-Semitism in the country.

It is not the first time that Amnesty has limited its solidarity in ways that are enduringly shameful.

Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are based in imperialist countries and were founded in the context of the Cold War, largely focusing on advocating for the rights of individuals in communist Eastern Europe.

Their narrow frameworks and founding ideologies have put them in opposition to anti-colonial liberation struggles and the violence those necessitate because, as Nelson Mandela put it, it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor.

These fundamental contradictions mean that Western human rights groups will always take compromised, if not harmful, positions concerning Palestinian liberation, with Human Rights Watch recently suggesting a moral equivalence between the violence used by Israel against besieged Palestinians in Gaza and that of Palestinian resistance against it.

But Amnestys educational materials, including a lengthy Q & A, will help prepare grassroots campaigners to respond to Israels apologists who seek to deflect criticism of the states practices by attacking the messenger.

After all, as one astute observer put it on Twitter, that is the only arrow in the quiver of those committed to maintaining Israels apartheid rule and the situation of impunity.

Amnestys report is a strong indicator that an analysis beyond the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is becoming mainstream.

Meanwhile, Israel and its proxies and abettors in the US Congress and State Department trot out tired talking points while ignoring the substance of Amnestys findings.

(By contrast, a few members of Congress belonging to the Democratic Party are publicly supportive of Amnestys findings, with Cori Bush calling for an end to US taxpayer support for this violence.)

But like UN and EU officials forever droning on about their commitment to the nonexistent peace process towards a two-state solution, those parroting these Israel lobby talking points so detached from reality appear increasingly ridiculous.

While rejecting the term apartheid and attacking Amnesty, Israel and its proxies and supporters have their eyes on an even bigger threat to Israeli impunity.

According to an Israeli foreign ministry cable seen by the publication Axios, Israel has planned a campaign attempting to discredit a permanent UN commission of inquiry into Israels violations of Palestinian rights in all the territory under its control.

The UN Human Rights Council narrowly passed a resolution establishing that commission of inquiry last May following Israels 11-day attack on Gaza during which Palestinians rose up throughout their homeland.

Palestinian groups have long called on states to address the root causes of Israels settler colonialism and apartheid imposed over the Palestinian people as a whole, as Al-Haq said ahead of the vote.

The commission of inquiry undertaken by three independent human rights experts tapped by the Human Rights Council is expected to deliver its findings in June.

Axios reported last week that Israeli officials are highly concerned that the commissions report will refer to Israel as an apartheid state.

The publication adds that the Biden administration doesnt support the inquiry and played a central role in cutting its funding by 25 percent in UN budget negotiations.

A bipartisan grouping of 42 members of Congress has meanwhile called on the US secretary of state to lead an effort to end the outrageous and unjust permanent commission of inquiry.

But Israel apparently fears that this intervention may not be enough.

Haaretz reported this week that unnamed senior Israeli officials are concerned that the UN may soon accept the narrative that Israel is an apartheid state, issuing a serious blow to Israels status on the international stage.

A UN consensus around Israeli apartheid could lead to Israels exclusion from various international events, including sports competitions or cultural events, the paper adds.

In other words, Israeli officials are afraid that the state will be treated as a global pariah as South Africa was before the fall of apartheid in that country.

The steering committee of the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement inspired by the global campaign that helped bring apartheid to an end in South Africa argues that investigation of Israeli apartheid by the UN and its members are necessary steps for achieving freedom, justice and equality for the Palestinian people.

That committee urges formerly colonized states to reprise the leading role they assumed in the UN for the eradication of apartheid in Southern Africa.

Human Rights Watch has called for the appointment of a global UN envoy for the crimes of persecution and apartheid.

Amnesty states that the UN General Assembly should reestablish the Special Committee against Apartheid, which was originally established in November 1962, to focus on all situations where the serious human rights violation and crime against humanity of apartheid are being committed.

These moves would have implications beyond the Palestinian cause within the UN system, where bullying and political pressure have prevented the study and debate, let alone punishment, of Israeli apartheid, according to the BDS movement steering committee.

Ultimately, Amnestys study may not be fundamentally different from those that came before.

But the context in which it appears as international consensus coalesces around recognizing Israeli apartheid, an International Criminal Court investigation is underway and amid Israeli spyware blowback suggests that a new chapter in the global struggle for Palestinian freedom may have begun.

Cover Photograph:A Palestinian youth places a flag on Israels wall during a demonstration in the West Bank village of Bilin in February 2014. Oren ZivActiveStills.

Electronic Intifada

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Why Is Israel Fearful of Amnesty's Apartheid Report? - The Citizen

Isabelle (not her real name)is a single mother fromthe Bega Valley and, despite renting all her life, she has recently found herself without a place to call home.

The 42-year-old has spent more than six months applying for rentals across New South Wales, from places in Wollongong to the Victorian border and up into the Snowy Mountains.

However, like many in the far south coast area, she hasbeen unsuccessful in securing a place to live.

"It's humiliating telling people that we're homeless and it's terrifying," she said.

"Especially being a mother of a 12-year-old child who doesn't know when he's going to have a stable roof over his head."

Mission Australia has helped her family find some temporary accommodation on the far south coast.

Isabelle relies on her disability pension for income and she is now sleeping at a motel in Eden withher son and her brother.

She said while she was grateful for a roof over their heads, she was concerned about how long they couldcontinue to pay $600 a week for the two rooms.

"It's not something we can afford," she said.

"But there are no options, absolutely no options left, short of sleeping in the car."

Local serviceproviders across the South East of NSW said there simply was not enough housing stock to keep up with the "ever-increasing" demand.

Southern Cross Housing's chief operating officer Eric Coulter said it couldtake more than a decade for people on the list for social housing to get a property.

"In our areas, we're looking at a minimum wait time on a social housing waitlist of between fiveand 10 years," he said.

"For some properties, it's beyond 10 years."

However, Mr Coulter said to fix the issue there needed to be input from everybody.

"While we need to lead the way [to fix] homelessness and the ongoing crisis it's not just a government or not-for-profit solution," he said.

"It needs everybody to be involved in it."

Isabelle believesvoters need to think about the housing crisis during the upcoming Bega and Monaro by-electionson February 12.

She said it was time for the government to take urgent action and properlyaddress the issue.

"The people that we are voting for are the ones that have our lives literally in their hands and they need to step up," she said.

"That's what they're paid for."

Last week, the NSW government announced $30 million to address the housing crisis. Eligible councils can apply for $1.4 million each to fast-track the supply of shovel-ready land for homes.

Liberal candidate for the Bega by-election Fiona Kotvjos said the funding was just one of the many strategies needed to address the issue.

"This announcement is one announcement that will help address housing and there is a range of strategies that we need to take," she said.

"A lot of the real challenges that we face are a consequence of a lack of a really integrated approach and that's what we need to do."

Both major party candidates are yet torelease any specific policies that they would bring to government if elected but agreed more money and work was needed to address the issue.

Labor's Bega candidateMichael Hollandsaid government taxes could be better usedto address the shortages.

"They're raising lots of taxes through housing with stamp duty, land taxes, and the taxes that they raise through Airbnb," he said.

"That could be fed back into supporting housing."

Isabelle said, regardless of the by-election result, politicians needed to use their positions of power to make meaningful change for vulnerable Australians.

"I don't even know where I'm going next week, living pay chequeto pay cheque," she said.

"I'm having to ask for help from services and [politicians] couldn't even imagine the humiliation of that.

"You can build a house but let us make it a home."

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Housing crisis must be focus of Bega, Monaro by-elections, say people experiencing homelessness - ABC News

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On December 1st, the Supreme Court had its day of oral argument in a landmark abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, brought by the State of Mississippi. It was the first case that the Court had taken in thirty years in which the petitioners were explicitly asking the Justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion, and its successor, Planned Parenthoodv. Casey, which affirmed that decision in 1992. If anyone needed a reminder that, whatever the Justices decide in Dobbs, it will not reconcile the American divide over abortion, the chaotic scene outside the Court made it clear. At the base of the marble steps, reproductive-rights supporters held a large rally in which they characterized abortion as a human rightand an act of health care. Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic U.S. representative from Washington State, described herself as one of the one in four women in America who have had an abortion, adding, Terminating my pregnancy was not an easy choice, but it was my choice. Jayapal could barely be heard, though, over the anti-abortion protesters who had also gathered, in even greater numbers. The day was sunny and mild, and though some of these demonstrators offered the usual angry admonishmentsGod is going to punish you, murderer! a man with a megaphone declaimedmost members of the anti-abortion contingent seemed buoyant. Busloads of students from Liberty University, an evangelical college in Lynchburg, Virginia, snapped selfies in their matching red-white-and-blue jackets. Penny Nance, the head of the conservative group Concerned Women for America, exclaimed, This is our moment! This is why weve marched all these years!

A major reason for Nances optimism was the presence on the bench of Amy Coney Barrett, the former Notre Dame law professor and federal-court judge whom President Donald Trump had picked to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on September 18, 2020. With the help of Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, Trump had accelerated Barretts nomination process, and the Senate confirmed her just a week before the 2020 Presidential election. As a candidate in the 2016 election, Trump had vowed to appoint Justices who would overturn Roe, and as President he had made it a priority to stock the judiciary with conservative judgesespecially younger ones. According to an analysis by the law professors David Fontana, of the George Washington University, and Micah Schwartzman, of the University of Virginia, Trumps nominees to the federal courts of appealsbodies that, like the Supreme Court, confer lifetime tenurewere the youngest of any Presidents since at least the beginning of the 20th century. Trump made three Supreme Court appointments, and Neil Gorsuch (forty-nine when confirmed) and Brett Kavanaugh (fifty-three) were the youngest of the nine Justices until Barrett was sworn in, at the age of forty-eight. Her arrival gave the conservative wing of the Court a 63 supermajorityan imbalance that wont be altered by the recent news that one of the three liberal Justices, Stephen Breyer, is retiring.

Barrett has a hard-to-rattle temperament. A fitness enthusiast seemingly blessed with superhuman energy, she is rearing seven children with her husband, Jesse Barrett, a former prosecutor now in private practice. At her confirmation hearings, she dressed with self-assurancea fitted magenta dress; a ladylike skirted suit in unexpected shades of purpleand projected an air of decorous, almost serene diligence. Despite her pro-forma circumspection, her answers on issues from guns to climate change left little doubt that she would feel at home on a Court that is more conservative than its been in decades. Yet she also represented a major shift. Daniel Bennett, a professor at John Brown University, a Christian college in Arkansas, who studies the intersection of faith and politics, told me that Barrett is more embedded in the conservative Christian legal movement than any Justice weve ever had. Outside the Court, Nance emphasized this kinship, referring to Barrett as Sister Amy, on the inside.

