Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

Health

Labours big policy is a promise to increase spending on the NHS by an average 4.3% a year.

The partys base will be hugely cheered by a pledge to end and reverse privatisation in the NHS in the next parliament and reinstate the responsibilities of the health secretary to provide a comprehensive and universal healthcare system.

A milkshake tax would come into force on top of the existing levy on sugary drinks, as well as a ban on fast-food restaurants near schools and stricter rules around the advertising of junk food and the levels of salt in food.

Free annual NHS dental checkups would be available to all.

A new National Care Service to tackle the social care crisis, with a lifetime cap of 100,000 on the costs of personal care.

Labours pledge on NHS funding an average 4.3% increase in health spending every year of the next parliament is more generous than those of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. However, the Institute for Fiscal Studies says its plans amount to only a 3.8% annual rise.

The plans to tackle understaffing, the NHSs biggest problem, are not bold enough. Its best idea is restoring bursaries for nurses and others. Plans for generic drugs would mean setting aside patents, enraging pharma companies. Meanwhile, the promise to end and reverse privatisation in the NHS in the next parliament would be impossible to deliver.

Ending 10-year contracts with private firms would be legally messy. And the NHS would have to be ready and able to do all the diagnostic tests, treatments and inpatient care done by private firms. Its chronic workforce shortages make that unlikely. Denis Campbell

Labour would rip up Boris Johnsons Brexit deal, negotiate a new one with the EU within three months, and then put the deal to a referendum within six months of coming to power. The referendum would not be advisory but legally binding.

A deal would involve a comprehensive UK-wide customs arrangement with the EU; close alignment with the single market, and dynamic alignment on workers rights and the environment which guarantees keeping pace with any future EU protections as a minimum.

Under Labour, the UK would also continue to participate in the EU funding programmes on science and environment and scrap Operation Yellowhammer contingency planning.

There are no surprises in Labours Brexit policy because it was announced by Jeremy Corbyn before party conference and approved by members.

The plan for a new Labour-negotiated deal and a second referendum is supposed to offer something for everyone, but some in the party worry that dedicated remainers and leavers alike will not be satisfied.

It also leaves open the question of how the party and Corbyn himself would campaign leave or remain which will be decided at a later date. Rowena Mason

Labour has come up with a compromise on immigration. It would continue with free movement of people within the EU if the UK votes to remain in a second referendum. If it chooses to leave, immigration rights would be negotiable under a deal, but the party recognises the benefits that free movement has brought.

It pledges to end indefinite detention and close two detention centres Yarls Wood and Brook House which falls short of the partys conference motion in favour of shutting all detention centres.

There would be an improvement in the rights of people to bring family members to the UK, an end to minimum income requirements, and changes to the work visa system to make sure shortages in certain sectors are filled.

The absence of anything remotely radical on freedom of movement will disappoint those who backed a motion at the partys recent conference overwhelmingly supported by delegates to maintain and extend free movement. However, it will satisfy the likes of influential union leader Len McCluskey, who called on Labour to take a cautious stance.

The manifesto firmly puts to bed the spurious claims disseminated by the Conservative party last week that Corbyn, as prime minister, would oversee an open borders policy that would push net migration as high as 840,000 people a year. Jamie Grierson

Labour is sticking with its pledge to scrap tuition fees, the flagship policy from its 2017 manifesto.

Free schools and academies would be brought back under the control of local authorities and communities.

Up to six years of adult learning and training would be free.

The party is promising to close the tax loopholes enjoyed by private schools and would ask its new social justice commission to advise on integrating private schools into the state system. This stops short of the motion passed by conference which called for the assets of private schools to be seized.

All two-, three- and four-years-olds would get 30 hours of free nursery care a week and paid maternity leave would be extended to 12 months.

No mention of measures to address existing student debt, which many graduates might have hoped for. The proposal to remove private schools tax benefits will please the pressure group Labour Against Private Schools (also known as Abolish Eton), but stops well short of plans endorsed by activists at party conference to close them.

Many of the measures will be warmly welcomed by schools and teachers, particularly promises to get rid of Ofsted and high-stakes testing in primary schools.

Scrapping tuition fees is also a clear vote-winner among students, though the Institute for Fiscal Studies and others were quick to point out that the highest-earning graduates stand to benefit most. Sally Weale

A new 400bn national transformation fund, paid for through borrowing, would invest in infrastructure and low-carbon technology. There would be a mandate to lend in line with climate goals and productivity.

The railways, broadband infrastructure, postal services, energy utilities and water would be put in public ownership, paid for by issuing government bonds.

Free full-fibre broadband would be available for all by 2030.

Labour wants to increase spending, change who spends the money and what the money is spent on. There is no doubt it is a tall order.

To end Whitehalls dominance, much of the spending will be devolved to the major cities and local councils. A 10-year green transformation fund costing 250bn will be used to upgrade energy, transport and other networks.

More borrowing will support a broad sweep of nationalisations covering areas of the economy considered to be natural monopolies, with free broadband being the biggest giveaway, funded by a capital investment of about 40bn, and 5bn a year to provide the services for free, says BT. Phillip Inman

Labour would bring in a windfall tax on oil and gas companies raising 11bn, based on their contribution to climate change since 1996.

An increase in income tax for those earning more than 80,000 would also be introduced.

Corporation tax cuts made since 2010 would be reversed.

The party guarantees that VAT will not be increased.

A 5% increase in pay would be awarded for public sector workers.

A living wage of 10 an hour for all workers over the age of 15 would be introduced.

Capital gains and dividends tax would be brought into line with income tax rates.

Inheritance tax cuts introduced by George Osborne would be reversed.

Tax rises worth more than 80bn a year by 2023-24 were widely attacked by business groups, which said the burden fell heavily on companies, shareholders and their employees.

An 11bn windfall tax on oil and gas companies is a response to years of excessive carbon emissions, but many of the companies that owned North Sea gas and oil fields 20 years ago have long since moved on.

A rise in corporation tax from 19% to 26% heaps further pain on the corporate sector, but is probably less toxic for business leaders than a rise in income tax to 45p in the 1 on people earning over 80,000 a year, which roughly correlates with the top 20% of earners. Phillip Inman

Labour is launching a new green deal under which it would aim to achieve the substantial majority of the UKs emissions reductions by 2030. This is a watering down of the partys conference motion that targeted net-zero emissions by 2030.

A new clean air act to improve pollution levels would be introduced, including a vehicle scrapping scheme.

The party would give an extra 5.6bn for flood defences.

Producers would have to pay for the waste they create and new bottle return schemes would be introduced.

The layout of the manifesto says it all: eye-catching plans for a green industrial revolution come first. This is the first time one of the UKs two major parties has placed so much importance on the environment, and Labour has carefully positioned its low-carbon plans as a support for industry, not a burden as the Conservatives have termed green measures for years.

The removal of the 2030 net-zero target came after union pressure, but Labours ambition is still much greater than the Conservatives. Missing is any commitment to curb emissions from aviation, with no frequent-flyer levy and a hedge on airport expansion. Fiona Harvey

Labour would introduce a right to food to end foodbank Britain. It would aim to halve food bank usage within a year and remove the need for them altogether within three years.

Create a new national care service.

The party would scrap universal credit the controversial welfare system brought in by the Tories, which has caused benefit delays and hardship.

The benefit cap and the two-child limit would be scrapped.

Dehumanising work capability and personal independence payment assessments for those with a disability would end.

Labour also promises an end to raising the retirement age beyond 66, and maintaining the triple lock on pensions.

Bringing back universal free TV licences for the over-75s.

Although the manifesto promises more allotments, the rescue of pubs from closure and an end to rising retirement ages, the biggest social reforms would be Labours abolition of the flagship universal credit and the creation of a new national care service.

That would mean free personal care, beginning with the elderly, an end to 15-minute care visits, paid travel time for care workers and a 6.95 weekly benefit increase for full-time carers. Robert Booth

Labour would recruit 2,000 more police officers than the Conservatives and restore prison officer numbers, reversing cuts since 2010.

The party would work to eliminate institutional biases against black and minority ethnic communities, making sure stop-and-search was proportionate.

A royal commission would be set up to develop a public health approach to drugs, focusing on harm reduction rather than criminalisation.

A review of the controversial Prevent programme, which aims to reduce radicalisation, would be carried out.

Prisons built under private-finance initiatives would be brought in-house and no more private prisons built.

Labours attacks on the Conservatives cuts to police were so successful that their opponents braked hard and performed a dramatic U-turn.

With Boris Johnson promising to hire 20,000 officers to replace the ones lost to cuts Labour seeks to outbid them and promises to recruit 2,000 more frontline officers than have been planned for by the Conservatives.

Promises for a review of drug policy will also be heralded by campaigners as the first step towards radical reform. Vikram Dodd

A war powers act would be introduced to prevent a prime minister bypassing parliament when trying to take the country to war.

An audit of the impact of Britains colonial legacy would be carried out.

Also promised are a judge-led inquiry into alleged complicity in rendition and torture; a formal apology for Britains role in the Amritsar massacre; allowing the people of the Chagos Islands and their descendants the right to return to their lands; upholding the human rights of the people of West Papua; and recognising the rights of the people of Western Sahara.

Labour would commit to spending at least 2% of GDP on defence and initiate a strategic defence and security review.

Full commitment to a standalone Department for International Development (DfID) with an aid budget of at least 0.7% of gross national income.

Labour wants to understand our contribution to the dynamics of violence and insecurity in its review of the legacy of the British empire a commitment designed to more broadly inform foreign policy thinking under a Labour government.

The policy is set against what Corbyn views as a bomb first, talk later approach to global security, and is intended to amplify the party leaders long-established distinctive positioning on foreign policy, which has seen him consistently oppose military intervention abroad, most notably in Iraq in 2003. Dan Sabbagh

Labour would embark on a massive housebuilding programme of social housing, creating more than 1m homes in a decade.

A new national levy on second homes used as holiday homes would be used to help deal with the homelessness crisis.

Cities would get the power to impose rent caps and other controls.

With its focus on renters, Labour is gambling on a housing policy for the few, not the many. Private renters make up 20% of British households, according to ONS figures, with owner-occupiers at 62% and social housing renters at 17%.

Labour would cap private rent increases at inflation levels, strip landlords of some powers to evict tenants and spend 1bn a year so welfare claimants can rent in pricier areas.

Plus it promises 75bn for an historically ambitious social housing programme. It may be an electoral risk because while 9.5m households rent in England 15m are owner-occupiers and have less to gain from the manifesto. But regardless of their circumstances, many voters will welcome these moves as social imperatives. Robert Booth

Labour would work to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with a senate.

The party would scrap the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, which keeps a government in power for five years as standard.

Tighter rules on lobbying and stopping MPs from having second jobs, with limited exceptions, would be introduced.

