Category Archives: Wage Slavery

The conversation about reparations for slavery entered a new stage earlier in 2021, with the U.S. House Judiciary Committeevoting for the creation of a commissionto address the matter.

The bill,H.R. 40, has been introduced every Congress since 1989 by U.S. Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee and John Conyers,until his death in 2019. But this year marks the first time that its request to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans has cleared the committee stage.

Calls to redress the lasting impact of slavery and racial discrimination have been amplified recently because of further evidence of the impact of systemic racismboth through thedisproportionate effect of COVID-19 on the Black community and the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others at the hands of U.S. police.

To many, the question is not so much whether or not reparations are in order, but what kinds of reparations might be appropriate.

Most of the conversation to date has focused on reparations in terms of payouts of some form. Prominent authorTa-Nehisi Coates, in a powerful argument for reparations, said payments must be made by White America to Black Americamuch asGermany started paying Israel in 1952to compensate for the persecution of Jews by the Nazis.

As ascholar who has written on economic justice and the labor movement, I agree that reparations must have economic substance, because the impact of racism is inherently linked with power and money. But myresearch suggests another modelfor reparations: If one of the most significant aspects of slaveryeven if not the only onewas a massive disruption of labor relations, then a crucial part in the reparations discussion could involve reshaping the labor relationship between employers and employees today.

I believe such a reshaping of the labor relationship would substantially benefit the descendants of enslaved people in the United States. Labor, as my research has argued, has implications for all aspects of life and labor reform would, I believe, address many of the problems of structural racism as well. In addition, reshaping the labor relationship would also benefit all working people,including those who still experience enslavement today.

Labor relations can be considered distorted when one party profits disproportionally at the expense of another. In other words, it is a departure from a fair days pay for a fair days worka concept that forms a bedrock demand of the labor movement, alongside good working conditions.

This is not just a matter of money but also of power. Under the conditions of slavery, the distortion of labor relations was nearly complete. Slave owners pocketed the profits and claimed absolute power, while slaves had to obey and risk life and limb for no compensation.

Black Americans continue to be disadvantaged in the labor market today. As CEO compensationsoars, the number of Black CEOs remains remarkably low justfour Black CEOs were at Fortune 500 companiesas of March 2021. In general, the wage gap between Black and White employeeshas grown in recent years. Fueling these disparities, as well as building on them, is the structural racism that reparations could be designed to address.

Unionization can be a tool to rebalance labor relations and candiminish this racial gap,studies have shown. But union membership in generaland among Black workers in particularhasdeclined in recent decades. And a weaker labor movement is associated, studies show, withgreater racial wage disparity.

Another tool to rebalance labor relations is worker-owned cooperatives, which have along tradition in African American communitiesaseconomist Jessica Gordon Nembhardhas noted. From early on, she points out, African Americans realized that without economic justicewithout economic equality, independence, and stability social and political rights were hollow, or actually not achievable. Gordon Nembhards work also shows that such cooperatives were often fought and ultimately destroyed because they were so successful in empowering African American communities.

Some in the labor movement are beginning to link reparations with union rights. Laborlawyer Thomas Geogheganhas suggested that the proposed Protecting the Right to Organize Act, a bill before Congress that would strengthen workers rights and weaken anti-union right-to-work laws, should be viewed as a practical form of Black reparations. He argued inan article for The New Republicthat wealth redistribution through union membership is more permanent and lasting than a check written out as Black reparations, however much deserved, and far more likely to get a return over time.

While many disagree about the profits employers should be able to make from the labor of their employees, few disagree about the wrongness of practices like outrightwage theftwhich today takes the form of employers not paying part or all promised wages or paying less than mandated minimum wage. Even those who rarely worry about employers making too much profit would for the most part likely agree that wage theft is wrong. Agreement on this matter takes us back to slavery, which might be considered the ultimate wage theft.

Addressing the ongoing legacy of slavery and systemic racism requires not only economic solutions but also improving labor relations and protecting workers against wage discrimination, disempowerment at work, and violations such as wage theft thatdisproportionately affect workers of color.

Reparations that fail to pay attention to improving labor relations may not achieve economic equality. The reparations paid to Israel by Germany, for instance, have not helped to achieve economic equalitythe Israeli economy is still, alongside the U.S.s, among themost unequal in the developed world, with the richest 10% of each countrys population earning more than 15 times that of the poorest.