In recent years, conservatives have been intent on installing judges who will not disappoint by becoming more centrist over time. Sandra Day OConnor and Anthony Kennedy sided with liberal Justices in a few notable cases, including ones that allowed same-sex marriage and upheld Roe. David Souter, who had become a federal judge just months before President George H.W. Bush nominated him to the Court, in 1990, moved leftward enough that No More Souters became a conservative slogan. A decade ago, Chief Justice John Roberts committed the unpardonable sin of providing a critical vote to keep the Affordable Care Act in place. In 2020, the seemingly stalwart Gorsuch delivered a blow, writing the majority opinion in a case which held that civil-rights legislation protected gay and transgender workers from discrimination. On the Senate floor, Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican who later attempted to discredit the results of the 2020 Presidential election, declared that Gorsuchs opinion marked the end of the conservative legal project as we know itthe originalist jurisprudence, prominent since the nineteen-eighties, that claims to be guided by the textual intent of the Founding Fathers. It was time, Hawley said, for religious conservatives to take the lead. Four months later, that new era unofficially began, when Barrett joined the Court.

For decades, leading members of the Federalist Society and other conservative legal associations have vetted potential appellate judges and Justices and provided recommendations to Republican Presidents. The Federalist Society has traditionally showcased judges with records of high academic distinction, often at lite schools; service in Republican Administrations; originalist loyalties; and a record of decisions on the side of deregulation and corporations. Barrett hadnt served in an Administration, and, unlike the other current Justices, she hadnt attended an Ivy League law school. She went to Notre Dame, and returned there to teach. These divergences, though, ended up becoming points in her favorespecially at a time when religious activists were playing a more influential role in the conservative legal movement. Notre Dame, which is just outside South Bend, Indiana, is a Catholic institution in a deeply red state, and its one of the relatively few well-respected law schools where progressives do not abound. Barretts grounding in conservative Catholicism, and even her large family, began to seem like qualifications, too. Andrew Lewis, a University of Cincinnati political scientist who studies faith-based advocacy, told me that religious conservatives often used to feel looked down upon by some of the original Federalist Society members. But, he went on, they have increasingly gained power, and their concerns have become more central to the project.

To some of Barretts champions, her life story also offered a retort to the kind of liberal feminism they abhorred. When I asked Nance what she most admired about Barrett, she replied, in an e-mail, Amy Coney Barrett is a brilliant, accomplished jurist who also happens to be a mother of 7 serving on the highest court in the land. She decimates the argument that women cant do both, or that women need abortion to live their best lives. (Barrett declined my request for an interview.)

In public appearances before her nomination, Barrett was pleasant, non-ideological, and disciplined to the point of blandness. Yet her background and her demeanor suggested to social conservatives that, if placed on the Court, she would deliver what they wanted, expanding gun rights and religious liberties, and dumping Roe. In a recent memoir, Trumps former chief of staff Mark Meadows, a hard-line conservative, unflatteringly describes Brett Kavanaugh as an establishment-friendly nominee who had served in the George W. Bush White House. Meadows writes that Trump, who had almost nominated Barrett in 2018, was exasperated by Kavanaughs performance at his confirmation hearingsnot because he had to fend off sexual-assault accusations but because the sometimes tearful nominee had appeared weak. Picking a conventional Beltway guy had led to disappointment, and the President was determined not to make the same mistake twice. According to the memoir, Barrett didnt miss a beat during her first meeting with Trump, assuring him that she would follow the Constitution and that she could handle attacks from liberals. Meadows was struck by her commitment to her faith and to conservative ideals. When she made a pre-confirmation tour of Senate offices, he trusted her to do so without the aid of a sherpatypically a former senator who helps break the ice.

In the religious magazine First Things, Patrick Deneen, a colleague of Barretts at Notre Dame, wrote that she had developed a useful kind of cultural insulation, or armor. He extolled her upbringing in Louisiana (the state with the highest percentage of native-born residents) and her immersion in the Catholic community in and around South Bendsometimes known, he said, as Catholic Disneyland. There, a minivan full of siblings was just a regular family. With Barrett, the nation was getting the first justice to receive her law degree from a Catholic university, and someone who had spent almost her entire life in the flyover places of America where gentry liberalism is not the dominant fashion. Barrett might acclimate to the cosmopolitan secularism of Washington, D.C., Deneen said, but there is hope her entire life story to date will make her resistant to that fate.

In public, most conservatives deride the notion that a jurists cultural background might influence her decisions, let alone make her a better judge. At Sonia Sotomayors confirmation hearings, in 2009, Republican senators denounced her for having argued, in a speech, that a wise Latina might fruitfully draw on her life experiencein her case, as a Puerto Rican New Yorkerin her jurisprudence. But many conservatives were eager to spotlight Barretts identity, because it suggested an imperviousness to public-opinion polls and the disapproval of coastal lites. Nance told me that, on a Women for Amy bus tour that she had organized to generate enthusiasm for Barretts confirmation, older women in particular would come up to us with tears in their eyes saying that they have been waiting their whole lives for a conservative woman to be appointed to the court. (OConnor, Ronald Reagans appointee, who helped forge the compromise in Casey that preserved abortion rights, apparently didnt count.)

On the day of oral argument in Dobbsv. Jackson Womens Health, loudspeakers outside the Court broadcast the proceedings, and some people in the crowd surged closer to listen. (Because of pandemic restrictions, the courtroom was closed to the public.) Breyer, Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, the three liberal Justices, expressed concern that overturning the long-standing precedents of Roe and Casey could severely undermine the principle of stare decisisadherence to past rulings on which citizens have come to relyand make it look as though the Court were reversing course because thered been a change in personnel. Sotomayor was especially blunt: Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception, that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?

Veteran observers of the Court often remind the rest of us not to leap to conclusions on the basis of oral argumentsthe Justices might just be testing out ideas. But many journalists and legal academics saw this session as easier to parse than others. The conservative wingRoberts, Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomasseemed inclined to uphold Mississippis ban on virtually all abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy, undoing Roes guarantee of legal abortion up to the point of fetal viability. (Doctors currently consider a fetus viable at about twenty-four weeks.) The remaining question was whether a majority of the conservatives would accept Mississippis request to throw out Roe and Casey altogether. Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch appeared ready to do so. Kavanaughwho had been less of a sure bet going inalso seemed to be on board, noting that previous Justices had overturned precedents after concluding that their predecessors had been wrong; he invoked Plessy v. Ferguson and other infamous decisions. Roberts seemed to be looking, as he often does, for a narrower rulinga way to find the Mississippi law constitutional without obliterating Roe.

When it was Barretts turn, she paid respect to the benefits of stare decisis, but also emphasized that its not an inexorable command, and that there are some circumstances in which overruling is possible. She then proposed that the Courts opinion in Casey had relied on a different conception of stare decisis insofar as it very explicitly took into account public reaction. The implication was that the Justices in 1992 had been too attuned to momentary political fluctuations. She wondered aloud if the Court, going forward, should minimize that factor. As Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University and an expert on abortion law, told me later, Barrett didnt seem as obviously ready to get rid of Roe as some of the others.... But if you were betting, and oral argument was the evidence you had, it would sure look like they had the votes to overturn it.

Barrett devoted more of her time to a line of questioning that was not especially jurisprudentialand not one which any other Justice likely would have pursued. Speaking politely, in her youthful-sounding voice, she began asking about safe haven laws, which allow a person who has just given birth to leave the babyanonymously, with no questions askedat a fire station or some other designated spot. States began passing such legislation in 1999. (Some legislators found the idea appealing partly because it was about saving babies and partly becauseunlike programs that subsidize child care or help beleaguered parents in many other wayssafe havens generally cost little to set up.) Barrett seemed to be implying that such laws posed a feasible alternative to abortion. In a colloquy with Julie Rikelman, who represented Jackson Womens Health Organizationthe only abortion clinic in MississippiBarrett noted that safe-haven laws existed in all fifty states, adding, Both Roe and Casey emphasize the burdens of parenting, and, insofar as you... focus on the ways in which forced parenting, forced motherhood, would hinder womens access to the workplace and to equal opportunities, its also focussed on the consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy. Why dont the safe-haven laws take care of that problem? Pregnancy itself, Barrett went on, might impose a temporary burden on the mother, but if you could relinquish the baby you could avoid the burden of parenthood. And, in a peculiar sideswipe, she described pregnancy as an infringement on bodily autonomy... like vaccines, a comment that seemingly built on anti-vaxxers appropriation of pro-choice rhetoric to make a novel suggestion: that being required by your employer to get a shot against a deadly communicable disease is somehow equivalent to being forced to give birth.

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Amy Coney Barretts Long Game - The New Yorker

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Voice of Real Australia is a regular newsletter from ACM, which has journalists in every state and territory. Sign up here to get it by email, or here to forward it to a friend. Today's was written by North West Star editor Derek Barry. The flooding that has closed the Stuart Highway and caused food shortages in the Northern Territory has prompted renewed calls for a rail link to Queensland. The Ghan rail line goes from Adelaide to Darwin and has been cut off by flood waters in northern South Australia. Freight has started to flow through the flooded section of Stuart Highway but the opening is a staged one under restricted conditions. Meanwhile there is also a rail link from Townsville to Mount Isa, known as the Inlander - though the passenger service on that line has been run down over the years and has also been suspended due to COVID. However there is a tantalising missing link between Mount Isa and Tennant Creek that could have linked the the two states and territories. The food shortage in Katherine has become so dire due to flooding in Central Australia local chamber of commerce manager Colin Abbott told the ABC this week he wanted to see a continuation of the line between Mount Isa and Territory. He is not the first person to suggest this though Mr Abbott mentioned Alice Springs as a possible terminus when Tennant Creek would be a more direct route to Mount Isa, such as that taken by the Barkly Hwy between Queensland and NT and the 620km-long Northern Gas Pipeline that links Northern Territory gas projects with the eastern seaboard. The Ghan has been around (at least from Adelaide to Alice Springs) since the 1880s while Mount Isa has been linked to the eastern seaboard by rail since 1929 though it has gone no further west since then. Indeed there was no road worthy of the name between Queensland and the Territory until the 1940s when Australian governments finally had to look seriously at the problem of getting soldiers, equipment and supplies to Darwin, with the threat of Japanese was all too real. It still needed the arrival of the United States into the war after Pearl Harbor to make the road a reality (though they may have not felt the gratitude with 70 Black American soldiers believed to have died of cyanide poisoning in Mount Isa after drinking a home brew made in disused mining cyanide drums). A railway was a transport option too far for the industrious Americans but it keeps coming up from time to time. Feasibilities studies after the 2015 Northern Australian White Paper found it was not economically viable unless funded by the mining industry just as the Townsville to Mount Isa railway was a century ago. Yet there remains appetite for rail extension such as the Ghan to Darwin in 2004 while the Inland Rail project between Melbourne and Brisbane seems to be still happening, although delayed to 2023. The Queensland-NT rail line missing link was one of the projects pushed by the Tennant Creek-Mount Isa Cross-Border Commission representing cross-border Councils but the Commission has been moribund since COVID. There was talk of another feasibility study in 2017 but the plan attracted criticism from Townsville business leaders who feared the line extension might negatively affect its economy. Ross Muir, an economic development specialist with Nexidel Consulting said at the time it was a nation building exercise that deserved support. "The connection would enable new mining and agricultural ventures, including potential mining of huge phosphate deposits in the Barkly region. It also would foster tourism links through northwestern Queensland," Mr Muir said. In 2020 there was an audacious plan for a so-called "Iron Boomerang" line, proposed to link Queensland's Bowen Basin coal resources with WA's Pilbara region and its store of iron ore by a whopping 3300km of rail across northern Australia. Though with a proposed price tag of $100 billion, it may not come to rescue the empty shelves of Katherine supermarkets any time soon. In case you are interested in filtering all the latest down to just one late afternoon read, why not sign up for The Informer newsletter?