Labour would reduce the voting age to 16 and give full voting rightsto all UK residents. There would also be automatic voter registration.

Sweeping changes to the electoral franchise would probably result in the biggest boost to voting in a century, as Labour is proposing automatic registration and giving a vote to all 16- and 17-year-olds, plus all UK residents, not just UK nationals.

Abolishing the Lords sounds more like an ambition than a concrete plan but scrapping the Fixed-term Parliaments Act would be likely to command support across the Commons given it played a role in the deadlock parliament found itself in this autumn. Rowena Mason

10 per hour minimum wage for all workers would be introduced. Zero-hours contracts would be banned. A 32-hour full-time working week would be introduced over a decade with no loss of pay.

New inclusive ownership funds would force large companies to set aside 10% of their shares, over 10 years, to be owned collectively by employees. Staff would get dividends of up to 500 a year.

Companies that failed to deal with their carbon emissions could be forcibly delisted from the London Stock Exchange.

Sectoral collective bargaining would be brought in across the economy to stop good employers being undercut by bad employers.

One-third of board seats would be reserved for elected worker-directors.

A public interest test would be required for hostile takeovers.

Major accounting firms would have to separate audit and non-audit activities.

Eradicating in-work poverty is a first-term priority for an incoming Labour government and the increase in the minimum wage to 10 per hour, including for 16-year-olds, is the main vehicle. Critics will argue the measure risks increasing youth unemployment.

The most radical proposal is inclusive ownership funds, regarded by City critics as expropriation of assets. The manifesto does not explain how the policy would apply to foreign-owned companies. Worker-directors are promoted as ways to reverse corporate short-termism. Nils Pratley

Labour would give all councils powers and resources to control bus services with under 25s travelling for free.

The rail network would be renationalised with a safety-trained crew member as well as a driver on every train.

HS2 and fast northern rail links would be built and high-speed rail to Scotland extended.

The party would aim to phase out new diesel and petrol cars by 2030.

Originally posted here:

Labour manifesto: what it says and what it means - The Guardian

Andrew Yang is being championed for breathing new life into an unlikely economic model: The idea of universal basic income (UBI) or, per his campaign, the Freedom Dividend, has been at the forefront of his presidential campaign.

Just this past weekend, fellow Democratic presidential candidate senator Elizabeth Warren also indicated that shes open to UBI as an option to consider to raise wages and strengthen the social safety net.

The idea of a universal basic income system is simple: Give everyone in a country a small allotment of cash each year to hopefully prevent them from falling under a certain level of living.

Those who support UBI say that people are being left behind, displaced by technology, and need a basic level of sustenance. As a technology entrepreneur and someone who has long been involved in the artificial intelligence field, I do understand these concerns. I also understand them as someone who knew material scarcity in my youth.

But UBI is a lazy solution that fails to solve the real problem: how to give people an opportunity to create wealth. We need to get more people invested in our country as owners of real things that create this wealththings like real estate, businesses, cars. Otherwise, like in the days of sharecropping, we risk continuing to have a whole class of people who are merely being sustained, but not given the chance for real economic advancement.

After the Civil War, the southern region of the US was left destitute to a degree barely imaginable by todays standards. Since the economic model of the south was heavily reliant on slave labor, the regions economy was struggling to survive after the abolition of slavery.

The answer? Sharecropping.

The practice of giving people a modicum of economic incentives, where they could subsist at a low-income level, but where it was impossible for them to rise permanently, defined American poverty for decades.

My fear is that rather than helping, solutions like UBI will create a permanent class of people on the margins.

In the sharecropping system, a person would rent land from an owner and farm that plot. A share of the profits was also provided to the landlord/owner. Rents were set to make economic profit impossible. So, sharecroppers survived through very hard work, but they could not statistically rise as a group. As a result, people never became owners, which is a basic tenet of economic advancement. From an economic vantage point, sharecropping resembled a form of slavery, except that it also enveloped poor white people.

Not surprisingly, following the Civil War, the South was locked into a cycle of poverty lasting into the 20th century with income down 36% from where it was prior to the war.

Todays proposal for UBI is similarly flawed, specifically since it will not result in more ownership. My fear is that, rather than helping, solutions like this will create a permanent class of people on the margins. Without owning assets of significance, people will remain bystanders.

There are better ways to attack the problems of poverty:

Early and broad education around financial literacy and wealth building, for example, costs taxpayers less and creates more results. I got an MBA and never took a course in simple personal financial management. Poor people are forced into bad financial practices by their circumstances and lack of knowledge.

Another option is tax credits for people who invest in tech companies that produce anti-poverty or wealth-building products that benefit the poor. So, you invest $1 and get a $1 deduction against your income. We have to get tech companies working for the poor rather than indirectly against them. A company can get certified with a B Corporation designation, which indicates that it is a social enterprise. Why cant we create the same type of designation for companies working on anti-poverty technologies and initiatives?

The USs Small Business Administration (SBA) costs taxpayers about $715 million a year. It seems to me that this is a case where increasing a spend can move the dial for everyones benefit, including by aggressively expanding the SBA, but where it partners with private sector non-profit organizations that emphasize helping people start businesses.

If you look at the history of disenfranchised people, the pattern is that they got themselves out of poverty either by getting educated or by starting their own businesses. This is especially crucial because, despite the popularity of entrepreneurship, the rate of ownership in private companies continues to fall dangerously low over the past 50 years. Lower ownership in private businesses is a national risk.

Having an opportunity to participate and own is integral to human dignity. It is true that the problem of poverty is immensely complicated and encompasses many socioeconomic factors.

But, if solutions are well thought through and not slapped together under a false premise, such as sharecropping and UBI, we can significantly reduce poverty in this country with the resources and economic power that we already have.

Read the rest here:

Universal basic income is not an opportunity to create wealth - Quartz

To launch her campaign, back in January, Sen. Elizabeth Warren had a number of locations to choose from. She could have started in Norman, Oklahoma, the setting of her ragged-edge-of-the-middle-class origin story, where her prairie populism could have been brought to the fore. She spent years in Houston, Philadelphia, and Boston, too, all chock full of their own useful imagery for a campaign. Instead, she chose Lawrence, Massachusetts, for her opening salvo, linking her campaign to the Bread and Roses strike, led in 1912 largely by radical immigrant seamstresses and other garment workers.

It would be the first of three speeches setting up what Warren sees as the driving force of her campaign: the labor movement more precisely, the women- and immigrant-led labor movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries. She continued this narrative arc in September in New York Citys Washington Square Park, chosen for its proximity to the 1911 Triangle shirtwaist factoryfire, and finished on Thursday night before a crowd of roughly 2,000 at Clark Atlanta University.

Ive learned that no matter what fight youre in today, no matter how steep the climb feels, thereare fighters who were here before you. Fighters we can learn from, she said, summoning the history of the 1881 washerwomen strike in Atlanta. Like much of the history of black resistance outside the 1960s, this moment has mostly been obscured by popular history, which favors narratives focused on black victims and white heroes.

Ive learned that no matter what fight youre in today, no matter how steep the climb feels, thereare fighters who were here before you. Fighters we can learn from.

Instead, the speeches tell a different history, and situate her campaignin 150 years of conflict between the working class and the dominant power structure, inextricably tied up with issues of race and gender exploitation. The stories serve as guideposts for the Massachusetts senators approach to politics, grounding her in a radical tradition of multiracial union organizing that pressures, and gives ammunition to, allies working from inside the political system. Warren is not a subtle storyteller.

This heritage is not one that would obviously be associated with a crusading Harvard bankruptcy professor and author who is famously enthralled with capital markets and its probably not always legible, even to her supporters. But linking with women-led labor struggles is a way of addressing a question that has vexed her politics from the beginning of her rise, as the patriarchal forces of American discourse worked to push her, as a rising female political figure, away from fighting for economic justice and into a womens issues box. While she has consistently sided with womens rights groups, she has just as consistently refused to be a leading voice in the area.

Her one nod to that energy came about accidentally, when, on the Senate floor in early 2017, she was reading off a litany of Sen.Jeff Sessionss racist transgressions over the years, arguing in opposition to his confirmation asattorney general. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warned her against such criticism of a fellow senator, but Warren went ahead with her speech. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted, McConnell declared when he moved to silence her delivering to her a feminist slogan shes happily adopted since.

By identifying her heroes as women who persisted in the face of powerful opposition Frances Perkins, Clara Lemlich, and the women of Lawrence and Atlanta she is able to root herself in the fight for womens liberation without taking her focus off of the battle between the haves and the have-nots. Its a timely pivot, as women, beginning with the 5-million-strong Womens March the day after Donald Trumps inauguration, flowing through into the #MeToo movement, and accelerating into the 2018 midterms, have fueled the Democratic resurgence and realignment, and are seen as the key to winning the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. In an era where identity politics is routinely used to divorce progressive efforts from class conflict, Warren is going the opposite direction, arguing that gender identity, race, immigration status, and class consciousness are inseparable.

After the Atlanta event, in between her shots with hours of selfie-seekers, she paused for a brief interview. I told Warren that I suspected the three speeches were her way to square the class and gender circles, while still responding to the pressure to be a woman running on womens issues.

I know exactly where youre going with that. This is about the power of women, she said. All three of those speeches. The Lawrence speech is about how a lot of women got together and said, Enough, we are going to make change. The speech in New York, which was about the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, was not only about the women who burned to death, the women who led the protest movement, but also the woman, Frances Perkins, who was the one who fought it from the inside and made real change. And here, today, to be able to celebrate black women and how much black women have contributed to organizing to power and to making real change.

Warren is not just glomming onto a movement, but hoping to reorient it from a broad force of resistance to Trumpinto a fighting force for economic justice. Our history is a piece of the message of how to go forward, she told me. Indeed, shes betting her campaign on it, while her chief rival for the votes of white, college-educated women, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, is betting just the opposite. We will fight when we must fight, but I will never allow us to get so wrapped up in the fighting that we start to think fighting is the point, Buttigiegsaid in October at the fourthDemocratic presidential primarydebate, taking his fight to Warren shortly before he began his climb in the polls.

An attendee at Elizabeth Warrens campaign event in Atlanta on Nov. 21, 2019.

Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

The Civil War ended in 1865 and, within a year, free black women were on strike. At the time, one of the leading occupations for newly freed women involved laundry. Cotton had filled peoples closets with clothes, those clothes got dirty quickly, and the main way in the South to clean them was by hand: work done predominantly by black womens hands. In 1881, in the fast-growing city of Atlanta, the capital of the so-called New South, 20 black women came together to organize the Washing Society. Their first order? Strike, said Warren. Their demands? Higher wages and to be treated with a little dignity.

The washerwomen had a plan, she added, deploying her trademark line in a way that appeared to respond to criticism from the left that trumpeting plans signals a top-down technocratic lack of interest in producing change from the bottom-up. Warrens rejoinder, that the washerwomen had a plan, argues that having a plan and building a movement can indeed, must go hand in hand.

