Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

Conversations about mental health have sprung up within the Rochester community, inspired by cruel incidences such as the murder of Daniel Prude. Similarly, the UR community has been significantly impacted by recent events surrounding mental health.

There are many resources for UR students, both remote and on-campus, although most have been entirely online due to the pandemic. Resources that support students who are struggling include the University Counseling Center (UCC), the UR CARE Network, UR Connected, the Health Promotion Office, and many more. Because of the critical nature of the pandemic and social justice issues that have occurred throughout the year, students have felt it important to review mental health advocacy for the Spring 2021 semester, and how it will continue for the upcoming in-person Fall 2021 semester.

UR Connected coach and first-year Karenrose Kamala shared her thoughts on how the surrounding community impacts the institutions approach to mental health: UR tends to forget that theyre part of the Rochester community as a whole, and theres definitely a responsibility to play their part, especially when peoples health is on the line. As for improvements, I think UR just needs to be more cognizant of their impact, and they also need to more actively listen to students.

CARE Network Associate Director Kaitlin Legg told the Campus Times in an interview that as a part of their service, the CARE Network works with students to better understand what resources work for the [students] situation. If a student doesnt feel comfortable with an institutional resource, UCC or the CARE Network can direct them towards off-campus resources.

Senior Antoinette Nguyen, a core leader of the UR Abolition Coalition (URAC), agreed that students may feel uncomfortable with institutional resources because they are made by people of higher power, which makes students worry: Is that really a safe space?

Likewise, it can be a challenge to analyze how students have grown through mental health programs without direct feedback.

Associate Director for University Health Promotion Amy McDonald recognized the difficulty of evaluating the success of these programs. Despite the challenge, she says that UHS creates measurable objectives ahead of time, and then has an evaluation afterwards and is able to track if we met those objectives.

According to Nguyen, race also plays a role in making mental health advocacy on campus more difficult. Mental health is a very white concept in everybodys head, she said. Some are allowed to have mental health problems, and some are not, because of all these other structures that exist.

Especially as an Asian person, my family has so many taboos around therapy and mental health resources. Theyre refugees, so theyre like, Theres bigger problems, and I think thats a very pervasive thought in a lot of communities of color and ethnically non-white communities. So deconstructing that is something that I want to dedicate my life to, Nguyen continued.

There are diverse on-campus spaces for students of color, first-generation/low-income students, LGBTQ+ students, and students with disabilities. These spaces include the Kearns Center, the Womanist Club, and the Black Student Union, but Nguyen wishes that those spaces had more funding from the University.

Similarly, Kamala said that its the student coaches that makes UR Connected more approachable. Sometimes you just need someone who can kind of relate more closely. I know a lot of the feedback we get, people mention that talking to coaches can feel like talking to a friend.

Still, students like Nguyen have concerns for how the University is supporting student mental health advocates.

We are creating space. We are carving out space to heal for specific racialized events, which I think is really good, Nguyen said. I just wish that the University gave more support, instead of always having it all on the students.

More here:

A review of the spring semester's mental health advocacy - Campus Times

The checkered flag is poised to start waving as state lawmakers enter the final month of the legislative session with a host of major policy and budget issues still unresolved, from repeal of the death penalty to raising taxes on the mining industry, wholesale changes to the K-12 funding formula and many other big-ticket items.

Tuesdays meeting of the Economic Forum the panel of five economists who forecast expected state tax revenue is generally viewed as the green light for a host of budgetary issues and major bills to move to the finish line before the clock strikes midnight on sine die, May 31.

Most indicators are that the improving economy, coupled with rising COVID vaccination rates, will boost state tax revenues above what the Forum forecasted in December about $8.5 billion over the next two fiscal years, or about $500 million less than the last two-year budget cycle.

Legislators have nonetheless proceeded based on the less-rosy budgetary picture, making tough cuts to education and health care programs that at times drew heated debate. While a recovering economy is expected to help alleviate some of those previously identified cuts, lawmakers say theyre still waiting on the bigger piece of the puzzle U.S. Treasury guidance on how the state can spend the roughly $2.9 billion allocated through the recently passed federal American Recovery Act.

But without guidance soon, legislators say it's almost a guarantee that a summer special session will be needed to make a decision on how to dole out the one-time federal windfall.

Every day from this day forward, we're running out of time, Senate Finance Committee Chair Chris Brooks said. (If) that happens at a certain point ... the only way we can do it is to close the budget, and then fill it back in at a later date, just because we'll run out of time.

Gov. Steve Sisolaks Chief of Staff Michelle White echoed those comments, saying that the governors office didnt want to recommend allocating general fund dollars to needs that may later be met by an influx of federal funds even on topics that might attract bipartisan support, such as funding a replacement unemployment insurance system, a broad expansion of preschool and more. Beyond the flexible $2.9 billion, other pots of federal funding with more specific earmarks are also expected.

The governor wants to make sure that that's a process that can go through the appropriate budgetary process, and with the Legislature having full input, she said. We hope that's the case.

Outside of the budget, legislators are beginning their typical ritual of rolling out ambitious bills in the waning days of the session, including a state-based public health insurance option, fixes to the oft-criticized unemployment insurance system, and a major transmission and electric vehicle omnibus bill. Theyre also making progress on behind-the-scenes negotiations, including on a much-publicized effort to raise mining taxes and implementing a wholesale change to the decades-old K-12 funding formula.

But hopes in early May can often turn to tears by June, with many landmines and potential pitfalls awaiting lawmakers and major pending legislation. Heres a look at the state of play for some of the biggest proposals on tap for the last month of the session.

Mining taxes

The question of a potential mining tax hike has simmered in the background through the first three months of session. Theres been little public movement from lawmakers, but three proposed constitutional amendments raising the industrys constitutional rate cap are playing the role of Chekovs gun.

Though progressive advocates are clamoring for lawmakers to move forward on AJR1 striking what they call the mining industrys sweetheart deal in the Constitution and imposing a 7.75 percent tax on the gross proceeds of mining companies discussions are ongoing about a potential deal that would lead to lawmakers dropping the proposed amendments in favor of a more immediate tax change.

Democratic legislators appear wary of sending a mining tax resolution to the 2022 midterm ballot and stirring up rural angst at a time when Gov. Steve Sisolak and other high-profile Democrats are up for re-election. The mining industry may also be wary of a ballot measure voters in 2014 narrowly defeated a ballot question removing the language in the Constitution capping mining taxation, but that victory for the industry came during a midterm election that favored Republicans and had particularly low turnout (though many expect the 2022 midterms to be difficult for Democrats as well, given that the party controlling the White House historically does poorly in midterm elections).

I said even last special session that if we can find common ground and some compromise that would avoid us having an expensive exercise on the ballot, that we will certainly be open to that, and we still are, Assembly Speaker Jason Frierson (D-Las Vegas) said on Monday.

Negotiations are still fluid meaning things could easily collapse between now and the end of session. But lawmakers, including Senate Finance Chair Chris Brooks (D-Las Vegas), say that some sort of immediate mining tax increase may be the best and only option to raise revenue this session.

I would prefer to see a collaborative approach between the industry and the Legislature to come up with a change in the current [taxation] structure that they have, he said. That would be a sustainable way to put money into our budgets in the short term, and not many years from now. I'm supportive of that approach.

But any struck deal will lead to a math problem lawmakers need at least a handful of Republican votes in the Assembly and Senate to clear the needed two-thirds threshold for a tax increase.

One of Republicans most prominent concerns when the proposed constitutional amendments emerged over the summer was that the mining industry was surprised by them; this time around, the industry is at the table for discussions. Republican leaders in both chambers have not completely closed the door on a tax increase, but said they want more input in the process and would want any revenue hike be narrowly tailored and go to specific programs or functions amenable to both parties.

I think that all tax bills should have been discussed from the get-go, Senate Minority Leader James Settelmeyer (R-Minden) said in an interview. I don't think it's proper to bring anything with 30 days left and say, Oh, here you go. We made the deal, and now we want you to vote for it. Why not have a discussion with us?