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REAL AUSTRALIA

February 7 2022 - 12:30PM

Damage to the Ghan rail line has prompted renewed calls for a rail link between Northern Territory and Queensland.

The flooding that has closed the Stuart Highway and caused food shortages in the Northern Territory has prompted renewed calls for a rail link to Queensland.

However there is a tantalising missing link between Mount Isa and Tennant Creek that could have linked the the two states and territories.

The food shortage in Katherine has become so dire due to flooding in Central Australia local chamber of commerce manager Colin Abbott told the ABC this week he wanted to see a continuation of the line between Mount Isa and Territory.

He is not the first person to suggest this though Mr Abbott mentioned Alice Springs as a possible terminus when Tennant Creek would be a more direct route to Mount Isa, such as that taken by the Barkly Hwy between Queensland and NT and the 620km-long Northern Gas Pipeline that links Northern Territory gas projects with the eastern seaboard.

Indeed there was no road worthy of the name between Queensland and the Territory until the 1940s when Australian governments finally had to look seriously at the problem of getting soldiers, equipment and supplies to Darwin, with the threat of Japanese was all too real.

A railway was a transport option too far for the industrious Americans but it keeps coming up from time to time.

Feasibilities studies after the 2015 Northern Australian White Paper found it was not economically viable unless funded by the mining industry just as the Townsville to Mount Isa railway was a century ago.

Yet there remains appetite for rail extension such as the Ghan to Darwin in 2004 while the Inland Rail project between Melbourne and Brisbane seems to be still happening, although delayed to 2023.

There was talk of another feasibility study in 2017 but the plan attracted criticism from Townsville business leaders who feared the line extension might negatively affect its economy.

Ross Muir, an economic development specialist with Nexidel Consulting said at the time it was a nation building exercise that deserved support.

"The connection would enable new mining and agricultural ventures, including potential mining of huge phosphate deposits in the Barkly region. It also would foster tourism links through northwestern Queensland," Mr Muir said.

In 2020 there was an audacious plan for a so-called "Iron Boomerang" line, proposed to link Queensland's Bowen Basin coal resources with WA's Pilbara region and its store of iron ore by a whopping 3300km of rail across northern Australia.

Though with a proposed price tag of $100 billion, it may not come to rescue the empty shelves of Katherine supermarkets any time soon.

MORE STUFF HAPPENING AROUND AUSTRALIA:

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The trouble with rail when the wide brown land floods - Daily Liberal

All writers in Op Ed are here to inform and acknowledge issues of importance to our communities, however these writings represent the views and opinions of the authors and not necessarily of The Advertiser.

By Blaney Pridgen

Almost twenty years ago Lee Greenwood recorded a very popular song, ProudtoBeanAmerican. Some of you may remember that. I heard it not long ago and was unexpectedly moved as I am always moved by the young girl who sings the Star Spangled Banner late in the evening on Channel Twelve. And I always love AmericatheBeautiful and God Save Our Native Land.But I am very skeptical of the overt nationalism of populist politics and the dangerous attitudes it breeds and the fires of prejudice it fans; nonetheless, I am patriotic and proud to be an American, just not in that peculiar way. When I heard Greenwoods song, my heart ached for our native land and the sorry state in which we seem to be. Regardless of our opinions, I believe most of us feel that way.

Opinions and their expression in uncivil ways are a national problem. We have a right to our opinions. We can and should disagree in the ultimate working out of our opinions in a free and open democracy governed by law. This begins and ends with our Constitution and Bill of Rights, even with amendment and addition, ifneeds be as our founders had the good sense to allow. Of course, the rub comes with a thorough understanding of the wordsfree,open, andlaw. Nobody ever claimed this would be easy. Democracy is hard work and requiresboththe vigilance to conserveandthe courage to change. Inevitablycompromise is necessary and should not be a bad word. Anything less than this is uncivil, which is uncomfortably close to uncivilized and ultimately unamerican.

Forgetting the principles which unite us is a national problem. Ignoring these principles, even when we know them, is a worse problem. The worst problem is not knowing them at all and assuming that our opinions are our principles. Opinions are not our principles. We canhaveall kinds of opinions about hot button issues and special interestsdriving them and the politics surrounding them, but ultimatelythe rule of law, duly arrived upon and justly enforced, is a key principle. The checks and balances of the three branches of government (national, state, and local) is a principle which makes us a union with the common goals of a relatively free society. Free market enterprise with necessary safeguards and regulation is a principle. The Bill of Rights in specifics and the Declaration ofIndependence in general,are principles. Open elections, well governed and fair to all within the confines of the Constitution and the peaceable, civil transfer of power are principles. I could go on. We need to concentrate upon, continually study and debate these and many other principles and change or modify them as our democracycontinues to evolve. We need to remain united in our principles, while pursuing our opinions in a civil manner.

I can sit down with any fellow citizen, liberal or conservative, agree with them or disagree, vote my conscience along side them, and work together to come up with something that mostly works for the majority and ensures the common good, even if the particular outcome isnt exactly what I want or even believe. That is as long as they are civil, law-abiding, and patriotic lovers of the principles which unite us.

In conclusion, I might add this illustrativereflection: How do our principles address the filibuster,gerrymandering, campaign financing, executiveprivilege, and rampant extremismin the dark corners of both the left and the right? When I too sing Proud to Be an American, I pray that we will celebrate the humanism and reason at the foundations of our heritage and government and never forget that. What is right, what is practical, and what is possible and especially what is clearly for the common good of most if not all of usof these we can be duly proud.

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Proud to be an American The Edgefield Advertiser - Edgefieldadvertiser

Under a large white tent on a warm Sunday in early autumn, a group of residents in Montgomery County, Maryland, gathered at Welsh Park in the town of Rockville. A crescendo of gospel hymns hung above the crowd before falling gently over us like a warm bedsheet. A small group of children squealed from a playground in the distance. We were there to remember the lives of two Black men who had been lynched in the county more than a century ago. This is the county where I live. Before this event I did not know these mens names, but now I do.

Estimates vary widely, but according to the Equal Justice Initiative, from 1865 to 1950 nearly 6,500 Black Americans were lynched in the United States. Two of those men were Sidney Randolph and John Diggs-Dorsey.

Two local students shared the stories of Randolphs and Diggs-Dorseys murders. The audience listened attentively.

On May 25, 1896, Randolph was walking down the road between Gaithersburg and Hunting Hill when two white men, cousins Frank Ward and John Garrett, pulled up next to him and started asking questions about where he was going and what he had been doing. Randolph wasnt originally from the areahe said that he had been born and raised in Georgiabut he knew that two white men approaching you on horseback, unsolicited, was a recipe for trouble. An itinerant worker who had slept in a barn the night before, Randolph thought the men were attempting to arrest him for trespassing or vagrancy. So Randolph ran, and the two cousins followed. They looked so mad they scared me, Randolph said, according to The Baltimore Sun, and I tried to get away and they shot me and rode their horses over me. Randolph was struck in the hand, and the two men tied him up at gunpoint and brought him to the county jail.

The two men were part of a group of vigilantes who had been looking for a man who had assaulted a white family, the Buxtons, with the back of an ax in Gaithersburg. A neighbor said he had seen a Black man flee the home, and white residents began scouring the area for the alleged assailant. Randolph and another man, George Neale, were arrested. Initially, Richard Buxton, the patriarch of the assailed family and the recently elected town commissioner, wasnt sure that Randolph had committed the crime. But two weeks later, after Buxtons 7-year-old daughter died from the wounds, Buxton changed his story and said that Randolph definitely was the person whod assaulted his family and killed his daughter. Neale was cleared of all charges and released. Randolph was held. The sheriff, fearful that a mob might act before a grand-jury trial could begin, is said to have moved Randolph to a different location each night. But in the early morning of July 4, the mob found him.

From the November 2017 issue: Hanged, burned, shot, drowned, beaten

Two dozen or three dozen men, their faces hidden behind red handkerchiefs, overpowered the guards, pulled Randolph into the street, struck him in the head, and placed him in a wagon that took off down Darnestown Road. They came to a stop at a chestnut tree at the edge of a local farm and pulled Randolph out of the wagon. The mob wrapped a noose around the mans neck, threw the rope over the tree, and hauled Randolphs body off the ground. He stirred and struggled, then stopped. No one was charged with Randolphs murder and his body was buried in an unmarked grave in the paupers cemetery of the local almshouse. Years later, the Montgomery County Detention Center would be built on part of the almshouse site.

The circumstances of Diggs-Dorseys lynching 16 years prior were not dissimilar. He had been accused of sexually assaulting a white woman, though Diggs-Dorsey claimed that the encounter had been consensual. To the white public, that didnt matter. Diggs-Dorsey was arrested; then a mob formed, overpowered the sheriff, took Diggs-Dorsey to the edge of town, wrapped a noose around his neck, and hanged him from a tree, as had been done to so many other Black men in the years following the Civil War. After Diggs-Dorseys body was taken down, pieces of the rope and parts of his clothing were distributed as souvenirs. He, too, was buried in the paupers cemetery.