Simple monetary payouts are not, I believe, sufficient to solve the problem of racial inequality. Wage theft can again serve as the example here. While repaying stolen wagesasNew York state did in 2018by returning $35 million to workersis commendable, repaying stolen wages does not in itself change the skewed relationships between employer and employee that enable wage theft in the first place. Greater empowerment of working people is needed to do that.

So while redistributing money can be part of the solution, it may not go far enough.

Tying reparations to the improvement of labor relationswhich can happen through the empowerment of working people or the promotion ofworker-owned cooperativeswould not only help those most affected by wealth and employment gaps, Black Americans, it would alsobenefit others who have traditionally been discriminated againstin employment, such as women, immigrants, and many other working people.

Improving labor relations would address systemic racial discrimination where it is often most destructive and painful: at work, where people spend the bulk of their waking hours, and where the economic well-being of families and by extension entire communities can be decided.

This article was originally published byThe Conversation. It has been republished here with permission.

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Opinion | Why Empowering Workers Is a Form of Reparations - YES! Magazine

There is no doubt that the climate catastrophe threatens the future of life on the planet. A massive mobilization of the working class will be needed to combat this threat.

But, as Hurricane Ida and the associated flooding revealed, this is not just a threat to future generations climate change is already a killer. Not only have dozens of people drowned in the hurricanes wake, but hundreds are dead from the heat wave in the Northwest.

Structural failures under capitalism are compounding the climate catastrophe for the working class. As the Sept. 3 New York Times admitted, Disasters cascading across the country this summer have exposed a harsh reality: The United States is not ready for the extreme weather that is now becoming frequent as a result of a warming planet.

We see a clear lack of preparedness in the richest country in the world. There is no regard for poor, oppressed and working-class people, who get no evacuation assistance in a life-threatening situation and are basically left to their own devices.

The trillion-dollar infrastructure bill passed by Congress includes $150 billion for clean energy and climate change protections. Tens of billions would also be utilized to fight extreme weather like drought, wildfire, flooding and erosion. (PBS, Aug. 5)

Tens of billions is woefully inadequate.

Consider, on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, how Louisiana and Mississippi were devastated, their governments still not fully prepared for another major weather event. One million people remain without power and with little gas and water during the worst heat of the summer.

Floods devastated New York City. Here, Harlem subway station.

Throughout New Yorks five boroughs and parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, people were trapped, some dying in flooded basement apartments, others unable to commute to work or do essential tasks due to collapsed roadways and bridges, totaled vehicles and flooded subways and expressways.

Lack of money isnt the problem. There is incredible wealth concentrated in New York City and the surrounding areas, yet workers who produce that wealth were helpless in the rush of floodwaters. If the financial fortunes in Wall St. alone were taxed at the same rate as an average worker, funds could be used to prevent many of these tragic deaths.

Manhattan is an island of asphalt, with too little exposed soil to absorb floodwaters. The land was stolen from Indigenous people and then built up to serve the interests of finance capital people and the environment be damned. As with every major urban center, money in the city budget needed for infrastructure repairs and improvements instead goes to city bondholders. Big Wall Street banks extort bloated interest payments from New York and other cash-strapped cities.

Time for system change, not climate change

The pattern of damage reflects the relationship between climate exposure and racial inequality; impacts were more apparent in low-income communities of color, which, because of historic inequalities, are more prone to flooding, receive less maintenance from city services and frequently experience lax housing code enforcement, the New York Times acknowledges.

Environmental terrorism and environmental racism in the U.S. are part of the legacy of capitalist development.

And the situation is far worse in the colonized Global South.

But socialist Cuba, with far fewer resources than the U.S., has created a model for hurricane evacuation that looks out for every human being and even pets and livestock. The whole population is mobilized, and no one is left to fend for themselves.

A program of working-class demands is necessary to meet the twin crises of global warming and faulty or woefully inadequate infrastructure: Money for flood protection and relief, not for war! Money for cooling centers in a heat wave, not for tax breaks to the rich! Money for green jobs, not interest to the banks! People and the planet before profits; make the fossil fuel industry pay to clean up the messes it made!