State-based public option

One of the most heavily lobbied issues over the last month of the session will be the effort to implement a state public health insurance option requiring insurers that bid to provide coverage to the states Medicaid population to also apply to offer a state-backed public option plan.

SB420 was introduced in the Senate on Wednesday and sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro (D-Las Vegas) and has already been scheduled for a hearing Tuesday.

The legislation dubbed CannizzaroCare comes from public option efforts in past sessions, including a 2017 effort to allow Nevadans to buy into the states Medicaid program, (which the Legislature approved but that was vetoed by Gov. Brian Sandoval), and a 2019 study lawmakers approved to look into the possibility of allowing Nevadans to buy into the states Public Employee Benefits Program (PEBP) health plan.

The legislation is backed by a cadre of public health groups (including health districts in Washoe and Clark counties) and progressive organizations, but has attracted an organized opposition effort from doctors, hospitals and health insurance panning the legislation as an unaffordable new government-controlled health insurance system.

Death with dignity

The latest in a long line of efforts to legalize a process allowing terminally ill patients to self-administer life-ending medication prescribed by a physician hasnt made much movement since it was referred without recommendation out of committee by the first committee deadline in early April.

The bill, AB351, was referred to the Assembly Ways and Means Committee shortly after, where its sat ever since. But bill sponsor Edgar Flores (D-Las Vegas) said he was confident about the bills chances adding that he expected it to come up for a hearing and likely vote at some point once the budget committee finishes processing more straightforward agency bills.

Eventually we'll have an opportunity to have a hearing there, and then hopefully get it to the floor, he said. And I'm confident that that's where it's at now. Obviously, things may change, but I think that's where we're at now.

Flores said he had also spoken with the states Department of Health and Human Services, and believed the agency would take its fiscal note (estimated cost to implement) off the bill.

The concept has divided lawmakers, and not always along strict party lines. Assembly Minority Leader Robin Titus (R-Wellington) said she had struggled with the bill; her libertarian side supported giving patients those rights, but thought that many of the concepts including limiting a coroners investigation and timelines in the bill were improper.

I have real issues with those things, apart from my struggle with does a person have a right to decide how they end their life, she said.

Death penalty

Members of the Assembly recently voted along party lines to abolish the death penalty, pushing the proposal as far as its ever been in Nevada after fits and starts in recent sessions. But the bill hasnt been touched in the Senate, where both the committee chair responsible for processing it and the Senate majority leader are prosecutors whose boss Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson has been vocal in favor of keeping capital punishment.

Gov. Steve Sisolak has at times expressed unqualified opposition to the death penalty, and on other occasions said he would support it for extreme cases, such as the Oct. 1 mass shooting.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairwoman Melanie Scheible has said that the bill could move forward if the sponsor can come with an amendment that is acceptable to the governor, but bill presenter Assemblyman Steve Yeager while acknowledging he wants to make progress says hes not sure whether he and abolition supporters would accept a watered down version of the bill.

Others, including leaders of the Nevada State Democratic Party, say the onus is on senators to at least give the bill the courtesy of a hearing. In a video not widely circulated before this week, Scheible affirmed unequivocally at the Battle Born Progress Progressive Summit in January that she supported the quest to end the death penalty.

DETR bill

Republicans have latched on to one of the most prominent failings of the executive branch massive backlogs in an inundated unemployment claims system as one of their top priorities this session. Lawmakers of both parties often mention the emails they have received from claimants desperate for stalled benefits.

Senate Republicans have met with claimants in the glitchy Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and hinted for weeks that they would introduce legislation to address issues identified in a lawsuit brought by PUA claimants, such as the lack of communication between a regular unemployment and PUA computer system. They also have been publicly critical that the Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation loan policy bill, SB75, makes technical changes to the regular unemployment program but does not speak to some of claimants marquee complaints.

Though Republicans bill, SB419, dropped last week, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chris Brooks described it as a stunt and likely dead on arrival because it proposes spending $40 million from the strained general fund on a multi-year modernization project.

Brooks said the ambitious project should wait until the latest round of federal funding comes through. Democrats have listed a modernization project as a top priority in a framework on how to spend the money, and say they expect the federal guidance will allow such a use.

White said Democrats are in agreement with recommendations made by a governor-appointed unemployment strike force led by former Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley.

We have to make sure that anything that we've identified last year that could be better, that we're making all efforts to change now that funding will be available, pending eligibility, White said.

DETR officials have said it could take up to a year to design a request for proposals laying out exactly what the state wants out of the IT overhaul. In the meantime, the governors budget proposes a modest $1 million over the biennium for contractors to help resolve close to 2,000 technical issues of various sizes within the benefits system.

Education

Release of the long-awaited report from the statutorily-created Commission on School Funding last week laid bare what many lawmakers and public education advocates have long suspected moving Nevada to the national average in per-pupil school funding will cost more than $2 billion over a decade and hundreds of million of dollars in additional revenue every year.

The report recommended that lawmakers implement major changes to the current sales and property tax systems, but those general proposals have largely fallen flat. On property tax changes, Brooks said he absolutely agrees changes are needed but I don't think now's the time to do it as the state continues to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Frierson in a previous statement panned the sales tax as regressive but signaled support for restructuring the mining tax and bringing in revenue from short-term rental companies such as Airbnb.

"With regards to other revenue structures, many take time and robust stakeholder outreach and that has not been something we have had during this session," Frierson said.

Still, lawmakers are moving forward with plans to accelerate a shift to the new Pupil-Centered Funding Formula, an update to the dated past funding formula initially approved by legislators in 2019. Many of those budget details, including promises to implement various hold harmless protections to avoid massive overnight funding losses for rural school districts, are still in the works.

Some Republicans have expressed openness to increase funding for education if it has direct ties to student outcomes and is allocated in a transparent manner; they fear that it could otherwise be swept up into collective bargaining agreements. They also have bristled at the shift toward the new funding formula, which has reshuffled the deck on some of their partys most significant legislative accomplishments a series of categorical programs targeted toward specific student groups with special needs that flourished under unified Republican control of the governors office and Legislature in 2015.

Settelmeyer cautioned that Republicans would only be likely to support tax increases directly tied to targeted education spending (the so-called categoricals, which include programs such as Read by Grade 3, and Zoom and Victory schools). He said the odds of starting a discussion on a bipartisan way of how to get there didnt bode well at this late stage in the session.

That's nothing new. Education has always wanted more money, he said. Republicans have shown consistently, if it goes to a purpose, we'll have a discussion. You want it to just go to the same system? I think we tend to be a little bit less likely to agree.

Cannabis

A bill to authorize cannabis consumption lounges seeks to resolve a longstanding conundrum in the state that using cannabis is legal, but consuming it anywhere outside a private home is illegal. It stands at odds with an assumption that drove much investment in the Nevada marijuana industry that tourist consumption would make the Silver States cannabis industry punch above its weight.

The measure, AB341, is described even by the director of the Cannabis Compliance Board as the most promising vehicle for diversifying an industry with upper ranks that skew white and male. Social equity elements of the bill would give a competitive advantage to lounge operators who have been adversely affected by the War on Drugs, bringing new players into an industry characterized by extremely high barriers to entry and fierce competition for a limited number of licenses.

A similar consumption lounge concept failed late in the 2019 session, but that was before the Cannabis Compliance Board had formally assumed regulatory oversight of the industry. Proponents are optimistic that with a focused regulatory body in place, the state is now ready to take a step toward lounges.

The bill has been parked in the Ways and Means Committee because of the estimated $3 million the Cannabis Compliance Board would have to spend to support the projected 30 new positions needed to regulate scores of consumption lounges. Marijuana regulation is generally self-supported by licensing fees, although the board has not yet estimated how much revenue the lounges would bring in to balance out the ledger.

I'm hopeful it's gonna move, said Assemblyman Steve Yeager (D-Las Vegas), the bills sponsor, adding that it would likely be one of the last things finished in the session. I just think it's gonna sit there for a while, because we have to close sort of everything else before we can really have a discussion about what might be available to satisfy that fiscal note.

Another potential wrench in the wheels is that the bill requires a two-thirds majority vote, which means its possible Republican-raised concerns about people driving after consuming marijuana could sideline the bill.