After lynchings, across generations, souvenirs were brought home and shared with people who had not been able to attend the event itself, and they became heirlooms passed down to children that showed them the power their whiteness could wield. The historian David Roediger estimates that with these souvenirs, several million early 20th century whites witnessed a lynching or touched its relics.

One of the most unsettling yet ubiquitous aspects of lynchings across the country is that the people who committed these crimes, who took these artifacts home as souvenirs to share with their families, were rarely two-dimensional caricatures of evil; they were everyday people in the community: the grocer, the postman, the teacher, the doctor. It is its nucleus of ordinary men that continually gives the mob its initial and awful impetus, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America. They are people whose children and grandchildren are still part of these same communities today, here in places like Montgomery County. Some of them know what their fathers and grandfathers did, but they do not speak of it.

After the students went back to their seats, those of us present were silent as we processed what we had just heard.

I was unnerved in ways I hadnt expected to be. Part of why, I now realize, is because these stories, told in this place, recalibrated my own sense of my physical proximity to this history.

I am a Black American who is the descendant of enslaved people and who was born and raised in Louisiana. My grandfather once shared a story with me of how when he was 12 years old, someone in his small town of just 1,000 people had been lynched and castrated. I watched the way the veins in his temple rose as he recalled that event of 80 years prior. His memory was clear; his voice was certain.

From the March 2021 issue: Stories of slavery, from those who survived it

This history is never distant; it follows us everywhere we go. It lives under the soil of the playgrounds where we bring our children to play, under the concrete we drive on in our neighborhoods, and under the land upon which we live. It rests beneath our feet in ways that we arethat I amstill discovering. This is not true just of the Deep South; it is true of places across the country that pride themselves on tolerance and multiculturalism.

Montgomery County, Maryland, is such a place. We walked this morning past where my great-great-grandfather was enslaved, Jason Green, the chair of the Montgomery County Commission on Remembrance and Reconciliation, said that day at the event. But slavery didnt exist here. Not in this part of Maryland. Not precious Montgomery County. These are the stories we tell ourselves, that we tell each other. Murmurs of affirmation swept through the crowd.

But thats not the real history, and, as Green put it, telling the story accurately matters. According to researchers at the Maryland State Archives, the Equal Justice Initiative, and Bowie State University, at least 44 people were lynched in Maryland from 1854 to 1933. The Baltimore Sun has compiled a chronological list of these lynchings, along with short descriptions, and as I read through them I was struck by the consistency of the stories. Almost all of these lynchings involved the murder of a Black man by a group of white people. Many of these men were denied due process. All of the murderers avoided charges. According to Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the author of On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century, there is no record of any white person ever being convicted of lynching a Black person in the United States until 1999.

I was also struck, scrolling through the list, by how young many of the victims were, and one victim in particular.

In 1885, Howard Cooper was accused of assaulting a prominent local farmers daughter as she walked home. An all-white jury, which did not even leave the courtroom to deliberate, took less than a minute to find him guilty. He was sentenced to death. Local Black activists in Baltimore raised money for a federal appeal, but before they could proceed, a mob of more than 70 white men stormed the jail, where they found Cooper hiding under a mattress. They took him out of his cell, dragged him through the back door, and hanged him from a sycamore tree right outside the jailhouse. The next morning, as a train was passing by the site of the lynching, the conductor slowed the train down so that passengers could look more closely at the body as it hung there. His mother had to come the next day and collect her sons body. Cooper was 15 years old.

Maryland has long been a state whose history of racist violence defies easy categorization.

At the start of the Civil War, Maryland was a slave state with more than 87,000 enslaved people, but, like the other border states where slavery existedDelaware, Missouri, and Kentuckyit never seceded from the Union. It is the state where both Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman were born, raised, and enslaved; Baltimore at the time was home to the largest population of free Black people in the entire country, North and South. The numbers vary widely, but by one estimate, approximately 80,000 Maryland men fought for the Union; about 20,000 fought for the Confederacy. At one point, one-third of Montgomery Countys population was enslaved. And slavery was not outlawed in Maryland until November 1864nearly two years after the Emancipation Proclamationfollowing a ballot referendum, just a few months before the Thirteenth Amendment would abolish slavery nationally. The measure barely passed, with 30,174 voting in favor of freeing the slaves and 29,799 against: a difference of just 375 votes. Much of Marylands wealth came from the institution, and many were not ready to let that go.

The day after emancipation thus found black men and women in the same ambiguous position as on the day before: between slavery and freedom, struggling to define a new free status for themselves, wrote the late historian Ira Berlin, who was a professor at the University of Maryland. But the struggle proceeded on new terms. Instead of grappling with freedom on the terrain of slavery, they now grappled with slavery on the terrain of freedom.

And for so many formerly enslaved Black people in Maryland, as was the case across the country, the threat of lynching and racial terrorism would shape that terrain for another century. The public spectacle of violencethe way that 15-year-old Howard Coopers body hung for townspeople and passersby on the train to seewas meant to send a message about how white supremacy ruled that space. As Ifill writes, More than the poll tax, the grandfather clause, and Jim Crow segregation, lynching and the threat of lynching helped regulate and restrict all aspects of black advancement, independence, and citizenship.

Recently, however, Maryland has done more to confront its history of lynching than many other states.

This image was modified for The Atlantic by the artist Ken Gonzales-Day, whose technique, as showcased in his Erased Lynchings project, is to digitally remove the victim from historical photographs of lynchings. By erasing the victims bodies, Gonzales-Day pushes the viewer to focus on the crowd, and, by proxy, the racism and bias that were foundational to these acts of violence. (Digital alteration by Ken Gonzales-Day for The Atlantic. Source: The Baltimore News-American / Hearst)

One person responsible for that is Will Schwarz, a white man in his 70s with white hair and tortoiseshell glasses who serves as the founder and president of the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project.

Like many involved in the lynching-memorialization work in Maryland, Schwarz first learned about this history through Bryan Stevenson, the public-interest lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, in Montgomery, Alabama. I had no idea, Schwarz told me, shaking his head. I dont think Im that atypical, but lynching wasnt even something that was mentioned when we were in high school.

Schwarz had been reading Stevensons book, Just Mercy, and later went to see Stevenson speak at a local event. He felt like he was able to connect the dots between the past and the present in ways he had never been able to do before. He wanted to get involved in work that excavated the history of lynching and assumed that someone in Maryland was addressing the issue. Black communities had been memorializing this history in informal ways for generations, but Schwarz couldnt find any formal organization doing so. So he started one, and it quickly grew. People realized that no one was going to take us by the hand and walk us through the garden of racial reconciliation, he said. It was something that we had to do ourselves.

The Maryland Lynching Memorial Project has partnered with local schools, churches, and community organizations to help bring these stories to the wider public. It has helped coordinate soil-collection ceremonies across the statein which local communities gather soil from the locations where lynchings previously took placeand has placed plaques on several lynching sites, including in front of the former Baltimore County Jail, where Cooper was murdered.

From the June 2021 issue: Why Confederate lies live on

I asked Schwarz if he has any hesitancy about being a white person leading an organization focused on the history of racial-terror lynchings. He said that he is mindful of the relationship between his position and his identity as an older white man, and added that he collaborates with, and often defers to, Black community members. But he also rejects the idea that his whiteness means he shouldnt be part of the work. White people are the people that did this, he said, so it makes sense that white people are involved in addressing it.

The work that Schwarz has done has been part of a broader push to get Maryland to more directly confront its history of lynchings. A pivotal moment came in 2018, when Nicholas Creary, then a professor at Bowie State University and a founding member of the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project, reached out to Joseline Pea-Melnyk, a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, with a proposal to create a commission to further research and account for the states history of racial terror. Pea-Melnyk was so compelled by Crearys proposition that, in the middle of their first meeting, she called the legislatures bill-drafting department and handed the phone to Creary so bill writing could begin right then and there. The following year, the Maryland legislature passed House Bill 307, and became the first and only state in the country to create such a commission. A lot of the victims families in the community never received a formal apology, Pea-Melnyk told me, and this is a way to honor their lives.

At the beginning of October 2021, the commission held a virtual public hearing on the lynching of an 18-year-old man named Robert Hughes in one of the states westernmost counties, Allegany. It was the first of what the commission expects to be at least a dozen hearings on lynchings throughout the state, and featured the testimony of two of Hughess descendants.

Recognition has come in other forms toosymbolic, yet significant. In May, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan pardoned 34 victims of racial-terror lynchings that took place in the state from 1854 to 1933. (Not all of the individuals who were lynched in Maryland were charged with a state crime, and therefore they were not eligible to receive a pardon.) He signed the order by the jail where Cooper was murdered. In no other state has a governor issued such a pardon.

Some in Maryland are also attempting to take the process of truth and reconciliation a step further, by interviewing not only the descendants of the lynching victims, but also the descendants of those in the lynch mobs. Charles L. Chavis Jr., a professor, the director of African and African American studies at George Mason University, and the author of The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State, has spent years combing through archives in order to identify people who participated in lynchings in Maryland. After identifying the participants, he traces their lineage and reaches out to their descendants. If they are willing, he sits down with them for interviews. Some are aware through family lore, but others have no clue whats going on, he said. Chavis believes that Black people deserve the opportunity to testify about the racial-terror violence they witnessed, experienced, and carry as part of their family story. But he also believes that Black people shouldnt be the only ones telling those stories, and that white descendants must confront what was done in their name. If your grandfather was part of a lynch mob that killed a manor a childChavis believes that is something you should know.

At the Montgomery County commemoration event, Jason Green stepped from the stage, and reflections were offered by Elliot Spillers. Spillers, who had flown in from Montgomery, Alabama, and was representing the Equal Justice Initiative at the event, finished his speech by recitingrather than singingthe words of Lift Every Voice and Sing, as written by James Weldon Johnson in 1900, before it was put to music and transformed into an anthem. I meditated on the lines at the beginning of the final stanza:

God of our weary years,God of our silent tears,Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;Thou who has by Thy mightLed us into the light,Keep us forever in the path, we pray.

Something about hearing the words for themselves, without the melody that has long accompanied them, gave me a different, more intimate, sense of their meaning. As Spillers recited the poem, everyone under the tent stood and let the words wash over them, many shutting their eyes as if listening to a prayer.

But the centerpiece of the event came next, behind the tent on a hill, where several mounds of dirt lay alongside one another.

We invite you to help fill the jars of soil, Lesley Younge, a middle-school teacher and a member of the Montgomery County Lynching Memorial Project steering committee, said to the crowd. We have combined the soil collected here at Welsh Park with soil gathered near the sites where Mr. Diggs-Dorsey and Mr. Randolph were lynched and buried. One jar for each man will be held at [the Equal Justice Iniatives] Legacy Museum, along with jars of soil from other counties where lynchings took place.