This is just a start. It will take a monumental struggle to win climate justice.

But rebellion is inevitable. Ida is the storm of wind and rain before the coming storm of protest. The challenge is to carry future waves of resistance through to their essential conclusion: a workers revolution for the abolition of capitalist wage-slavery.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing in 1848, said the workers have a world to win.

That worlds very fate is in our hands.

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The storm before the storm - Workers World

Linus Guok is 21 years old, with a compact frame and hair thats cropped short on the sides. He leans over a kitchen counter, using a large knife to chop up a pile of produce.

One of his favorite things is to cut potatoes or sweet potatoes, his mother, Fiona Wong, explains. He actually will cut any and everything like fruits and vegetables that he sees, which is why we no longer have fruits on the kitchen counter. Because one fine day it got all cut up and there was a big grin on his face!

Fiona and Linus live near Berkeley, California with dad Chin, and brother Ethan. Linus has severe autism. With it comes a variety of behavioral, social, and medical issues. Hes nonverbal, which means he can vocalize, but isnt able to use speech, but Fiona says he can understand more than he can speak.

Julia Lee

When I visit their home in late July, Linus and his caregiver, Kevin Bernard, are sitting at the kitchen table together. Linus is eagerly taking a pair of scissors to a stack of colorful New Yorker magazines. Its another one of his favorite hobbies.

Kevins been working in this field since the 1980s, and though he first got into it as a side job, he now feels its his vocation.

Kevin Bernard

Hes only been caretaking for Linus for a few months, but he used to be on staff at an afterschool program Linus attended. So now, after years of working together, the two have developed an unspoken language. Kevin understands what Linus is trying to say from a flick of his head or a subtle gesture.

With Kevin as caretaker, life is the best it's been for Linus and Fiona in 18 months. Only after talking with Fiona did I learn just how desperate things had gotten after their support systems failed.

In her late 40s, Fiona is extremely open almost disarmingly so. Quick to smile, shes the kind of person who becomes fast friends with the grocery store clerk. She also has a tendency to laugh at slightly inappropriate times.

Christopher Egusa

Yeah, I have dark humor and I laugh at these things, she remarks during one of our conversations.

Fiona and her husband Chin immigrated to the Bay Area from Singapore in the late 90s, and had Linus soon after. At two years old he was diagnosed with autism.

There was an education on my part, to understand: what is his trajectory going to look like? she says. There was of course the denial and the ignorance, and then the building of community, and finally the acceptance. It was a long journey.

That journey hasnt been easy. Linus isnt violent or aggressive, but hes extremely strong-willed. His emotions can easily spiral out of control, ending in tantrums.

And, he doesnt just have autism. He also has OCD and epilepsy. Without warning, he can be struck by a sudden seizure. Its sent him to the ER multiple times. The latest was just before the pandemic, when Linus was away at a camp.

Fiona recalls, The camp counselor thought he had settled in for bed, and so he left the room and then when the night person came, found Linus on the floor bleeding from the head.

Because of all this, Linus needs 24 hour care and supervision. Even stepping away for a few minutes like the camp counselor did can end in disaster.

Despite all these challenges, Fiona and Chin eventually got Linus care pretty dialed in.

He attended a special school during the day, and then an afterschool program. Both parents worked full time: Chin as an engineer and Fiona as an occupational therapist. On nights and weekends, Fiona would switch into caregiving mode. It wasnt easy, but it was working. We were, like, being parents and also we wanted time with Linus, she says.

An Endless Pit of Despair

But, in March of last year, the Bay Area announced shelter in place orders, and their lives fell apart. The school closed, and so did the afterschool programs, Fiona says. So we went from having Linus being involved in a program and being engaged and taken care of to nothing at all.

Because Chin needed to keep working full time, the all-consuming task of taking care of Linus fell to Fiona; every waking moment of every single day. Even just using the bathroom was a challenge.

Fiona Wong

As weeks went by and the pandemic showed no signs of slowing down, Fiona realized that something needed to change. She needed help. So, she reached out to the local regional center.

And heres some background on the complicated world of intellectual and developmental disabilities or IDD for short.

Regional centers are nonprofits that are funded by the government. There are 21 of them in the state, and theyre supposed to act as a sort of hub for the over 330,000 IDD individuals and families in California. The regional center that Fiona reached out to was the Regional Center of the East Bay.

