Category Archives: Wage Slavery

The sindicatos of Bolvar, gangs that control illegal gold mining, are ruthless. Running operations with an iron fist, they force miners, adults and children alike, to work long hours in unsafe conditions and for little reward. But facing a campaign of violence from Venezuelan armed forces seeking to take over the gold trade, one sindicato stood out. Organization R has become part criminal group, part community organization and part political force.

At around 11 p.m. on April 6, 2020, Lieutenant Colonel Ernesto Sols was returning to the military base he commanded near the town of Tumeremo in the eastern Venezuela state of Bolvar. There he was intercepted by gunmen on motorbikes who riddled his car with bullets. The attack left Sols and the sergeant that accompanied him dead.

Sols' death had an air of inevitability to it. In his role directing military operations in one of Venezuela's most fiercely contested gold mining regions, he had faced numerous accusations of abuses and alliances with armed groups. He had already survived previous attacks on his life, according to his own account. He had many enemies.

The police quickly made it clear which of those enemies they believed to be responsible for the ambush: the R Organization (Organizacin R OR) and its leader, Eduardo Jos Natera Balboa, alias "Run" or "Peln Natera."

*This investigation exposes how the Maduro regimes attempts to control Venezuelas mining heartland in the state of Bolvar has led to criminal chaos, as guerrilla groups, heavily armed gangs and corrupt state elements battle over the countrys gold. Read the full investigation here.

At the time, few outside of Bolvar had heard of the OR. Reports from the region were more concerned with the military's efforts to seize control of the region's gold trade from criminal gangs in a campaign directed by the inner circle of President Nicols Maduro and, media investigations and local sources alleged, coordinated with Colombian guerrillas.

Today, though, the OR has skillfully blended armed force with social work and political action to position itself as one of the leading powers in Bolvar's mining heartland. In doing so, it has exposed the failures of the Maduro regime's strategy to turn Bolvar's lawless mining sector into an economic powerhouse that could both prop up Venezuela's spiraling economy and line the pockets of its corrupt elites.

For more than a decade, the riches of Venezuela's gold mining heartland in Bolvar have been fought over by criminal gangs known locally as sindicatos (unions). But from the start, the OR was different.

The group's founder, Run, was better known as a player for the local soccer team. But he had a criminal history stretching for more than a decade. In 2009, he was convicted of a series of petty crimes, but he escaped from the local El Dorado prison.

Run formed the OR, also known as the 3Rs, from the remnants of mining gangs that had previously run the trade in Tumeremo, according to Amricode Grazia, a local leader of the political opposition. He strengthened the group by recruiting deserters from the Venezuelan military, a senior Bolvar state government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told InSight Crime.

"Of all the gangs operating in Bolvar, for me, OR is the best organized because they have a tremendous logistical capacity and Colombian-style training," the official said.

Run also sought to win the support of the local community in Tumeremo by handing out food and children's toys; organizing sporting events and activities for the local youth; carrying out or helping improve public services, and even funding a local ambulance service.

SEE ALSO: Gold and Chaos: Gang Lords Rule Venezuela's Orinoco Mining Arc

This social work was carried out under the banner of a charitable organization, the 3Rs Foundation. Although both the foundation and the armed group fiercely deny any links publicly, an OR member, who InSight Crime interviewed via WhatsApp on condition of anonymity, confirmed what in Bolvar is common knowledge, and something that the OR has in the past recognized: They are two faces of the same organization.

"Everything that the town needs, we make it appear through the Foundation," he said.

The OR also took a different approach to mining. Whereas most sindicatos focus on squeezing every last drop of profits from the trade at gunpoint, the OR has positioned itself as a defender of the miners and mining communities.

"We are youths who are worried about the lack of order in the mines and the disrespect for other people," said a 3Rs leader, who agreed to answer InSight Crime's questions by email on condition of anonymity. "We have proposed to bring order, based on respect for others, respect for women and children, respect for the work, the need to honor debts, respect for people's religion, for children's right to education and recreation, and the respect for the health of the mining population."

However, the OR's version of "order" comes at a price. According to the OR member contacted via WhatsApp, that price is 15 percent of gold production. The OR also tightly regulates the commercial activity down to the price. One communique issued to the community obtained by InSight Crime begins with: "We are updating gold prices in dollars, cash and transfers." After listing the new prices, the statement concludes: "The prices established by the OR must be respected. In the case that they are not, corrective measures will be applied as necessary."

For those living in OR territory, "corrective measures" reads as a barely concealed threat as the rules are brutally enforced. In one OR video that circulated around Bolvar, a half-naked man is shown clutching his head with a sign around his neck reading: "Do not hit women." Prompted by a voice behind the camera, he confesses to beating his partner. "There will be no next time," the voice warns him.

However, compared to the "justice" meted out by other mining gangs, which includes mutilation and dismemberment, according to evidence collected by human rights groups, such punishments seem relatively humane to many in Bolvar. Despite the financial cost and the harshness of the group's extrajudicial justice, many of the residents and miners interviewed by InSight Crime welcomed the security the group has provided.

"There is no more extortion, no more kidnappings, all these things that we had to live with, the harassment, the persecution, that has ended," said one Tumeremo resident, who did not want to be identified for security reasons.

When InSight Crime interviewed Sols three months before his murder, he described how the OR had become a formidable enemy by mixing armed power with social outreach. A supportive local population was acting as an intelligence network for the group, giving it a vital advantage over the security forces and criminal rivals.

But it was his description of the time he visited the local offices of the political party, the Venezuelan Popular Unity (Unidad PopularVenezolana UPV) a member of the coalition of leftist parties supportive of the Chavista government that revealed just how far their reach extended.

"On the outside, the office was UPV, but inside it was all OR. The documents said OrganizacinR, he said. "On the computer, they had a census of all the people involved in gold sales. Everything, absolutely everything was accounted for."

The coopting of the local branch of UPV confirmed in the OR's own public statements was not the limit of the group's political aspirations. The 3Rs Foundation has also worked closely with the Movement for Peace and Life (Movimiento por la Paz y la Vida), a national government program that promotes cultural and sport programs in disadvantaged communities.

The program head is a former professional basketball player and ex-vice minister for sport, Alexander Vargas, who was appointed to the role directly by the Office of the President. The social media feeds of both Vargas and the 3Rs Foundation feature videos of him inaugurating sports facilities and health programs in the company of 3Rs Foundation representatives.

The OR's offer to bring order and security was perfectly timed to appeal to Bolvar's mining communities, exhausted by years of violence and turmoil at the hands of criminal groups and security forces.

When the group began its expansion in 2019, it was becoming clear the Maduro government's grand plans to build a thriving gold mining sector in what the government called the Orinoco Mining Arc (Arco Minero del Orinoco AMO) were little more than a mirage.

The government had failed to bring in either the capital or the technical expertise needed to turn an unregulated, low-tech mining sector into a modern industry.Instead, it had brought in an ever-growing number of actors from the Chavista elite, granting access to the region's wealth to everyone from the president's family to state governors.

"[The Maduro regime has been] dividing up the state as if it were their territory. Everyone receives part of the loot," said a former military official who occupied a senior command position in Bolvar before retiring and who spoke to InSight Crime on condition of anonymity.

Bolvar's gold also began to fund a shadow payroll for security forces. Rank-and-file security officials are paid a poverty wage by the near-bankrupt Venezuelan state, so many instead make a living by taking a cut of criminal economies in the areas where they are posted. A constant rotation of personnel sees these opportunities distributed throughout the forces. Bolvar's mining region is now one of the most coveted postings in the country, according to the retired military official.

"When I first came to the south of Bolvar, it was as a punishment," he said. "Now, people fight over it as if it were a prize."

The region was soon flooded with different branches of the security forces, including the military, the Bolivarian National Guard (Guardia Nacional Bolivariana GNB), police and intelligence services. There is strong evidence the military initially worked with Colombia guerrillas to combat the sindicatos. But as the guerrilla presence began to dissipate, security force units struck up alliances with the sindicatos, turning their guns only on those who would not cooperate or pay them off.

SEE ALSO: Human Trafficking Accompanies Illegal Mining in Venezuelas Orinoco

InSight Crime spoke to numerous sources in Bolvar who did not wish to be named, among them active and retired military and police service personnel, who described how each branch of the security forces has found its own way of profiting from the trade through the deals they make with sindicatos and other actors behind the mining operations.

Some work directly with criminal groups to control or extort mines, while others protect the interests of political and military elites. Others take on more specialist roles, such as charging those moving contraband gasoline into the region or gold out of the region or by squashing ongoing investigations into murders and other crimes.

Even those who are not corrupt when they arrive in Bolivar soon are enticed by the system, according to an active military official recently stationed in Bolvar, who spoke to InSight Crime on condition of anonymity.

"We all have a price. It might be money, or it might be family, but we have a price," he said. "Not everyone is bought with gold. With others, they say, 'You pass me information, or I will kill you and your family, and I will chop you into pieces."

But now, a new problem is arising. There may not be enough riches to go around. Informal miners have been exhausting easily accessible gold deposits near the surface, mining experts in the region told InSight Crime, and the promised technologically advanced operations that could dig deeper have failed to appear.

As a result, the Chavista elites and the numerous branches of the security forces have found themselves in competition over dwindling resources, not only with sindicatos but also with each other.

"It is total chaos, a conflict in which the winner is the person who has the most power, who is closest to those at the top," said the retired military official.

In Sifontes, Sols came to embody these tensions. Local communities accused him of being responsible for extrajudicial killings and disappearances and alleged he was collaborating with the Colombian guerrillas. The situation reached a crisis point when in December 2019, the military took over local mines and blockaded access routes to them.

For the OR, he had become the main obstacle to their takeover of Tumeremo.

"Sols made our lives impossible, he didn't let us work," said the OR member. "He killed too many innocent people, which is something Run does not do."

Sols' murder not only paved the way for the OR to seize control of Tumeremo. It also marked the start of their expansion into new regions, as they advanced into the north of Sifontes and pushed into the neighboring municipality of El Callao.

This advance soon earned them new enemies as they moved into territories controlled by one of the region's oldest and most powerful sindicatos: Tren de Guayana.

In the past, Tren de Guayana had received support from former Bolvar governor Francisco Rangel Gmez, according to testimonies of whistleblowers from within the security forces. Media investigations and miners in the region allege that the gang continues to count on the support of allies in power today. There have even been accusations that Tren de Guayana has coordinated operations with a faction of the military and employs current and former soldiers as mercenaries.

Despite having to confront both an armed criminal group and the military, the OR drove their new enemies from at least three mines in months of clashes.Yet while they displayed their military prowess, high-powered arsenal and willingness to use deadly violence, the OR again painted its expansion as a righteous campaign to protect miners from the predatory Tren de Guayana and their military allies.

The Tren de Guayana rob people. They disrespect women and children. They don't respect public spaces, and they abuse the workers," the OR leader said.

Once again, their rhetoric has been echoed by the miners themselves. After the OR had ended Tren de Guayana's control of a mine located between Tumeremo and the Tren de Guayana stronghold of Guasipati, the miners staged a press conference.

"Thanks to the R Organization, who freed us from the slavery of Tren de Guayana!" said one of the spokespeople. The event ended with the gathered miners chanting "R! R! R!" in unison.

After months of bitter fighting, the conflict came to an abrupt end in September or at least a pause. The OR released a statement declaring they had reached a peace agreement with Tren de Guayana and the government. According to the statement, the areas around the mines they had fought over would now be "peace zones," free from armed groups.

The rivals remain enemies, Run told InSight Crime, responding by WhatsApp to written questions. But the fight, for the moment, was over.

"Everyone wants peace," he said. "[But] the relationship hasn't changed. Each side will stay in its area. We're not friends. We're not anything."

The announcement of the truce came as a surprise, as the OR appeared to have the upper hand in the conflict. The most striking aspect, though, was the role of the Venezuelan Mining Corporation (Corporacin Venezolana de Minera CVM), which, according to Run, helped broker the agreement and will administer the disputed mines.

As Maduro's vision of the Orinoco Mining Arc reviving Venezuela's fortunes has given way to the stark reality of corrupt elites and criminal groups looting natural resources, the CVM is now responsible for ensuring Venezuelan officials continue to get their cut.

The body claims a percentage of the production of every state-authorized mining concession. But according to multiple sources in the region who all spoke to InSight Crime on condition of anonymity, it has similar arrangements with the illegal operations run by sindicatos.

The CVM, though, sources say, is getting frustrated as many of the actors behind the mines above all the military are not delivering on their side of the bargain.

"There is a strong clash [between the CVM and the military] because the CVM is not collecting what it is due, and the majority of the owners [of the mining operations] are generals," said the senior Bolvar government official.

The OR, in contrast, has built its reputation on being a reliable partner who can keep the gold flowing. The group appears to have helped deliver control of three mines directly to the CVM's hands - at least for the time being.

The OR becoming a better ally for the CVM than the military would represent a change for an organization that has cultivated a Robin-Hood image of being righteous outlaws, refusing to play the power games with distant elites and local thugs while standing up for the workers those power blocs exploit.

"Run is the rebel of the south because he doesn't want to align himself with any security forces nor with any big name in the government," said the OR member.

Although the OR is playing a dangerous game in Bolvar, it has done so with panache. As Maduro struggles to control the chaos he has unleashed in Bolvar, the Rebel of the South is becoming the state's favored business partner.