Asked about the possible reemergence of a policy allowing coveted dispensary licenses for applicants who did not win them in a contentious 2018 licensing round, Gilles said the governors office is not committing to any policies on that front, citing many moving parts, including ongoing litigation.

I will be happy to engage in any conversations with folks if there's a proposal that's worth ... being worked through the Legislature that's going to resolve everybody's issues and everybody's concerns, he said. I don't know that that's possible.

Energy policy

One of the biggest remaining policy-focused bills yet to drop is Sen. Chris Brooks forthcoming major energy policy bill, which is expected to be introduced sometime this week.

Brooks has described the provisions of the bill in past interviews it will require a $100 million investment by NV Energy to facilitate greatly expanded electric vehicle charging infrastructure, while doubling down on transmission infrastructure aimed at finishing NV Energys proposed Greenlink transmission project, which utility regulators partially approved in March.

On Friday, Brooks said that those portions and others previously described including adoption of tenant solar, allowing utility-scale battery storage projects to access renewable energy tax abatement programs, and moving the state to a larger wholesale electric market would all be included in the legislation.

Brooks reiterated that there were no surprises in the forthcoming bill, and he said the goal was to start the state on major transmission projects as soon as possible saying that while the Public Utilities Commission made the right choice in the most recent transmission case, lawmakers needed to sign off on any major policy push toward greater transmission infrastructure.

Its not the PUCs job to encourage economic development in the state of Nevada, it's the PUCs job to keep the lights on, he said. And so the argument that we need transmission, so that we can become a regional hub for transmission in the West, and so that we can attract economic activity to our state, is not necessarily the regulator's job... it's the policymakers and legislators jobs and the governor's job to give that message.

Housing and rental assistance

Gov. Steve Sisolak has said that the state extension of the eviction moratorium, which runs through May at the state level but is backed up by a federal moratorium that lasts through June, will be the final one. But lawmakers are working on a bill that creates a glide path from the eviction ban into normalcy, and ushers out the hundreds of millions of dollars the state has received in rental assistance but has struggled to get out to people quickly.

As we're coming up to the end of the moratorium, we need to figure out a way to even further ... perfect the way in which we get those dollars into the hands of landlords, said Scott Gilles of the governors office.

Gilles said the governors office doesnt think they can get around a federal government restriction that prevents payments directly to a landlord with no tenant involvement but the legislation aims to ensure that a tenant who wants to engage and take advantage of the rental assistance dollars will ultimately have that opportunity.

Assemblyman Steve Yeager (D-Las Vegas) said discussions include how we can slow the eviction process enough so that the monies that are there get used and whether there are other pots of less-restricted money that could help tenants who dont qualify under newer, stricter federal rules setting income limits or landlords who are having trouble securing the required tenant cooperation.

Its still unclear whether the bill would have provisions that prevent landlords from immediately evicting a tenant after receiving overdue back rent through the assistance program.

We're looking at whatever options are there to keep people in their homes and if there's some enticement for a landlord to be paid these dollars or ... have some sort of agreement going forward through the mediation program, Gilles said. Obviously that's the intended result.

State worker collective bargaining

Another potential hurdle in the rush to finish the session will come in the novel process of approving collective bargaining agreements for state workers the first-ever undertaking since lawmakers expanded bargaining rights to state employees in 2019.

In theory, the bargaining units (representing a swath of state workers) are supposed to come to a tentative agreement with the states Department of Administration, go for approval to the states Board of Examiners (composed of the governor and other statewide elected officials), and is then transmitted to the Legislature as a budget amendment, prior to the end of session.

However, a spokeswoman for the Department of Administration said Friday that only one agreement (with the Nevada State Law Enforcement Officers Association) out of the seven recognized bargaining units is ready to go before the Board of Examiners.

The agency said it does not currently have a timeline for bringing forward agreements with bargaining units represented by AFSCME (which represents four) and is still negotiating tentative agreements with two other units the Battle Born Fire Fighters Association and Nevada Police Union.

The 2019 legislation authorizing state workers to collectively bargain also contains provisions giving the governor the final say on wages or other monetary compensation despite any approved collective bargaining agreement.

White said that the main focus right now was timing, and getting budget amendments over to lawmakers with enough time to spare before the end of session.

Anyone could look at it right now with 30 days left and say that's a tight timeline, and it is a tight timeline but, we feel confident in our partnership throughout this process to negotiate in good faith and get everything done that we can possibly get done in these negotiations and agreements, she said.

Right to Return

A bill presented by Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro (D-Las Vegas) that guarantees hospitality workers the right to return to the job they lost during the pandemic has not advanced since it had a public hearing in early April. But the measure, SB386, has a waiver that exempts it from legislative deadlines, and parties have been negotiating to address stark disagreements between union and business interests.

Our whole goal is making sure people can get back on the job and so it's something we're monitoring. I think there are some real, real challenges that people are trying to work through. And that's kind of the last update I've had on it, White said on Saturday. So I think we'll see. I think it's something that folks want to find a resolution on.

See the original post:

There's one month left in the session. Here's where the Legislature is on taxes, the death penalty and more. - The Nevada Independent

The Portland Police Department said it has been in contact withthe FBI overa menacing video that includeda masked individual with an altered voice issuing a threat against the city's mayorTed Wheeler.

The Oregonian reported that the two-minute video appeared on Twitter earlier this week and the individual claims to be part of the citys anti-fascist community.

"Blood is already on your hands, Ted," the person said. "The next time, it may just be your own."

The paper reported that the video emerged shortly after Wheeler signaled that he would take a tougher stance against thosewho want todestroyparts of the city in the name of protest.He vowed to "unmask" those who take up arson or vandalism and said it was time to "hurt them a little bit," according to the New York Times.

He asked the public to come forward with any information on members of the anarchist group.

"The city is beginning to recover, but self-described anarchists who engage in regular criminal destruction dont want things to open up, to recover," Wheeler said. "They want to prevent us from doing the work of making a better Portland for everyone. They want to burn, they want to bash."

The Oregonian reported that the individual in the video vowed that the unrest would continue in the city until Wheeler steps down.

GET THE FOX NEWS APP

"We are not just challenging the idea of having Ted as a mayor. We are challenging the idea of having mayors at all. We want abolition. Abolition is absolute," the individual in the video said, according to the Post Millennial.

Fox News' Thomas Barrabi contributed to this report

Read more from the original source:

Portland cops, FBI investigate video of masked anarchist who issued threat to Wheeler: report - Fox News

Cronyism and outsourcing have defined the governments response to the pandemic, from the VIP lane for personal protective equipment (PPE) suppliers with connections to the Tory party to the privatised track and trace system so flawed it was described by Sage as only being of marginal impact. But less attention has been paid to what the longer-term impact of these decisions might be. Far from being an aberration, the governments pandemic response reflects its commitment to embedding private interests at the heart of the state and stealthily chipping away at our most valued national institution.

As Sir David King, a former chief scientific adviser, and the special representative for climate change under Boris Johnson when he was foreign secretary, recently told the Guardian, the government is slipping through plans to effectively privatise the NHS by stealth in the name of a pandemic. This story of privatisation is not one of wholesale transfer, such as the sell-off of British Gas or Royal Mail, but rather of a gradual hollowing out, a process that has been further accelerated by the pandemic and will continue under the Johnson government. In 2010, for example, the NHS spent 4.1bn on private sector contracts; by 2019, this had more than doubled to 9.2bn.

Already, the governments pandemic response is shaping the future structures of the NHS, public procurement and public scrutiny. Look at PPE procurement, which has functioned recently as a giant slush fund for Tory donors. Matt Hancocks pub landlord, Alex Bourne, and a former adviser to Priti Patel, Samir Jassal, are just two beneficiaries of what the charity Transparency International has called systemic biases in the award of PPE contracts favouring those with political connections to the party of government. The charity says these red flags require more, not less, scrutiny. But less scrutiny is precisely what the government has been engineering.