Heres how it works: you contact the regional center, and they assign you a case manager who can connect you to the resources you need. So if you tell them you need help with caregiving, the regional center contracts with one of several caregiving agencies in the area to fill that need. At least, thats how its supposed to work.

But my case manager dropped the ball, Fiona says. Because in June, a month later, I emailed her and she had done nothing about it. And shes like, uh oh thanks for the reminder.

At this point, Fiona had already been Linus 24/7 caregiver for three months. Shed quit her job to do it full time. Shed reached out to Linus school and afterschool program about possible solutions, but her questions were dismissed. And, though she didnt know it yet, it would be months more before she got help.

Fionas mental health began sliding sharply. I was not dealing with it very well, she says. You do the daily thing. So, the feeding and caring and changing his sheets and stuff like that. But it seemed like an endless grind. And I got into a dark place of I don't want to live like this anymore.

She describes it as an endless pit of despair, which she sunk deeper into each day with each negative headline and each unanswered call.

In that state, she felt she couldnt reach out to others for help out of fear of being a burden. One day, though, she did manage to pick up the phone.

I did call a friend and cried my heart out, she says. I said things that made her worry I would take my life. And I had thought about that. And I was in a very dark place.

Julia Lee

Sadly, this is a common story. A June 2021 study from the CDC found that 70% of parents and unpaid caregivers of adults suffered mental health issues during the pandemic, including anxiety, depression, trauma, and suicidal thoughts. In fact, family caregivers like Fiona were eight times more likely to contemplate suicide than others.

Fionas friend, now very concerned, called two other friends who are connected to the IDD community, and they immediately had a Zoom intervention with Fiona. They went right into brainstorming mode. Even though they didnt have all the answers, just the process gave Fiona a spark of hope.

She describes their support as life saving. It just reminded me that when I think I'm alone, actually, I do have friends who if I knew to call them, they would step in and try to help me.

With their help, Fiona decided to move Linus to a different school system, and redoubled her efforts to secure a caregiver.

A Revolving Door of Care Workers

Finally, in September 2020 six months after the lockdown began she was assigned someone from the caregiving agency, Maxim Healthcare. She says, We loved her right away. We thought she was a great match. Amazing, life-changing service. From nothing to Oh my God, we have help.

She even planned to go back to work. But it didnt last. After two weeks, the caregiver abruptly stopped showing up. Fiona says, I got a phone call Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then Thursday, no call and no person.

It was another month before the agency let her know what happened: the caregiver had had a sudden flareup of chronic illness, and they were trying to find a replacement. From there, it was a series of false starts. Every time Fiona thought maybe they had found something stable, things would go wrong.

A month and a half went by, and a new caregiver started, but she consistently showed up several hours late. And if a caregiver is late, Fiona cant work.

After a week, Fiona asked for someone new.

Three more weeks; another caregiver. She was great at first, but became inattentive, spent much of her time on her phone, and also started showing up late.

Then, in January, in a cruel twist, the caregiver gave the whole family Covid. Fortunately they all made a full recovery. Fiona can only laugh at the absurdity. So she gets the first positive test on January 27, she recalls. I remember these days, because theyre seared in my mind through trauma.

The final straw was in May, when the caregiver told Fiona she was leaving for Hawaii a few days later. I told the coordinator, I think I'm done. I cant live this way.

But she largely didnt have a choice. Fiona says when the agency assigns you a caregiver, it really feels like luck of the draw.

Some families try to get around this by looking for care workers outside of the system. That method has its own complications, but its exactly what ended up finally working for Fiona. In May, a friend tipped her off that Kevin, who we met earlier, was in between jobs. Its not an overstatement to say that Kevin changed their lives.

He willingly walked into this job knowing how tricky it could be, she says. He's reliable, and when he's on hes on, Kevin is not on his phone. He's like, engaged with Linus. He's actually doing the caregiving and I'm so grateful. I dont even have the energy to do that.

Christopher Egusa

The Caregiving Crisis

Ive gotten to know Fiona as an incredibly upbeat, energetic, and resourceful person. So I had to wonder: what happened in this system? How did things reach such a critical breaking point in Fionas life?