*This investigation exposes how the Maduro regime's attempts to control Venezuela's mining heartland in the state of Bolvar has led to criminal chaos, as guerrilla groups, heavily armed gangs and corrupt state elements battle over the country's gold. Read the full investigation here.

See the article here:

'The Rebel of the South': Rise of the R Organization - Insightcrime.org

In the United States there have traditionally been three pathways to prosperity and intergenerational wealth creation: occupational mobility, homeownership, and business formation and growth. As in virtually every other aspect of American life, the distribution of opportunity for each of these pathways varies significantly by race. In this article I will lay out the ways in which these pathways to wealth creation have been blocked for Black Americans both nationally and locally and conclude with some concrete proposals to break down barriers and close the gap.

Occupational mobility, moving "up the career ladder" to attain greater income and job security, is a function of market power. In the ideal world of free and fair labor markets, individuals move up by accruing skills and credentials, leveraging social networks, and gaining experience in a chosen field of endeavor. Blue-collar and some white-collar workers have traditionally climbed the ladder via gaining seniority under collective bargaining agreements or in the civil service. Workers on more stable career trajectories tend to have access to employer-sponsored, tax-advantaged retirement plans such as 401Ks, 403Bs, and on increasingly rare occasion, defined benefits plans like traditional pensions.

Homeownership has been the most prevalent source of wealth generation and transmission for Americans since the mid-20th century when the federal government began subsidizing mortgage lending. In 2020, the aggregate value of residential property was $37.1 trillion, according to Zillow. For middle-income Americans, residential property accounts for 50-70% of household wealth.

Business formation and growth is a third key pathway to wealth creation. Households in which the head of household is self-employed have substantially higher wealth levels than those in which the head works for someone else. Roughly 50% of U.S. GDP and job growth are generated by small businesses.

The first challenge for African Americans in terms of occupational mobility is that labor markets have never truly been free and fair but have been permeated by structural racism since the first slave ships landed in the New World circa 1619. Aside from the obvious barrier represented by enslavement and its immediate legacy, structural racism has severely inhibited the ability of Black workers in the post-Civil War period from climbing the career ladder. For one, a large body of research has demonstrated that a Black worker can submit an identical application as a white worker for a job and the hiring process will favor the latter. Though since the 1970s the U.S. has had laws intended to mitigate discrimination in hiring, the onus is generally on the individual to demonstrate the bias in a particular recruitment process, a difficult and often costly process.

Second, Black adults, especially males, are less likely to command the same market power in terms of credentials or experience as white workers. Since Black rates of poverty are higher and Black rates of college attainment lag that of whites (again, especially for males), on average Black workers have weaker educational credentials. However, African Americans make up a substantial proportion of the contemporary labor movement, especially the public sector unions, and this has been a critical path to middle-income status for tens of thousands of Black workers. As local and state government workforces have stagnated or shrunk in the post-Reagan era, opportunities for career mobility for Black civil service and unionized employees have commensurately constricted. At the same time many of the traditional craft unions in the lucrative building and construction trades, for example, have long had a history of discriminating against Black workers joining their ranks, while the more racially integrated industrial unions have downsized dramatically as the U.S. economy has shifted away from manufacturing and toward service and knowledge.

Compounding the issue is that far too few Black households have sufficient retirement savings. More than half of Black households have no retirement savings at all, compared with less than a third of white households. The median retirement savings for a white household between ages 25 and 61 is $79,500, while Black households have $29,200, according to research by the Economic Policy Institute and others. The legacy of structural racism in the labor market is a profound racial pay gap; nationally, a Black male makes just $0.68 for every white male dollar, according to Economy League research thus there is simply less money to be put away for retirement.

In terms of homeownership, the legacy of redlining has a very long tail. The maps drawn by federal agencies in the 1930s led to the extreme geographical sorting of Americans by race and the denial of billions of dollars in equity to Black homeowners consigned to "bad" neighborhoods by the government and the financial sector. The great wave of homeownership that swept the country in the immediate post-WWII period overwhelmingly benefited whites, who had the freedom to move to new suburban developments, many with race-based covenants designed to maintain racial homogeneity, and to take advantage of government-backed mortgages. In a process known as blockbusting, unscrupulous real estate agents helped to drive down property values in mixed race neighborhoods by persuading whites to sell, transforming once-vibrant, relatively integrated neighborhoods into single-race enclaves stripped of much of their economic reason for existence, with falling property values. Andre Perry has estimated the devaluation of Black-owned property at roughly $160 billion, a massive blow to dreams of capital accumulation and wealth-building. As shown in the figure below, median home equity varies significantly by race, with the median among whites in 2015 about 68% higher than that among Blacks.

The passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968 outlawed many of the most egregious practices and served to level the playing field somewhat, but more than a century of discriminatory practices in the period since Emancipation is a very tough legacy to overcome via market forces alone. To this day, the net worth of an average African-American family is one-eighth that of an average white family, in large measure due to the large residential property equity gap. Black rates of homeownership have also plummeted, with fewer than 41% of African Americans owning homes as of 2019, versus 73% of white Americans the largest gap since the passage of the federal housing act in 1934.

And finally, in terms of business formation and growth, Black Americans lag whites and other racial and ethnic groups. Of the roughly 5 million firms in the U.S. in 2019 with at least one employee, just 2.3% were owned by Black Americans, though they comprise 14% of the population. Black-owned firms also tend to be smaller and generate less revenue than white-owned firms. According to the American Business Survey, white-owned sole proprietorships averaged $404,000 in revenue in 2019, while Black-owned firms with no employees averaged just under $300,000 in revenue. Black owned-firms with one to four employees averaged $337,000 in revenues while similarly sized white-owned firms averaged $442,000.

Due in part to the devaluation of Black-owned properties as a legacy of redlining and well-documented discrimination in lending by banks, African Americans have had less access to equity capital to start businesses and a harder time accessing loans and credits than non-Blacks. Additionally, unlike immigrants, who tend to agglomerate with fellow countrymen largely in urban areas, and who are able to tap into giving circles and other informal and formal communal financial infrastructure, African Americans were manumitted from slavery with little or no property the broken 40 acres and a mule promise to leverage in order to capitalize business formation. While federal programs like Small Business Administration loans and the Community Reinvestment Act have been enormously helpful to those Black entrepreneurs who manage to create and sustain viable businesses despite tremendous obstacles, they have also left many if not most Black entrepreneurs working to pay off debt rather than building equity and expanding their firms. Nevertheless, as scholars such as Juliet Walker, Robert Weems and John Sibley Butler have shown, Black business thrived in the period between the end of slavery and the 1960s, as de jure and de facto segregation compelled the creation of separate but equal Black economies across the country. A paradoxical impact of the Civil Rights Movements focus on the integration of public accommodations like retail establishments was the precipitous decline of Black-owned firms in the 1970s and '80s; once Black consumers were able to shop in non-Black stores, they did so, as Maggie Anderson details in her important book, "Our Black Year." Scholars also cite the rise of large chains and lax enforcement of anti-trust laws since the 1980s as another significant factor in the decline of small business in general and Black-owned business in particular.

Median net worth for Black business owners is 12 times higher than for Black nonbusiness owners, according to research by the Association for Enterprise Opportunity and the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis. But while Black families are about as likely as white families to own wealth in the form of equity in a closely held business, the level of wealth they hold is about 50% lower. There are many reasons for this, but chief among them is lack of access to capital, which tends to steer Black entrepreneurs toward industries with low capital requirements and commensurately low margins.

Philadelphiaspersistently high poverty rate derivesdirectlyfroma legacy of racialized policy and planning decisions.For centuries, policy has been wieldedas a weaponto marginalize African Americansin the U.S.,whichtheBrookingsInstitutionsAndre Perry refers to as policy violence.The map below showsthe concentration ofPhiladelphias racial and ethnic groups in specific neighborhoods and sections of the city. It also showsthat the legacy of redlininghas kept manyminority neighborhoodspoor.

The chart above details the economic impacts of racial concentration and segregation.Median household incomes in majority-Black census tracts are48% of the median household income in white-majority tracts (a difference of $35,838).The poverty rate is 2.6 times higher in majority-Black tracts versus majority-white.

In terms of employment, Black workers earning power in Philadelphia is significantly lower than that of white workers. A Black male in 2019 earned roughly 64 cents for every white male dollar, while Black females earned 61 cents; Philadelphia performs at or slightly below the national average, but the pay gap is smaller in Philadelphia than in peer cities like New York City, Boston and Washington, D.C. However, between 2006 and 2019, the proportion of Black Philadelphians living in poverty dropped nearly 6 points, from 32.5% to 26.7%. Though at its lowest level in 15 years, the Black poverty rate in 2019 still surpassed the citys average poverty rate by 3.4%. Between 2011 and 2019, the number of jobs in Philadelphia increased by an annual average rate of 1.4% while Black employment grew by 2.6% annually, as the graph below illustrates. It remains to be seen whether the pandemic-induced economic downturn wiped out those gains.

In terms of homeownership, trends for Black Philadelphians mirror those for whites, though Black homeownership rates lag whites by about 10 percentage points. From 2005 through 2019, white homeownership declined about 5%, from roughly 62% to 57%; during the same period Black rates dropped 4% from 52% to 48%. In terms of differential property values, the Economy League is currently undertaking an analysis of 70 years of property valuation data by neighborhood. In terms of housing affordability, the home-price-to-income ratio for Philadelphias Black population stood at 5.0, meaning it would take over five years of income for at least 50% of Black Philadelphians to afford the citys median home value about double the rule of thumb ratio of 2.6 used by mortgage bankers to determine whether a family can afford a home.

In terms of business formation and growth, quality local-level data disaggregated by race are surprisingly hard to come by. According to the 2012 small business census, summarized in the table below, of the roughly 105,000 businesses in the City of Philadelphia, 80% were sole proprietorships; among Black-owned firms, the proportion is far higher, around 96%. Of the roughly 21,000 firms with paid employees, 64% were white-owned while only about 5% were Black-owned in a city that is 43% Black and about 40% white.

Moving outward from the city to the region, where data is somewhat more robust, the number of Black-owned businesses in Greater Philadelphia is disproportionately low, mirroring the nation as a whole. In 2017, 20.3% of the regions population identified as non-Hispanic Black, but only 2.5% of all employer firms were non-Hispanic-Black-owned. These firms generated $2.5 billion in revenue (0.3% of the total revenue generated in Greater Philadelphia), employed approximately 31,837 workers (1.1% of Greater Philadelphias 2017 total nonfarm employment), and generated $862 million in annual payroll (accounting for 0.6% of Greater Philadelphias total annual payroll). It should be noted, however, that this data from the U.S. Census includes only businesses with employees and payrolls. It fails to account for sole proprietors like caterers, artists, daycare providers, construction workers and or other gig economy businesses. According to Pew, accounting for sole proprietors pushes Greater Philadelphias non-Hispanic Black-owned business representation closer to 25.1%.

With this sketch of the impact of centuries of structural racism along three critical dimensions of wealth generation, what is to be done? In his book "From Here to Equality," the Duke economist William Darity has made the case powerfully and I think incontrovertibly for reparations for the descendants of slavery. Only the federal government truly has the resources for a comprehensive reparations program, which ought to include provisions for ensuring that every Black child has sufficient funds to achieve the post-secondary credential of their choosing; programs to help Black homeowners recapture the billions of dollars of lost equity in their homes and neighborhoods, as well as for helping more become homeowners; and a massive fund for investing in Black business formation and growth, along with strictly enforced policies to ensure that such businesses have a fair shot at capturing opportunities under federally funded contracts.

But what can we do on the local level here in Philadelphia?

Closing the occupational mobility gap requires workforce development programs that draw disenfranchised workers back into the labor market and provide career-ladder jobs at the end of a period of competency-based training. Employers need to be integral partners in this work. The West Philly Skills Initiative and the Lenfest North Philadelphia Workforce Initiative represent promising models of employer-engaged workforce development that need to be scaled and expanded to include a wider array of industries and employers. The Octavius Catto and 50th Anniversary PROMISE scholarship programs at the Community College of Philadelphia have virtually eliminated tuition barriers to post-secondary education for most Philadelphians. City policies that require the payment of 150% of federal minimum wage on City contracts or City-assisted development projects are important, especially since it seems unlikely that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania will raise the states minimum wage beyond the federal $7.25 an hour anytime soon. City policies that facilitate collective bargaining among low-wage service workers in large employment sectors with low wages and low union density, such as retail and hospitality, with disproportionate numbers of Black workers, ought to be explored. Organizations such as Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity have been working on expunging criminal records and obtaining pardons for those who have done time in prison, a major barrier to occupational mobility. And finally, strategies that promote retirement savings, like a city-sponsored retirement savings plan promoted by Councilmember Cherelle Parker and former City Controller Alan Butkovitz could serve as both an aid to small businesses in retaining employees and help workers at small businesses prepare for retirement.

In terms of helping Black homeowners recapture some of the lost value of their property, incentivizing what might be called responsible gentrification or development without displacement, through the promotion of workforce housing to increase the number of households with disposable incomes in poor, depopulated parts of the city and increase socioeconomic as well as racial integration, would likely help. Roughly one-third of Philadelphias neighborhoods have seen growth in the past two decades, while most others have experienced decline or stagnation, and most of these are areas that are primarily Black or Latinx. A few private development projects are taking the mixed-income approach, notably the North 10 Philadelphia initiative in Hunting Park, TPP Capitals Tioga District, and Shift Capitals efforts in Kensington. At the same time, strategies for boosting equity and opportunities for homeownership in ways that are sheltered from displacement, such as large-scale land trust projects like those proposed by Esperanza and others, modeled after Bostons Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, could build wealth and preserve affordability. The $1 million challenge announced in January by Brookings scholar Andre Perry in partnership with the Ashoka Foundation aims to surface innovative approaches to revaluing Black-owned properties.