Ive spent the past several years thinking about, visiting, and observing processes of reconciliation, memorialization, and reckoning with this nations history of racial violence. I have seen memorials, monuments, and observances across the country, and have grown accustomed to these sorts of proceedings. Yet this event moved me more than I could have anticipated. Here I was, in a park not so far from my own home, surrounded by a solemn procession of my neighborspeople I saw shopping at the grocery store, cheering at childrens soccer games, riding their bikes down the same roads I do. They bent down over patches of excavated soil, lifted the dirt with small shovels, and poured it into glass jars carrying the names of those whose lives had been taken by perhaps the most violent manifestation of white supremacy.

Sometimes, in these moments, at events like this one, I am not sure whether I want to simply observe whats happening around me or whether I should more directly participate in the proceedings. But on this day, I felt my body being drawn to the soil, so I listened to it. I got in line.

When my turn arrived, I made my way to the first mound of dirt and bent down on one knee. I felt the cool earth dampen my pants. I turned my head and looked at the white sheet of paper next to the dirt, and saw John Diggs-Dorseys name written on it, attached to two thin wooden sticks that lifted his name just slightly off the ground. I picked up the shovel and dug into the soil. I brought the shovel to the jar and let the soil fall in. A choir was singing a melody both comforting and haunting, its refrain evaporating into the air.

In that moment, I felt in my body one of the primary intentions behind this gathering. Decades ago, crowds had formed to watch the bodies of Black men dangle from trees and lampposts. Now a crowd had gathered on that same land to condemn what had been done.

I had not expected that placing a small shovelful of soil in a jar would transform the emotional tenor of the event. But I was wrong. Doing so made me feel closer to the stories that had been shared about these young men, and closer to this history.

In this soil there is the sweat of the enslaved. In the soil there is the blood of victims of racial violence and lynching, Bryan Stevenson has said about the importance of soil-collection ceremonies. There are tears in the soil from all those who labored under the indignation and humiliation of segregation. But in soil there is also opportunity for new life, a chance to grow something hopeful and healing for the future.

I went over to Beth Baker, a white woman with silver-white hair who is a local freelance writer and a member of the steering committee that helped organize the event. Around us, neighbors hugged one another; some held hands. Baker told me that not everyone had been on board when they first began putting ideas for the soil-collection ceremonies together. Some white community members had been skeptical of the first soil-collection event, and a few Black community members thought that this history might be too painful to revisit. A couple of days days after the Rockville event, however, she shared an email with me from one of the days volunteers, an older Black woman and member of the memorial project who had initially expressed hesitation: The occasion was a powerful reminder that throughout the world; every country, human, does not always come with a good history. It was a solemn, peaceful, introspective day.

This sense of solemnity was shared by Lesley Younge, who had opened the event by invoking the names of the men. As a teacher, Younge, who had black locs that fell to her shoulders, is aware of the implications this history has for her students. Theyre bringing up their own stories of racial injustice that theyre experiencing at 11 and 12 years old, and its all completely connected. And so just knowing my students stories makes this work feel really important, she told me. Younge said that teaching her students this part of the regions history is important because it allows them to ground themselves and their communities in an understanding of the policies, systems, and circumstances that gave rise to them. It also allows them to engage with the lives of people from previous generations.

Younge nodded to the tree whose branches hung over us. You always have to get at the root, right? If you want to dig up a tree, you got to get the roots or it just grows back.

To mark the end of the event, several students picked up the jars that had been filled with soil, and walked in a quiet procession past those whose hands had filled them.

A local pastor, Reverend Alyce Walker Johnson of the Clinton AME Zion Church, stepped barefoot into the center of a circle of people that had formed. Somebody said, Pastor, where are your shoes? She paused and looked at the people around her. Im on sacred ground.

Walker Johnson invoked the names of Randolph and Diggs-Dorsey once more, and the crowd repeated their names after her.

A few days later, I drove to the Montgomery County Detention Center, which was built years ago over the almshouse near Randolphs and Diggs-Dorseys graves. The colors of the foliage were beginning to change, and trees around the facility were ornamented in orange-yellow leaves.

I sat on a bench outside the facility and looked at the barbed-wire fencing that encircled several plain beige buildings. I reached down and dug my fingers into the earth and lifted it from the ground. The dirt was thin and dry and began falling between my fingers as quickly as I had lifted it up.

I looked around and tried to imagine where the bodies of Randolph and Diggs-Dorsey might lie, how far beneath the concrete of the parking lot or the foundation of the buildings their bodies might be buried. I looked down under my feet, where pine needles formed a thin blanket of brown, and considered the possibility that one of them might be buried beneath me.

Charles L. Chavis, the author of The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State, contributed research for the artwork in this article.

See the article here:

The True Legacy of Lynching Lies in How We Remember the Victims - The Atlantic

This article appears in The American Prospect magazines February 2022 special issue, How We Broke the Supply Chain. Subscribe here.

For the past dozen years, Omar Alvarez has been a key link in the nations supply chain. Hes one of some 12,000 truckers who haul the containers from the adjacent ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach (where 40 percent of all the ship-borne imports to the United States arrive) to the immense complex of warehouses 50 miles east of L.A., where the goods are unpacked, resorted, put back on other trucks, and sent to all the Walmarts, Targets, and the like within a thousand-mile radius.

In the course of his daily rounds, Alvarez promotes the general welfare to insure the domestic tranquility of manufacturers, shopkeepers, and consumers. For which the economic system of his grateful country rewards him with a pittance.

Alvarez works for one of the largest trucking companies at the ports, XPO Logistics, but XPO insists that Alvarez and his fellow truckers arent really employees. As far as XPO is concerned, theyre independent contractors and it treats them as suchthough they drive XPO trucks they lease from the company or its adjuncts and cant use those trucks for any other jobs. As independent contractors, they receive no benefits and arent covered by minimum-wage statutes. They must pay for their gas, maintenance, rig insurance, and repairs themselves; and, ever since the pandemic clogged the ports with more goods than ever before, theyve had to wait in lines for as long as four to six uncompensated hours before they can access a container and get it on the road. If they get in the wrong line at the port, they literally cant get out, surrounded by other trucks and doomed to waste more time. Many ports dont even provide bathrooms for waiting truckers, because they arent port employees.

More from Harold Meyerson

According to a 2019 study by the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley, the median annual pre-tax income of Alvarez and his fellow port truckers, once their expenses are factored in, is a munificent $28,000.

We have no health insurance, Alvarez says. Like the majority of port truckers, hes an immigrant who doesnt qualify for Medicaid. When I need to see a doctor, he says, I drive [not in his truck] to Tijuana.

Perhaps one-fifth of port truckers actually are independent contractors; nearly everyone else is, like Alvarez, misclassified as independents. Over the past decade, dozens of lawsuits from misclassified drivers have resulted in judgments affirming that theyve been misclassified and awarding them compensation from the companies that misclassified them. XPO recently paid a $30 million fine to a large number of its drivers. But neither XPO nor any of the other fined companies have stopped misclassification. Its cheaper for them to pay a fine than to pay their drivers a living wage.

Not surprisingly, given the long waits and meager rewards, a lot of drivers have simply stopped showing up. According to Gene Seroka, the executive director of the Port of L.A., fully 30 percent of the ports 12,000 drivers no longer show up on weekdays, a percentage that rises to 50 percent on weekends. Once the waits exceed six hours, as they now sometimes do, drivers would run the risk of exceeding the 11-hour federal limit on trucker workdays if they then were to actually get a loadwhich means the port must turn them away, and theyll have spent an entire workday for no pay at all.

And you wonder why the supply chain isnt working very well?

THE PLIGHT OF THE PORT TRUCKERS may seem extreme, but the plight of the great majority of long-haul truckers is dismal as well. It wasnt ever thus. Until 1980, long-haul truckers were generally employed by regulated companies whose routes and rates had to pass muster with the Interstate Commerce Commission. Under the terms of the 1935 Motor Carrier Act, the ICC kept potential lowball, low-wage competitors out of the market. Drivers were also highly unionized, under a Master Freight Agreement between the Teamsters and close to 1,000 trucking firms. For which reasons, truck driving was a pretty damn good blue-collar job, with decent pay, livable hours, and ample benefits.

The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 changed all that, scrapping the rules of the 1935 act so that startups, charging far less than the pre-1980 rates and paying their drivers far less as well, flooded the market. Facing that competition, established companies dropped their rates and pay scales, too. By 1998, drivers were making between 30 percent and 40 percent less than their pre-1980 predecessors had made. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, following the steep decline in wages in the decades after the 1980 deregulation, trucker income has flatlined for the past 20 years. The median income of long-haul truckers who are employees was roughly $53,000 in 2018; for contractors, it was $45,000though drivers in both groups had to put in many more than 40 hours per week to reach these totals.

The story of trucking deregulation is a story of the decentering of workers from liberalisms concerns.

After 1980, the share of long-haul drivers who are contractors increased as well. Of those contractors, the Berkeley Labor Center reports that over one-quarter are misclassified, too (including the drivers for FedEx and Amazon). Like the port truckers, long-haul independent contractors also have to wait, unpaid, in pandemic-lengthened lines to pick up their loads, so that their hourly wage often falls below the legal minimum. Nor have the legacy companies that have allowed their workers to retain employee status, with the notable exception of UPS, maintained their unionized status. With wages plummeting throughout the industry, the thousand companies that had been party to the Master Freight Agreement with the Teamsters in 1980 had dwindled to a bare five by 2008. Fully 57 percent of truckers were unionized in 1980 (nearly all with the Teamsters). A threadbare 10 percent were union members at the turn of the millennium.

Not surprisingly, the supply chain in long-haul trucking suffers from the same ailment as port trucking: no-show-ism. The American Trucking Associations estimates that the nation needs 80,000 more long-haul truckers to move its goods in a timely fashion, and that by 2030, that shortfall may double to 160,000. Confronted with jobs that take them away from their families and require long hours for low pay and scant if any benefits, Americas truck drivers dont stay truck drivers for very long. A 2019 study by University of Minnesota economist Stephen Burks and Kristen Monaco of the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the annual turnover rate of long-haul truckers is a breathtaking 94 percent. And this, I hasten to point out, was before the national quit rate reached new highs in 2021.

The combination of fewer drivers and more goods to be moved has slowed delivery times on the interstates no less than on the port-to-warehouse runs. Phil Levy, an economist who measures such things for a San Franciscobased logistics company, says that before the pandemic, moving a shipment from L.A. to Chicago took on average ten days; it now takes 22. Returning the empty container from Chicago to L.A. used to take 20 days; now it takes 33.