To begin understanding, I reached out to Lisa Kleinbub, the Executive Director for the Regional Center of the East Bay, which serves Alameda and Contra Costa counties, where Fiona and Linus live. She told me, I don't think any of us were prepared for the pandemic in any real way.

She says the first part of Fionas story is really concerning to her the part about the unresponsive case manager and the month wait time. That is certainly not what we want, she says. We can always work to improve that.

However, I will say that the story of having to go through a number of different caregivers before you find the one that fits is not unusual whether there's a pandemic or not a pandemic.

What Fiona and Linus experienced is a look into the caregiving crisis experts say is looming just on the horizon, and some say is already here. Its one that will eventually affect anyone who needs care.

The problem starts with basic math. Changing demographics like an aging baby boomer generation means that over the next decade the US is going to need more care workers. Like, 4.7 million more, according to a report by the Paraprofessional Research Institute. Thats the most of any occupation. more than the second and third places combined.

But the number of care workers is actually shrinking, as workers leave the industry. The reason? Caregiving jobs are of such poor quality. Mostly minimum wage or below, offer few benefits, and provide minimal training. Nationally, one in five care workers live below the poverty line, and over half receive public assistance.

One of the challenges in the Bay Area, says Lisa, is just finding people who want to do the kind of direct service work with people who are going to get paid possibly less than they will get to work at a fast food restaurant.

She says the rates that the regional center can pay caregivers are set by the state legislature, and theyre badly outdated. Some salary levels are still using formulas from the 1990s.

Having a system that depends on many, many minimum wage workers is not a sustainable system to really serve people in the way they should be served, she explains.

Kevin, Linuss caregiver, says he knows plenty of people who have been driven out of the industry simply because they couldnt make ends meet.

There really is no way to make it viable if you're not going to offer us a working wage, he says. And if you're not going to offer insurance things that people need in order to stay in the field. You need to feel wanted.

Though they may pay like entry level jobs, caregiving work is demanding and skill-intensive. Kevin has spent years developing his craft.

You might spend time with Linus and I and not get the nuance of it. If you have no experience in this field, it might seem like we're just cutting potatoes and dribbling a basketball. But if I'm able to understand what the process is and how I'm trying to slow Linus' day down, and get him to be attentive to things and communicate as much as possible, it starts to make sense.

The end result is an industry that experiences shockingly high turnover. Some estimates put it at over 60%. This is a problem when one of the most important aspects of a caregivers work is developing a trusting relationship with their client and learning their specific needs. The revolving door of care workers means that cases like Fiona and Linus get stuck in limbo for months or years, unable to find the consistent care they need.

SEIU Local 2015 is Californias long-term care workers union. In July, President April Verrett spoke at a rally for a national day of action for care workers.

They told us we were indispensable, she says to the crowd. Many of you in this room, you looked death in the face while you put on a mask. And you went out into a plague ravaged nation to care for others.

So I ask you, isnt an essential worker worth more than the minimum wage? Many of us provided care for others during COVID without having healthcare for ourselves or for our families. So I asked you, isnt a caregiver deserving of care?

Care workers are 87% women, 49% POC, and almost a third immigrants, and some advocates argue that the poor job quality speaks to a long history of oppression and discrimination.

Kim Evon is the unions executive vice president. She says, This was jobs done by black women coming out of, you know, slavery. We've got to start reconciling the fact that people make excuses to pay these women less. It's a leftover part of a racist system.

She says health insurance and adequate training are some of their priorities. But the big push? We believe that it is time to make a bold demand. That the minimum floor of any caregiver job, the minimum floor is $20. That it begins to show that you are demonstrating the value of this work.

She says their top priority on the national front is the passage of the Biden Administrations Better Care Better Jobs Act, which would invest $400 billion in home and community based services like caregiving.

It's a huge part of starting to get to this place that we're talking about. This path to $20, training, healthcare, retirement, this workforce that can really take care of this growing population of seniors and people with disabilities.

The goal is for these jobs to be attractive as long term careers.

Care jobs should be seen as an economic engine in our country, she says. And what you reap from it in terms of health outcomes, a growing workforce, a booming economy is to us, all interconnected.

But, its not enough to just pass the national bill. Kim says its also about convincing officials at the state and local levels that this work should be prioritized.