Closing the business scale gap will require a variety of strategies. In the public sector, local leaders need to increase the resources available to the Commerce Department and the Office of Economic Opportunity to ensure that diversity and inclusion goals are actually met on public projects and that there are consequences for noncompliance. This will be particularly important as the Biden administration prepares to unleash a flood of infrastructure funds in cities like ours. The Philadelphia Equity Alliance is taking the lead on shepherding that process.

In the private sector, initiatives like the Economy Leagues Philadelphia Anchors for Growth & Equity need to be scaled so that Black-owned firms have the connections, capacity and capital to win large contracts in the institutional supply chain across the economy. The Enterprise Centers Innovate Capital Fund must meet and surpass its $50 million fundraising goal, so that there will be sufficient equity capital for Black-owned firms to form and grow; civic leaders and elected officials need to use the leverage they have with individual and institutional investors, including the citys own pension fund, to create local capital pools dedicated specifically to Black business growth. City Council should move forward with the creation of a city-backed public bank, which could help fill in financing gaps that traditional institutions arent always able to provide, like providing initial lines of credit to underbanked businesses, or seeding the growth of minority developers. Promising and innovative strategies for bolstering commercial corridors, like the Kensington Corridor Trust, need to be scaled and replicated.

City leaders need to hold large institutions accountable to the promises and pledges they make to support supplier diversity, and measure outcomes not simply in terms of contract dollars awarded but in terms of the number of Black-owned businesses that demonstrate year-over-year growth something that can be readily tracked using the citys wage and business income tax data. And of course, with the huge number of cranes dotting the skyline, city leaders need to hold the building and construction trade unions and the contractors that are signatory to their collective bargaining agreements accountable for diversifying the composition of the workforce and its thousands of family-sustaining jobs. A first step here is to require the unions to provide verifiable data about the demographic composition of their memberships. We cannot manage what we cannot measure.

While the above set of proposals will neither end poverty nor completely close the racial wealth gap, they will demonstrate serious resolve toward this goal. There are numerous organizations working on their respective pieces of the puzzle. What is often lacking in Philadelphia is coordination, which in other cities is catalyzed by the convening power of a major local foundation or via a broad-based civic alliance (like the Philadelphia Equity Alliance hopes to become). The time is now 2022 must be the Year of Action and Accountability.

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Unblocking the paths to Black prosperity | | phillytrib.com - The Philadelphia Tribune

It has been over a month since the Bates Educators and Staff Organization (BESO) filed with the National Labor Relations Board to hold a union election. With the election drawing ever closer, The Bates Student reached out to the Bates administration and members of the BESO Organizing Committee (OC) to try and gather more information about their respective positions.

Some union-eligible employees were also willing to share their perspectives on the unionization efforts and why they choose to support BESO or not. Individuals who were interviewed and not in support of BESO are a part of Bates Employees say No Union (BENU).

The administration and the BESO OC were asked a series of shared questions, with the addition of a few more unique queries regarding their respective positions.

Bates College Administration

The Bates Student reached out to Bates College Media Relations Specialist Mary Pols with a number of questions regarding the unionization efforts on campus. Four of these questions were either the same or reciprocal to the first four questions asked of the BESO OC, while five others were unique questions asked of the administration.

Pols provided the following statement on behalf of the administration:

After learning of efforts to unionize Bates employees, the college developed an FAQ and other communications to provide factual information for its employees. In its role as an educational institution and to answer the many questions raised by Bates employees, the college is providing the basic facts so that eligible voters can get a comprehensive and accurate understanding of what it means to be represented by a union, including the employment conditions under which a union operates. The colleges goal is to support those colleagues as they make an informed choice about whether or not they wish to be represented by a union.

This is a complex time for all of us, and we have heard from many colleagues who have questions about the process and their role in it. The college will continue to answer those questions, provide updates, and make sure that all employees are aware of their rights and to correct any misinformation that might be circulating.

The BESO Organizing Committee

What do you believe the potential benefits and drawbacks of a union are?

The main benefit of a union is that we all get a say on matters that affect operations and dynamics of a workplace, and by doing it together we amplify what any of us could accomplish alone. Issues such as high turnover, inequality, favoritism, among others can be addressed through a thoughtfully and well-negotiated contract in good faith. But maybe the most important thing is this: the next time theres a crisis and Bates has to make hard choices, do you want to have a real seat at the table, or be on your own and at the mercy of what a few decision-makers decide? Andrea Trumble, Academic Administrative Assistant

Nothing is perfect. Any democratic decision-making takes time and commitment, and having management decide things for us can be easier and fasteruntil they make decisions that affect us negatively. It will take all of us to ensure that our union is strong and active, to ensure that we and the College can really work together to build and sustain the workplace we all want to see. Keiko Konoeda, Contingent Faculty

Why does BESO believe a union is necessary?

Its never been more clear that we need to be included in decision-making at Bates. Last year, the administration stopped paying into our retirement, without consulting us. Even though they eventually reinstated it, I think that was an eye-opener for many employees. After we vote yes to form our union, it will be Bates legal obligation to bargain with all Bates employees in good faith. That means they will no longer be able to make cuts or changes to our benefits, pay, and working conditions without our input and approval. There is so much interest in forming our union, from all across campus, because so many of us understand that we cannot be left out of conversations about wages, hours, and working conditions. Forming our union is the only way to ensure that we actually get to offer ideas and alternatives when the going gets tough. Joe Graziano, Dining

Many of our coworkers have positive and supportive relationships with our supervisors. Through our union, we can work to preserve what makes those relationships work. Unfortunately, not everyone has positive relationships with their supervisors. Many of our coworkers have experienced harassment, discrimination, and bullying at work. HR has not been an effective avenue to address and stop this behavior. Forming our union would add an extra layer of support and accountability that any of us could rely on, if we choose to. If an issue with a supervisor or manager cannot be solved through conversation with them or with the help of HR, forming our union gives us options to bring in the assistance of one of our colleagues (often called a shop steward), or seek binding arbitration to resolve the issue. Collective bargaining gives an opportunity to bring up and address issues all at once in a structured, democratic way and with a more effective voice than most of us or our managers could achieve. Peter Osborne, Purposeful Work

Editors Note: Binding arbitration is the submission of a dispute to a neutral third party who hears the case and makes a decision.

Since Bates is an at-will employer, where you can be fired at any time for any reason, bargaining for just cause protections against unfair discipline and termination would add a level of job security so employees feel we can more easily speak up about negative behavior by managers or supervisors without fear of reprisal. Julia Panepinto, Athletics

Editors Note: Bates is an at-will employer, but cannot fire employees for illegal reasons such as race, religion or sexuality.

Forming our union is a way to ensure that we can fulfill and advance Bates commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Too many staff of color at Bates have left due to burnout, and this high turnover impacts students, particularly students of color. Too many employees experience pushback when they try to do equity work. Through the right to collectively bargain, we could improve workplace culture for people of color by implementing concrete accountability mechanisms to address discrimination, and by rewarding DEI work or work that requires language and cultural fluency. Olivia Orr, Communications

Through our union, we could also address the lack of pay transparency, which allows for significant variation for equal work. Women and people of color especially lose out on equal pay and fair promotions when there are no pay and wage scales, consistent annual raises, and step increases tied to length of service and performance typical of most union contracts. Sam Boss, Harward Center

Why might some employees not wish to be part of a potential union at Bates?

Deciding whether or not to join ones coworkers to form a union is an intensely personal thing for many people. Each of us weighs a lifetime of personal and professional experiences in the process. But a few reasons someone might consider not joining include unfamiliarity with unions, uncertainty about whether a group of coworkers can faithfully represent individual interests, or a belief that they are better off by themselves rather than having strength in numbers. Unfortunately, the administration and their labor relations expert have actively or tacitly spread misinformation in an effort to persuade our colleagues to vote no. Fears about losing benefits, paying mandatory dues, having their job outsourced, or having a third party speak for you or get in between you and your manager none of these things are true about BESO and the unionization process, and none should be cited as a reason to vote no. The important thing is that colleagues are talking to each other about these questions now; and, if we form our union, everyone will continue to have a place in these conversations regardless of how they vote in the upcoming election. Eddie Szeman, Resident Life

Editors Note: To hear the insight of those who oppose the BESO, turn to the section titled Union-Eligible Employee Perspectives.

If the union forms, what will the next steps be?

After a majority of us vote yes to form our union, we will do an extensive survey of our coworkers and ask everyone to give input. Using survey responses, group meetings, and one-one-one conversations, our negotiations team will develop proposals to bring the issues, concerns and needs forward at the negotiations table with management. Everyone will be invited to participate.

We will nominate our coworkers to the negotiations team and then vote to elect that team. We will want to create a diverse team that represents the different departments, work groups, types of work and experience to make sure all of our voices, from all departments across campus, are represented throughout all parts of the negotiations process. Our negotiations team will be assisted by an MSEA staff person with experience in contract negotiations.

We would also decide membership while we bargain our first contract. Since it is up to workers to decide membership, closed shops are very rare; workers usually choose to make membership optional (open shop).

Editors Note: A closed shop union is where an employer agrees to only hire people who are already a member of the union. An open shop does not require its employees to be a member of a union as a condition of employment.

Once a tentative agreement on a contract is reached that our negotiations team feels reflects the goals and priorities set by their coworkers, they will bring that tentative agreement back to all Bates employees for a ratification vote. Regardless of whether or not a worker voted to unionize, every union-eligible worker (the bargaining unit) would get to vote on that first contract.

After we win a first contract and it is approved by a vote to ratify, we will work on developing our bylaws, decide on our structure of leadership and create our shop steward structure. Jon Michael Foley, Facilities

During this past year after BESO was first formed, how did the group work together and what was the planning process like?

BESO has deep roots in issues and multiple work areas (e.g. grounds, custodial, contingent faculty, etc.) that predate [the organization of BESO]. Whatever momentum might have existed prior to BESO emerged from solidarity efforts that responded to feelings of institutional disenfranchisement and alienation that took shape during the pandemic as a result of the colleges simultaneous usage of two contrasting rhetorical positions: We are all in this together and Only some of us get to make the decisions about this institution.

Though some of the people who were involved in these solidarity efforts are now involved in the OC of BESO, the solidarity efforts were much more about supporting anxious, overworked, and vulnerable co-workers in the immediacy of the pre-vaccination pandemic than they were about organizing. Though many of those people have since left Bates, it would be fair to trace the strong feelings about the wall-to-wall organizing approach to those earlier experiences of people providing much-needed support to each other in uncertain and alienating times. Josh Rubin, Contingent Faculty

From what we understand, BESO was originally to be made up of solely contingent faculty, but now it has expanded to encompass almost all of the departments on campus. Why was that decision made?

BESO has never been a group of solely contingent faculty. This is a misunderstanding that came from the initial NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] petition filing. The authorization card collection moved fastest in the contingent faculty work group, and that made it possible to file the petition first and make our campaign public. From our first public communication, we were clear about our intent to form a wall-to-wall union, and it has always been a whole-campus effort. This reflects our commitment to each other, and our shared belief that we are a stronger institution when the existence and success of our union depends on building relationships and having dialogue across work areas. Keiko Konoeda, Contingent Faculty

Editors Note: According to the NLRB, if at least 30% of workers sign cards or a petition saying they want a union, the NLRB will conduct an election.

Can Bates employees choose if they want to be in the union or not?

We will decide together how we want to structure membership in our union. Since it is up to workers to decide membership, closed shops are very rare; workers usually choose to make membership optional. Workers unionized with MSEA have chosen open shops, agency fees, or closed shops. Marissa Melnick, Student Affairs

Editors Note: An agency fee is a fee that an employee must pay if a companys workforce is represented by a union and the employee chooses to not join the union.

If the union does form, what process would Bates employees have to go through in order to bring up a particular issue with their manager or the administration?

Any one of us will be just as free to bring up a particular issue with our manager as before. But forming a union does bring an extra layer of support and accountability that any of us could rely on, if we choose to. If an issue cant be solved through conversation with a manager or with the help of HR, unionizing gives us options to bring in the assistance of one of our colleagues (often called a shop steward), or seek binding arbitration to resolve the issue. Peter Osborne, Purposeful Work

What has the communication been like between BENU and BESO?

Both BESO and BENU held open Q&A sessions last week, and both meetings involved conversations between members of the two groups. Personally, Ive appreciated continued private conversations with a good friend in another unit who has been involved with BENU. From those conversations Ive come to believe that there are some real areas of common ground to build on. One thing Ive heard from colleagues from both BENU and BESO is an interest in establishing a Staff Council to provide input on decisions at the College. Staff have had concerns for years about a lack of input in key institutional priorities and decisions the recent accreditation report listed this as a key issue for Bates. From the BESO perspective, a Staff Council would only be able to have a real impact if members had just cause protections that a Union contract would provide, because this would allow us to express candid views without fear of retribution. Sam Boss, Harward Center

What do you think of the administrations response to BESO so far?