Escaped slaves working as washerwomen at a union generals headquarters in 1864.

Photo: Matthew Brady/Buyenlarge/Getty Images

Not more than a few minutes into Warrens speech, just as she was getting to the story of the citys washerwomen, a protest erupted from a back corner of the auditorium. Roughly 100 demonstrators began chanting pro-charter school slogans. (Warren wants to end for-profit charter schoolsand rein in nonprofit charters.) Warren initially tried to plow through, but then paused as the chanting continued, likely considering the optics of shutting down a protest by mostly black women in order to give a speech about the power of black womens protest. As they showed no signs of slowing down, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., the lone member of the so-called Squad to endorse Warren, came to the mic to try to regain control of the situation. Security guards ushered the groups leader, Sarah Carpenter, into the hallway, quieting the scene.

Carpenter told reporters in the hallway the group had come together organically over the past few weeks, in the wake of Warrens education plan. But the group, calling themselves the Powerful Parent Network, has a handful of billionaire patrons. Carpenter is the founder of a pro-charter group in Memphis that is wholly funded by the Walton Family Foundation (Walton as in Walmart), which invests in and makes loans to charter schools. PPN is also backed by the California Charter Association, which is significantly funded by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, a major donor to Buttigieg.

Back inside, Warren returned to her narrative, describing how the washerwomen began to form a multiracial coalition. White city leaders brought the law down on strikers, but were unable to break it, eventually conceding to higher pay and a more dignified work environment.

By identifying her heroes,Warrenis able to root herself in the fight for womens liberation without taking her focus off of the battle between the haves and the have-nots.

Black women led, but soon, the handful of white washerwomen whod stood on the sidelines realized that the only way to better wages was to follow the lead of the black women, she said. Working women standing together.

After the rally, Warren met with the protesters, but told me she didnt know they were funded by the Waltons. (We had a good conversation, but, you know, mostly I just wanted to be able to talk to everybody here, and we got a chance to do that, she said.)

Thirty years after the washerwomen victory, in the wake of a citywide general strike led in 1909 by 23-year-old immigrant Clara Lemlich, garment workers had secured recognition and improved wages and safety conditions in New York. The unionization effort was organized by the radical Industrial Workers of the World, known as the Wobblies and led by women and girls in Manhattans sprawling garment industry, most of them immigrants.

Left/Top: Garment Workers Picketing, circa 1909. Right/Bottom: Wobblies marching in New York, N.Y. in 1913.Photos: Universal History Archive/Getty Images; Bettmann/Getty Images.

But the TriangleWaist Companys factorynear Washington Square Park in New York City remained an anti-union stronghold. Legislators in Albany, along with local city leaders, had remained resistant to the union movement, rebuffing efforts to use legislation and regulation to extend the protections won for some workers in the strikes. It was a reflection of the limitations faced by even the most successful strikes, when they are not complemented by political gains at the state level. This is a truism in labor movement politics, though its often overlooked by organizers uninterested in electoral or legislative politics; as the saying goes, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. Two years later, in 1911, the non-union Triangle factory, still employing barbaric and wildly unsafe practices, burst into flames, trapping and killing 146 people in a gruesome fashion.

The next year, garment workers in Lawrence, again organized by the Wobblies, went on strike after a unilateral pay cut, demanding both better wages (bread) and dignity (roses). Street battles pitted young girls and women against company-run militias, including even students from ironically for Warren Harvard, who eagerly armed themselves to do their duty and put down the worker uprising. The schools dean allowed the students to retake missed final exams for the good of the class cause.

The women of Lawrence won the Bread and Roses strike. Those workers did more than improve their own lives. They changed America. Within weeks, more than a quarter of a million textile workers throughout New England got raises. Within months, Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to pass a minimum wage law. And today, there are no children working in factories. We have a national minimum wage. And worker safety laws. Workers get paid overtime and we have a 40-hour work week, Warren said in Lawrence during her campaign launch.

The story of Lawrence is a story about how real change happens in America. Its a story about power our power when we fight together. In Washington Square Park, she reiterated this theme of worker power: The tragic story of the Triangle factory fire is a story about power.

In Atlanta, the theme emerged once more, this time focused on the way race is deployed by the powerful to divide workers who otherwise would find solidarity in their fights against bosses.

Divide and conquer is an old political tactic and it comes in all sorts of ugly flavors: racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, Warren said. The rich and powerful want us to be afraid of each other. Why? Because theyre afraid of us. Afraid of our numbers. Afraid of seeing us stand together. Afraid that we will take up each others fights as our own. Afraid that they will lose their power.

Elizabeth Warren takes the stage at a campaign event in Atlanta on Nov. 21, 2019.

Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

All three, indeed, are stories about power not only because they are landmark achievements, but because they also demonstrate the power that the left is up against. Within two years of the Bread and Roses strike, once national attention had faded, the Lawrence unions were effectively smashed, returning power to the bosses, and minimum wage laws and other job protections, absent worker power to enforce them, were widely ignored. In New York, the legislative victories that came in the wake of the fire would be more enduring, but capital would fight back over the following decades by fleeing New York for cheaper nonunion labor elsewhere in the country. Once those workers were organized, production fled overseas. That offshoring was abetted by politicians bought off by the bosses, and Warren wants to link that corruption within the system to the exploitation outside of it. Shes selling herself as someone who can both galvanize a movement for change, then use the power that movement built to restructure the system in an enduring way.

One of the women who witnessed the fire also became central to the success of legislative advances first in New York, and then through the New Deal and is the most explicit model for Warren. That woman, Frances Perkins, took center stage in Washington Square Park literally: The podium on the stage was constructed from barn boards the Warren campaign got from the Perkins family. A 30-year-old Perkins had been a witness to the shirtwaist factory fire. which Warren described in all its gory detail:

The flames leapt higher, and women climbed out onto the ledges.

And as people on the ground stood in shocked silence, a woman jumped. Then another, then another. They hit the ground with a sickening thud. They died on impact. So many, so fast that the womens bodies piled up on the sidewalk. Their blood ran into the gutters.

Dozens more were trapped inside. Trapped because the door to the staircase was locked locked by bosses afraid the workers might steal scraps of cloth. Firefighters would later find a pile of burned bodies next to that very door.

It took 18 minutes for 146 people to die. Mostly women. Mostly immigrants Jewish and Italian. Mostly people who made as little as $5 a week to get their shot at the American dream.

In the wake of the fire, the movement Lemlich had led exploded in size. A week later, the womens trade unions organized a funeral march, and half a million people showed up to march down Fifth Avenue, right behind me. Half a million people in 1911.

Demonstrators mourn the victims of the Triangleshirtwaist factory fire in New York, N.Y., in 1911.

Photo: PhotoQuest/Getty Images

The element of the story that Warren tells next is critical to understanding her view of social and political change: While the women of the trade unions kept pushing from the outside, Frances pushed from the inside.

On the one hand, Warrens nod to the successes of the movement a minimum wage, improved safety, shorter hours and a weekend are part of the labor canon. At the same time, there are elements of the left that are skeptical of insider tacticians, believing that true power lies with organizing broad-based movements, and that insiders, concerned about their own careers and interests, fundamentally compromise a movements integrity.

Were going to need all of that pressure, all of that energy, to hold Congress accountable, to hold our state governments accountable, to hold this country accountable.

Her opponent on the left, Sen. Bernie Sanders, is not an explicit advocate of that view; after all, hes been inside Congress since 1990, and is running to be president. But, with a campaign mantra of Not me, us, and a promise to be the organizer-in-chief, he leans in that direction. Warren, meanwhile, focuses on ending lobbying as we know it, confronting corruption, and rewriting the rules of the legislative and administrative rule-making process. Where Sanders wants to out-organize the system, Warren wants to reorganize it.

Their different approaches to labor reform are instructive on that front: Sanders emphasizes his plan to empower workers on the shop floor and make it easier to join a union. Warrens emphasis tends to be on her plan to put workers directly on corporate boards, empowering them inside the highest echelons of the system. (Sanders has since done one better, coupling it with significant employee ownership of firms.)

Crucially, though, both Sanders and Warren argue that their agendas cant be accomplished without sustained outside pressure. Sanders calls it a political revolution, and is working to build a movement to see it through. Warren, with her nods to labor movement history, is making the case that she, too, understands the necessity of people power to drive change. I asked her if she agreed with Sanders that President Barack Obama had made a mistake by demobilizing his grassroots army in the wake of his election.

Ive already been telling people, Im building a grassroots movement thats going to be our comparative advantage in November of 2020, but then when we win, nobody gets to go home, she said, because its really about making change starting in January 2021, and were going to need all of that pressure, all of that energy, to hold Congress accountable, to hold our state governments accountable, to hold this country accountable, to make the kind of change we need to make. We got a lot of fights to fight and we need to pick up each others fights as our own, whether its on climate or gun violence or health care, or a two-cent wealth tax so that we can invest in an entire generation. We embrace each others fights. Thats how were going to make real change.

Indeed, one of the crippling handicaps of the Obama administration was that it did not have a Frances Perkins fighting from the inside, leaving operatives like Rahm Emanuel to play on Obamas worst instincts. Perkins moved with Franklin D. Roosevelt from New York state politics to the federal level when he named her his secretary of labor, where she was a driving force. Frances Perkins became the first woman in history to serve in the cabinet, Warren noted at Washington Square Park, quickly moving from the breaking of that ceiling to what she did with the power once she had it. She used the same model that she and her friends had used after the Triangle fire. She worked the political system relentlessly from the inside, while a sustained movement applied pressure from the outside. As Francis Perkins put it, the Triangle Fire was the day the New Deal was born.

Left/Top: Firefighters try to put out the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York, N.Y. in 1911. Right/Bottom: Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins testifies before the House Naval Affairs Committee in Washington, D.C. in 1942.Photos: George Rinhart/Corbis/Getty Images; Bettman Archive/Getty Images

Warren, went the strong implication, is todays Perkins, ready to lead from the inside, with the backing of millions on the outside. She referred to Perkins as one very persistent woman a call back to her famous run-in with Mitch McConnell and credited her with producing big, structural change, her campaigns wonky mantra since day one:

So, what did one woman one very persistent woman backed up by millions of people across this country get done? Social Security. Unemployment insurance. Abolition of child labor. Minimum wage. The right to join a union. Even the very existence of the weekend. Big, structural change. One woman, and millions of people to back her up.

In New York, before Warren even appeared onstage, Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, promised that, with its endorsement earlier that day, WFP intended to add the kind of movement-building to her campaign that Warren has not, previously, been associated with.

[Radical social movements] arise when institutions arent responsive to the needs of society, Mitchell said.

Elizabeth Warren hosts a rally in Washington Square Park in New York, N.Y., on Sept. 16, 2019.