And you wonder why the supply chain isnt working very well?

WHAT HAPPENED IN 1980 that led to the transformation of trucking from a regulated industry with a willing workforce to a deregulated, dysfunctional mess whose workers bail after a year or less on the job? In the largest sense, the story of the progression from the 1935 act to the 1980 act is a story of the decentering of workers from liberalisms concerns.

In the first couple years of Franklin Roosevelts presidency, the chief concern was to arrest the deflationary downward spiral that had diminished production, incomes, prices, and employment. Its first stab at a solution was a kind of worker-friendly cartelization: creating production and pricing codes and standards for industries and granting workers the right to collective bargaining. Unbridled competition in a deflationary time, FDRs advisers believed, only produced a race to the bottom.

In 1935, the Supreme Court killed this strategy, declaring the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional. A few interstate industries, however, had been regulated long before the NIRAnotably the railroads. In 1935, Congress preserved and revised rail regulations, and as interstate trucking was beginning to supplement the railroads, devised new legislation to ensure that trucks wouldnt be racing to the bottom, either.

Hovering over their considerations was an unprecedented outbreak of trucker militancy. In 1934, truckers in Minneapolis had gone on strike, waging a prolonged battle with their employers and, eventually, the police, at whose hands several strikers were killed. In the process, their job action ballooned into a general strikefollowing which, their employers collectively agreed to recognize their union (the Teamsters) and grant many of their demands for decent pay and hours.

So, the Motor Carrier Act of 1935 combined the spirit of the First New Dealthe regulation of commerce, and of interstate transportation in particularwith the Second New Deal, the pro-worker policies to which Roosevelt turned after the Court had struck down the first. In 1935, the New Deal also enacted the National Labor Relations Act, giving workers an unambiguous right to collective bargaining, and the Social Security Act as well. It embarked on the massive public-works programs of the WPA, in which millions of the unemployed were put to work building, among other things, highways and byways. A number of more progressive unions broke away from the hidebound AFL and began organizing the factory workers whom the AFL had shunned. The Teamsters remained in the AFL, but inspired by their Minneapolis brethren and enabled by the NLRA, embarked on organizing campaigns that increased membership from 75,000 in 1933 to 370,000 in 1939. In 1933, according to a study by University of Wisconsin economist James Peoples, a flat zero percent of intercity truckers were unionized; by 1948, 80 percent of them were Teamsters.

One Teamster staffer who played a supporting role in the Minneapolis general strike was a young Jimmy Hoffa. A lesson he took from that strike was that organizing on a citywide basis was more effective than a shop-by-shop approach, and given that truckers were routinely crossing city lines in their daily rounds, and increasingly crossing state lines, too, Hoffa applied that lesson to his hometown of Detroit, then all of Michigan, then all the Midwest, rising in Teamster ranks with each expansion of the Teamster membership. Harvard University labor expert John Dunlop hailed Hoffas area contracts as a strategic advance in labor relations.

Once Hoffa assumed the Teamster presidency in 1957, he embarked on a hitherto unheard-of innovation in American labor relations: bringing all the nations long-haul truckers under the terms of one master contract. Over the next seven years, constantly traversing the country, he schooled his members in the logic of sweeping, multi-employer contracts. In 1964, having convinced his far-flung locals that establishing nationwide standards for generous pay, health insurance, and pensions was a good idea, and having persuaded 800 long-haul trucking companies that the 1935 Motor Carrier Act ensured that they could raise their rates to cover these labor expenses without fear of being undercut by competitors, he signed the National Master Freight Agreement with representatives of those companies. Every one of the approximately 450,000 Teamster long-haul truckers (close to half of all truckers in America) was covered by the contract. The New York Times termed the agreement one of the most significant developments of the postwar period.

Then, in 1980, it all fell apart.

BY 1980, NOT ONLY had the 1930s specter of deflation all but vanished from American memory, but the very real specter of inflation stalked the land. The spike in prices came chiefly from the oil shock of Middle Eastern nations raising the cost of their universally needed commodity. The rising costs of fuel hiked prices across the transportation sector, not because airlines, railroads, and trucking companies sought to raise prices but due, rather, to the oil shock.

Still, all three industries were regulated in ways that largely forbade them from cutting other expenseslike, say, the cost of labor, particularly inasmuch as all three were heavily unionized. In short order, all three became targets for deregulationthe airlines in 1978, rails and trucking in 1980.

But the deeper causes of these deregulatory drives lay in the changes to the nations political economy. Popular revulsion at the Watergate scandal, paradoxically, pushed Democrats to the right. They gained 50 new House members in the 1974 and 1976 elections, largely from middle- and upper-middle-class districts they hadnt ever carried before. Most new Democratic members of Congress, labeled Watergate babies, faithfully represented their constituents politics: liberal on social issues, moderate to center-right on economic issues. Business interests increased their contributions to those officeholders whod determine their future: the Democratic moderates. One prominent House DemocratTony Coelho from Californias Central Valleylaunched a major initiative of raising campaign funds from Wall Street and other corporate interests, which fed the coffers of many of his colleagues.

The new breed of Democratspersonified by such figures as Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, Jerry Brown, and President Carter himselfhad no particular affinity for organized labor. Most of the Watergate babies represented districts with insubstantial union membership. As Carters economic adviser, the pro-deregulation Alfred Kahn once said, Id love the Teamsters to be worse off.

Moreover, labor at the time was personified by such cigar-puffing old white guys as AFL-CIO President George Meany, who had led the mainstream of labor in its support for the Vietnam War, and spearheaded its opposition to those Democratic candidates whod opposed the war or emerged from such newer social movements as second-wave feminism. And if there was one union that the New Dems found especially repulsive, it was the Teamsters, widely known for its occasional violent tactics, its links to the Mafia, and, at the level of presidential politics, its support for Republicans. (To fend off Justice Department interest in their own doings, the Teamsters had provided funds to keep the first tranche of Watergate convicts from fingering higher-ups, and continued to back Republican presidential candidates for years thereafter.) Worse yet, the Teamsters were seeking to undermine the organizing efforts of one of the few unions the New Dems supportedCesar Chavezs United Farm Workersin hopes of supplanting them in the fields.

Two other transformations boded ill for labor generally and the Teamsters in particular. First, the rise in inflation undercut the claims of governments ability to manage the economy, and with it, the hold that Keynesian economics, with its de facto emphasis on boosting employment and worker interests, had on the economics profession. Regulation came to be seen as a driver of inflation. Second, with mainstream labor largely abandoning any efforts to organize the unorganized (disproportionately women, people of color, and the poor) and opposing many of the initiatives of feminists and civil rights activists, much of the left had come to view labor as a part of the corporate establishment. The rising consumer movement of the 1970s, spearheaded by Ralph Nader, sometimes found itself butting up against labor, as it did when Nader gave congressional testimony in favor of airline deregulation. Those efforts were led by liberal lion Ted Kennedy, with the assistance of his chief aide on such questions, future Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. In 1980, even as he was challenging incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination, Kennedy joined forces with Carter to move trucking deregulation through Congress.

That year also saw Congress deregulate much of the rail industry, but railroads were in horrible shape and clearly needed some kind of remedy. Roughly 20 percent of the nations rail lines were owned by companies then in bankruptcy, and the 1970 bankruptcy of the Penn Central line had been the largest to date in the nations history. [See Matthew Jinoo Bucks How Americas Supply Chains Got Railroaded.] Trucking, by contrast, was thrivingbut somehow, it fell to the deregulatory chopping block, too.

As it became clear that deregulation was likely to pass, the Teamsters found themselves devoid of a strategy to stop or mitigate it. They werent a union that rallied its members to political causes (their support for candidates was almost entirely financial) and, having been expelled from the AFL-CIO for corruption, they had few allies within labor or without.

One ploy, alas, remained. On January 10, 1979, Teamster Vice President (and soon to be President) Roy Williams and mob-connected Teamster pension fund honcho Allen Dorfman met with Nevadas Democratic senator (and chair of the Senate Commerce Committee) Howard Cannon in Cannons Las Vegas office to discuss how he could kill the pending legislation. FBI wiretaps of subsequent phone conversations of Williams and Dorfman had included comments indicating that Cannon had suggested he might be able to sink the bill if the Teamster pension fund let him take ownership of a six-acre Vegas lot the pension fund ownedan offer to which Williams had given his hearty assent. Williams and Dorfman were later convicted and did time for bribery, though Cannon, denying the allegations, was never indicted, though he did lose his subsequent bid for re-election.

In the end, Cannon either couldnt or didnt stem the rush to deregulation. With the strong backing of Carter, Kennedy, and even Dan ONeal, Carters appointed chair of the Interstate Commerce Commission, the House voted by a 367-to-13 margin to pass a new Motor Carrier Act, repealing the industrys minimum rate standards; the Senate followed suit in a 70-to-20 vote.

With deregulation in place, all it cost to enter the industry was the price of a few trucks. Thousands of drivers and small businessmen took the plunge. Alongside the small-timers, some mega-companiesmost prominently, FedEx and, more recently, Amazonentered the field, declaring their drivers to be independent contractors, though no one has ever seen a FedEx or Amazon truck used by its independent drivers delivering balls and bats to their kids Little League games..

Within a decade of 1980, as new entrants jumped into the industry, the number of truckers nearly doubled, from one million to two, most of them paid far less than their pre-1980 predecessors. Today, after competing to drive down earnings, that workforce has shrunk to the point that it can no longer keep up with the demands of its nation.

Ultimately, what doomed trucking as a decent occupation was more than the self-marginalization of the Teamsters, the estrangement of Democrats and progressives from labor, the increasing clout of business and declining clout of unions, and even the supplanting of the postNew Deal social order by a crueler neoliberalism. It was that in 1980, after 35 years of the postwar broadly shared prosperity that the New Deal had created, few if any could imagine that American workers were on the verge of becoming downwardly mobile. A handful of union leadersnotably the United Auto Workers visionary president, Doug Fraserwarned it was beginning to happen. In the discourse of 1980, however, such voices went unheard and unheededand, though growing progressively louder, largely remained unheeded until the past decade.

So, how do we fix this mess?

TO THE EXTENT THAT THE PILEUP at the ports is the result, on the trucking side, of misclassification, the state of California is working hard to remedy it. Newly enacted legislation that took effect at the start of this year holds retailers (like Walmart and Amazon) liable if they use the services of companies that are repeatedly found guilty of misclassification. The city of Los Angeles is also engaged in long-term litigation against the companies with warehouses at the port (that is, on city-owned land) that use non-union workforces.