Anytime you challenge the status quo, youre likely to face pushback, so the administrations response has not been totally surprising. Weve been disappointed to see so much misinformation about BESO (and unions more generally) on the Administrations FAQ and from their labor relations expert. We have reached out to the Administration multiple times to explore ways that we could work together to issue credible and accurate information about this process for our colleagues, but have so far had no luck getting through. What we hope will become clear is that the creation of BESO offers a real opportunity for Bates to be a leader among private colleges by moving beyond a hierarchical model across higher ed that has increasingly put key decisions in the hands of a small group of administrators. Empowering staff and contingent faculty through the formation of BESO will allow us to contribute our experiences and insights to the betterment of Bates on an equal footing, with the knowledge that were protected with a contract if we speak up. Darlene Zupancic, Dining

Do faculty and staff on the OC feel that making their position on BESO public has affected their relationships with other members of the Bates community?

The process of organizing together to build BESO has involved hundreds of conversations with hundreds of our colleagues, and built connections across departments and work areas that never existed before. These conversations have led to some really amazing new relationships, and strengthened others that existed before. Despite the misinformation thats been spread, and despite some of the tension thats spilled onto some of the email lists, these conversations are bringing to light some long-standing issues that badly need everyones attention. But theyre also laying the groundwork for the kind of connected and empathetic campus community we all want. Francis Eanes, Contingent Faculty

Union-Eligible Employee Perspectives

The Bates Student reached out to a number of union-eligible employees at Bates with the goal of gaining some more clarity as to why these extremely valuable members of the college hold their respective viewpoints about BESO. All of the respondents were neither members of the OC nor the administration and were asked similarly framed questions.

Three anti-BESO employees, who are collectively members of BENU, were willing to speak on-record, while one pro-BESO employee was willing to speak on-record.

Responses from BENU

What are your major concerns about joining the union BESO is forming?

Some of my biggest fears are bringing the union in and then it doesnt work out for us. It isnt easy to say no, we dont want this anymore. We have to go through this whole voting process to get rid of it after. The union also [prevents] us from not being able to have direct contact with our people in management. We would have to call a union representative to talk to management. Now, I can make an appointment and walk over [when I am having a problem] Some of the other things I am worried about We have wonderful benefits here. Our health insurance is amazing and Bates contributes to my retirement plan. I know a lot is being said in support of a union that [our retirement plan] wont be taken away, but when they negotiate, everything gets put on the table. Sandy Brooks, Custodial Services

Editors Note: Above, BESO has claimed that forming a union will not prevent employees from speaking about issues directly to their manager.

I dont think Bates needs a union because we have great working conditions here. Unions are not a magic wand everything will become a negotiable item. [The] average union wage increase is [3.3%]. Over a two or three year contract, you may get 3% the first year and then 2% the following year then 1.5% the last year People need to realize that we will be getting pennies rather than dollars Sherry Lessard, Custodial Services

Editors Note: First-year union wages in private non-manufacturing jobs increased 3.5% in 2020 according to Bloomberg Law. According to the data, wages increased 2.7% and 2.8% on average in the second and third years.

I have worked [in] many different places in my career and have never felt as much support from a job [as] I do here. I have never felt like my job has ever been in danger and everyone has been a joy to work with. I feel like we have amazing benefits here and the college always makes sure they take care of us and is very family oriented. Jason Therrien, Facilities Services Carpenter

Why do you believe Bates does not need a union?

We love doing what we do, and we love being around students, but those perks [of benefits and time-off] are a big part of it. A lot of companies dont do that anymore. I feel comfortable with what I have now. Sandy Brooks, Custodial Services

I have been in a union. I have worked without a contract. I have gone out there with our signs and picketed, just to [have signed] a low contract to get back to work. Sherry Lessard, Custodial Services

I just feel that it is unnecessary and that nothing good is going to come from it. Im afraid we will lose more than can be gained and will cause unnecessary rifts in our great work environment. Jason Therrien, Facilities Services Carpenter

Can you reflect on a particular experience that has allowed you to feel a union is not necessary?

We just got a $1.50 raise, which was in our last paycheck, and that was something we negotiated at a meeting over in Olin. A group of custodians got together and asked our manager, We are feeling a little overworked and underpaid. We are doing all of this extra work with COVID going on and we feel like we are worth more than this. It took a while but we did finally get our raise. It didnt take a union to get that for us. We all sat down with Geoff Swift and told him how we were feeling, and eventually something happened.

Something a lot of people didnt know is that Bates didnt have to furlough or get rid of any people on campus. We got our contributions [to our retirement fund] cut for a while, and we were mad about that, which was part of what the meeting [with Swift] was about, but across the whole campus he stopped [the retirement fund contributions] Doing that, he kept everyone working. Immediately after things started to settle down he gave it right back to us and he paid us every penny that was stopped. Sandy Brooks, Custodial Services

Editors Note: Geoffrey Swift is the Vice President for Finance and Administration and Treasurer at Bates.

I cant think of many places that would do that [not lay off workers due to COVID]. I had also just started here when my wife gave birth to my son and had some complications. They did everything they could do to give me the time to be there at the beginning, and I will be [] thankful for that. Jason Therrien, Facilities Services Carpenter

Management has listened to us. We have sat down with them and let them know how we feel and what our needs are. I can call, email, or stop in anyones office with my concerns. Sherry Lessard, Custodial Services

Why do you believe some faculty and staff are pro-BESO?

I think some of the faculty and staff are caught up in all the hate and turmoil thats going on in the world. Look beyond what the pandemic and politics has brought us to. Bates has always been a great place to work and we can get back to that. We dont need a third party to take a portion of our pay. Sherry Lessard, Custodial Services

Editors Note: Lessard is referring to union dues, which the BESO has reported as optional.

Responses From Pro-BESO Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics Alyssa Maraj Grahame

What are some aspects of BESO that will benefit your experience as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics?

The most important benefit will be having a seat at the table. As a visiting assistant professor, my job is insecure a concern that is shared by almost all contingent faculty.

When I first started at Bates in 2019, I knew that my job was temporary and that I might have to relocate for a longer-term, tenure track academic position. Bates was giving me a great start to my career. However, since the pandemic started and the academic job market dried up, Ive worried what will happen when my contract expires.

Whether from job instability or inadequate wages, uncertainty can make the stress of the past 20 months nearly unbearable. None of this is abstract, and it impacts Bates as a whole. BESO is made up of people who understand those pressures because they have experienced them. I think everyone in the Bates community stands to benefit if BESO is part of the conversation around charting a path out of this pandemic.

What about your experience at Bates has led you to believe that unionizing is necessary?

I believe that unions are always necessary, full stop. Under almost any circumstances, I would support unionization both as a political economist and as an employee.

As a political economist, I dont know of any time in history when ordinary working peoples lives substantially improved without organization by and for working people.

I would likely not be at Bates at all if not for a union that I was a member of in graduate school. Before that, Id been barely scraping by on $12 an hour with no health insurance, and spending most of my take home pay just on childcare and rent.

At UMass Amherst, our union was called the Graduate Employee Organization, which was affiliated with United Auto Workers (UAW). I came to realize that, as a single parent with a three year old, GEO-UAW was the reason I could go to graduate school at all. Through GEO, I received subsidized, on-campus preschool for my son. With the subsidy, preschool tuition was around $50 a month instead of $1,700.

Our benefits at Bates may be generous compared to corporate employers, but during the pandemic weve seen that the college can take away benefits suddenly and without consultation.

When the pandemic started, Bates unilaterally announced it was suspending contributions to employees retirement accounts and it asked faculty to voluntarily give back their cost-of-living-adjustments we had already signed our contracts in light of the hiring and pay raise freeze that had been announced for staff. At the end of 2020, employees were given a one-time retirement payment equivalent to the total dollar amount we would have received over the preceding six months. However, this payment didnt account for the interest we might have earned in that six-month period.

In contrast, if there were a union and a union contract, the college would likely have to come to the bargaining table and negotiate if it felt that cuts were fiscally necessary.

Supporting a union isnt implicitly a criticism of Bates. A union introduces democratic practices into the workplace, which should be seen as a positive thing for all.

What are your opinions on the administrations response to the unionizing efforts so far?

Id encourage the administration to consider whether and how embracing BESO could advance the administrations goals for Bates. Last year, Bates committed to doing its part to dismantle structural racism. Unions are a crucial part of that effort. Going back to the 19th century, racism persisted after the abolition of slavery in no small part because of opposition to organized labor. Bates can contribute to redress by supporting unionization. Its an opportunity for Bates to lead the way among its peer institutions and the entire American academy.

Read more here:

Q&A With Bates Administration, the BESO Organizing Committee and Union-Eligible Employees - The Bates Student

David Brooks| Palm Beach Post

One of the Democratic Partys core problems is that it still regards itself mainly as the party of the underdog. But as the information-age economy has matured, the Democratic Party has also become the party of the elite, especially on the cultural front.

Democrats dominate societys culture generators: the elite universities, the elite media, the entertainment industry, the big tech companies, the thriving elite places like Manhattan, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

In 2020, Joe Biden won roughly one-sixth of the nations counties, but together those counties generate roughly 71% of the nations GDP.

As the Democrats have become more culturally and economically dominant, many people at tippy-top private schools and super-expensive colleges have flamboyantly associated themselves with the oppressed. Thankfully, that has moved society to more aggressively pursue social and racial justice. Unfortunately, a tacit ideology sometimes called wokeness has been grafted on to this pursuit.

It includes the notions that society is essentially a zone of conflict between oppressor and oppressed groups, that a persons identity is predominantly about group identity and that slavery is the defining fact of American history.

Because they dominate the cultural commanding heights, including some departments of education and the largest teachers unions, progressive views permeate schools, museums, movies and increasingly the public stances of large corporations.

The Republican Party, like many right-populist parties across the Western world, has become a giant vessel of resistance against cultural, urban and information-age elites. Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who was just elected governor of Virginia, expressed that resistance when he said, I believe parents should be in charge of their kids education.

When Democrats seem to be magnifying the education establishments control of the classroom and minimizing the role of parents, theres going to be a reaction. Some of the reaction is pure racism, but a lot of it is pushback against elite domination and the tacit ideology.

The results of Tuesdays elections show again that resistance against the elites can be a powerful force propelling Republicans to victory. In the final weeks leading up to Youngkins victory, education became one of the top issues for Virginia voters.

The results also put the Donald Trump phenomenon in a new perspective. Trump was necessary to smash the old GOP and to turn the party into a vanguard of anti-elite resistance. But by 2020, with his moral degradation and all the rest, he was also holding back Republicans. If Republicans can find candidates who oppose the blue oligarchy but without too much Trumpian baggage, they can win over some former Biden voters in places like Virginia and New Jersey.

Democrats would be wise to accept the fact that they have immense social and cultural power, and accept the responsibilities that entails by adopting what Id call a Whole Nation Progressivism.

America is ferociously divided on economic, regional, racial and creedal lines. The job of leaders is to stand above these divides and seek to heal them. The job of leaders is not to impose their values on everyone else; it is to defend a pluralistic order in which different communities can work out their own values.

From FDR and LBJ on down, Democrats have been good at healing economic divides. The watered-down spending bill struggling its way through Congress would be an important step to redistribute resources to people and places that have been left behind.

But Democrats are not good at thinking about culture, even though cultural issues drive our politics. You cant win a culture war by raising the minimum wage. In fact, if politics are going to be all culture war as Republicans have tried to make them I suspect Democrats cant win it at all.

Democrats need a positive moral vision that would start by rejecting the idea that we are locked into incessant conflict along class, cultural, racial and ideological lines. It would reject all the appurtenances of the culture warrior pose the us/them thinking, exaggerating the malevolence of the other half of the country, relying on crude essentialist stereotypes to categorize yourself and others.

It would instead offer a vision of unity, unity, unity. That unity is based on a recognition of the complex humanity of each person that each person is in the act of creating a meaningful life. It would reject racism, the ultimate dehumanizing force, but also reject any act that seeks to control the marketplace of ideas or intimidate those with opposing views. It would reject ideas and movements that seek to reduce complex humans to their group identities. It would stand for racial, economic and ideological integration, and against separatism, criticizing, for example, the way conservatives are often shut out from elite cultural institutions.

Democrats will be outvoted if they are seen to be standing with elite culture warriors against mass culture warriors or imposing the values of metropolitan centers. On the cultural front especially, they have to be seen as champions of the whole nation.

This article originally appeared inThe New York Times.

Continue reading here:

Democrats need to confront their privilege - Palm Beach Post

Aldo Perez

Businesses are desperate for employees. Broadway Heights in Chico is going as far as offering a vaccination bonus for new hires.

Businesses throughout Chico are struggling to keep employment. Some are shortening their business hours, others are even offering hiring bonuses.

The labor shortage, however, is not unique to the city of Chico. While scrolling through Twitter late one night, I came across a picture of a sign in front of a business that read: We are short-staffed. No one wants to work anymore.

The picture was originally posted on an anti-work subreddit appropriately titled: r/antiwork: Unemployment for all, not just the rich!

The subreddit has seen exponential growth over the past two years and now garners over a million members. Most of the growth coincided with the record-breaking number of Americans who quit their jobs between April and August of this year, according to an economic news release from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Im no economist, but the reasons seem simple, and its not what people think. We know there are jobs available; the signs in front of businesses and the shorter business hours due to lack of employees corroborates this. Why, then, are so many Americans quitting their jobs?