Photo: Todd Heisler/The New York Times/Redux

Warren, in Atlanta, finished with one last linkage or intersection, so to speak between racial, gender, and class struggles. Dorothy Bolden, she noted, was born in 1924, within living memory of the washerwomen strike. By the time she was nine, she had joined the trade herself. After having six kids of her own, she became active in the civil rights movement, encouraged along by one of her neighbors: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King encouraged Dorothy to continue this fight, so she mapped out a plan, Warren said.

That plan was to follow the Washing Society with a new union, called the National Domestic Workers of America. It was, said Warren, the first union with real power for domestic workers in American history, noting that it evolved into the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which remains a force.

From the boldness of Atlantas washerwomen to the courage of Dorothy Bolden, black history teaches us that the only way to win is to get in the fight, Warren concluded. Dorothy Bolden showed that one very determined woman backed up by many people across this country can deliver big structural change.

Ryan Grim is the author of the new book Weve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement.

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In Three Touchstone Speeches, Elizabeth Warren Grounds Her Campaign in a History of American Protest and Movement Building - The Intercept

The Brexit party has eschewed a traditional manifesto in place of a brief, 21-page contract with the people. These are the main points:

The party says its priority is a clean-break Brexit. While this has been long seen as a synonym for no deal, at the launch event Farage said it means any Brexit that removes the UK from EU regulations and legal jurisdiction.

Long a priority for Ukip as well, the Brexit party wants changes to the voting system and postal voting, and abolition of the House of Lords. It also proposes citizens initiatives guaranteeing a referendum on any subject if 5 million voters sign up to the idea.

The policy document details what it calls a 200bn Brexit dividend from no longer having to make EU budget contributions, scrapping HS2 and other ideas. This would be spent on public services in infrastructure, including the NHS, help for high streets, money for roads and rail, and more widespread broadband. It also pledges to abolish inheritance tax, eliminate corporation tax for smaller companies, and provide transitional relief to industries affected by Brexit, such as car firms.

The policy document calls for a focus on planting trees to absorb emissions. At the launch, Farage said the hope would be to plant billions around the world.

The Brexit party would abolish VAT on domestic fuel bills, and cut tariffs on food imports.

The policy would be to seek annual net migration of no more than 50,000 people, although Farage said this could vary. More people could enter to fill jobs, but on time-limited work visas. The party says it will always provide a humane welcome for genuine refugees, but Farage said anyone who entered the UK unofficially, such as by small boat or in a truck, would be removed.

While there is a pledge to back more parental choice on schools, this mentions only academies and free schools. Grammars were a fixture in Ukip manifestos, but do not get a mention.

The party aims to increase the number of homes built through market mechanisms, such as easier planning for brownfield sites, and allowing flexibility on other planning areas and the number of affordable homes. But the policy also states it should be made easier for councils to borrow to build social housing.

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The Brexit party's election pledges: key points - The Guardian

For user-centered design, metaphors are not enough. Successful products often give people what theyve wanted all along without realizing it, rather than what they say they want. The authors invoke the phrase industrialized empathy to describe the patient fieldwork required to understand how people use objects and software, and the rounds of prototype testing frequently needed for successful product development. Such industrialized empathy led to the discovery that DVR viewers often wanted dialogue clarified and thus the two-second rewind was born.

Empathy creates social dividends. Subway station elevators and cuts in sidewalk curbs benefit not only people with special needs but almost everybody examples of whats called universal design. Kuang and Fabricant cite the thick-handled OXO peeler, designed to ease the pain of arthritis, which became a best seller among unaffected people. They also observe a Microsoft researcher as he discusses the limitations of the companys Xbox console with a deaf gamer and concludes that the design could be tweaked in a way that would benefit hearing players as well.

User-experience designers have explored other social dimensions of technology: how electronic assistants should interact with owners, for instance, and how hybrid and electric automobiles can encourage energy-efficient driving through gentle feedback. A display in the Ford Fusion depicted multiplying leaves on a vine when drivers optimized behavior, turning energy conservation into a game of greening the dashboard.

Kuang and Fabricant also consider design in the context of the now-familiar debates over screen addiction and social medias effect on politics, but another topic they address may be even more important. The better technology is at automating tasks and anticipating our behavior, they argue, the greater the threat to our own skills, and to the serendipity that can result from delay and deliberation. One of their most intriguing observations involves the contrast they draw from an argument between Douglas Engelbart and Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in artificial intelligence. The former regarded information technology as a tool for extending and augmenting our intelligence, the latter as a system for replacing and improving on human beings. The authors favor Engelbart, but the Minskians, they point out, are still with us, in the form of self-driving car manufacturers, for example, who have recently begun lobbying for the abolition of steering wheels and pedals.

On balance, User Friendly is a tour de force, an engrossing fusion of scholarly research, professional experience and revelations from intrepid firsthand reporting.

The books single weakness may be that it shortchanges the history of user-friendly design in this country. Already in the late 18th century, members of the Shaker religious sect used special vises to craft the forerunners of our current flat straight-edged brooms in the interest of godly cleanliness. Shakers also helped spread another early American folk favorite, the rocking chair, a masterpiece of empathetic design. The superbly balanced American felling ax, celebrated in Walt Whitmans immortal Song of the Broad-Axe, was a favorite of the British prime minister and gentleman woodcutter William Ewart Gladstone. User friendliness is as American as five-minute microwaved apple pie.

The greatest challenge for designers may be the unintended consequences of promising ideas. The founders of the e-cigarette company JUUL graduates of Stanfords celebrated graduate program in product design originally aimed to make a safer nicotine alternative for adult smokers. Now theyre confronting a firestorm over the health risks of their product. JUULs ease of use, proclaimed in a winning entry to an international design award, paradoxically has become part of the case against it.

Finally, new research suggests that user-friendly design can sometimes be too convenient. Harder-to-read fonts promote better learning, according to psychologists who call this paradox disfluency. Other studies have shown that the difficult work of taking lecture notes in longhand instead of with laptops forces paraphrase, leading to deeper understanding. Will user tough love become the new user friendliness?

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Design Thats Got Users in Mind - The New York Times

Bettmann via Getty ImagesFormer enslaved people in a Southern town shortly after the end of the Civil War, circa 1865

This essay is an adaptation of the fourth annual Philip Roth Lecture, delivered at the Newark Public Library on November 4, 2019. The lecture began with an appreciation of Roths merging of fiction and history. An admirer of great historical writing, Roth understood that, to be truly great, it had to grapple with what he called, in The Plot Against America, the relentless unfolding of the unforeseen. Flipped on its head, he wrote, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as History, harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The task of intelligibly describing the past, let alone interpreting it, risks slighting how unexpected and largely unintelligible the past was to those who made it. As Roth put it in the mind of the novels young protagonist, named Philip Roth, the terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic. He might have added, turning triumph into an epic as well. That insight cuts to the heart of our most difficult and enduring historical issues, including the lectures main topic, the centrality of slavery to American history.

Sean Wilentz

Although they diverge sharply, the most common accounts of American slavery have an air of inevitability about them. This is especially true regarding the abolition of slavery in 1865. Whether celebrated as a monument to freedom or diminished as a transition from one form of racial oppression to another, the course of Emancipation can seem almost preordained, the product of essential features of American life. If anything, we wonder why it didnt happen sooner, and condemn past generations for their hypocrisy, mendacity, and cruelty. Yet few things if any in modern history were more unexpected than the eradication of human bondage in the Atlantic world.

A fixture and force in Western culture, time out of mind, slavery, and more specifically racial slavery, had been essential to the European settlement of the New World ever since the Portuguese pioneered the plantation system with enslaved African labor in the sixteenth century. Apart from sporadic protests, the spread of slavery went virtually unchallenged by European and British settlers let alone their governments; periodic slave revolts and insurrectionary plots did not appreciably slow the rise of the plantation complex that at its height stretched from Brazil to the Caribbean to British North America. There is evidence inside the Anglo-American world, dating back to the seventeenth century, of popular repugnance at slavery and, especially, at the brutal Atlantic slave trade, but that sentiment slumbered for many decades, sufficient to raise moral doubts but too feeble to produce political action.

Suddenly, in the late 1740s and early 1750s, Western culture reached a turning point, producing what the great modern scholar of slavery and the antislavery movement David Brion Davis called an almost explosive consciousness of mans freedom to shape the world in accordance with his own will and reason. The causes of this moral revolution were manifold and remain much debated, but need not detain us here; what is important is that it brought, in Daviss words, a heightened concern for discovering laws and principles that would enable human society to be something more than an endless contest of greed and power. That concern made slavery appear for the first timeto the un-enslavedas a barbaric offense to God, reason, and natural rights.

Rejecting the dogmas of the past meant scrutinizing inequality, personal sovereignty, national sovereignty, and servitude of every kind. In France, Montesquieus The Spirit of the Laws destroyed ancient justifications for slavery, which inspired and emboldened antislavery religious sectarians and budding philosophes across the Atlantic world. In Philadelphia, the pioneering Quaker abolitionist John Woolman, a major figure in the antislavery awakening, published his first antislavery tract in 1754. A few years later, his friend and fellow Quaker Anthony Benezet began recruiting a network of intellectuals and political leaders to the cause. By the mid-1770s, in the American colonies as well as in Britain and France, a significant number of reformers and intellectuals had come to regard American slavery as pure evil. Over the next fifteen years, they set in motion political movements dedicated to eradicating the degradation of persons into property.

Against slaverys millennia, the struggle to abolish it came abruptly. By the end of the succeeding century, against slaverys immense and unyielding power, it had largely succeeded. As a spiritual as well as political endeavor, it is one of the most, if not the most astonishing unfolding of the unforeseen in all of recorded human history. Yet it is too often at best consigned to the inevitable, as something that was bound to happen as if in the natural unfolding of progress. At worst, it is pushed to the margins, as if slaverys abolition came about without abolitionists, without politics, let alone without rebellious slavesthe byproduct, as some accounts say, of impersonal, amoral economic forces, or the unintended outcome of white peoples selfish squabbles over policy and profits, or even as an accident.

The neglect of historical understanding of the antislavery impulse, especially in its early decades, alters how we view not just our nations history but the nation itself. More and more in these pessimistic times, we are learning once again, and with a sense of justice, that the United States and its past are rooted in vicious racial slavery and the lasting inequities that are slaverys legacy. We learn too little or not at all that the United States and its past are also rooted in the struggle against slavery, and in the larger revolutionary transformation of moral perception that produced that strugglea transformation that, with all of the contradictions, helped give the New World its symbolic meaning of rebirth.

Effacing this essential tensionthat the United States was defined, from the start, neither by American slavery alone nor by American antislavery but in their conflictcan lead to a strange complacency. Because the ideals that propelled the American Revolution shared crucial origins with the ideals that propelled antislavery, it can be tempting to treat slavery as a terrible appendage to American history, an important but also doomed institution at the nations founding.