Julie Gutman Dickinsonthe attorney who, with backing from the Teamsters, has represented misclassified drivers in an unbroken string of successful lawsuits against those trucking companieshas long been frustrated, however, by those companies refusals, even after theyve been compelled to make payments to those drivers in the millions of dollars, to shift to actually employing those truckers. In 2014, working on one such case, she had what she calls an epiphany: What was it that restrains an employees right to have a voice on the job and to bargain collectively? Misclassificationits an inherent violation of the NLRA.

Drivers deserve a political economy and legal superstructure that takes the rights of workers seriously.

At the time, the National Labor Relations Boards general and deputy general counsels, Richard Griffin and Jennifer Abruzzo, both Obama appointees, wanted the regional NLRB attorneys to make that case to the administrative judge, but the case was settled before it reached that stage. In 2019, the Trump-controlled NLRB, in its Velox decision, ruled that misclassification did not violate the NLRA. (The brief arguing that it did was written by Gutman Dickinson.)

But in a dissenting opinion, Board member Lauren McFerran argued that Gutman Dickinson was right: Misclassification did violate the nations labor law. Today, McFerran chairs the now-Bidenized Board, and Jennifer Abruzzo, the Boards new general counsel, has sent a memo to the Boards regional offices that will likely turn up cases whose particulars could enable both Abruzzo and the Biden-appointed majority to rule that a walking, talking, quacking duck is actually a duck, regardless of what its employer might contend. On January 19, Omar Alvarez and his fellow XPO drivers provided just such a case, asking the NLRB to rule that they are actually employees and thus entitled to a unionization election.

At the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, according to the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economys Mike Munoz, the 50 largest trucking companies currently have more than 7,000 drivers whom they misclassify as independent contractors. Should Abruzzo and then the Board rule that this violates the NLRA, the companies would be compelled to reclassify them as unionizable employees. By the same logic, the Board could find that the drivers for Amazon and FedEx, not to mention the rest of the long-haul drivers who are misclassified, could become employees as wellas could the drivers for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash et al.

The NLRB may be the nations best hope for ending the gridlock in trucking. In early January, two of Bidens Cabinet departmentsLabor and Transportationunveiled a joint program to help unclog the current pileup, by increasing the number and accessibility of trucking apprenticeship programs, and lowering the legal (if not the safe) age for truck driving to 18. As more than 450,000 Americans obtain commercial drivers licenses annually, making them easier to get when the problem is the nature of the jobs themselves doesnt seem likely to make appreciable improvements.

But even if the NLRB is able to transform the gig economy portion of the transportation industry into a more rewarding, stable, and efficient employer-employee model, and if (a big if) the courts uphold such transformations, that still would leave the greater part of the industrythe part thats not misclassified but is merely underpaid, overworked, and in constant and total fluxunchanged. What the drivers, and the nation that needs the goods that the drivers bring them, deserve and require is a political economy and legal superstructure that takes the rights of workers seriously. It may require the kind of upheaval that the Teamsters brought to Minneapolis in 1934only on a far vaster scalefollowed by regulations that improve job quality, to create an economy where trucking, literally and metaphorically, can again deliver the goods.

See the original post here:

Why Trucking Can't Deliver the Goods - The American Prospect

Im not a sports fanIm bored by games in general, including that wordy color-blindness test or whatever it is that everyone online seems to be playing latelybut Im already rooting for the defeat of the newly rechristened Washington Commanders. The name is a clumsy reminder that Washington, DC issues orders and the rest of us are expected to obey. Its as obnoxious in its way as the propagandistic, authoritarian tone of the Olympics opening ceremony.

But sports isnt the real enemy here. For all the brutality, primitivism, sadism, tribalism, and zero-sum win/lose thinking of sportsmade worse by nationalism in the case of the pompous Olympicspolitics is worse. Politics is also involuntary, so long as governments (or other, more anarchic threats of violence) exist. Involuntary, by definition, isnt fun.

Thats why so many political figures devote their time to the pretense of being just like you, as if theres no need to fear their preferences would ever diverge from yours. No divergence, no need to wonder where theyre taking you or what they plan to do to you when you get there. Theyre all competing to see who can get you to a centrally planned economy fastest.

Take the Ohio U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance, with his oscillations between sounding like the populist whos coming to save you from the depredations of capitalism and sounding like the party stalwart wholl save Republicans from further embarrassment by Trump. Its a safe bet that as the primary approaches in May, Carpet-Bagger Vance will sound like he has whatever principles are polling well, likely determined by that months stock market fluctuations but explained via homespun tales about his working-class upbringing.

One of the most positive spins on Vances oscillations was a Simon van Zuylen-Wood piece arguing that Vance is taking care not to let his anti-woke thinking devolve into classical liberalism and is striving to combine Trumpism with the milder reformicon (ostensibly-reformist conservative) tendencies of Ross Douthat circa 2010.

In short, if you squint, you can see Vance working to avoid libertarianism (that is, 19-century-style, small-government, classical liberalism) while also grinding a cultural axe, bashing global trade, and praising the most expensive parts of the welfare statesuch as Social Security and Medicare, the debt-swelling, huge-ticket items that purported reformers such as Douthat are keen to leave intact, since a citizen is afraid to discuss tampering with them.

Whatever that makes the Vance agenda, its not really capitalism. Far from being a fresh set of ideas, its basically a watered-down version of the anti-economic, pro-big-government thinking celebrated in those Chinese ceremonies I mentioned earlier. If conservatives are just milder commies now, dont expect me to get worked up making distinctions between the two philosophies or voting for either.

Vance is far from alone on the right in his bland attack on the market and private property. Floridas Gov. Ron DeSantis, inordinately beloved by some pseudo-libertarians whose anti-regulatory thinking goes little farther than their dislike of anti-Covid rules, crowed on Twitter last Thursday about urging his state legislature to throw another $100 million of taxpayers money at fighting cancer. So much for the heirs to Trumps populist mantle looking to dispel the illusion that government is generous and lifesaving. Unless they explicitly argue for the non-violation of property rights and the drastic and immediate shrinking of government, populist politicians will obviously deliver politics as usual with a few novel freebies tossed in.

I hope paleolibertarian-ish ex-punk Sam Goldman is right to argue the fumbling of the Republicans populist team post-Trump might yet yield a return of the delayed libertarian moment in American politics. If there are any signs of hope in that regard, though, I dont think they take the form of any politicians but rather private-sector phenomena like that shining Castello Cube made of $11.7 million worth of gold that appeared in Central Park last week (likely inspired by the 1990s sci-fi novel Cryptonomicon) heralding the launch of yet another cryptocurrency.

Im not saying this is the coin that will end humanitys reliance on governments arbitrarily-inflated fiat currencies, but governments tyrannical hold over humanity is more likely to be ended by some exogenous phenomenon like that than by any internal reforms government itself endorses or generates. Lately, all the worlds political teamsleftists, liberals, conservatives, moderates, most anarchists, even some libertariansbadmouth or at least rhetorically shy away from unregulated, laissez-faire markets.

In the 20th century, they might all at least have agreed that the USSR was terrible and promised not to replicate its errors. With European Communism gone and Chinese Communism seemingly a taboo topic among obedient Westerners, our political players are free lazily to forget what a society without market mechanisms looks like. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is free to denounce capitalism as irredeemable, as the economically ineducable and inflammatory New York politician said a few days ago on a trip to Austin, TXthe sort of liberal town where she probably hears as many youthful cheers for her extremism as she does back home in New York City, though both places owe their freedom and prosperity to markets.

But its not just quirky post-libertarian right-wingers and left-wing backbenchers who are out to destroy capitalism. Boring old President Biden and his ostensibly centrist pals can do that just fine all by themselves. Among other things, Biden plans to triple the amount of protected (that is, government-controlled and largely unused) land in the U.S. and wants half again as much federal spending as when he took office, though his agenda is notoriously sputtering. And the White House still finds time to tell Spotify it needs to go farther in silencing easygoing non-partisan conversationalist Joe Rogan (Jon Stewart, by contrast, urges people to let Rogan speak).

Make enough mediocre leaps forward like Bidens and it wont much matter if you keep claiming not to be a full-blown socialist. America will be socialist nonetheless. It wont matter one bit that libertarians and conservatives used to complain more explicitly about that threat back in the 1980s, when their principles were clearer and more consistent, back when they didnt always shift around in an embarrassed fashion looking for something else to talk about, like pot, immigration, or sex. Now, every political team of any appreciable size is either silent on econ or battling for the collectivist gold.

Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on Twitter at @ToddSeavey

Excerpt from:

The World is Always Playing Commie Olympics - Splice Today

The Constitution reads, We, the people of South Africa, recognise the injustices of the past, honour those who suffered for justice and freedom in our land, respect those who have worked to build and develop our country, believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity. Of fundamental importance, the Bill of Rights provides the cornerstone of democracy in South Africa. In the advent of the quarter of a century after South Africa finally attained democracy, Thabo Masombuka sat down with South Africas seventh Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development (And Correctional Services) on behalf of BBQ Magazine to take stock of the journey and progress made since the Constitution was signed into law in 1996, as such paving the way for a new constitutional order in South Africa.

If there is one man who stood against the tide in seeking to shape a new political destiny, by raising a voice against corruption and state capture, that man is Ronald Ozzy Lamola, the former Deputy President of the ANC Youth League when Julius Malema was the President. He single-handedly protested outside the various sittings of the NEC of the ANC against what was then state interference and capture by the Gupta family in the administration of the state.

But no one listened. He now leads the most powerful cluster in the countrythe justice and crime prevention cluster, having been appointed by President Cyril Ramaphosa in May 2019. As President Ramaphosa begins the process of considering the appointment of the Chief Justice of the apex constitutional court, a few weeks after the local government elections, we catch up and sit down with the Minister of Justice to understand how far the Constitution of the countryarguably the most highly celebrated liberal document across the world, has fared in changing the lives of its citizens, particularly the most vulnerable and the poor.

Asked what he thought about the value and significance of the Constitution 25 years after its enactment, the Minister premised his comments by stating that, In the Constitution, we have been able to achieve what is set out in the preamble and the objectives. In addition, the Constitution has facilitated South Africas transition from the old order into the new order.

Notwithstanding this, he is of the strong view that the Constitution is not, and should not be, an answer to all social ills and deficiencies, but mustas it does, provide a framework and opportunity for citizens to express their socio-economic challenges and rights.

That being the case, Lamola makes the point that the Constitution has given rights to citizens in terms of equality and dignity.

He further acknowledges that more still needs to be done to advance socio-economic rights of individuals, particularly those from poor and disadvantaged communities, as the socio-economic inequalities are still stubbornly high.