Ministers are still refusing to publish the full list of companies that were placed in the VIP lane after being endorsed by politicians or senior civil servants. The register of ministers financial interests, which should be published every six months, was last updated nine months ago. Basic avenues of accountability and transparency are consistently being closed down or obstructed; journalists have found freedom of information (FoI) requests delayed or blocked by the clearing house unit set up in the Cabinet Office to screen requests, while leaked emails show the Cabinet Office is collating lists of journalists with details about their work, and intervening when sensitive subjects are inquired about. (The unit has been condemned as Orwellian by the former Conservative cabinet minister David Davis.)

Meanwhile, the role of overseeing the ministerial code was left vacant for five months after Sir Alex Allan resigned when Johnson opted not to sack Patel for breaching the code last November. His replacement, Christopher Geidt, will still not be able to initiate investigations into impropriety without the prime ministers approval.

These instances reflect a dilution of oversight that bodes ill for the future. Scaling back scrutiny and accountability are vital ways of providing cover for further NHS privatisation, a policy ministers know to be politically unpopular. Another way of doing this is through the creation of new bodies, spearheaded by figures who are compliant with and sensitive to this governments agenda. Hancock has already replaced Public Health England (PHE) with the National Institute for Health Protection (NIHP), which will continue to sit outside the NHS (the consulting firm McKinsey was paid 560,000 for five weeks work drawing up plans for the new body). The NIHP will be led by Dido Harding, who sits in the House of Lords as a Tory peer, an appointment that Lord Falconer termed a corruption of our constitution.

The creation of the NIHP was sold as bringing together expertise. But politically the government has used the cover of a pandemic to subsume public health experts under track and trace management. Vital areas of public health are now being handed over to an appointee who thought the most appropriate way of dealing with the pandemic was to outsource contracts to private sector providers such as Serco, Sitel and Deloitte, rather than harness the capacity of local public health teams. Understandably, the creation of the NIHP and abolition of PHE has upset dedicated public professionals across the health service.

Another policy decision that may strengthen the cronyist approach adopted during the pandemic is the health and social care white paper, which was published in February this year and spun as a set of policies that would unravel Andrew Lansleys 2012 Health and Social Care Act. The white paper sets out how integrated care systems (ICS) will be rolled out, combining NHS trusts with GP services as commissioners from a single budget pot. These ICS bodies will no longer be required to put contracts out to tender, but can instead award them directly creating opportunities for contracts to be awarded to politically connected firms.

The campaigning thinktank We Own It is concerned that these plans would embed the role of the private sector within the health service, but with less transparency and accountability over contracts. Indeed, GP services are an area where the private sector is taking an increasing interest, with US health giants such as Centene Corporation buying up GP services through its UK arm Operose Health. Campaigners are worried these ICS bodies will be unaccountable and profit-making, and that private providers could sit on their commissioning boards (its not yet clear whether ICS board meetings will be public and subject to FoI requests).

Its not just GP services that are an area of concern. In August last year, the government announced a four-year plan to spent 10bn of taxpayers money on private hospitals in order to clear NHS waiting lists. This has been justified as an emergency measure to deal with a backlog, but the question remains why this money was used to fund private providers rather than NHS capacity. The health campaigner John Lister says the institutionalised use of private hospitals will likely leave the NHS weakened and could lead to long-term expansion of the private sector for elective care.

This points to the crux of the issue. Though ministers have sought to justify their decisions with reference to the exceptional circumstances of Covid-19, many of these decisions instead seem part of a longer-term plan to embed political appointees and private providers at the heart of the state. Rather than selling off the NHS outright a decision politicians know would be unpopular they are instead doing this through the backdoor, by stealth. Its up to everyone who cares about the future of the NHS to make some noise about it.

Link:

The NHS is being privatised by stealth under the cover of a pandemic - The Guardian

Commodore Malcolm Williams, 69, of Gains Road, Southsea, died following a collision on the A3(M) on Tuesday, April 20, Hampshire Police confirmed.

Paying tribute to the retired Royal Navy officer, his family said: Commodore Malcolm Williams CBE RN was a man of principle, fortitude and compassion and a loving husband, father, grandfather and brother.Both his naval career and his subsequent work were immensely important to him. He will be missed by those that had the privilege to know him.

Cdre Williams had a naval career spanning 31 years, during which he served in the Falklands War.

He was awarded CBE in the New Years Honours for coordinating the joint response to crises in Sierra Leone, Kosovo and humanitarian responses to natural disasters in Mozambique and Honduras.

Having left the naval service, he was appointed as chief executive of the Shipwrecked Mariners Society, a national charity based in Chichester, where he turned his attentions to the welfare of merchant seafarers and fishermen.

With others, he spearheaded the campaign to halt the abolition of the cheque by banks and was a staunch advocate for proper representation and coverage of merchant seafarers during the November Ceremonies.

He was later admitted into the Fraternity of the Younger Brethren of Trinity House.

Cdre Williams retired as the societys chief executive in 2018 after 14 years at the helm.

Members of the Shipwrecked Mariners Society paid tribute to him, and said: Commodore Malcolm Williams CBE RN was a man of principle, fortitude and compassion. Both his naval career and his subsequent work for the Shipwrecked Mariners Society were immensely important to him. He will be missed by those that had the privilege to know him.

During his Royal Navy service Cdre Williams served as operations officer on the Type 21 frigate HMS Ambuscade during the Falklands conflict.

He also served as navigator aboard aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious and commanded both HMS Andromeda and HMS Scylla. He was commanding officer on HMS Fearless while she was deployed in the Far East for the handover of Hong Kong in 1997.

Following his naval retirement Malcolm took up his role with the Shipwrecked Mariners Society, focusing on the welfare of merchant seafarers, fishermen and their dependants in need.

He led a campaign to stop cheques being abolished by banks and called for acknowledgement of merchant seafarers during remembrance services.

Speaking following the news of Cdre Williams passing, society chairman Captain Nigel Palmer, said: Malcolm was a true gentleman and respected by all who knew him. He instigated reform and modernisation of the society during his time as chief executive and we have much to be thankful to him for. When he retired he left the Society on a solid foundation for the future and his legacy will live on.

His tireless campaigning for proper recognition of the role of the Merchant Navy in wartime was successful in raising the profile with the public. He will be very sadly missed by us all.

View post:

Tributes to former head of the Shipwrecked Mariners Society - Chichester Observer

Anti-Asian violence has taken hold of national attention this spring with six Asian women among the lives lost to a string of shootings in Atlanta and four members of the Sikh community among the lives lost to another shooting in Indianapolis. Additionally, brutal attacks against East Asian and Southeast Asian elders have been carried out across the country. It remains unclear when or if these attacks will cease.

In response to this surge in violence, the Asian American community and its allies have organized around the rallying cry and hashtag #StopAsianHate. While this slogan has done important work to draw attention to anti-Asian violence and to guard against alternative hashtags like #AsianLivesMatter, which would problematically appropriate the work of Black movements, the word hate misdiagnoses the problem Asian American communities are facing.

The hate frame locates racism in the extreme emotional responses of individuals, which obscures the fact that racism is a structural problem. This is why, in the immediate aftermath of the Atlanta shooting, the national conversation became about whether the shooters actions were racially motivated when it should have been about the white supremacist structures of racial inequality and the feeling that conspired to produce both the assault and the assailant.

The second risk of #StopAsianHate is that the hashtag prescribes a solution that isnt one: hate-crimes legislation. And, indeed, the Senate recently passed, by a vote of 941, the COVID-19 Hate-Crimes Act, introduced by Hawaii Senator Mazie K. Hirono and New York Representative Grace Meng. The legislation will enhance law enforcement responses to anti-Asian attacks in light of COVID-19 and create a position at the Department of Justice to facilitate the expedited review of such cases. This should give us pause.

Many believe that treating acts of violence as hate crimes can deter people from enacting bias-based harm, but there is no conclusive evidence that it does. Hate-crime laws merely attach additional penalties to already criminalized acts assault, harassment, vandalism, murder. By definition, they are reactionary in that they are dispensed only after harm has already been done.