The historian Bernard Bailyn has offered one influential version of this view in his description of how the Revolution unleashed a contagion of liberty. Slavery, although a central part of American society, hardly encapsulated the ideals of the Declaration of Independence; it contradicted them, for reasons later explained by no less of an authority than Abraham Lincoln. The American Revolution may not have overthrown the institution of slavery but its egalitarian principles were at least implicitly antislavery. The anomaly became more glaring over the succeeding two generations when, in yet another unfolding of the unforeseen, American slavery did not die out as most expected but expanded, turning the American South into the most dynamic and ambitious slavery regime in the world. Still, when Emancipation arrived, it did so as a vindication and affirmation of Americas founding principles, the new birth of freedom that Lincoln pronounced at Gettysburg in 1863. It confounded the claims of those reactionary pro-slavery apologists who belittled Thomas Jefferson as a cunning dissembler and who regarded the Declarations assertion of self-evident equality as, in the words of one Indiana senator from 1854, nothing more than a self-evident lie.

One problem with this familiar view is that it obscures how new, how radical, antislavery politics were during the revolutionary era, and how, for many patriots, American slavery and American freedom were perfectly compatible. Im referring here not to those slaveholders with troubled consciences like Jefferson and James Madison, Virginians who perceived slavery as an intolerable offense yet who (at least after the 1780s, in Jeffersons case) lifted not a finger toward ending itcritics of slavery who continued owning, buying, and selling human beings until the day they died. Im referring instead to stridently proslavery figures like that young South Carolina grandee and signer of the Constitution, Charles Pinckneya patriot who served as an officer in the revolutionary militia and who, as a delegate at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, asserted if slavery be wrong, it is justified by the example of all the world. I am also referring to those white Northerners, as well as most white Southerners, who believed that the Declarations egalitarian principles were perfectly sound but that they categorically did not apply to blacks, slave or free. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney attempted finally to enshrine this racist egalitarianism in American national law in his notorious ruling on the Dred Scott case in 1857.

These proslavery Americans and apologists for slavery and their progeny were no less products of the American founding than the early abolitionists inspired by Woolman and Benezet or the conflicted enlightened Virginians like Jefferson. Plantation slavery grew stupendously in the United States after the Revolution, generating a well-organized slave power that long dominated national politics. Slaverys defeat was not inevitable. Nor, obviously, did white supremacy die with slavery. Over the century and a half since slaverys abolition, the racist Americanism of Charles Pinckney and Roger Brooke Taney has survived and flourished in new forms, along with dominating social and political structures that uphold it. Far from vanquished, it has morphed and resurged in ways expected and unexpected, from the bloody overthrow of Reconstruction to the menacing rise of Donald J. Trump.

There is another view that challenges the familiar one, hailed by its supporters for forcing an honest reckoning with slavery and its unending consequences. This account asks profound and unsettling questions about the nations origins and bids us to regard the experience of the slaves as the true test of Americas professed ideals. Slavery, in this view, wasnt simply an important part of American society at the founding and after; it defined a nation born in oppression and bad faith. While this view acknowledges the ideals of equality proclaimed by Jefferson and others, it regards them as hollow. Even after slavery ended, the racism that justified slavery persisted, not just as an aspect of American life but at its very core.

If the familiar view courts complacency, this one is vulnerable to an easy cynicism. Once slaverys enormity is understood, as it should be, not as a temporary flaw but as an essential fact of American history, it can make the birth of the American republic and the subsequent rise of American democracy look as nothing more than the vindication of glittering generalities about freedom and equality founded on the oppression of blacks, enslaved and free, as well as the expropriation and slaughter of Native Americans. It can resemble, ironically, the reactionary proslavery insistence that the egalitarian self-evident truths of the Declaration were self-evident lies. It can leave our understanding of American history susceptible to moralizing distortions that seem compelling simply because they defy reassuring versions of the past.

Some of that cynicism is on display in The New York Times Magazines recently launched 1619 Project, enough to give ammunition to hostile critics who would discredit or minimize the entire enterprise of understanding Americas history of slavery and antislavery. The projects lead essay, for example, by Nikole Hannah-Jones berates our national mythology for conveniently omitting that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. Supposedly, Britain, by 1776, had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. There were, the essay says, growing calls in London to abolish the slave trade, which would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. Americans, in short, may never have revolted against Britain had the founders not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. The American Revolution, in effect, anticipated the slaveholders rebellion eighty-odd years later: the American patriots allegedly declared their independence of Britain in 1776 for the same reason that the Southern states seceded in 18601861, to guarantee that slavery would endure. American independence, in this view, was a precursor of Southern secession.

It is worth noting that Jefferson Davis and the rebellious slaveholders also depicted secession as a glorious replay of the American Revolution, although they did not go so far as to claim that the patriots of 1776 fought to protect slavery. Not for the first time, modern critics have concluded that the Confederates were basically correct about American history, whereas Lincoln as well as most abolitionists, above all Frederick Douglass, were wrongas when Douglass, in his most famous speech, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, excoriated American hypocrisy and white racism but also praised the US Constitution as a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.

Coincidence aside, though, this portion of the 1619 Project is simply untrue. Neither the British government nor the British people were deeply conflicted over slavery in 1776. To be sure, controversy did arise in the 1760s and 1770s over the legality of owning slaves on British soil proper, where wealthy merchants and gentlemen held thousands of slaves chiefly as house servants; and in 1772, a small group of abolitionists succeeded in getting Britain declared free soil in the landmark Somerset decision. But these efforts affected roughly the same number of enslaved persons as lived in the single colony of New York; more important, they affected Britains entrenched involvement in colonial slavery and in the slave trade not at all. Apart from the appeals of a tiny handful of abolitionists like Granville Sharp, there were no growing calls in London to halt the Atlantic slave trade; on the contrary, it had been American colonists who attempted to end involvement in the Atlantic slave trade only to be overruled by the Crown and its colonial officials.

Had the Americans not won their independence in 1783, it is almost inconceivable that the British government would have ended slavery in any of its colonies thereafter. Although Lower South slaveholders and their Northern allies succeeded in removing from the Declaration Jeffersons language describing the slave trade as a cruel War against human Nature itself, violating its most sacred Rights of Life and Liberty, and although Jefferson blamed the introduction of slavery on the monarchy, this hardly turned the fight for independence into a fight to sustain slavery.

Cynicism about the Revolution gives way to cynicism about the Civil War and, in particular, about Abraham Lincolnrendered as a white supremacist who, whatever his qualms about human bondage, supposedly had no interest in ending slavery, but only in preserving the Union. One is left to wonder how Lincolns first Inaugural Address, delivered weeks before the fighting began, affirmed to one admittedly unfriendly Northern editor that anti-slavery is the corpus, the strength, the visible life of the party which has now assumed the reins of government. One is bidden to forget that the war was a Southern counterrevolution against the victorious Republicans explicit intention to place slavery, in Lincolns words, in the course of ultimate extinctionand much else that Lincoln said against slaverya counterrevolution that Lincoln was determined to crush. It took a year and a halfjust a year and a halfbefore the Emancipation Proclamation officially turned the struggle against secession into a struggle for liberation under force of arms, fought in part by African-American Union troops who included more than one hundred thousand former slaves. That, too, was part of the Emancipation Proclamation. From the very start, however, the war for the Union was inherently antislavery.

The antislavery impulse, of course, has not disappeared utterly from our accounts of American slavery. Historians rarely fail to credit the radical abolitionist movement that arose in the 1830s under the leadership of, among others, William Lloyd Garrison, for courageously calling to moral account not just the slaveholders but their Northern accomplices and apologists. Hannah-Joness essay cites the Pennsylvania Anti-Federalist and abolitionist Samuel Bryan attacking the US Constitution in 1787, as well as the later abolitionist William Goodell.

Our current interpretations, though, fail to appreciate both the magnitude of the unforeseen antislavery rupture with the past and Americas crucial role in that rupture. They overlook how organized antislavery politics originated not in the Old World but in the rebellious British North American colonies. One line of argument finds it hard to explain how most slaveholders and some antislavery advocates reasonably regarded the nations founding in 1787 as a blow for slavery. The other cannot explain why leading abolitionist and antislavery voices just as reasonably believed exactly the opposite, that the Constitution advanced the promise proclaimed by an anticipatory ode published in Philadelphia: May servitude abolishd be / as well as negro-slavery / To make one LAND OF LIBERTY.

*

Placing antislavery along with slavery at the center of American history produces an unfamiliar alternative history that tracks the unfolding of the unforeseen. Lacking a novelists genius for invention, a historian can only record it. This alternative account illuminates the fragility of history not by telling what might have happened and didnt, as in The Plot Against America, but by relating things that did happen, disrupting all that seemed settled and foreclosed back then, as well as what might now seem settled fact about American history. Above all, it shows that Revolutionary America, far from a proslavery bulwark against the supposedly enlightened British Empire, was a hotbed of antislavery politics, arguably the hottest and most successful of its kind in the Atlantic world prior to 1783.

The history begins in the 1680s, at more or less the same time that plantation slavery was established in the Chesapeake. The year 1619 has become symbolic of slaverys commencement in our history, when a Dutch man-of-war consigned twenty Africans and creoles to John Rolfe in Jamestown, to be sold to wealthy local planters. Only in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, however, did the slave plantation economy in tobacco take root in Virginia and Maryland, followed immediately by the spread of plantation slavery in the rice, cotton, and indigo producing low country regions to the South. Slavery and slave trading likewise took hold in all of the colonies to the North, particularly in the infant seaport cities, where as much as one-fifth of the population consisted of enslaved laborers, as well as in the proximate hinterlands.

What 1619 has become to the history of American slavery, 1688 is to the history of American antislavery, the year that four German speaking Quakers in the settlement of Germantown, Pennsylvania, raised what is generally regarded as the first written public protest against African-American slavery in the British colonies. Denouncing slavery as a violation of the Golden Rule, they initially directed their petition to the local Quaker monthly meeting, but it had no effect and was forgotten until its accidental rediscovery in 1844.

Antislavery sentiment persisted in Pennsylvania, as part of what became a dissenting tradition inside the Society of Friends aimed by a minority of pious Quakers against the more extravagant slaveholding and slave-trading majority. Finally, in the 1750s, a full-scale reformation of American Quakerism produced a revulsion against what was still very much a fundamental institution in the Quakers world, but the reformation did not expand much beyond the Friends. As late as 1763, only a small minority of British or European colonists anywhere in North America thought involvement in slaveholding or the slave trade, direct or indirect, deserved the slightest ethical questioning.