Weve all heard it: People dont want to work because theyre lazy and make more money staying unemployed.

This is simply not true. A 2020 news report from Yale economists found no evidence that the more generous unemployment benefits during the pandemic reduced employment.

Its not that people dont want to work. Rather, theyd prefer to be self-employed or find work where they are appreciated and offered benefits like healthcare, flexibility, lower hours and higher pay.

People dont want to fall victim to the vicious cycle of wage slavery in which an individual is unable to escape a low paying job with little chance of economic mobility.

Our economy isnt experiencing a Great Resignation it is experiencing a Great Reflection.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced workers to take into serious consideration the type of life they want to build. A 40-hour workweek at a minimum wage job is, and has always been, absurd. Such a lifestyle robs people of precious time they will never get back.

Its incredibly difficult to work a 9-5 all while cooking healthy meals, taking care of your mental health, exercising regularly, sleeping 6-8 hours a day and spending time with family and friends.

Workers are simply burned out and are realizing that a system in which their labor barely helps them survive but puts more money in the pockets of CEOs than they know what to do with is a broken system.

This does not mean that capitalism is broken. The opposite is true. Capitalism is actually flourishing and working exactly as intended.

Exploitation and extreme inequality arent simply curable symptoms of capitalism, theyre the very foundation on which capitalism is built. Both are necessary features of capitalism. This system by its very nature concentrates money to a select few by exploiting the many. It rewards corporations for maximizing profit even if this leads to low wages and poor working conditions.

Of course, a complete overhaul of our economic system is certainly not on tomorrows agenda, but employers should take the current labor shortage as an opportunity to do better. Unfortunately, their current reactions to the labor shortage is illustrative of an insensitive regard for employees as a mere means to their own profit-driven end.

When I see a sign in front of a business stating that no one wants to work anymore, what they are actually communicating is that their job is so terrible that people would rather take a chance and explore other options.

The pandemic has shown that change is possible. Businesses will be fine if they accommodate the needs of their workers. Whether providing an option to work remotely or allowing workers to leave in the middle of the day to pick their kids up from school, offering flexibility in the workplace demonstrates a basic level of respect for workers by acknowledging that their life outside of work is meaningful and worthy of consideration.

Businesses will not crumble if they offer safer working conditions, flexible hours, higher wages and shorter work weeks. In fact, shorter workweeks appeared to boost productivity in Iceland, according to an NPR study.

Instead of blaming the labor shortage on laziness, perhaps it may be better to reflect on what it is that people want out of their lives. You may find that a 9-5 grindfest is not on most peoples wish lists.

Aldo Perez can be reached at [emailprotected] or @Aldo_Perez on Twitter.

Here is the original post:

Independence and a better quality of life is fueling the labor shortage - The Orion

Rescued from slave ships brimming with human cargo off the coast of erstwhile Bombay in the early 19th century, hundreds of African men, women and children began life anew in the city of dreams. Many of them were taken in by orphanages where they received a new identity as Bombay Africans.

Enslaved people had been bought and sold in erstwhile Bombay for hundreds of years. Today, barring the term Bombay African, most of the sites which associated the city with the international slave trade and an equally strong anti-slavery campaign remain forgotten.

Bombay was an important hub of the Indian Ocean slave trade with captive Africans being brought in on Arab-owned dhows. While some of these slaves were meant to be sold in the city, a huge number of them would be shipped to Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines to work in plantations.

The inhuman living conditions they existed in meant that many preferred to run away rather than lead a life of subjugation. In fact, patrols set up by the British administration in the 18th century could apprehend any black African found in a group of more than two people.

All coffrees or other runaway slaves were to be apprehended, and were punished by being put to work on the fortifications for a year at a wage of Rs 3 per month, or by being placed aboard cruisers for the same term, a notice being published of their age, size, country of origin and description, so that their masters might have a chance of claiming them. If unclaimed by the end of twelve months, they were shipped to Bencoolen in Sumatra, S M Edwardes writes in his book on the history of the Bombay Police.

There was a standing order to all slave owners in Bombay to register their slaves. A head money of Rs 10 was granted to the local police for every runaway slave that they arrested. In 1780, a survey found that of the citys total population of 47,170 individuals, 431 were registered as slaves.

However, in 1813 the British government decided to abolish the practice of slavery, following which the then Bombay government issued a Regulation for preventing the importation of slaves from foreign countries, and the sale of such slaves, in the territories immediately dependent on the Presidency of Bombay. Slave trade, nonetheless, continued.

At the time, Bombay was the eastern headquarters of the British Royal Navy which had a base in the city and carried out many operations to stop slave trade. Many who were rescued from the high seas were brought to the city. Christian Missionaries subsequently set up a number of orphanages to house these freed individuals where they were given shelter and taught languages like English and Hindi, besides other technical skills.

Due to their association with the city, they eventually came to be known as Bombay Africans and many of them joined expeditions by British explorers to the African continent. One such Bombay African was Abdullah Susi, a close associate of explorer David Livingstone. After being rescued, Susi had partly lived in Bombay. In 1866, he accompanied Livingstone on his final journeys to East Africa and after the authors death, helped carry his body to the East African coast in 1873.

While several of these Bombay Africans played important roles in various expeditions launched by the Royal Geographical Society, very little is known about them.

Read more from the original source:

Mumbai Rewind: Bombay Africans and the citys role in their emancipation from slavery - The Indian Express

INDIANOLA, Miss. For more than a quarter-century, Richard Strong worked the fertile farmland of the Mississippi Delta, just as his father and his grandfather did, a family lineage of punishing labor and meager earnings that stretched back to his enslaved ancestors brought from Africa.

He tilled the soil, fertilized crops and irrigated the fields, nurturing an annual bounty of cotton, soybeans and corn for a prominent farming family. Ive been around farming all my life, Mr. Strong said. Its all we knew.

Black families with deep connections to the Delta have historically been the ones to perform fieldwork. That began to change about a decade ago, when the first of dozens of young, white workers flew in from South Africa on special guest worker visas. Mr. Strong and his co-workers trained the men, who by last year were being lured across the globe with wages of more than $11 an hour, compared with the $7.25 an hour that Mr. Strong and other Black local workers were paid.

Growers brought in more South Africans with each passing year, and they are now employed at more than 100 farms across the Delta. Mr. Strong, 50, and several other longtime workers said they were told their services were no longer needed.

I never did imagine that it would come to the point where they would be hiring foreigners, instead of people like me, Mr. Strong said.

From the wheat farms in the Midwest to the citrus groves in Californias Central Valley, growers have increasingly turned to foreign workers as aging farmworkers exit the fields and low-skilled workers opt for jobs in construction, hospitality and warehouses, which offer higher pay, year-round work and, sometimes, benefits.

The agricultural guest worker program, known by the shorthand H-2A, was once shunned by farmers here and elsewhere as expensive and bureaucratic. But the continuing farm labor shortages across the country pushed H-2A visas up to 213,394 in the 2020 fiscal year, from 55,384 in 2011.

Our choice is between importing our food or importing the work force necessary to produce domestically, said Craig Regelbrugge, a veteran agricultural industry advocate who is an expert on the program. Thats never been truer than it is today. Virtually all new workers entering into the agriculture work force these days are H-2A workers.

In the Mississippi Delta, a region of high unemployment and entrenched poverty, the labor mobility that is widening the pool of fieldworkers is having a devastating effect on local workers who are often ill-equipped to compete with the new hires, frequently younger and willing to work longer hours.

The new competition is upending what for many has been a way of life in the rich farmlands of Mississippi. Its like being robbed of your heritage, Mr. Strong said.

In Mississippi, where the legacy of slavery and racism has long pervaded work in the cotton fields, a federal lawsuit filed by Mr. Strong and five other displaced Black farmworkers claims that the new foreign workers were illegally paid at higher rates than local Black workers, who it said had for years been subjected to racial slurs and other demeaning treatment from a white supervisor.

Two additional plaintiffs are preparing to join the suit, which says farmers violated civil rights law by hiring only white workers from South Africa, a country with its own history of racial injustice.

Black workers have been doing this work for generations, said Ty Pinkins, a lawyer at the Mississippi Center for Justice, which is representing the Black farmworkers in the lawsuit. They know the land, they know the seasons, they know the equipment.

A vast flood plain, the Mississippi Delta boasts some of the countrys richest soil. It also is the poorest pocket of the poorest state. In Indianola, a town of almost 10,000 about 95 miles north of Jackson, the median household income is $28,941.

The hometown of the blues legend B.B. King, Indianola is the seat of Sunflower County, where empty storefronts line forlorn downtowns and children play outside crumbling shacks.

The region, which is more than 70 percent Black, remains rigidly segregated. Black children attend underfunded public schools while white students go to private academies. Black and white families bury their dead in different cemeteries.

The Delta is only one of a number of places where South Africans have been hired for agricultural work in recent years. While Mexicans accounted for the largest share of last years H-2A visas, or 197,908 of them, the second-largest number, 5,508, went to South Africans. Their numbers soared 441 percent between 2011 and 2020.

Garold Dungy, who until two years ago ran an agency that recruited foreign farmworkers, including for Pitt Farms, the operation that employed Mr. Strong and the other plaintiffs, said South Africans represented the bulk of his business. They are the preferred group, he said, because of their strong work ethic and fluency in English.

Under the program, growers can hire foreign workers for up to 10 months. They must pay them an hourly wage that is set by the Labor Department and varies from state to state, as well as their transportation and housing.

Farmers must also show that they have tried, and failed, to find Americans to perform the work and they must pay domestic workers the same rate they are paying the imported laborers.

According to the Black workers lawsuit, Pitt Farms paid the South Africans $9.87 an hour in 2014, a rate that reached $11.83 in 2020. The plaintiffs who worked in the fields were paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour or $8.25 on weekends, plus occasional bonuses.

Both Walter Pitts, a co-owner of Pitts Farms, and the farms lawyer, Timothy Threadgill, declined to discuss the farms hiring strategy because of the pending litigation.

The reliance on South Africans may reflect the nature of agriculture and the demographics in the Mississippi Delta, compared with places like California.

In the Mississippi Delta, row-crop production requires fewer workers but workers who have skills to use machinery and equipment, said Elizabeth Canales, an agricultural extension economist at Mississippi State University. We hardly have any Latinos in this remote region. Naturally, its easier to hire South Africans where language will not be a barrier, especially because in this area, you have a very small Spanish-speaking population.

The South Africans arrived in the region willing to work weeks that sometimes stretched to 75 hours or more, grueling schedules that might have been difficult for older local workers to maintain, industry analysts said.

There was initially no public controversy over the program in Indianola. Growers in the region described the South Africans as good workers, said Steve Rosenthal, a three-term mayor of Indianola who lost his bid for re-election in October. Until the lawsuit was filed, he did not realize that some Black workers had been let go.

If you have a man that youve trained and worked with for years and he knows how to get stuff done, he said, how in good conscience can you bring somebody over and pay him more than a man thats been with you five, eight, 10 years?

The Strong family has worked for generations for the Pitts family, which has farmed in the Mississippi Delta for six decades. Richard Strongs grandfather Henry and grandmother Isadora worked their land. So did his father and his uncle.

Mr. Strong and his brother got hired in the 1990s; he eventually operated not only tractors, but big equipment like combines and cotton pickers. He mixed chemicals to control weeds and pests. He ran irrigation pivots in 19 fields, covering some 3,000 acres. He rose to manager, driving across the farm to verify that everything was in working order.

When he first heard that Africans were coming to work on the farm, about eight years ago, I didnt question it. I just went along doing my job, he said.

But when four white men showed up, they were not the Africans he had expected. Even so, Mr. Strong said, the men, a good 20 years younger than him, were cool guys.

He taught the men how to properly plow, how to input GPS settings into the tractors navigation systems, how to operate the irrigation system so just the right amount of water was sprinkled on the crops.

Over the next few years, more South Africans came, until more than half the farms work force was there on foreign visas.

One of them was Innes Singleton, now 28, who learned about the opportunity to work in Mississippi from a friend in 2012.

He had recently finished secondary school and did not know what to do next.

He arrived in Indianola in early 2013, and is now earning $12 an hour, making in one week what would take a month for him to earn in South Africa, where the unemployment rate now exceeds 30 percent.

I learned a lot here, he said, adding that he sometimes had to work up to 110 hours a week. South Africans now do the main work on the farm, he said, and four locals help us out.

After the 2019 season, Mr. Strong traveled to Texas to visit his ailing father-in-law. When he returned, the Pitts Farm truck that he drove had disappeared from outside the house he had rented from the grower for about a year. He was told to vacate and was not offered work for the 2020 season.

A year later, others were let go, including his brother, Gregory, who said he had devoted much of his life to Pitt Farms.

I gave them half my life and ended up with nothing, he said. I know everything on that place. I even know the dirt.

Andrew Johnson, another plaintiff in the lawsuit, is 66 and said he had worked 20 years at the farm.

I used to work rain or shine or anything, he said.

But before the 2021 season began, he said, one of the Pitts owners told him he didnt need me no more.

Since the lawsuit was filed, other Black workers have come forward, saying they had labored in the fields and catfish farms of the Delta before unfairly losing their jobs, Mr. Pinkins, the lawyer, said.