Despite the Constitution having given birth to various pieces of legislation, such as the Equality Act, the Employment Equity Act, the BBBBEE Act, and many other economic transformation interventions that are able to promote the participation of black people in the main stream of the economy, the majority still remain trapped on the periphery of the economy.

The perpetuation of such an unequal society remains largely unsustainable. The equality clauses ensure that everyone is equal before the law and has equal protection and benefit of the law.

Whether or not, in real terms, South Africans, especially poor black communities, are in fact equal, remains arguable.

When challenged on this, Minister Lamola states that those are the real challenges that the country needs to focus on in order to change the economic conditions of all South Africans, so that we build a real society based on equal opportunities.

27 years after democracy, black South Africans remain trapped in poverty, with unemployment and inequality rising astronomically. When asked about the income gap between the poor and rich widening radicallyand how the Constitution has been able to help in this regard, Lamola said: Yes, more still needs to be done. It is in the interest of all South Africans that we strive towards economic equality where everyone feels that they are part of the mainstream of the economy. In that way, that will result in a society where there should be an equal sharing and equal distribution of resources.

He argues that there has been efforts to redress this and policy makers at the time had envisaged that these laws should advance meaningful progress and take us somewhere, including laws on land reform and redistribution.

Unfortunately, the outcome is different. Experience points us somewhere to the contrary. More efforts still need to be placed at the execution level. We still have a long way to go in achieving the objectives of these pieces of legislation.

Is the Constitution a fundamental compromise?

In this regard, we suggest to the Minister that some radical sections of the country have criticised the Constitution for being too soft and too compromising on the key fundamentals of transformation such as the property clauses, with the governing party having moved very slowly in addressing issues of redress.

Lamola is having none of that. He insists that it is a misconception that the current Constitution is a compromise. What was the compromise was the 1993 version of the interim Constitution had the compromise and contained the sun-set clause. He further states that the current version is a product of the National Assembly made up of representatives of all major political parties in the country.

The Constitution is a transformative piece of intervention. Even Section 25 speaks about issues of land reform, restitution, and redistribution, stating what must be done in order for those land reforms to be achieved. However, the failures of land reform are well documented in what is now recorded as the Mothlante Report on constitutional land reform. It is not that the failures of land reform are because of the Constitution, but issues related to nepotism and state capacity to enforce some of the laws and legislative interventions, he reminds us. Former Deputy President, Kgalema Mothlante, has led a high level panel on the assessment of key legislation and the acceleration of fundamental change, in which land reform, restitution, redistribution, and security of tenure and the failures of land redistribution are discussed. When asked whether the current version of the Constitution is unambiguous and clearly defined in terms of intent and objective, Lamola asserted that it could not be more clear. He believes that the Constitution is not to blame, as the issues relate to state capacity. With the introduction of the Expropriation Bill, the Constitution was a well-thought document that could have been tested as a case study when it comes to economic interventions.

Transformation of the judiciary

Transformation and the acceleration of black judicial officers in generaland black women in particular, has been a serious topic of discussion for a long time. When pressed as to whether the next chief justice should be a black woman, Lamola chose to refrain from answering the question, but he did point to some key stats that back up a move in the right direction for transformation. He was of the view that there has been tremendous progress in the appointment of black female judicial officers, not only in the magistrates, but for the judges as well. A clear effort in that process is being put in place. The focus now is, however, on ensuring that there is content of the jurisprudence coming out of the courts to ensure that it is inherently transformative and deals with the imbalances of the past.

Of the 311 judges that were appointed after 20 years of the Constitution, at least 86 of them were women.As of 2019, at least 47.8% of South Africas magistrates were female. This substantially represents good progress in the transformation of the judiciary. In early 2020, while 207 of the 210 recommended female magistrates were appointed, Minister Lamola emphasised the fact that a fully transformed judiciary is not only a constitutional imperative, but also goes a long way in further transforming our magistracy to reflect the demographics of our country. Notwithstanding, the Minister believes that more still needs to be done to increase this.

Access to justicea fundamental ethos of the Constitution

But what about access to justice?

There has been some progress in the setting up of more judicial offices, such as the introduction of new divisions, but is there a plan to perhaps put in place specialist courts to deal with a number of specific concerns for communities? The Minister stated that the transformation of the judicial system entails a broader concept of reform, which includes the reorganisation and rationalisation of the courts to have them aligned with the Constitution, also ensuring that the profession is transformed in such a way that state legal services and initiatives to improve areas of the justice system are put in place.

He does acknowledge that the process to accelerate access to justice is critical in dealing with justice-related matters as envisaged in the Constitution. However, the Minister was cautiously aware that there could not be a special court for every matter or issue that faces society.

However, the Department of Justice recognises that there could and should be areas that prioritise certain matters.

This is despite the fact that there are already existing courts such as the sexual offences courts, the labour court in relation to labour matters, the income tax courts, small claims courts, military courts, and competition courts. Lamola highlighted that there are plans to ensure that the land claims court, which was an interim court, is now going to be a permanent land court. The Bill to finalise this process is already before parliament and is being considered.The Minister has indicated confidence in the Special Commercial Courts, which are responsible for prosecuting high level fraud, stating that such has been accelerated as well in Limpopo and Mpumalanga. This has recorded a significant progress in broadening the provision of access to justice.Otherwise the state and the Justice Department would not be able to have sufficient resources and capacity to be able to manage and administer specialist courts for literally every issue and matter that affects society.

Do South Africans have reason to celebrate the progress of the Constitution?

The countrys Constitution has laid a foundation for the South African people to make an input in building the society that they wantin terms of building the construct between civil society and government. This, according to the Minister, is the biggest take away from the past 25 years. The country needs to selfishly guard against efforts to undermine the Constitution and contribute in ensuring that the Constitution becomes the dynamic living document that it was envisaged to be. So, in that respect, there is more reason to celebrate.

In his own words

On whether the Constitution is still legitimate and relevant to the lives and conditions of the people

The fact that the citizens, including the protesters, still participate in forums and platforms that are created by the Constitution, this is indicative of the relevance and importance of the Constitution. Naturally, there would be instances where there is conflict and contradictions created by the very same values in the Constitution, such as the right to life.

On the calls that effectively challenge the integrity of the doctrine of separation of powers by unfairly attacking the judiciary on the basis of state capture

There are established processes within the judicial service commission that people are able to follow to report instances of misconduct and misbehavior by some judicial officers, otherwise it is unfair to attack and criticise the judiciary without substance and evidence. Otherwise, these attacks do not augur well on the integrity of the judiciary. Ordinarily, the attacks on the judiciary are unsubstantiated and unwarranted based on superfluous and frivolous attacks. Where such evidence exists, consequence management would follow after a procedurally fair process.

On the calls for the amendment of the Constitution

We welcome the calls and initiatives that seek to amend the Constitution with the view to make it a dynamic and effective legal framework to advance the interests of the South African communities.

On transformation

There has been tremendous progress in the appointment of black female judicial officers, not only in the magistrates, but for the judges as well. A clear effort in that process is being put in place. The focus now is, however, on ensuring that there is content of the jurisprudence coming out of the courts to ensure that it is inherently transformative and deals with the imbalances of the past.

On the value and significance of the Constitution, 25 years after its enactment

In the Constitution, we have been able to achieve what is set out in the preamble and the objectives. In addition, the Constitution has facilitated South Africas transition from the old order into the new order.

On the income gap between the poor and rich widening radicallyand how the Constitution can help in this regardYes, more still needs to be done. It is in the interest of all South Africans that we strive towards economic equality where everyone feels that they are part of the mainstream of the economy. In that way, that will result in a society where there should be an equal sharing and equal distribution of resources.

On land reform

The Constitution is a transformative piece of intervention. Even Section 25 speaks about issues of land reform, restitution, and redistribution, stating what must be done in order for those land reforms to be achieved. However, the failures of land reform are well documented in what is now recorded as the Mothlante Report on constitutional land reform. It is not that the failures of land reform are because of the Constitution, but issues related to nepotism and state capacity to enforce some of the laws and legislative interventions.

On access to justice

The transformation of the judicial system entails a broader concept of reform, which includes the reorganisation and rationalisation of the courts to have them aligned with the Constitution, also ensuring that the profession is transformed in such a way that state legal services and initiatives to improve areas of the justice system are put in place. I acknowledge that the process to accelerate access to justice is critical in dealing with justice-related matters as envisaged in the Constitution. However, I am aware that there can not be a special court for every matter or issue that faces society.

Minister of Justice and Correctional Services Mr Ronald Lamola, MP

Ronald Lamola is a Member of Parliament and he was appointed by President Cyril Ramaphosa to form part of the National Executive and Cabinet as the Minister of Justice and Correctional Services of the Republic of South Africa on 29 May 2019.

Background

He was born in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga and Matriculated from Machaka Secondary School. He is the former Deputy President of the ANC Youth League. He was elected to the National Executive Committee of the ANC at the December 2017 Conference and he is also a member of the National Working Committee of the ANC.

Academic background

He obtained LLB Degree from the University of Venda in 2005. He holds three Post-Graduate Certificates in Corporate Law; Telecommunications Policy and Banking Law. He also has an LLM in Corporate Law from the University of Pretoria 2013-2014.In addition, he also obtained two Masters Degrees from the University of Pretoria. Lamolas first Masters Degree was in Corporate Law, where he explored the regulation of property syndication schemes.

His research looked at the roles of regulators in the regulation of taking deposits from the public, the conflation of the Companies Act, Banks Act and the Reserve Bank Act. Lamola got his second Masters Degree in Extractive Law in Africa from the University of Pretoria in 2018. His research focused on Corporate Social Investment by the Mining and Energy Sectors.

His research suggests that the Department of Minerals and Energys enforcement unit is inadequately resourced to ensure compliance with the social labour plans by companies in the sectors.

Career outside politics

He is an admitted attorney of the High Court of South Africa. He formerly practiced as a Director of a private Law firm which specialised in Competition Law, Litigation, Communication Law and Banking Law.

He also worked in both the Mpumalanga Provincial and Local Governments as:

Who is Thabo Masombuka?

Thabo Masombuka is an economic transformation practitioner from Middelburg, Mpumalanga, based in Johannesburg.

He is an admitted attorney and the former chief executive officer for the Construction Sector Charter Council (CSCC), overseeing construction sector transformation and empowerment.

He is an activist with unimpeachable credentials in the areas of BBBEE fronting investigations, stakeholder facilitation, empowerment compliance, governance, and risk management.

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Exploring the constitutional order: In conversation with Minister Ronald Lamola - BBQ Online