Yet the moral revolution of the 1740s and 1750s, advanced on these shores by prophets like John Woolman, exploded after the French and Indian War, the American front of the European Seven Years War, amid the rising colonial revolt against imperial rule. Couching political complaints not as assertions of customary English rights and liberties but as tests of universal principles and natural rights rapidly dishonored holding Africans and their children in permanent slavery. As the historian Christopher Leslie Brown writes:

More than a decade before the development of abolitionism in Britain, the middle and northern colonies in North America presented the unusual spectacle of societies with slaves turning against the practice of human bondage, in part, to abide by the dictates of professed values, or to liberate themselves from moral corruption.

Although that spectacle was most striking in the colonies where slavery was less uniformly central to the economy, the contradictions for a time became felt even where plantation slavery was strongest and enslaved persons the most numerous. Remarking on the period of the 1770s, the leading South Carolina politician Henry Laurens, a major slaveholder and possibly the countrys premier slave trader, recalled how he and his fellow planters became solemnly engaged against further importations under a pretence of working by gradual steps a total abolition. Over the succeeding decade, Low Country South Carolina planters would manumit more slaves than they had during the previous thirty years.

Between 1767 and 1775, a wave of antislavery petitions, sermons, pamphlets, and private missives swelled across the colonies, from New England as far south as Virginiaa political outburst unprecedented in the Atlantic world. At least half a dozen Massachusetts towns, and several others elsewhere in New England, instructed their representatives to propose antislavery legislation at the colonial assemblies. In the city of New Yorkhome to the largest number of slaves in any American city other than Charleston, South Carolinalocal distillers voted in 1774 not to distill molasses or syrup intended for the slave trade. In April 1775, five days before the battles of Lexington and Concord, a group of ten Philadelphians, seven of them Quakers, formed the first antislavery organization in history, the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. Two months later, a group of local leaders met in Worcester, Massachusetts, to announce their determination to achieve the abolition of slavery.

The upsurge achieved some rapid results. In 1777, fractious Vermonters adopted the first written constitution in history to outlaw adult slavery. That same year, when drafting a new state constitution, the New York State legislature stopped short of approving emancipation but endorsed the principle that their state should be free soil and exhorted future legislatures to take the most effective and prudent steps toward abolishing domestic slavery. Three years later, the Pennsylvania assembly approved the first legislatively enacted emancipation law in modern history; four years after that, Rhode Island and Connecticut passed similar measures. Petitions and freedom suits initiated by slaves and pressed by antislavery legislators and lawyers undermined slaverys legitimacy in Massachusetts, leading to the landmark rulings in cases involving the slaves Quock Walker and Mum Bett, which in 1783 outlawed slavery under the terms of the commonwealths constitution of 1780.

The Atlantic slave trade came in for similar attack. Between 1769 and 1774, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland either passed highly restrictive duties on slave imports or banned the imports outright. Measures abolishing the trade also won approval in Massachusetts, New York, and Delaware, only to be thwarted by royal governors. The Virginia General Assembly, calling the commerce an inhumanity, passed high duties on the slave trade in 1767, 1769, and 1772, rejected on each occasion by the Kings Privy Council. Finally, the Continental Congress, acting in 1774 and 1776, halted the trade until the end of the Revolutionary War.

In all, by 1787, five Northern states had either abolished slavery or put it in the course of abolition; New York, the largest slaveholding state north of Maryland, had passionately debated abolition and come close to enacting an emancipation law in 1785, finally achieved in 1799; public debates in New Jersey, which would hold out the longest, until 1804, had been roiled by talk of abolition from neighboring states. In Virginia, where the legislature liberalized manumission laws in 1782, lawmakers three years later seriously debated a gradual emancipation proposal initiated by a statewide petition campaign.

It needs emphasizing that outside of northern New England, where slavery was crumbling already, success was hard-won, even if the overall number of slaves, compared to the South, was very small. In some portions of lower New England and the Middle States, notably New Yorks Hudson Valley, slavery and slave trading were important to the local economy, and resistance to antislavery efforts there was especially strong; but slaveholders everywhere ferociously fought any proposal for emancipation. The heart of the matter, for them, was property rights, an issue that won over to their side many non-slaveholders.

No state was prepared to offer direct monetary compensation for freeing the slaves (as Britain would grant its colonial slaveholders in 1833); slaveholders, who wielded outsized political power, charged that anything short of such compensation, paid in full, would be, as one proslavery New Jerseyan put it, a solemn act of publick ROBBERY, or FRAUD. Some slaveholders opposed even compensated emancipation, insisting that legislators had no authority whatsoever to interfere with vested property rights. Beginning in Pennsylvania, abolitionist advocates and lawmakers in most states had to settle for compromises that freed only the children of slaves and kept them in indentured servitude for a period that in some placesat the slaveholders insistanceran four to seven years beyond the age of majority.

To the most fervent abolitionists, the compromises amounted to a bogus emancipation that still left slaves, as one of them put it, groaning under the rod of a cruel unfeeling tyrant. Most historians today appear to agree, describing Northern emancipation, with a touch of cynicism, not as the product of intense political struggle between insurgent abolitionists and politically powerful slaveholders but as a grudging, half-hearted enterprise that rewarded slaveholders with a kind of indirect compensation.

Their accounts relate important truths about the limitations of Northern emancipation. But they ignore how, with unprecedented force and against the immense weight of the past, abolitionists and their political allies abolished outright or initiated the abolition of an entire category of propertyby any measure, a radical act in a world dedicated to the guarantee of property as a vested right. They slight how even the most gradual emancipation laws immediately broke the chattel principle regarding the children of slaves, which was a cornerstone of American slavery. They overlook how resistant slaveholders forever considered the measures repugnant and oppressive, unjustly depriving slaveholders, one Massachusetts jurist wrote, of property formerly acquired under the protection of law. They suppress how the legislation formally branded slaveholding, an institution almost universally deemed perfectly valid among whites less than twenty years earlier, as an abominationone that, according to the 1780 Pennsylvania law, robbed slaves of the common blessings of nature while casting them into the deepest afflictions.

As its victories piled up, the haphazard antislavery movement began to cohere and push for still larger reforms, regarding its previous successes, according to the Pennsylvania law, as just one more step to universal civilization. In 1784, the Philadelphia antislavery group, having suspended operations during the Revolutionary War, reorganized as the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of the Abolition of Slavery. A year later, New Yorkers formed their own manumission society. By the end of 1790, at least six more self-styled abolitionist societies had appeared, from Rhode Island to Virginia.

These groups, restricted to white members, were not paragons of racial egalitarianism, as some historians are quick to point out. Some of the societies even admitted slaveholders to their ranks. Yet the revolutionary-era abolitionists envisaged black equality as well as black freedom in a biracial society, and they collaborated closely with African Americans, enslaved and free. The societies in time struck alliances with intrepid black abolitionists; individual members worked tirelessly with untold thousands of enslaved men, women, and children, pursuing claims of freedom with extraordinary success. Stopping short of extra-legal action, the abolitionists agitated to protect and expand the civil rights of free blacks respecting everything from access to the courts and securing marriages to preventing kidnapping into bondage. For the abolition societies, one leading New York African-American abolitionist later remarked, ending slavery was a prelude to eliminating racial distinctions and assuring that equal justice is distributed to the black and the white.

The American movement in turn became the antislavery beacon to the rest of the Atlantic world and especially to beleaguered British abolitionists like Granville Sharp. Having formerly berated the colonials en masse as slaveholders, Sharp would credit the American abolitionists, with whom he built close connections, for moving him to trace the evil to its source. His broadcasting of American antislavery and anti-slave trade tracts became the foundation for the great upsurge of British agitation against the slave trade that began in the late 1780s. For Sharp, as for other British abolitionists friendly to the patriot cause, the American Revolution loomed as the instigator of a civil war within the Empire that promised to eradicate slavery and servitude of every kind.

Sharp and the others were wrong: the American Revolution was also a slaveholders revolution, and in its aftermath, slaveholders stiffened their resolve to affirm their property rights in human beings. In the Lower South, where the humanitarian ripples from the 1770s died, slaveholders deemed slavery not simply as a necessity for their economic survival but as a scripturally sound and even noble institution, ratified by the example of the entire world. In Virginia, enlightened slaveholders like Jefferson faced the reality that proslavery planters ruled the roost in their own state and, in any case, that they possessed neither the strategy nor the will to pick up on the example of Northern emancipation.

When delegates assembled in Philadelphia in 1787 to design a stronger federal union, there was never a question about their granting the new national government authority over slavery in the states where it already existed. Southern slaveholding states were not about to give the new government the power to abrogate their property laws, including those enshrining slavery, any more than Northern states would surrender power over their property laws, including those advancing emancipation. Still, antislavery delegates to the Constitutional Convention, urged on by organized abolitionists outside the conventions closed doors, aimed at the very least to insure that the government had the authority to abolish the Atlantic slave tradeto that point, the vital first step in every blueprint yet devised for ending American slavery.

Lower South slaveholders violently refused, declaring the matter non-negotiable. Either leave the slave trade untouched and in the hands of the individual states, the rebarbative South Carolinian John Rutledge announced, or the Lower South shall not be parties to the Union. Yet, while they managed to salvage a significant twenty-year delay, and came away with enough to tell their constituents back home that they had secured a proslavery triumph, the slaveholders lost the main issue. The Constitution conceded to the slaveholding states a measure of extra representation in Congress and the Electoral College, although it was far from determinative; and it gave them a weakly worded clause on returning their fugitive slaves. The convention majority refused, however, to acknowledge slaverys legitimacy in national law, which gave the new national government authority over slavery wherever it exercised jurisdiction, as in the national territories. Above all, as the abolitionists had dearly hoped and the slaveholders deeply feared, the convention specifically authorized the national government not simply to regulate the Atlantic slave trade but to abolish it.

The proslavery Southerners, wary of their constituents, declared victory, proclaiming the concessions they gained in Philadelphia were sufficient to secure slavery permanently under the new Constitution. As with gradual emancipation, some of the most ardent antislavery advocates, especially in New England, denounced the conventions work as a sellout to tyranny. Many, if not most, prominent abolitionists, however, including the renowned physician, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and secretary of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society Benjamin Rush, hailed the Constitution, and in particular its provisions on the slave trade, as auguring the commencement of slaverys eradication. Some could not suppress self-congratulation. How honorable to America, one widely-reprinted Pennsylvania Gazette essay observed, to have been the first Christian power that has borne a testimony against so repugnant a practice as the Atlantic slave trade. How extraordinary, another writer remarked, that in this new country, we should, in less than 150 years, possess a degree of liberality and humanity, which has been unknown during so many centuries, and which is yet unattained in so many parts of the globe. In Providence, Rhode Island, an assembly of free people of color more straightforwardly celebrated the Constitution and its Prospect of a Stop being put to the Trade to Africa in our Fellow-Creatures.