In late October, as the harvesting season came to a close, eighteen-wheelers in Indianola rumbled down the highway, loaded with bales of cotton. Driving alongside the farm where he spent 24 years, Mr. Strong scanned the rows of neatly carved earth as far as the eye could see. I put in all that, he said, with a certain pride.

Then a tractor passed by, a young South African man at the wheel, and Mr. Strong looked away. I miss working the land, he said.

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

See the article here:

Black Farmworkers Say They Lost Jobs to Foreigners Who Were Paid More - The New York Times

Illustration by Joe Ciardiello.

George Packer is one of the most successful long-form journalists of his generation. For more than two decades, he has been among this countrys leading liberal commentators. Offering a political and often personal chronicle of the vicissitudes of American liberalism over the past century, he has sought at once to reclaim and repurpose a political tradition he knows is in crisis.1 Books in Review

With each book, the task has gotten harder for him. In an early treatise, Blood of Liberals (2001), Packer reckoned with a New Deal and Great Society liberalism that had been assailed from the right and abandoned by the Democratic Party. Taking an inventory of this liberalisms decline through the life of his maternal grandfather and namesake, Alabama Congressman George Huddleston, an agrarian populist who opposed the New Deal during the 1930s, he then followed the life of his father, Herbert, a law professor and academic administrator at Stanford who committed suicide after suffering a stroke at the height of the New Left campus protests in the late 1960s. Joining the ranks of liberals pressing for the revival of a hawkish foreign policy in the early 2000s, Packer supported the post-9/11 wars, only to see them lead to an era of futile and seemingly endless military conflict overseas. Writing dispatches for The New Yorker tracking the unfolding catastrophe in Iraq, he published Assassins Gate in 2005, recording his disillusionment with the Iraq War, which he believed had squandered an otherwise noble purpose. Soon Packers liberalism was in for another challenge: the Great Recession of 2008. His next book, The Unwinding (2013), confronted the collapse of middle-class prosperity at home and the role that Democrats, as well as Republicans, had played in its demise.2

Across a formidable body of work, Packer has maintained his belief in a liberalism capable of perfecting itself and in the United States exceptional role as the agent of this perfection. The real question, he wrote in The Fight Is for Democracy, a collection of essays by writers stressing the importance of liberalism and human rights in the Global War on Terror, is not whether America is an empire, but what to do with the power we have. The surest guide to action is not to reject liberalism, he argued, but to embrace the most vibrant, hardheaded version of itthe kind of assured liberalism that characterized those midcentury elites who had fought and won the Cold War. Despite the abominations of Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib, the declining life chances of Americans of modest means, and a war in Afghanistan that (until recently) dragged on to no apparent purpose, Packer held firm to this vision of an aggressive liberalism capable of transforming the United States and the world together.3

Packers new book, Last Best Hope, returns to this theme of liberalism in crisis and in need of renewal. Joining those who have worried that liberalism finally reached a breaking point in the time of Trump, he still insists that his strain of liberal internationalism abroad and liberal pragmatism at home is the only thing standing in the way of the excesses of an authoritarian right and an unhinged, utopian left. While this is not a new subject for Packer, the tone and tenor of his latest book is decidedly insular. At times he does not seem wholly convinced by his own increasingly abstract pronouncements. Never fully answering the question of how we arrived at our current predicament, Packer does not explain how a revitalized liberalism can get us out of it. The search for causes and policy remedies remains secondary to the reassertion of ideological precepts: above all else, that liberalism and America in general remain our eras last best hope.4

To his credit, Packer identifies a core problem: Inequality in the United States, he argues, has crossed a threshold that fatally compromises the public trust and comity needed to inspire and achieve effective and robust government. But how to solve the problems of inequality and the countrys crisis of confidence and cohesion is another matter. For the readers of Packers new book, it is never entirely clear what needs to changewe mainly need to remember and reaffirm the idea that defines us: that we are a people uniquely created neither by blood nor rank but by common agreement. Against the weight of Big Tech monopolies, market-friendly regulation, gerrymandered politics, voter suppression, precarious labor, declining life expectancy, hoarded wealth, destructive climate change, and public health emergencies, Packer floats platitudes about democracy and self-government, evading substantive questions about the kind of transformation our politics and institutions need.5

Beginning with a pseudo-ethnographic reflection on trying (and ultimately failing) to relate to his Trump-supporting neighbors in rural farm country (where his family took refuge during the pandemic), Packer goes in search of a usable past that might stitch the country back together. It is a strange journey, one in which our hero provides a few flourishes of insight but ends up in a well-worn groove. Rather than revitalizing his flagging faith, Packer gives his readers more reasons to look beyond his strain of hardheaded liberalism for the answers to todays ills.6

Last Best Hope takes its title from Abraham Lincolns paean to Americas exceptional role in world history: to achieve a more perfect and democratic republic. Franklin Delano Roosevelt amplified the idea during the Great Depression and World War II, arguing that both at home and abroad, the United States would help save an economy and a world system in tatters. By the early Cold War, this elite commitment to the notion of Americas exceptional character and exemplary role in world affairs had hardened into orthodoxy. Challenged by struggles for decolonization abroad and civil rights at home, these liberal elite champions frequently resorted to both covertly and overtly reactionary defenses of a highly unequal status quo.7 Current Issue

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According to Packer, the exceptional role that the United States and elite liberals had to play in world history faltered only in the 1960s and 70s, as the country began to splinter into a set of competing Americas. These different Americas now conform to partisan lines, but they are best understood not in the clichd hues of red and blue but in terms of the widening inequality of the past half-century and the divisions it created among what Packer terms the four Americas: Free America, Real America, Smart America, and Just America, The first two align mainly with the Republican Party and the last two with the Democrats, but each represents a different challenge to the liberal consensus that defined the political landscape during the Cold War and, in Packers view, created a society with more economic equality, more shared prosperity, and more political cooperation than we have today.8

Packer recognizes that inequality is a material condition produced by political and economic forces, actors, and policies. But the notion of a common faith grounded in storytelling, underwriting collective agreements that allow us to work toward shared goals, is what interests him most. This begs an important question, however: Was the common faith that supposedly existed before todays rampant inequality, cultural division, and partisan animus undermined by inequality, or did it depend on certain kinds of inequality and intolerance as its precondition? The fact that the midcentury liberal world that serves as Packers baseline became mired in a long, unjust war in Vietnam; was riven by racial despotism and the protests against it; had been shaped by restrictive immigration quotas and repressive ideas about womens roles and normative families; and remained intolerant of non-normative sexualitiesall of this is barely mentioned, because Packer does not wish to confront a basic challenge to his entire historical account: What if the conflicts of our time have deeper roots? What if America was already many countries, not one? What if there never was a truly common faith?9

Avoiding these larger questions that hover in the background, Packer marches us through his potted history of the Four Americas. Starting in the 1970s and 80s, he argues, as the previous liberal consensus broke down, a Free America arose that elevated the prerogatives of capital accumulation, the privatization of public goods, and the reallocation of labors share of the profits to private businesses. Reaganism, or market conservatism, was Free Americas gospel, though Packer makes too little of how the Reagan administration married a vision of lower taxes and fiscal discipline against welfare spending with a punitive moralism, a sharp law-and-order politics, and a penchant for proxy wars. But either way, Free America arose out of the embers of the liberalism that had dominated the early Cold War era and began a transformation of US political culture.10

By the late 1980s, and reaching its apex with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 and 96, Free America helped give birth to Smart America. Accepting Free Americas broad economic policy parameters, including free trade, financial deregulation, and shrinking government transfer payments to the poor, Smart America was led by a new generation of technocrats and progressives; it did not eschew Free Americas emphasis on individual responsibility and pared-down public initiatives, but it did seek to temper the cuts to social spending and the welfare state with moderately higher taxes and multicultural tolerance for those who played by the rules.11

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By the 1990s, it was clear that the succession of Free America and Smart Americathe milieu in which Packer came of age as a journalisthad engendered a qualitatively new governing compact, one that spoke of meritocracy and equality of opportunity yet failed to enlarge the middle-class democracy of the postwar years, resulting in rising inequality and declining social mobility. With large swaths of the country saddled with debt, a crumbling infrastructure, failing public institutions, and low-wage jobs, Republican Free America and Democratic Smart America gave birth to two angrier, less reasoning offspring, each with a growing influence inside the two parties. On the right, we saw the rise of Real America, appealing to white denizens of the abandoned hinterlands and deindustrialized heartland, who believed that the elites of Smart America had left them behind. On the left, a Just America arose with a large, diverse, downwardly mobile cohort of college-educated millennials who felt no less betrayed by a broken meritocracy.12

Packers Four Americas comprise a basic two-by-two square representing the elite and the base of the two major parties at odds with one another. These Four Americas, Packer argues, place us at a double impasse: Both parties are tilting in multiple directions at once and without any dominant faction in charge.13

Having provided this schematic rendering of our political stalemate, Packer turns to a more distant history for possible ways out. He offers sketches of Horace Greeley, Frances Perkins, and Bayard Rustin: a journalist, a government official, and an activist, each an intellectual leader in a successful liberal reform movement. Greeley, who was involved with the antislavery movement in the run-up to the Civil War, allows Packer to tell the story of the refounding of the United States with the abolition of slavery. Perkins, who served as FDRs labor secretary, helps him consider the progressive transformations of the state as it became more oriented toward the needs and aspirations of the wage-earning majority, culminating in the New Deal. Rustin, who helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, allows Packer to revisit the way the civil rights movement seeded a broadly inclusive vision of racial and economic democracy.14

Underlying each of these movements, Packer argues, is the struggle for equal citizenship, which he defines as the art of self-government through democratic consent. This ideal is the core of the American exceptionalist promise, and it remains, he writes, the road that connects our past and future. Searching our history for progress and inspiration, rather than for evidence of crimes and idols to destroy, is refreshing these days, but in the wrong hands the pursuit falls flat. Not too long ago, Barack Obama framed his election to the presidency in terms of hope and change and as the culmination of our better history, one bending inexorably toward greater economic equality and less racial injustice. It proved to be another dream deferred.15

Contributing to the staleness of his approach to the past, Packer understates the ways in which these moments of significant reform were sparked by societal rupture, radical politics, and collective action. Slaverys abolition was not the result of Greeleys agitation, but rather a civil war, including the mass desertion of slaves from plantations and their enlistment in the Union cause; the New Deal was spawned by the near-collapse of capitalism, the rise of industrial unionism, and the twin specters of fascism and world revolution; the civil rights movement sought to overthrow patterns of anti-Black domination forged over a century. Packer likewise fails to explore the dialectics of reform and reaction: For every reform won, a counter-struggle to make citizenship a non-universal privilege aroseand many of these reactionary movements also won lasting victories. The defeat of Reconstruction by white supremacy after the Civil War; the segregation and anticommunist hysteria that followed World War II; and the truncated civil rights era, which saw a war on crime substituted for a war on poverty by the end of the 1960s, traduce the notion that liberal progress best represents the arc of history.16

If Packer can be Whiggish about the past, he has a rather too jaundiced view of our present predicaments. According to him, we have entered a cul-de-sac defined by the sudden eruption of conflict between Real and Just America, or what he sees as the extremities of white nationalism and wokenesseach in its own way illiberal, chauvinistic, and intolerant. But insofar as his historical narrative ignores the longstanding, consciously reactionary, and structurally racist dimensions of our political life, which have proved difficult to overcome and which liberal reformers have failed to vanquish, Packer finds himself with a set of political arguments that do not clearly answer the questions being posed in the current moment. Ignoring the radicalism of many of his liberal reformers and especially the reform movements they championed, he remains ill-attuned to the fact that social change grows less from the noble work of broad-minded individuals and ideas than from messy protest and forms of collective struggle that have often been deemed immoderate and even incendiary in their own time.17

Packer tries to anticipate his left-wing and right-wing critics by offering just enough solicitude toward both Real and Just America. Those in Real America who are now animated by white status anxiety define for him the demotic core of the countrys founding egalitarian ethic (a country of white peoplewith belief in themselves as the bedrock of self-government). The multiracial activists of Just America, in turn, are advancing a righteous cause in the face of the most consistent exception to the American code of equality: Black exclusion. Both nonetheless represent for Packer an unreasonable and unreasoning developmentand also a sudden one. Despite his interest in historical antecedents, he opines that the American character changed in 2014, when the sharpening conflict between Real and Just America shattered the optimistic story of incremental progress and expanding opportunity in a multiracial society.Packer does not fail to acknowledge that the Free America of market fundamentalism arose by making common cause with racial segregationists, that racism informed [this] political movement from its beginnings. Yet he immediately seems to forget this point, and he also elides how Smart America played its own role in undermining incremental progress and expanded opportunity in a multiracial America. The fact that the Clinton-led Democratic Party ended welfare as we know it and built the worlds largest carceral state and deportation regime during these years goes unmentionedeven though these policies abandoned the predominantly urban, Black and brown working-class in the process and are a core reason why something like Just America has come into being.18