By seeking justice through a hate-crimes framework, Asian Americans risk putting themselves and other marginalized communities, especially Black communities, at greater risk of violence not from street assailants or mass shooters, but from the carceral state. And, as the legal scholar, trans activist writer, and teacher Dean Spade argues, Hate-crime laws strengthen and legitimize the criminal-punishment system, a system that targets the very people these laws are supposedly passed to protect. Movements for abolition through the Black-led uprisings that swept the nation after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have forcefully forwarded the claim that safety, accountability, and justice cannot be attained with the help of police, prosecutors, and prisons. Asian Americans must not forget this lesson. More recently, the police killings of Christian Hall and Angelo Quinto are reminders that the violence of the criminal legal system is also anti-Asian violence.

Rather than pouring more resources into criminalization, Asian Americans should instead push for more investment in life-affirming, grassroots services, and organizations dedicated to serving the Asian Americans who are most vulnerable to interpersonal and structural violence. What good are the billions of dollars spent on policing and incarceration when there is no state support for the families of victims? The families of the Atlanta shooting victims, for example, received no governmental assistance and instead resorted to crowdfunding to pay for health care, funeral expenses, and lost income. In a different attack, 83-year-old Asian grandmother Nancy Toh was knocked unconscious and bleeding profusely when she regained consciousness. Toh reported that she was afraid to go to the hospital because she could not afford medical care. Hate-crimes laws cannot meet these needs because they dont even try.

Read more:

Hate-Crime Laws Are Not the Answer to Anti-Asian Violence, Abolition Is - Teen Vogue

We spend many waking hours preparing for work, at work, or recovering from work, and many of us live in societies that, in the words of scholar Kathi Weeks, expect people to work for wages. In The Problem with Work, Weeks argues that domination and subordination are central experiences in the organization of work today. This is especially true for domination based on racial differences.

The transatlantic slave trade in the 1500s1800s bound up capitalism with colonialism and racism. Slavery was progressively abolished starting in the late eighteenth century in Haiti and continued through the nineteenth century, but this did not bring an end to racial hierarchies or the entanglement between race, capitalism, and colonialism. Instead, the transition to free wage labor accompanied the rise of scientific racism, the rapid growth of industrial capitalism, and heightened rivalries among competing empires.

Race remained a central principle for the organization of labor in new capitalist enterprises, through differences in recruitment, working conditions, wages, and housing. For example, historian Ad Knotter has demonstrated that race and ethnicity determined the division of labor and working conditions in coal mines worldwide. But even though the most oppressed workers have fought segregation and racist working practices, others have demanded privileges and a firmer racial division of labor. Workers, in other words, are not guileless dupes or helpless victims; they are historical actors with agency, albeit often circumscribed by the structures of capitalism and imperialism.

The following works chart the global history of race and labor in the early twentieth century, highlighting the complex ways in which race, labor, and imperialism intersect.

The abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the 1830s forced plantation owners and colonial bureaucracies to turn to indentured labor from India and China.

Moon-Ho Jung, Outlawing Coolies: Race, Nation, and Empire in the Age of Emancipation

Moon-Ho Jung traces how Chinese and Indian coolie workers were racialized by Caribbean sugar plantation owners, and later by American politicians, in the nineteenth century. By portraying coolie labor as coerced, US lawmakers easily reached a consensus against it, culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. As Jung points out, this consensus was a result not so much of anti-Chinese rancor in California but of US imperial ambitions in Asia and the Caribbean[.]

Mae M. Ngai, Chinese Gold Miners and the Chinese Question in Nineteenth-Century California and Victoria

In her comparative history of Chinese miners and anti-Chinese politics in the late nineteenth-century United States and Australia, Mae Ngai attributes the racialization of Chinese coolies to the fact that Chinese miners outcompeted white Australian and American miners in gold mining. White miners deployed anti-Chinese racism to eliminate their competitors, as did white trade unionists and labor-oriented urban politicians. As Ngai concludes, a common global discourse of anti-coolieism had emerged in the 1880s among Great Britains white settler colonies[.] Similar dynamics of racialization and racism could be found in the British Empire.

G. Balachandran, Workers in the World: Indian Seafarers, c. 1870s1940s

Gopalan Balachandran argues that Indian seafarers inhabited a world deeplymarked byrace which determined what they would do and analyzes the role of the white British seafarers union in keeping Indian seafarers out of skilled work and officers positions.

David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class

The pioneering work on the formation of racialized classes and white working-class racism in the United States in the nineteenth century is David Roedigers The Wages of Whiteness (1991). Roediger argues that working class formation and the systematic development of a sense of whiteness went hand in hand for the US white working class[.] Roediger emphasizes the agency of white workers themselves, showing that they helped create and maintain their own racial identity.

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 18601880

Roediger drew extensively on the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, particularly his study of race and class in the aftermath of the American Civil War, Black Reconstruction (1935). Du Bois argued that white workers in the American South accepted exploitation because they were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage, whereby their white status accorded them a certain degree of respect from the state, unlike African Americans.

Barbara J. Fields, Whiteness, Racism, and Identity

In contrast with Du Bois, Barbara J. Fields argued that the psychological wage was speculation that could be neither proved nor disproved and that whiteness was incoherent and explained little. It relied, she argued, on a kind of circular logic: Whiteness entails material benefits; therefore, the material benefits whites receive are a reward for whiteness.

The expansion of European and American capital and the seizure of new territories around the world by colonial powers facilitated the dissemination of racist discourses and racial labor management practices.

David R. Roediger and Elizabeth D. Esch, The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History

In The Production of Difference, David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch illustrate the persistent centrality of race to the ideas and practices of US labor management, including the regimes of antebellum southern plantations and the factories and mines where various immigrant groups worked.

Jason M. Colby, Banana Growing and Negro Management: Race, Labor, and Jim Crow Colonialism in Guatemala, 18841930

Jason Colby demonstrates that the United Fruit Company introduced racial labor management ideas and practices to its banana plantations in Guatemala. But managers were not the only agents of imperialism and racism.

Kornel Chang, Circulating Race and Empire: Transnational Labor Activism and the Politics of Anti-Asian Agitation in the Anglo-American Pacific World, 1880-1910

Kornel Chang documents how white trade unionists and labor activists in the Pacific Northwest mobilized against Asian migrant and Native workers, resulting in the formation of the Asiatic Exclusion League in 1905.

Neville Kirk, Race and Whiteness, in Transnational Radicalism and the Connected Lives of Tom Mann and Robert Samuel Ross

In early twentieth-century Australia, as Neville Kirk explains, the labour movement officially committed itself to racism in the form of whiteness[.] But, Kirk also notes, there were instances of internationalism and opposition to racist imperialism.

The imposition and maintenance of a racial division of labor was perhaps most pronounced in South Africa.

Jeremy Krikler, White Rising: The 1922 Insurrection and Racial Killing in South Africa

Even before the beginning of apartheid in 1948, legislation protected the jobs and wages of white workers and restricted the rights of African, Colored, and Indian workers. White workers demanded this racialized protection through radical and violent protests against their employers and the state. This was best encapsulated by the infamous slogan Workers of the World, Unite and Fight for a White South Africa raised by striking white miners during the Rand Revolt in 1922, a strike that escalated into a full-blown insurrection, which Jeremy Krikler analyzes in his book from 2005.

Philip Bonner, Jonathan Hyslop and Lucien van der Walt, Rethinking Worlds of Labour: Southern African Labour History in International Context, in Global Histories of Work, ed. Andreas Eckert

The racial division of labor was not a peculiarly South Africa phenomenon. Philip Bonner, Jonathan Hyslop, and Lucien van der Walt emphasize that the struggles and organizational form of labor in South Africa were influenced by regional and transnational migration patterns.

The conflation of race and class identities, and discriminatory labor practices rooted in assumed differencesracial, ethnic, or nationalcan also be found in two non-white colonial settings: the Japanese Empire and Palestine.

Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan

Andrew Gordon examines how organized labor and left-leaning political parties in Japan embraced the imperial project of colonizing Taiwan, the Sakhalin Islands, Korea, and Manchuria during the interwar years.

Ken C.Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan.

Ken Kawashima details how ethnic discrimination in Japanese cities imposed precarious conditions on Korean migrant workers, whose status as colonial subjects deprived them of rights to political representation and collective bargaining.

Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 19061948.

Zachary Lockman shows how Jewish labor activists in prewar Palestine saw the exclusion of Arab workers from Zionist labor unions and later Jewish workplaces as vital to the establishment of a Jewish state. The Jewish workers had looked to apartheid rule in South Africa for inspiration.

Tensions over race and labor in Britain are often seen as a phenomenon of the period after the Second World War, when mass migration from the Caribbean and South Asia was encouraged by the British government to fill labor shortages.

A. Sivanandan, Catching History on the Wing: Race, Culture and Globalisation

A. Sivanandan argues that while demand for labor brought workers from the Caribbean and South Asia to Britain, the colonial legacy determined the nature of the work they were put to[.]

Jacqueline Jenkinson, Black 1919: Riots, Racism and Resistance in Imperial Britain

Black communities were established in port cities long before the arrival of workers from the Caribbean and South Asia. British sailors unions sought to prevent black, Arab, and Asian sailors from working on British ships. These tensions exploded into a wave of rioting in the aftermath of the First World War. Jacqueline Jenkinson explores how postwar unemployment and economic competition prompted white working-class residents in port cities across Britain to turn on Black workers and their communities.

Satnam Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider

Satnam Virdee offers an even longer-term perspective on the relationship between race and class in England, and critiques existing accounts of the development of the English working class since the 1780s as race blind. The working class in England, Virdee argues, was a multi-ethnic formation long before Caribbean workers arrived in the late 1940s and that racism structured relations between different components of this multi-ethnic working class.

Miners, factory workers, dock workers, and office workers are not the only wage workers. Feminist labor historians have long pointed out that domestic workers and sex workers are also wage workers, even though their labors are engaged in the intimate work of caring for others. In colonial and postcolonial societies, this intimate work is largely performed by women of nonwhite and/or migrant backgrounds, a fact that underscores how race and gender shape the division of labor.

Evelyn Nakano Glenn, From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor

Evelyn Nakano Glenn traces the continuities of racial and gendered hierarchies in domestic work in United States during the first half of the twentieth century and service work during the second half of the twentieth century.

Seungsook Moon, Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire: U.S. Military Prostitution in South Korea, 19451970, in S. Moon and M. Hhn (eds.), Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present

Seungsook Moons book chapter on Korean sex workers on US military bases in South Korea illuminates the entanglements of race, gender, and imperialism.

Racial labor practices and racial violence against migrant labor shaped labor relations in empires and colonial societies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These racist ideas, practices, and institutions did not go unchallenged.

Julia Martnez, Questioning White Australia: Unionism and Coloured Labour, 191137

Julia Martinez observes of the multiracial working community in Australias Port Darwin that white unionists increased contact with labor unions in Asia and mixed social activities outside the workplace eroded many white workers racist assumptions and stereotypes. Industrial unions and communist parties were also instrumental in confronting racial hierarchies in workplaces and racism in labor unions.

Peter Cole, Philadelphias Lords of the Docks: Interracial Unionism Wobbly-Style

Peter Cole recounts how the Industrial Workers of the World organized Philadelphia dockworkers, who were divided along racial and ethnic lines, into an integrated union during the years 19131922.

Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression

Robin D. G. Kelley describes how African-American Communist Party members in 1930s Alabama combined Black resistance traditions with Marxism to campaign and protest against local issues of racial inequality and economic injustice. The anticommunist climate in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s brought about the decline of the Communist Party, but the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s and 1960s opened a new chapter in the history of interracial labor movements.

Peter Cole, No Justice, No Ships Get Loaded: Political Boycotts on the San Francisco Bay and Durban Waterfronts

Peter Cole compares the antiracist activism of longshoremens unions in San Francisco and Durban, revealing how these multiracial workers wielded their economic power to advance social causes worldwide.

Support JSTOR Daily! Join our new membership program on Patreon today.

More:

The Global History of Labor and Race: Foundations and Key Concepts - JSTOR Daily

Since I started writing this article, at least 64 people have died at the hands of law enforcement half of them Black. It is time we abolish the police.

To be clear, people who support abolishing the police are not advocating for the removal of public safety or accountability. What abolitionists do advocate for, though, is being imaginative in a way we never have before to build community support services that arent posing a danger to members of the community. Confusion surrounding what abolishing the police means and entails is certainly valid and expected because the movement itself is not monolithic. Some scholars and activists disagree over what the phrase should entail the words defund, abolish and reimagine the police are all phrases used in different contexts.

A way to distinguish between abolition and defunding is understanding the degree to which the two movements want to phase out police presence in communities. The defund movement generally imagines a space for police (i.e. exclusively responding to violence) whereas the abolition movement advocates for a world without police and reimagines ways in which violence can be addressed. Students who support abolishing the police should educate their community about alternatives to policing they can begin advocating for.

The structure of law enforcement as it currently exists is so entrenched in violent tendencies, corruption and inadequate provision of safety that it cannot be reformed. While reforms can reduce the extent to which the adverse effects of these characteristics are inflicted upon the community, reforms cannot reduce these effects to an extent that would be sufficient to protect our most marginalized communities. Understanding that those who experience the failure of our current policing structure is drastically disproportionate along racial and class lines is key to understanding the abolition argument. What this means is that the way in which the popular imagination understands the role of police, as maintaining the safety of communities, is not experienced by everyone in the same way.

For example, Black, Indigenous and people of color have experienced the most violent and disruptive aspects of policing because of structurally discriminatory policies that stem from neighborhood segregation. People often understand segregation as being a relic of the past. But racially restrictive practices, like the implementation of zoning laws and redlining, have worked to confine Black Americans and other racially marginalized groups to neighborhoods that were overlooked and underserved by local governments, financial institutions and private developers. Meanwhile, federal policy incentivized home ownership for White families in areas that saw ongoing public and private investments. As generations of communities have established themselves in these neighborhoods, these dynamics have produced neighborhoods with profound differences in employment opportunities, poverty rates, school quality, access to health care, exposure to environmental hazards and crime, and so much more. Even if racially discriminatory behavior, policies and processes were to be halted, racism would endure because its victims are left with disadvantages in life conditions, choice, opportunity and power.

The development of these increasingly segregated neighborhoods along with other supplemental factors, have provided the geographical foundation for neighborhoods that are predominantly poor or Black to be violently policed for surveillance and social control and un-policed with regard to the provision of emergency services. In other words, the more segregated a neighborhood is, the more likely there is to be a racial disparity in who experiences police violence. The result has been that out of all of the individuals who police officers shot between 2010 and 2016 in the 50 largest police departments, 55 percent were Black double the proportion of Black people to the population of these policing districts. In 2016 alone, police officers killed nearly 1,100 people with Native American, Black and Latino people being killed at a rate 111 percent, 78 percent and 11 percent proportionally higher than their White counterparts, respectively.

Abolishing the police, while it sounds dramatic or radical, is really based more on common sense than it appears. For example, in the event of an armed burglary, one would call the police and, in the absolute best case scenario, the police would show up and arrest the burglar. Besides the threat of prison, few measures are taken to ensure this person wont burglarize another home. There are also few efforts to assess why this person felt it necessary to burglarize your home in the first place. Additionally, since policing isnt survivor centered, if youve suffered trauma from the burglary or need financial or emotional support, youre on your own.

On the other hand, an abolitionist approach that appreciates the forces that drive people to commit crime and that takes into account the need for the provision of basic living necessities, preventative crime measures and the provision of survivor-centered support services, is much more productive in addressing harm. In Oakland, California, for example, the Mental Health First hotline responds to mental health and domestic violence incidents with a hotline staffed by trained volunteers such as doctors, nurses, mental health professionals and community members. The appropriate volunteers then respond and work to deescalate the situation and connect the parties involved with community resources like shelters, mental health treatment or financial assistance.