*

The struggle, barely imaginable to the previous generation, had only just begun. For most of the ensuing seventy years, the slaveholders would secure the initiative in national politics, not because of the three-fifths clause in the Constitution or any other concession from the framers but because of the support they received from northern conservatives. Beginning in the 1790s, the renaissance of American plantation slavery bolstered by a revolution in cotton production turned early visions of a yeomans republic into the reality of an American slaveholders regime beyond anything slaverys early champions could have imagined.

Yet the struggle never ceased. As early as the very first Congress, abolitionists shook the House of Representatives with petitions demanding members press to the very limits of their powers to abolish promptly not just the Atlantic slave trade but slavery itself. Here and there, antislavery advocates won some unlikely victories, passing measures (eventually discarded) to choke off slaverys advance into the newly-acquired Louisiana Territory, fending off proslavery efforts to undermine the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade (achieved at the earliest possible date in 1808), and forcing a major crisis in 1819 and 1820 over the expansion of slavery, concerning Missouris admission to the Union. Thirty-five years later, the rise of the Republican Party, devoted to the single object of halting slaverys expansion in order to hasten its doom, commenced what soon enough became the final conflict.

That history was not harmless. It was not peripheral. Nothing about it was inevitable. It began with perhaps the greatest unforeseen transformation in modern history, the rise of antislavery ideas and arguments.Americans, earlier than anywhere else, turned that transformation into the politics that would seek to bring slavery to its ultimate extinction. In reaction, Americans also produced the mightiest proslavery resistance to those politics the world had ever seen and, through the Confederacy, came perilously close to establishing an American empire of slavery, if not for what Lincoln called the terrible war that rendered a result which was fundamental and astounding. Cynicism about this history defeats understanding as surely as complacency does. We are left to contemplate, as both Philip Roth the writer and Philip Roth the character he created tried to do, the terror and the triumph of the relentless unforeseen.

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American Slavery and 'the Relentless Unforeseen' | by Sean Wilentz | NYR Daily - The New York Review of Books

While the salaries of a teams highest-paid players are discussed ad nauseam between fans, media members and players themselves, many may not the ins and outs of how a salary works. Players unions across all sports are often brought up when it comes to collective bargaining agreements and grievances on behalf of players, but people dont know the extent of how they work.

In the NBA, the National Basketball Players Association has given players power in a way that few unions, sports or not, have ever been able to accomplish, and as a result, it has become the highest-paid union in the world.

According to the NBPAs website, the NBPA was established in 1954 with legendary Boston Celtic Bob Cousy at the forefront of the unionization. He wrote a letter to a representative of every team to gauge their interests and what they would want in a players union. The other players got on board, and the NBPA was born. Cousy, as the one who spearheaded the union, became the first President of the union.

The new NBA union demanded payment of back salaries for the defunct Baltimore Bullets club, the abolition of a $15 whispering foul that referees placed on players throughout the game in secret, and a 20-game limit on exhibition games, appearance payments for public events, and moving expenses for players who are traded.

The league initially refused to recognize the union, but followers of basketball will know that this did not last. In 1957, the league and the players agreed on the requests.

From pension for retired players to free agency, all of this went through the NBPA. The players have used a variety of tactics to let their voices be heard, from the 1964 season, when the players reportedly refused to take the court if they werent heard on a variety of issues, to the now common threat of lockout seasons if terms arent met.

65 years later after starting, now the players union has helped the NBAs players get their nine-figure contracts and made sure that players are getting their proper cut of the revenue.

The NBPA has never been afraid to stretch its power. They have fought for fair pay, fighting racism, and of course, fair pay. In a world where pay across racial lines is wildly inconsistent, the NBA has provided its largely-black member base with an avenue for fair pay and treatment of employees in a world where giants like Wal-Mart and Amazon refuse to allow unions to arrive.

Breaking from wages across the country at large companies such as these, the NBA players continue to get pay raises and more rights in the league. The average NBA salary is $7M, and while some of the players make less than a million dollars, a vast majority of NBA players who find a standard place in the league do. The highest-paid players in the NBA can make upwards of $40M a year.

While this is a large disparity, the union has ensured that all 450 members can live comfortably and stretch their rights as employees.

Players dont often speak out about the NBA salaries, but severalNBA players have spoken out about salaries in a different way. The WNBA, which likes to pride itself as the equivalent of the NBA for women, still pays its players peanuts when compared to NBA players.

Instead of staying silent, several NBA players have taken a stand and talked about how the WNBA players should get a similar CBA to them (relative to the WNBAs revenue, of course).

From LeBron James to Isaiah Thomas, several NBA players have spoken about how WNBA players deserve similar rights to NBA players. Kevin Garnett has used his platform on TNT to speak about it. Phoenix Suns big man DeAndre Ayton did not mince words when talking about it.

We should support it more and give the women a lot of credit because theyre doing the same thing us men do, Ayton said. They work on their game every day, as much as we do. They compete at the top level. I just think they deserve more attention and they should be paid more as well.

The NBA may continue to grow, but if they can start working with the WNBA and other unions, other players and employees across industries could begin to find themselves with more rights as workers and better pay in the process.

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NBA: What We Can All Learn From the World's Highest-Paid Union Workers - Sportscasting

Bringing historical characters well known, or overlooked to life has always been an important facet of cinema. A big personality can light up the screen. Their role in an already well understood moment of history can reveal new insights. Resonance with contemporary issues can be established. And filmmakers can sometimes even resist the temptation to make the film into a love-story.

Harriet explores the life of a Maryland slave, Mindy, who leaves behind her free husband and escapes north in 1949, travelling 100 miles to cross the state boundary into the more liberal Pennsylvania. Taking Harriet Tubman as her free name, the titular character insists on returning to rescue relatives, eventually joining the resistance movement and becoming one of the most prolific slave liberators of her time. Later federal legislative changes that allow slave-hunters to cross state boundaries, extend the dangerous journey of those fleeing Maryland, requiring travel to safety in Canada.

Cynthia Erivo plays Mindy/Harriet, capturing the tenacity and resilience of a woman who stands up to men who even after she finds freedom continue to tell her what she cant do. Shes a passionate and no-nonsense leader, never wavering from her goal. Faith and premonitions are well integrated into Harriets story. The spiritual songs of the underground railroad (the network of safe houses and antislavery activists) are used to good effect, and inject some much-needed emotion into Kasi Lemmons film that quickly establishes itself as something of a docudrama rather than a gripping expos of slavery and abolition.

The brutal treatment of slaves is mostly implicit. The legend of Moses leading slaves to the promised land is established, with rampant sexism leading men to believe it was a white abolitionist in blackface rather than a black woman. The roadblocks placed in the way of those who supported the abolition of slavery are laid out. However, the explanation of Harriets role in the American Civil War is disappointingly muddy, and the film relies on captions to establish the longer-lasting import of this figures work.

Harriet marks a significant character in the road to abolition. The film is an important history lesson. But its emotional grip on the audience is minimal. While Lemmons may have wanted to avoid making an action film that relied on sensational brutality for impact, his tale of slavery is somewhat underwhelming and oddly humdrum given the seriousness of the topic.

Harriet is released in UK and Irish cinemas including Movie House from 22 November.

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Harriet a significant character in the road to abolition (UK and Irish cinemas from Friday 22 November) - Alan in Belfast

This is part of a series of articles celebrating 20 years of MaltaToday

Twenty years might not sound like much in the scale of human history. To be honest, it is not very long even by newspaper standards. In a country that boasts a proud tradition of print media going back to the 19th century, MaltaToday is still a baby trying to take its first steps in a big world.

But 20 years is a very long time when it comes to the amount of change they can bring. When MaltaToday first came out in 1999, Eddie Fenech Adami had just been returned to power after Alfred Sants brief interlude as Prime Minister. The race for EU membership was about to begin in earnest. The introduction of divorce still seemed a near-impossibility in our lifetimes. And he first few boatloads of what would turn into a full-blown immigration crisis had already started arriving. Just look how much Malta has changed in those two decades.

So when my editor asked me to write a retrospective article about my experience with MaltaToday, I replied: Yes, gladly; but you do realise youre asking me write a whole book?

I am afraid I dont have time to do that right now, so instead I shall give an account of some of the experiences I have had in that time: focusing on the ones which I think taught me the most in my career.

I will start with what I consider to be the closest Ive ever been to a real war-zone. The year was 2008. The venue was Valletta. An estimated 14,000 hunters and trappers were marching on the capital, after the European Commission forced the government to close the spring hunting season. And boy, were they pissed off.

In all honesty, it was like the tension building up to the siege of Helms Deep. Even Former Police Commissioner John Rizzo looked a little scared when the first bottles started flying.

At least two journalists got slightly hurt in scuffles that broke out as the crowds dispersed later. I wasnt one of them; but thats probably because no one recognized me as a journalist (I dont look much like my press photo, when its not in my interest to do so).

As I made my way through thick crowds of very, very angry men, I stopped to chat with an old rugby friend of mine, who is also a hunter (yes, I have friends who have different opinions from mine). The conversation started with me telling him: tikxifnix (dont reveal who I am). And he didnt, recognizing that my precaution was warranted.

But then, the entire committee of the hunters organization FKNK marched past: led by former secretary Lino Farrugia, in a particularly foul mood. He nodded at my friend as he walked past then stopped and spun round to look at me.

Pointing at me but talking to my friend, he said very loudly DAK MALTATODAY! Then he stormed off.

The crowd that had hitherto ignored my existence suddenly turned to face me as a body. And Im telling you, its quite a hairy situation for a well-known anti-hunting journalist to find himself in.

Rather than beat me to a pulp, however, the ones who approached me were more interested in talking to me about our difference of views. It is a sensation I have often felt when talking to people who genuinely feel like theyre the good guys, but are being maliciously misrepresented. So I turned on my recorder and took their comments for the article.

As for Farrugia, I later interviewed him and discovered that he didnt seem to hold anything against me personally. He probably didnt even realise that he could quite easily have been responsible for a third injured journalist at that protest. I have since even eaten quail with Farrugia and the rest of the committee; the FKNK once invited the press to a summienata at Buskett, and I went very willingly.

I could say a lot more about this interlude, but that experience taught me that it is possible to have an open channel of communication with people, even if you strongly disagree with their views. I trust I do not need to explain the importance of that, at a time of all-out media war.

Another part of my job that has taught me a lot were all the interviews I have done since I joined the MT staff in 2007. Lets start with former prime minister Dr Alfred Sant. I have interviewed him twice in the living room of his Birkirkara home. The first time I was left waiting a few minutes, and inevitably I found myself poring over his (very impressive) library. What struck me most was that the section reserved for Russian literature Gogol, Dostoevsky, etc. was all in Russian.

When Sant came into the room, I asked him if he had read all those books in the original language. He nodded, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. What followed was a fascinating (but sadly very brief) discussion about Russian literature and history. I wish I could have interviewed him about that, instead of about Maltese politics.