Packer also downplays the racism transacted between Free and Real America. Distancing himself from the idea that the deep-seated racial animosity found in Real America might have been a source of Trumps appeal, Packer instead focuses on the anger caused by a justified sense of lost sovereignty. Real America, he writes, believes it has no way to participate in self-government. This lost sense of control, Packer argues, has less to do with the political manipulation of white status anxiety than with a series of economic dislocations. Here he does recognize the role that Smart America played: It lost the affections of heartland producers, Packer notes, by helping initiate a new phase of globalization that left American workers behind. He quotes the economist Larry Summers describing his tenure as Clintons treasury secretary: I dont think I ever went to Akron, or Flint, or Toledo, or Youngstown. For Packer, you can date Trumps election to this moment. That one imagines Steve Bannon nodding in agreement illustrates a problem with this line of thinking: focusing on lost sovereignty while avoiding the role that race and ethnic scapegoating have played in defining, if not constituting, the sense of loss. Whether it is Black criminal predators, illegal aliens, Muslim terrorists, or selling our industrial birthright to build the Chinese middle class, the arc of Real Americas America-first politics has consistently fused racial animus with economic concerns.19

Packer likely knows this. It is hard to deny that the purported threat to the status, and even the existence, of Americas white majority has now entered into the rhetorical and strategic calculations of both political parties, but especially those of modern conservatism and the GOP. But in order for Packers rescue mission to succeed, he has to obscure or deemphasize liberalisms discomfiting historical role in supporting the racial order and the way that major reversals of its political fortunes have resulted, in part, from successful appeals to racism and nativism by Republican operatives like Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and Stephen Miller. Though Packer knows that we need to assemble a convincing narrative about how to advance both racial equality and economic redistribution, he not only cant provide one but also cant really explain why we have so much trouble doing so in a way that wins the favor of a durable political majority. In the end, he capitulates to the bromides of the latest culture war from the right: The Democratic Partys historical commitment to redistributive class politics, he argues, was lost somewhere between the New Deal and critical theory (at least he doesnt say critical race theory).20

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Packers commitment to a narrative of symmetrical polarization, particularly his defensiveness about the Democratic Partys betrayal of the white working class, yields political misjudgments. Joe Biden won 47 percent of voters without a college degree, which is hardly a convincing portrait of a party simply in the thrall of elitist meritocrats, knowledge economy professionals, and woke millennials. Packers argument that Democrats lost the white heartland also concedes too much to the idea that insufficiently normative or patriotic messaging is the problem, rather than the counter-majoritarian and anti-democratic structure of our forms of political representation, as well as an era of elite policy-making that prioritized war overseas and mass incarceration at home and a commercial media that thrives on the culture wars and moral panics that Packer himself indulges.21

How Packer handles the George Floyd rebellion is instructive in this regard. Despite being the largest and most significant protest movement in decades, it induces in Packer what he describes as nauseaindeed, it represents for him the antithesis of hope. It is utopian and nihilistic, he writes, a strange combination given that the first descriptor seems to undercut the second. If one of Trumps failures, for Packer, was politicizing the pandemic, the failure of left progressiveswhich occupies much more of his attentionwas turning a social movement on behalf of an oppressed lower class into an affair of, by, and for professionals, one that sought a revolution in consciousness and diversity in elite organization and made grand systemic analysis the occasion for small symbolic politics and a withering fire on minor faults.22

What is odd about this argument is that Packer never inquires into the characteristics of the hundreds of thousands of people who participated in the protests across scores of US cities and towns (and even overseas); nor does he consider the array of movements and organizations under the banner of Black Lives Matter that have developed over the past decade or more. Instead, he describes the protests as howls in an institutional void, while remaining incurious about their substantive institutional agendas, from ballot initiatives to end felon disenfranchisement to electing progressive prosecutors, ending cash bail and punitive fines and fees, and holding police publicly accountable for the use of violent force. One would think a book interested in the art of self-government and inclusive citizenship would take a mass effort to reform (or even abolish) a prison-industrial complex that currently has one in 40 American adults under criminal state supervision, that disenfranchises millions with felony convictions and practices inhumane confinement, torture, and abuse, more seriously. Instead, we get what W.E.B. Du Bois once called car-window sociology.23

In fairness to Packer, one of the hardest arguments to get right these days is the relationship between professional-class liberalism and anti-racist reform. There are good grounds on which to criticize the elite skew of professional-class anti-racism and the nonprofit education and corporate management complex, which often ventriloquizes the struggles of the poor facing prison, poverty, and premature death in narrow arenas of elite jockeying for promotions, prizes, and clicks. But Packers brand of centrist contrarianism, with its empty solace of an industrial-era class politics, is no better, and it works against his larger purpose by ignoring how, in an age when millions of people are precariously employed, non-unionized, undocumented, or denied work due to felony convictions, racial and class divisions cannot be readily disentangled.24

If Real America is made up of downwardly mobile middle-class white Americans who imagine themselves to be in revolt against an administrative state in alliance with woke capital, Just America represents a working- and middle-class multiracial revolt against a carceral and neoliberal state that has redistributed wealth upward and instituted mass precarity over the past four decades. It should not be so difficult to determine which narrative is more faithful to the history that has shaped our current impasse, or to the democratic aspirations to move beyond it.25

An argument that has been popular with centrist liberals, and one that has also been welcomed by conservatives since the end of the civil rights era, is that limousine liberals and Black militants destroyed the possibility of a struggle for common dreams at the end of the 1960s, thus awakening a right-wing backlash. In this view, left progressives are paradoxically ineffective Democrats and at the same time useful idiots of a right-wing ascendancy. Channeling Arthur Schlesingers vital center, Packer writes that todays wokes remind him of nothing so much as 1930s communists, a collection of activists that lashes together the oppression of all groups in an encompassing hell of white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia and transphobia, plutocracy, environmental destruction, and drones. (If they have done sogood job!) To bend the analogy in the other direction, Packer reminds this reader of the archetypal Cold War liberal, someone who believed that he might harness the right in a governing coalition because while the anticommunist witch hunter Joseph McCarthy was bad, at least he hated the right people.26

Packer is correct that recent elections have not delivered the promised realignment of durable democratic majorities. But his own search for narrative solutions to structural deficits does not go much beyond the discourse either. He ends Last Best Hope with a (mostly) worthy laundry list of egalitarian policy recommendations: repairing the social safety net, supporting organized labor, equalizing public school funding via state and federal taxes, breaking the monopoly power of megacorporations, reviving a democratic press, and passing a new democracy law (including a bizarre recommendation to fine people who dont vote). But he thinks of these items less in terms of our concrete political situationthe play of existing policy proposals, the effective balance of forces, or the ongoing struggles required to achieve those goalsthan in relation to what he sees as the broader challenge to create an activism of cohesionthat brings Americans together across tribal lines. Packer is aware of how commercial tech platforms and media monopolies have steadily deformed our information ecology, but lacking a compelling structural analysis, he falls back on scolding the media for becoming too woke. Ironically, for a believer in democratic politics and self-government, and someone troubled by the culture wars that he sees all around him, Packer tends to view our ailment as a cultural inflammation of politics, not one constituted by material conditions and social forces. A believer in institutional reform, he is nonetheless angry when movements actually seek difficult institutional changes (such as to prisons and policing).27

Packer finally never confronts the limits of his vaunted midcentury liberalism. Its vital center not only helped create middle-class prosperity; it also elevated anti-communism into a program of endless war, turned a blind eye to the consolidation of the American economy and finance into a set of big banks and corporations, and channeled racial reform into narrow legal remedies. That some Americans had more faith, more cooperation, and more equality was undone not by the recklessness of the 1960s and post-60s New Lefts but by the excesses of imperial overreach, the economic impact of rising global competition, and the turn to austerity in public policy. A similar observation might be made about the post-92 liberal internationalist project abroad and the neoliberal reform project at home, both supported by Packers generation of pundits. Insofar as Real America and Just America have validity as descriptions of actual political factions, they are the outcome of these failed projects, which brought about civic decay and economic decline at home.28

Packers tendency to separate out the failures of these foreign and domestic policies is certainly not his alone. In the United States, liberals and conservatives alike have lurched for several decades from overseas interventions to declarations of a moral equivalent of war on some domestic evil, passing the baton back and forth, promising an end to political drift and dysfunction with every clarion call. In doing so, they have wasted not only valuable resources but also precious time, while making sure to ride every wave to avoid the debasement of their own intellectual and political authority.29

Packers effort to renew the liberal faith by divvying up the past into a set of progressive parables is sadly endearing. His failure to consider how the same liberal faith he sought to renew decades ago has contributed much to the dismal political and economic situation we confront today feels like malpractice. But this, too, is suggestive of Packers plight: Instead of realistically assessing the challenges of the current moment, he aims to restore something more ineffable than what we have lost. The melancholy emissary of a fading cause, he can only look backward instead of facing a profoundly daunting future, including what is already proving to be the next restructuring of capitalist civilization and the place of the United States within it. His weary tone belies a certain irony: that his brand of aggressive liberalism still has some juice. Before the massive new federal spending proposals and the withdrawal from Afghanistan prompted howls of protest from inflation and foreign policy hawks, the moderate reformism and bland patriotic assurance that best represent Packers own politics seemed to have found a successful champion in Joe Biden. Our last best hope is that Joe Bidens diminishing agenda might still succeed while continuing to disappoint them.30

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Stuck in the Middle - The Nation

This story was originally published by Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion here.

The triumphs and tragedies of COVID-19 present opportunities to address missteps and invest differently to create a more equitable post-pandemic health system, said Dr. Sandro Galea, physician, author, dean and Robert A. Knox professor at Boston University School of Public Health.

Galea shared these insights during his virtual keynote address on Oct. 29 to kick off the University of Utahs 2021 MEDiversity Week.

In keeping with this years theme, Intersectionality in Health Education and Care, MEDiversity Week participants explored how recognizing and understanding intersectional identities can help health care providers better serve their patients. The week wrapped up with theInclusive Excellence Awards on Nov. 5.

Using charts to underscore his points, Galea began his talk on a positive note, highlighting what went right during the pandemic. He shared how the healthcare system quickly adapted to the new disease and got better at treating it. The biggest triumph was the development of two vaccines with a more than 90% efficacy rate within eight months of the onset of the virus. The successes reflect the nations longtime investment in hospitals, medicine, and health systems, he said.

I think it serves us well to recognize where we did go right, Galea said. This was a really rapid development of outstanding life-saving technology. But it wasnt, of course, just eight months. In fact, it had been years and decades of investment that goes into these vaccines.

Amid all that went right, Galea pointed out that a lot went wrong.

The pandemic exposed and exacerbated longstanding disparities, which hit minorities, particularly Black, Latinx and Native Americans, the hardest. Mitigation efforts that protected some people from the coronavirus left others at increased risk of contracting the disease.

For example, Galea noted that White Americans and people in higher income brackets were more likely to have jobs that they could work from home. But Black workers, who were more likely to have low-wage and frontline jobs, such as cashiers and food processing plant workers, did not.Moreover, Black Americans tend to have more underlying health conditions, such as diabetes and hypertension, which put them at higher risk of more severe COVID-19 illness.

The more income you have, the less likely you are to have underlying conditions making you vulnerable to COVID, Galea said. This all reflects the legacy of decades and centuries of marginalization faced by groups in this country, particularly Black Americans. It all goes back to slavery, Jim Crow laws and other policies like redlining.

As a result, Black Americans had more than twice the risk of death than white Americans from COVID-19, and Black men had a three-year loss of life expectancy.

These deeper inequalities are the direct result of the type of efforts we took to mitigate COVID-19, Galea said. We are actually putting in place things that are further disadvantaging [vulnerable populations], which is really troubling and sad.

The disparities reflect the nations underinvestment in what makes people healthy and what keeps them healthy if a crisis occurs, he said. The United States spends more on medicine than on determinants of health, such as nutrition, exercise, physical environments, social supports, income, and education.

To close health gaps, Galea stressed the need for increased investment in public health and the well-being of people.

We need to address the conditions, Galea said. The vast majority of health issues are preventable.

Galea also challenged the blue-leaning health and science establishment to reflect on their bias and intolerance of different opinions and beliefs.

Weve made the mistake of casting alternative perspectives on what we should be doing during COVID as a red provocation, when in fact it really simply represents the plurality of ideas that we should be tolerating to get to a better place that fully understands the whole country, he said.

In closing, Galea urged the audience to seize this COVID-19 moment of opportunity to understand what makes and maintains a healthy community, then advocate for investing differently to achieve it. He then offered three approaches to improving better health for allhumility, compassion and reform through reason.

Humility reflects an awareness of ones limits in understanding, knowledge and importance. However, arrogance can blind us to the need to make sure that what we are doing reflects the needs of diverse populations in an inclusive manner, he said.

Secondly, Galea encouraged the practice of radical compassion, emphasizing that compassion is not charity but recognition of our shared humanity. To illustrate the compassionate approach, Galea returned to his example of COVID-19 mitigation efforts. Compassion would have prompted decision-makers to consider the impact of stay-at-home orders on low-wage, frontline workers and do more to protect them. And we utterly didnt do that, he said.

In explaining his third approach, Galea said reform through reason recognizes that it takes a radical vision to create a healthier world, but it happens through pragmatism and incremental, inclusive progress that brings everyone along, regardless of their political views.

I think that those of us in health have a particular responsibility, a real moral responsibility, to articulate the causes of health so that we can create a healthier world, he said.

After his talk, Galea joined a panel of Utah health care experts to discuss Priorities for Health in the Post-COVID Era.

Panelists shared their thoughts on centering intersectionality, navigating political and ideological divides, the importance of community engagement and moving forward to advance health equity.

Moderator Jessie Mandle, deputy director and senior policy analyst at Voices for Utah Children, asked how to create a narrative to convince people what it takes to be healthy.