Of course, in advocating for abolition, it is important to understand what is going to replace the police. The short answer is it depends, and the long answer is that activists replacements to policing must be informed by the culturally, historically and temporally specific characteristics of a community. Abolitionists have organized to form a variety of alternatives to the police, each specific to the needs of their fellow citizens, and we shouldnt assume that what works for one community will work for another. For instance, many organizations provide educational resources so people know how to respond to mental health situations, acute injuries and other emergencies that would ordinarily involve contact with the police. It is also crucial to advocate for an alternative to the police that is productive, as not all alternatives are for example, the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps could be described as a reimagining of police, but it is really just a vigilante group that attacks immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.

In considering all of this, students should begin to identify how they can amplify access to social and economic resources aimed at supporting members of the community, while simultaneously reducing their reliance on, and eventually working to phase out, their local police presences. Once theres an understanding of the constructive and restorative potential of abolition, we can start working to build a better community.

Karina Ochoa Berkley, a sophomore majoring in political science and philosophy, is a columnist.

This article appeared in the April 26, 2021 issue of the Hatchet.

The rest is here:

What abolishing the police really means The GW Hatchet - GW Hatchet

While former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin faced trial over the death of George Floyd last May, police shot and killed Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, just miles away from where Floyd lost his life. On April 20, police shot and killed MaKhia Bryant, a 16-year-old Black teen, in Columbus, Ohio, as the verdict was delivered on the Chauvin murder trial.

Conversations about police brutality, killings, trials and reform should not come and go at the convenience of the national zeitgeist when another Black individual loses their life at the hands of police.

For that reason, the editorial board spoke with representatives of the Divest/Invest UCLA Faculty Collective to discuss their initiatives regarding divestment from police forces on campuses, broader goals of complete abolition and how students can remain involved in continual advocacy efforts against police brutality.

The following is a Q&A between representatives from the Divest/Invest UCLA Faculty Collective and Daily Bruin Editorial Board. The coalition is represented by professors Ananya Roy, Shana Redmond and assistant professor SA Smythe. The 2020-2021 Daily Bruin Editorial Board is represented by Managing Editor Lucy Carroll, Opinion Editor EJ Panaligan and assistant News Editor Genesis Qu. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Editorial Board: What are divestment and abolition, and what would a future without police look like both at the University of California and UCLA, and more broadly?

Shana Redmond: Divestment is one means by which we get closer to abolition, so they are not synonymous. Divestment is a procedure by which we pull resources from policing structures as a means of shrinking it. And that is towards the project of abolition, which is a world without policing structures, without the prison, without the infrastructure that actually makes for vulnerability and precarity, on a universal, although uneven, scale.

For the purposes of divestment, it means that we have to get cops off campus. It means that the university actually has to commit to a future without disproportionate vulnerability for their students, staff, faculty and surrounding communities, that they actually have to take seriously their charge as a public good.

SA Smythe: I think its useful to know that abolition is not the ending point we dont stop at abolition because its a set of practices and strategies for building the world that we want. And that doesnt end at any point, its actually a place to begin.

And if we actually begin to start with abolition, we can actually find ourselves in a really good position to build a world where we can all be free and free as not some floating signifier, but free from the kinds of constitutive racialized harms of violences (and) free to imagine a world otherwise, a world where were not constantly beleaguered and fatigued and just one-sided or asymmetrical warfare against Black and brown peoples.

Ananya Roy: I think what the work of abolition exposes is the ways in which the university is the liberal purveyor of police violence, and many other forms of racialized violence. Despite all of the gestures of apology and racial justice proclamations, the university is constantly expelling and traumatizing those that it seeks to also include, integrate and showcase. The work of abolition exposes those logics and makes a very different case for what presence might mean for what it might mean for all of us to actually be here, and what the role of the university is in the world.

EB: What evidence does the faculty collective stand upon that shows skeptics a future without police is possible?

Smythe: The fact of the matter is that police and policing are structures of harm, reinforcing white supremacy. And if we want to find our way otherwise, we can give abolition a chance, which has never actually received one.

I was really disgusted on Tuesday to hear (Rep. Nancy Pelosi) talk about George Floyd as a martyr. Hes not a martyr, hes a victim. Hes a Black man murdered. MaKhia Bryant, as Shana named these are not martyrs to the cause to shackle and shake up the consciousness of the white moderates in their imagination. These are lives lost in the struggle.

Roy: In much of the rest of the world, schools and universities and colleges dont have police forces, let alone armed police forces. So as with the deliberate perversity of mass incarceration, the U.S. remains exceptional here. And I think its always good to remind ourselves of that and the ways in which the institution of policing, while often justified under the sign of safety does not, in fact, bring safety.

There have been so many beautiful experiments of life without policing in our communities the Unin de Vecinos movement is based in organizing by women, many of them undocumented women who lived in public housing projects in Pico Aliso. Those women organized not only to preserve public housing, but organized against police. They basically kicked police out of their neighborhoods and said, Dont use the justification of gang violence to be in our neighborhoods. So communities know, in fact, what it means to keep each other safe, and why the presence of police makes them deeply unsafe. This is a moment for all of us to learn much more about those practices, histories and possibilities, and make them real.

EB: What are some tangible things students can do to continue advocating against police brutality?

Redmond: I think telling our stories is really important. Im a system-impacted person, my father was incarcerated for almost a decade. (These stories) can be held up as evidence for why policing is not working, why policing has become an epidemic in peoples lives such that it is something that is on the minds of certain communities every minute of every single day.

But of course, there are more organized ways in which students might be able to collectivize and move towards some of these abolitionist practices and ideas as well. That is joining one of the many organizations on campus, being present in many of the student organizations that are organized around race and social justice. All of these things are part of the abolitionist strategy and world-making potential. So I think that there are many, many different ways to plug in if you think about abolition in its fullest sense.

Smythe: Abolition May is a month-long series of actions on campuses across Turtle Island. (Abolition May) begins with a day of refusal. On May 3, were calling everyone everywhere within the sound of my voice, to refuse the status quo and the day to day of police brutality (and the) violence of policing. So this means no emails, no classes, no work, no asynchronous lectures, no cops on campus. But this is (only) the beginning. One day of refusal to actually cause a pause and say, were going to reckon with and ramp up to prepare for actions, resisting the concerted power that police and policing have on our campuses and in our impacted communities.

And so we start there, in unison, in tandem collectively across Turtle Island to make this sort of demand. And then from that day, until May 25, in honor of the police murder of George Floyd, when we will be continuing to dissolve and dismantle the border between the university and the community because we imagine that we will be out in the streets with all of the people who wish to protest the police killing of George Floyd and also all other forms of police brutality and violence of this white supremacist settler state. And so we will join them in the streets in solidarity.

But between that, therell be direct actions, again, across Turtle Island. UCLAs will be May 21. And so if people are interested, we have social media handles at @copsoffearth, @UC_FTP or @divestUCLA.

EB: In a more immediate sense, what would you say to community members who are concerned that the LAPD will become more involved with calls from campus with more violent tactics if the community is successful in abolishing UCPD?

Redmond: We are in control of what our responses to harm look like. And if we create an environment such that mutual aid and mutual kindness and care are practiced first, then we will need not be concerned with the presence of the city on our campus. I think too, though, we have to consider and understand that the fight for cops off campus is part of this grand abolitionist project, which means its a tandem fight not only to get them off of our kind of relatively insulated space of learning and employment, but it is to actually take on the structure anywhere that we touch down.

Roy: I think most of us would be hard pressed to think of incidents where LAPD needed to come to campus for a safety issue. What people love to invoke is mass shootings. If you are going to talk about mass shootings, we need to talk about police forces as mass shooters. What the Jackie Robinson Stadium incident showed us is just the reverse, that UCLA has permitted its spaces to become extensions of LAPD and of the LA Sheriffs Department. And we dont know how much of that has been going on, how many of these staging areas, how much of this is underway.

But this really takes me to the question of the proposed expansions of policing in the UC system. Because in some ways, the conversation around UCPD and LAPD are almost rendered irrelevant by the proposed expansions that are on the table now and that have been on the table since February, except none of us knew about it. Because what the UC-wide system is proposing is the UCs version of a national guard with full access to military-grade weaponry for riot control, concealed carry without permits for retired police officers on all our campuses, including UCLA.