One interview experience that cannot be left out concerns Mario De Marco. This happened shortly after the 2017 election, and again I interviewed him at his house. I was recording him or, more specifically, I thought I was using a new device which I hadnt tested properly. I suppose you can guess what happened next. When I got home and tried opening the file It wasnt there.

I actually had to call him, in a rising state of panic, to ask if we could do it all over again. Any other politician apart from Mario De Marco would have (quite rightly) sent me flying. But he just laughed, said something like Thats the sort of thing that usually happens to me, and accepted to be interviewed again.

This makes me probably the only Maltese journalist to have ever interviewed the same person twice on the same day

On the subject of interviews, I feel compelled to pay tribute to the people I have interviewed who have since passed away. These include Jeremy Bosseivain, the Dutch anthropologist who put Malta on the map with his seminal book Saints And Fireworks in the 1960s. And also Peter Apap Bologna, whom I interviewed at his Sliema home in 2012. I distinctly remember it as one of the most unexpectedly fascinating interviews I have ever done. Apart from being a veritable goldmine of information about the era, Peter also turned out to be witty, charming, intelligent, cultivated and in a word a delight to talk to. On both counts, my only regret is that I will never be able to repeat those experiences again.

From the outset I was reluctant to mention libel, but I cannot look back on my career with MaltaToday and not mention the fact that I was shut down by multiple lawsuits complete with the threat of a garnishee order for daring to ask questions about the relationship between Maltas tuna-penning industry, government and organized crime.

We seem to have quickly forgotten that garnishee orders did not become a problem only recently; people have been trying to shut down MaltaToday for 20 whole years. In this one case, they succeeded because those multiple lawsuits are still, technically, in abeyance.

But those lawsuits were all filed in the civil court. I was less lucky when sued by the prison director and five prison warders, over an article about the results of an investigation into a prison beating. Those lawsuits were filed in the criminal court, and I was therefore prosecuted by the police.

The abolition of criminal libel was in fact one of the many, many issues MaltaToday has campaigned for in its two-decade lifespan. For newspapers are not just about the news; they are also being part of the epochal changes happening in the country.

The job of a journalist also includes covering major events in the country, including election campaigns.

It was difficult to select one incident out of so many. But one experience that certainly stands out took place during the 2013 election campaign. I must say that this is all from memory, so a few of the details may be incorrect; but what Im after now is the gist of what happened. The significance, from the point of view of someone who works for a newspaper.

For my sins, I was appointed to cover the Nationalist campaign. Thats the equivalent of drawing the short straw. Labour events were more fun, because Labour expected to win at the time. So attending a Labour press event was like going to a street party. Going to a PN tat it-tinda meeting, on the other hand, was like being invited to your own funeral.

I cannot even begin to describe the tenebrous atmosphere at a Nationalist Party campaign event in 2013. Lawrence Gonzi knew he was destined to lose by a margin that not even I predicted; so well, you dont exactly expect to be treated to a bottle of champagne, when youre part of a newspaper that exposed a major corruption scandal on his watch (which, strangely, no one ever seems to talk about anymore).

So I knew perfectly well that my presence there was going to be a little irksome to some people. Two of these people kept staring at me (I remember their faces well, and the leering, sinister grin they gave me as I was sitting there trying to do my job but lets not dig all that up again.) My demeanour made it very clear to them that I was aware of their intentions, and that it wasnt going to get in the way of me trying to do with my job. But they persisted, and followed me around the rest of the evening (other journalists have had this worse, I know, I know)

Once the speeches were ended and the crowd was dispersing, Lawrence Gonzi happened to walk past. (Remember, I was not Mr Popular at that event).

Now: this is from memory and I have nothing on record; but the impression I got (and I doubt hed remember this, because for him, at that moment, this would have been just a minor footnote) was that he noticed that two thugs were harassing me. All I will say is this: the look Lawrence Gonzi gave to those two bullies would have withered an entire mountain. Before my eyes, I saw those two guys literally deflate into a puddle on the road.

Now: I could fill the rest of this article with my interpretation of what that meant, but Ill just end on this note: just as I once had to apologise to him (and got criticized even for that), now I have to acknowledge that Lawrence Gonzi showed real leadership that day. Without even speaking a word that I can remember.

The long and short of it is that the work of a journalist can be very hard. Even hair-raising, at times. But it is also highly rewarding.

Originally posted here:

The long and short of it - MaltaToday

The nearly century-long fight to pass a constitutional amendment that would establish explicit protections against sex discrimination under the law has gained renewed momentum in the last couple of weeks, following a blue wave in Virginia and a subsequent move from Congress.

On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee passed a resolution that would remove the deadline on the Equal Rights Amendment, an amendment to the United States Constitution that would guarantee Americans equal protections under the law regardless of sex. The deadline for states to ratify the amendment expired in June 1982, with just three states short of the 38 necessary to amend the Constitution.

But between 2017 and 2018, two more state legislaturesNevada and Illinoishave voted to ratify the amendment, and when Virginia Democrats won back control of the state legislature earlier this month, it created the conditions for the state to become the 38th and final supporter of the ERA, making it viable once again.

Now, 96 years after the ERAs initial proposal, some say the amendment is largely symbolic: Women have made significant gains over the last century, and, for the most part, U.S. federal lawon its faceno longer permits blatant discrimination against them. Viewed in this way, the ERA is a modest proposal, intended only to rectify the fact that the architects of our countrys foundational legal document didn't include women in it. Yet others argue thatwhile yes, it may function as a powerful symbolthe ERA still has the potential to radically transform the way women are treated by the legal system, and address the obvious societal inequalities that still exist between men and women.

Women were intentionally left out of the Constitution, and in those several hundred years since weve seen a culture that is premised to some degree on the idea that women are second-class citizens, said Jessica Neuwirth, the president of the ERA Coalition. The ERA says that, at the highest level of our law, women and men are equal citizens. I think that will have a tremendous impact.

The ERA is a constitutional amendment that was introduced by the suffragist Alice Stokes Paul in 1923, just three years after states ratified the 19th Amendment. As it was originally conceived, the ERA read: Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.

Later, in 1943, the wording changed slightly to read as it does now: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

It also seeks to expand the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment formed after the abolition of slavery. Although Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg helped establish the precedent that the amendment pertains to sex too, ERA advocates say the language of the 14th amendment is still too narrow to fix the gaps in the legal system.

"The 14th amendment has not really been effective because its related to state action; a lot of the discrimination were dealing with is in the private sector," Neuwirth said.

Gender-based violence. ERA advocates argue that the amendment would have the greatest effect on the way gender-based violence is litigated in court. While currently, victims of domestic violence and sexual assault can appeal their cases through legal system, they can only go so far: In 2000, the Supreme Court struck down a provision of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, which allowed victims of gender-based crimes to sue their attackers in federal court. The ERA could help fill in this gap in the law and give women one more avenue for seeking justice under the law.

Workplace discrimination. The ERA may also have a positive effect on pay inequity and pregnancy discrimination. On paper, both are illegal, but experts say hidden loopholes have made the law easy to skirt. There are laws that provide everyone should be given equal pay for equal work, Neuwirth explained. But one legitimate factor that can legally affect your pay is what you were paid at your last job. Well, who gets paid less? Neuwirth said the ERA could help break women out of this vicious circle that allows companies to lawfully pay them less for the same job.

And when it comes to pregnancy discrimination, it still remains the case that employers can, in effect, refuse to make accommodations for pregnant employees: In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that pregnant employees must demonstrate that an employers demands impose a significant burden on them, and that the employers reason for imposing the burden is not sufficiently strong in order for their employers behavior to be considered discrimination. That means if a company doesn't make many accommodations for non-pregnant employees, then it doesn't have to accommodate pregnant workers either.

Will the ERA fix all of these things? Not necessarily; its not an immediate fix, Neuwirth said. But right now, the law isnt working and thats because of the way its been interpreted. Thats why we need another framework.

Abortion. The ERAs potential impact on abortion rights remains one of the most contentious aspects of the amendment. Some Republican lawmakers have claimed that the ERA would provide the basis for rolling back abortion restrictions. Reproductive rights advocates vehemently insist thats not the case, some going so far as to say the ERA has nothing to do with abortion. But there may be a sense in which there is a kernel of truth to each sides argument. While the ERA wouldnt provide people with a constitutional right to abortion Roe v. Wade already does thatit could provide lawyers with another legal framework to argue against restrictions in court.

The right to abortion has been framed as a privacy issue and that allows for that fact that states can take an interest in the status of the fetus once its viable, said Kelsy Kretschmer, an assistant professor at Oregon State University with expertise on the ERA. The ERA could instead frame abortion as equality for women under the law, and that would be a very important shift in the legal conversation around abortion.

Kretschmer said she understands why, strategically, ERA advocates would want to keep abortion out of discussion of the amendment. In the 1970s, Phyllis Schlafly and her conservative allies used abortion to sow opposition to the ERA, falsely claiming that the amendment would repeal all and every kind of anti-abortion laws that we now have. Schlafly also used the specter of same-sex marriage, women in combat, and the collapse of the nuclear family to foment fear over the amendment.

It does seem reasonable that advocates for the ERA would like to keep it as straightforward as possible, Kretschmer said. But in 2019, with much of the blatant discrimination against women in the law has been expelled, the final frontier of womens equality may be fighting for these subtler forms of discrimination, she argued, abortion restrictions among them.

The battles that remain to be won are the ones that treat women differently because of ideas about what role they play in society, Kretschmer continued. If youre not going to fight those battles, I dont know what the point of the ERA is.

The House Judiciary Committees decision to lift the ERA deadline is just the first step in what could be a somewhat protracted effort to get the amendment ratified. While Virginias new Democratic majority all but guarantees the amendment will make it to the floor for a vote in favor of ratification, even if the U.S. House and Senate both vote to get rid of the 1982 deadline (a tall order given that Republicans currently control the Senate), there is still some ambiguity as to whether that means the ERA will become part of the Constitution.

First off, in the 1970s, five states rescinded their ratification of the amendment: Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Tennessee. When ERA advocates attempted to dispute their rescissions in 1982, appealing a case up to the Supreme Court, justices refused to hear the case because they said the ERAs expired deadline made the matter moot.

Still, theres some precedent when it comes to the court permitting an expired deadline on a constitutional amendment: In 1939, in a case related to a proposed amendment about child labor, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress has the final determination of the question whether, by lapse of time, its proposal of the amendment had lost its vitality before being adopted by the requisite number of legislatures.

ERA advocates could use this case to advance their cause, but it could be contentious.

The Supreme Court has held that an amendment that has [an expired] deadline can be valid, but it has never had the opportunity to decide what would happen if three-quarters of the states ratify it and the only thing standing in the way is the deadline, said Linda Coberly, the chair of the ERA Coalitions legal task force. It seems clear that there will be litigation over that issue.

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Women Aren't in the Constitution. What Would Change If They Were? - VICE