Health is equally of concern to red people and blue people, said Mandle, referring to political party affiliations. If only blue people are listening, were doing something wrong.

Valerie Flattes, Ph.D., a faculty member in the University of Utah College of Nursing, spoke of issues affecting the Black community, such as misinformation, promotion of vaccines and working from home.

People in the community can tell us what the issues are and the problems are, Flattes said. It has to be the right approach if you want to get the community engaged.

Jos E. Rodrguez, M.D., associate vice president for health equity, diversity, & inclusion and professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, reflected on the intersection of underinvestment and disparities affecting Black populations. We are choosing to fund health inequities, Rodguez said.

Ivette A. Lpez, Ph.D., said her students give her hope for positive change as they engage with diverse communities.

They see that theres a need for transformation of systems, said Lpez, professor of public health in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine and deputy director of the Utah Area Health Education Centers. They see a need for more diversity among themselves.

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Humility, compassion and reform through reason | @theU - @theU

In a recent blog, I shared an article by Scott Klusendorf: Saving Some, Standing for All: A Defense of Pro-Life Incrementalism (And the Problem with Abortion Abolitionism).

As we expected, many who call themselves abortion abolitionists took issue with Scotts article and my posting it. I have heard from many of these people in the past and have tried to look at their arguments objectively. Thats not easy to do, partly because they consistently and strongly portray prolife Christiansincluding many of us who have invested considerable time, effort, and sometimes sacrifice to save the lives of unborn childrenas unchristian and actually at fault for the fact that abortion is still legal in America.

Heres a direct quote from one Facebook comment: If they [prolifers] would abandon their anti-Christian, God-opposing ideology, and start holding their politicians accountable and supporting Gods Word, instead of prolifes ideology, abortion could end in two years through the entire country. It is the prolife ideology that allows this atrocity to continue.

There was a time when using the term prolife was taking the moral high ground. Now, the high ground is taken by using the term abolitionists. Its an effective term because nearly all of us realize the original abolitionists were on the morally correct side of the slavery issue, and it also implies most Christians who are prolife do not want abortion to be abolished.

On the contrary, every prolifer I know would love for there to be no abortion! We just believe that given the prevailing mindset of our culture, it is simply impossible to achieve New Earth realities right now. Therefore, we think we should do our best to save however many unborn children we can through personal intervention in nonpolitical contexts (thats what I focus on through my writing and speaking and conversations) as well as legislative efforts which can be very effective in certain parts of the country. However, in many places (such as where I live outside of Portland, Oregon) there is no hope of passing such bills when they advocate eliminating all abortions by criminalizing them.

In my experience, and it is considerable, abortion abolitionists have insisted there is no room for compromise or pragmatism, and that abortions should be treated as all other murders and criminalized with appropriate punishmentsome believe capital punishmentunder civil law.

This has the advantage of moral consistency, as did the logic we used in the rescue movement that sent many of us to jail and to court in the late 80s and early 90s. We said, If three-year-olds were legally being killed every day at a building in our city, what would Christians do? Our point was, if wereallybelieved the unborn are fully human, shouldnt we intervene for them as we would for toddlers?

I was arrested seven times and sued by several abortion clinics, and by Gods grace we succeeded in the clinics having to be closed on the days we were present. Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups did studies showing that when women came for abortions and were turned away because of the presence of peaceful rescuers, 25% would never set up another appointment and would have their babies. To us, that was wonderful news! When a clinic had 40 abortions in a day, and it was shut down through our presence, that meant 10 childrens lives had been saved!

I tell this story because I keep hearing from abortion abolitionists that those who arent part of their movement are unwilling to take radical steps on behalf of the unborn. Because of my prolife efforts, I lost my job as a pastor, went to jail, and couldnt make more than minimum wage for twenty years. Thats very small suffering in the larger scheme of things, but I think I can say I am not casual in my dedication to stopping abortions (which is saving children) nor am I inherently opposed to radical thinking and action.

I have been reading abortion abolitionist comments onmy Facebook pageand the articles theyve linked to, and watching videos they sent me. I had hoped to write about those today, but it might be several weeks before I can put my thoughts together. Well see.

For now, I want to say that I believe many abortion abolitionists are sincere Christians who genuinely care about unborn children. They have listened to the arguments of intelligent and articulate leaders and have come to the uncompromising conclusion that their approachand theirs aloneto saving unborn children is the right one. Several have made clear they believe all other prolife approaches dont go far enough and therefore are sinful.

Their save all babies approach sounds pure and undefiled, but in my opinion their utter opposition to incremental prolife efforts amounts to Save all babies, and unless we can, lets not save any. (I realize they would never say it that way, but thats what it sounds like. Im sure some of them have a more balanced approach. I just havent heard it yet.)

So why am I looking over abortion abolitionist material? Because I want to be fair and open to the possibility that Im wrong, whether entirely or partially. Obviously, I dontthinkIve been wrong (do any of us?), but Im asking God to give me insight in the knowledge that sometimes I certainlyhave beenwrong. If I want others to be open to my viewpoints, I should be open to theirs.

In these last few years I have seen a jarring number of Christians despising each other about masks, social distancing, vaccinations, and political candidates. I dont want to fall prey to the acidic, demeaning ways Christians have treated other brothers and sisters in Christ. I believe these violations of Christian love and unity blatantly violate the commands of Jesus and hinder the work of the Holy Spirit in drawing unbelievers to Christ. (I recently wrote anarticle for Desiring Godthat addresses this vitally important issue that is hurting churches and undermining our gospel witness.)

This is why in a future blog, I plan to link to podcasts and articles so people can hear for themselves what abortion abolitionists are saying. In my bookhand in HandI say we should not base our appraisal of Arminians by listening to what Calvinists say they believe, nor should we base our appraisal of Calvinists by listening to what Arminians say they believe. I am absolutely convinced to understand any position, you must listen to its proponents, not its opponents.

I confess I have been treated in demeaning and dismissive ways by some (though not all) abortion abolitionists, and I do not want to reciprocate that. The golden rule is not, Do to others what they do to you, but Do to others what you would want them to do to you. Thats why Im asking God for understanding, and the ability to set aside my preconceptions and believe the best of my brothers and sisters whether or not they do the same. I want to have civil dialogue and not misrepresent or slander fellow believers.

Now to my focus in the remainder of this blog: Id like to demonstrate that the abolition of slavery, which the termabolitionistsis historically derived from, actually happened in increments over many decades, with the hard work of many who opposed slavery and used different means to attempt to end it.

Considerthis articleon ending slavery in the state of Virginia, which talks about incremental steps. Even the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 didnt end slavery, since it applied only to the Confederate States. Over a year later Virginia finally outlawed slavery in the entire state, including parts which had been loyal to the Union.

Another year later came the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery. Had that amendment not been ratified then, surely the efforts to abolish slavery would have continued, even if theyd taken decades. While the ideal would have been the immediate change of the law everywhere, in a world where those who understand whats right and wrong arent always in control (have you noticed?), the ideal is not always immediately possible. Therefore, righteous people must labor to change all thatcanbe changed, while working towards all thatshouldbe changed.

One of my great heroes is William Wilberforce. He is credited as the primary human agent to bring about the end of slavery in England. In an article calledThe Incremental Nature of Change,Tim Challies summarizes some points fromTalking About Good and Bad Without Getting Ugly, written by Paul Chamberlain, a professor at Trinity Western University:

Wilberforce was a realistic man and knew (to borrow a clich) that Rome was not built in a day. He knew that the kind of change he desired would take time, for it required the British people to adopt a whole new mindset. They had to be led to see that slavery was an afront to the God-given value of human beings, even those of a different skin-color. They had to see that the conditions of slavery were an abomination to a nation that claimed to be Christian. They had a lot to learna lot to understand. This would take time.

Wilberforce, then, was willing to accept incremental improvements. For example, at one point he supported a bill, passed on a trial basis, that would regulate the number of slaves that were permitted to be transported on a single ship. Previously slaves had been laid in rows on benches, chained on their sides with the front of one pressed against the back of the next. Following the legislation, improvements were made. However, the bill implicitly and explicitly supported the continuance of slavery. Wilberforce saw it as a step in the right direction and was willing to support it. Another time he voted for a bill that required plantation owners to register all of their slaves. While this bill also supported slavery, Wilberforce saw that a registry of slaves would keep plantation owners from adding to their number of slaves by buying them from illegal slave smugglers.

Wilberforce saw these incremental changes as accomplishing two goals. First, at the very least, they improved the living and working conditions of slaves. While slavery may continue, at least the slaves were afforded a greater amount of dignity, even if it continued to be minimal. Second, he believed that affording slaves greater rights set the Empire on a slippery slope. Having acknowledged the humanness of the slaves, people had to admit that slaves were something more than animals. The British Parliament had given approval to bills that Wilberforce knew would lead to nothing short of abolition. And of course his beliefs proved to be correct. The incremental changes for which he lobbied proved to be the starting point for the eventual abolition of slavery.

Year after year, while both unbelievers and Christians denied or ignored reality, Wilberforce suffered sleepless nights, plagued by dreams of suffering slaves. Finally, in 1807, against incredible odds, Wilberforce saw the slave trade outlawed. But even that was not the end to slavery; rather, it was a big step (otherwise known as an increment) toward ending it. Parliament still insisted that those who were already slaves should not be freed. Wilberforce and the other abolitionists labored over 25 more years for the emancipation of existing slaves. Wilberforce died in 1833three days after the Bill for the Abolition of Slavery passed its second reading in the House of Commons, bringing legalized slavery in England to its final end.

Can you imagine any British opponent of slavery in 1807 saying that they would refuse to vote for ending the slave trade unless all slaves were immediately freed? Sure, ideally, you would want every slave freed. But any way to endsomeslavery was better than not eliminatinganyslavery. And even when slavery was ended, it fell far short of establishing full legal civil rights for the former slaves. That didnt happen for more than a hundred years, and even then, the racism beneath the surface couldnt be eliminated. I also recommendthis articlethat depicts the many anti-slavery tactics employed decade after decade, ultimately leading to the abolition of slavery.Imagine if one group stepped forward and said, We will stand against all incremental efforts to end slavery in America. We will oppose all laws that free some slaves and not others, and we will fight all legislation that increases the rights of slaves but fails to give them absolutely equal rights.

Though these idealists might have had pure motives, and perhaps would have slept better at night knowing they didnt tolerate compromise, judge for yourself how effective they would or would not have been in actually ending slavery. Certainly their standard would have failed to help present slaves. I think its a worthy point that historically the true abolitionists in countries such as England and America normally favored, embraced, and frequently used innumerable incremental means to bring about their ultimate goal, the end of slavery.

The implications for the prolife movement today are obvious. As Scott Klusendorf pointed out in his article, we are all incrementalists, including abolitionists: When abolitionists introduce a total ban on abortion in one state but not all of them, they are working incrementally. We cant help but function incrementally when confronting evil. It was right to end slavery in 1865 even though legally sanctioned segregation was not abolished for another 100 years. Even if we ban abortion, we still have the evil of discarded IVF embryos to contend with, not to mention other reproductive technologies that treat children as commodities.

Suppose Im on an ocean beach, and I see a sinking boat. I see people in the water and hear some crying out. I see people flailing their arms. I dive into the water and swim as fast as I can to get to them. By the time I get there, the entire ship is below water. Some are injured, and there are no life preservers. Among those struggling are five children. I grab hold of the closest child and hold her head above the water. I swim to another child and hold her up, but when I hold both up, my head is under water. I make my way to a third child, but I realize that if I attempt to swim them all to shore, we will all drown. Two is the most I can possibly save. Even when I sink under, hopefully I can hold my breath then come up for air often enough to swim them both to shore.

This is a terrible moral dilemma. Who am I to choose to save some and let others drown? If two children have the right to be saved, dont all five? Of course. But what is the alternative to attempting to saving only two? To let them all drown? Two is an increment of five. Saving two is not as good as saving five. But since I cant save five, shouldnt I do what I can to save as many as I can?

Jesus said, Truly I tell you, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to the Messiah will certainly not lose their reward (Mark 9:41). Notice the value He places on doing small measures of grace to the extent that we can. He did not say, Unless you can save a child from a life of abuse and poverty, you should not do anything for him. He also did not say, Unless you can give a cup of cold water to all thirsty children, you shouldnt give one to any of them. Giving a cup of cold water to a child is a small thing which may or may not lead to greater measures to help that child. Jesus does not take an all or nothing at all attitude toward helping the needy. A cup of cold water was an increment, but it was a very good increment.

Every day, on average, there are over 2,000 abortions performed in the U.S. Theres much work to be doneand the good news is that every one of us can do something to help women and children in need. May we, in our hearts and actions, have mercy on the smallest and weakest of Gods precious children, and do what we can to rescue and help as many of them as possible. May we reach out in love and compassion to their mothers. If we cant reach them all right now, lets reach as many as we can. And meanwhile lets all work toward ending child-killing, just as the original abolitionists freed and aided what slaves they could, while working toward the goal of endingallslavery.

Browse more prolife articles and resources, as well as see Randys booksPro-Choice or Pro-Life: Examining 15 Pro-Choice Claims,Why ProLife?andProLife Answers to ProChoice Arguments.

William Wilberforce photo: Wikimedia Commons

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How Abolitionists Worked Incrementally to End Slaveryand the Implications for Prolifers Today - Patheos