The administrative apparatus that enables and expands policing is not that concerned about these divisions between UCPD and LAPD. This is one continuum. This is one system. And those distinctions are somewhat meaningless. We saw with Jackie Robinson Stadium, the distinctions are truly meaningless. And it means that everywhere has been turned into spaces of detention. Everywhere has been turned into spaces of potential death. And that is what we are challenging.

EB: What have conversations with UCLA administrators and the UC Regents looked like, if theyve been happening at all?

Smythe: The collective (doesnt) talk to police. That is our stance and that is a line that we hold. Every time a Black person is murdered in these United States, we are now being socialized into a customary pat response from the EVC or the chancellor or even somebodys president. Those are a pablum, a delightful word to say exactly what this is. It is words, it is an empty vest.

Roy: Every single communication from our collective (and the) No UCPD (Coalition) has been clear. Make a commitment to divestment. We understand that divestment might not happen tomorrow, but make a commitment. There has been no commitment, no good faith commitment on the part of this regime to divestment from policing. And so the Divest/Invest UCLA Faculty Collective will not meet with or be in conversation with UCLA administration until there is such a commitment. Because if we were to do so, we then become a part of that absolute hypocrisy and farce.

EB: What is the collectives stance toward the recently announced safety commission and the investigation into the Jackie Robinson Stadium incident?

Redmond: I anticipate that the system will always find itself not guilty. This is a commission that is led in significant portion by a former federal prosecutor. This is someone who is not impartial. This is someone who has built a career based on incarcerating people, on relying on police as trustworthy witnesses, and who now in their current position defending large corporations from efforts at dissent and accountability. So this, from its very first steps cannot be trusted, as an effort toward clarity, toward true, impartial as if that ever existed accountability around these issues. And so I dont have any expectations of that committee.

We have to be clear about the fact that this is set up to be a limit, not a horizon. This is set up to be a limit by which they will establish four, six, or even a dozen reforms that might be met. And every time that box is checked from their report, the institution will pat itself on the back and tell you that everything is fine. You have to reject that narrative and you have to reject a process that would seek to forward that kind of narrative.

Roy: This is a moment when the seduction of those reforms is all around us. And I think universities and those of us who are part of universities are in fact, both seduced and distracted. And we cant be. Because all of us are doing this labor its often joyous labor but its labor of (working toward) transforming the university.

These public safety symposia (and) task forces are a tremendous distraction, because they often require a response from us. And we should not be having to spend our time and energy in this way.

More:

Divest/Invest UCLA Faculty Collective talks abolition in Q&A with editorial board - Daily Bruin

After many decades of organizing, the resurgence of Black-led uprisings have brought abolitionist demands to defund, disarm and abolish into the mainstream. These struggles largely center on local police department budgets and prison expansion projects in major cities and jurisdictions across the continental United States. But abolitionist struggles are also matters of global justice, and interconnected to the movements to abolish the military-industrial complex, colonization and imperialism. The connections between decolonial and abolitionist struggles are deep and full of coalitional possibilities.

Building global justice movements are what Angela Davis calls intersectional solidarity bringing struggles together to end systems of oppression and exploitation across national borders. Julian Aguons new book, The Properties of Perpetual Light, speaks the language of intersectional solidarity; while it is geographically specific to Guam and the Pacific, it is also all about the world.

Aguon is a CHamoru writer from Guam a territory of the United States located in Micronesia. Aguon illuminates a decolonial vision grounded in Indigenous struggle for self-determination, and one that overlaps with the fight against militarization, colonization, climate destruction and the ravages of predatory global capitalism. The Properties of Perpetual Light draws on Aguons life work as an Indigenous human rights lawyer and his personal history. Aguons essays are a reminder that Indigenous struggles are a shared struggle.

As the poet Audre Lorde once said, There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives, and this is embodied in The Properties of Perpetual Light. Through an alchemy of poetry, critical essays, memoir and manifesto, Aguons voice seamlessly and unapologetically blends the personal with the political, and the universal with the particular.

The militarization of Guam is tied to five centuries of colonization and the destruction of the natural world. The U.S. Department of Defense is the biggest polluter in the world, and Aguon captures how devastating the environmental harm is for the planet, and specifically the Indigenous people of Guam. Aguon writes about the U.S. militarization of Guam, including the development of a massive firing range complex which will destroy more than 1,000 acres of native lime-stone forest home to many endangered endemic species.

Aguon laments, If only superpowers were concerned with the stuff of lower-case earth like forest and fresh water. If only they were curious about the whisper and scurry of small lives. If only they were moved by beauty. He recognizes that the destruction of the natural environment is tied to and is part of the latest course in a long and steady diet of dispossession. But Aguon refuses to accept dispossession not as a human rights lawyer, and not as a writer.

Aguon writes about radical reimagining of our world: Growing up in Guam, we constantly hear the word cant. We are always hearing about what we dont have, what is not possible, what cant change. We become fluent in the language of limitation. He goes on, So many of us so early on in life give up on our dreams. We place our dreams in boxes, seal them shut, and shelve them somewhere just out of sight. Maybe thats what colonialism looks like: Dreams Under Duct Tape. Aguon urges the Indigenous people of Guam, and all of us, to keep imagining and dreaming, and not to give in to fatalism.

In a book reading in March, I had the opportunity to ask the author about the connections between his work and abolition. Aguon said that he has been deeply influenced by Black feminists and abolitionists and hopes his book brings new life into the conversation around demilitarization, and how the demands to defund the police are intricately connected to the demand to defund the Pentagon. Both are shared demands to reprioritize and reallocate funds in order to sustain life-affirming services and institutions, instead of life-destroying systems. Recent reports indicate the Biden administration plans to increase the defense budget to $753 billion.

With respect to intersectional solidarity, Aguon elaborated: If the U.S. colonies could better link our struggles, if we can have more of that intersectional solidarity so that Black Lives Matter movements can connect with the call for demilitarization in the Pacific, it would be so powerful. Indeed, intersectionality is not an option it is the option. It is the only way forward. His words remind us that if we are to survive, we must build interconnected mass movements.

Aguons analysis builds on critical race theory to elaborate on the meaning of self-determination, beyond the limits of law. Aguon recognizes the law, especially American law, is limited in its power because harms like colonization, land dispossession, and racial subordination are woven into the very fabric of this countrys being. As close to this country as a jugular vein. He brilliantly draws on a depth of experience, perspective and passion as an Indigenous human rights lawyer whose references to the law are followed by sharp critiques of the law and legal institutions.

To be clear, The Properties of Perpetual Light is not limited to political commentary or legal analysis. Weaved together with Aguons critical analyses of colonization and the military buildup in the Pacific are personal stories of his relationship with family, loved ones and home. He gives us a glimpse into the vulnerabilities underneath the armor of activist-lawyer. At the crux of his personal narrative are stories of loss, grief and coming of age. He writes of his fathers death from pancreatic cancer. He writes about reconnecting with his grandmother who had dementia and singing to her before she passes. He writes about his mentor Uncle Tony de Brum, who spent his whole life fighting for nuclear disarmament and on behalf of the Marshallese people in the face of climate destruction; and he writes about other forms of loss, like for Auntie Frances, a healer whose lifes work comes from plant medicine, now endangered by the militarys destruction of the natural world.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Aguon finished writing The Properties of Perpetual Light. At a time when we have all suffered so much collective loss, reading Aguons words are a comfort. By writing in such personal terms, he tries to make sense of his grief while sharing with the world his struggles and his spirit, and for all of us to bear witness. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker describes The Properties of Perpetual Light as A powerful, beautiful book. Its fierce love of the land, the ocean, the elders, and the ancestors warms the heart and moves the spirit.

Aguons writing is not prescriptive, so much as it is a call to action to reimagine, to reclaim language and to inspire young people to do battle, as he says. His vulnerability and the intimacy of the text draws the reader in from wherever you may be reading. Ultimately, if colonization fails the imagination, and it kills dreams and self-realization, then self-determination is the cure and Aguon inspires a future of connection and liberatory possibilities.

Read more:

Abolitionist Struggles Are Also Matters of Global Justice - Truthout