So it's up and down the spectrum. Look, dignity isn't a solo act. We all have a part to play in it, and everybody has a way to lean in to make sure it happens.

Finding a Way to Move Forward

In California, theres a ray of hope. Governor Gavin Newsom recently approved an almost $90M funding increase to help regional centers pay care workers and other service providers higher rates. The number falls far short of the at least $1.8B thats needed, but its scheduled to increase in the coming years.

Ultimately, what all this could mean for people like Fiona and Linus is some semblance of consistency. Kevin has been a godsend for them, but theres no guarantee how long hell be able to work with Linus.

Fiona says if not for him, she would still be in this cycle of maybe having a mismatch of a provider and only having her or him only last a few weeks, you know, and then it's onto the next provider. I would be pulling my hair out.

Years of being the default caregiver have taken their toll. It's a tough place to be for an extended period of time. It's difficult to get self worth and validation, when you're putting others first constantly is exhausting, she says.

Besides using her dark humor to cope, she says she has certain memories that she likes to revisit. One of them is from when Linus was in kindergarten. The speech therapist was trying to get him to nod his head. He couldnt do it, so Linus would take his hands, hold his head and move up and down, she explains as she gestures with her hands. So he had to physically hold his head to nod! she explains.

It's like, it's a funny thing that he did. That makes me smile every time. But it also speaks to his character, his personality, which we have seen through the years. Whether good or bad, he has a tenacity about him to go do the thing. He is determined, yes, it is hard to stop that tornado destined to go that direction.

That tenacity has been the source of so many headaches, exasperated sighs, and frustrated hands flung in the air. But its also what she loves about Linus.

And its a trait that they share. It got them through the darkest months of the pandemic, and shes trusting it to get them through whatevers next.

Christopher Egusa reported this series while participating in theUSC Annenberg Center for Health Journalisms 2021 California Fellowship.

Continued here:

COVID-19 Is Exposing The Caregiving Crisis, Leaving Disabled People And Their Families Desperate - KALW

It has often happened that the most creative works in a medium, at various times, have been made by outsiders to the medium, not by those who have practiced it for many years. This seems very true in the case of Anamika Haksars [film] Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon.

Kabir Mohanty

The title of Anamika Haksars 2018 Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon (Taking the Horse to Eat Jalebis) comes from a line of dialogue in the film: when someone off camera asks a horse-cart driver what hes doing, he replies that hes taking his horse to eat jalebis, a traditional Indian dessert more popular with humans than equines. While the drivers answer might seem sarcastic, its very much in earnest. With scenes like this, Haksar welcomes viewers to a world in which laborers speak and dream in ways that one might not expect, creating a realism that goes beyond standard notions of reality.

The film opens with a shot of a leaky pipe, slowly dripping in the dark. Water collects in a dirty pool underneath, littered with garbage. Two voices argue, cursing each other. But when the camera zooms out, the scene doesnt reveal two people at each others throats, but rather two men sleeping: two workers, splayed out on cramped handcarts under streetlamps. The camera pans vertically over the men and settles on two others, sleeping in an open structure above the handcarts. These men are in shadow; both move slightly in their sleep as they dream. The camera movement is slow and allows us, the viewers, to take in each scene until we feel we are a part of it; the cameras time becomes our own. Suddenly a harmonium strikes up a tune and an animated sequence begins: we have entered the workers dream-space. In the first mans dream, flowers fall onto a silk bed. The camera pans up to show a Hindu goddess seated on a lotus that rises above the bed; the colors are bright and artificial, like gaudy calendar art. The goddess blinks as if to assert that she is real, but then our collective darshan is interrupted: the goddess is poked from the left by an expanding red flag that then envelops the screen. It is a communist flag held high above the ground by Lalli, a trade unionist, the other dreaming man. The two mens dreams are fighting with each other.

In Lallis dream he is rallying the masses for his communist cause. Below him are hundreds of people, flickering like lamps in the dark, accompanied by a soundtrack of the Internationale in Hindi. The red flag ultimately wins out over the Hindu goddess. Then the men themselves wake up to continue their quarrel. The movie works at real and allegorical levels, without reconciling their differences. If there is a theme to the film, it concerns representation itself: what aesthetic form, Haksar seems to ask, can adequately stage and represent the daily lives of the urban precariat?

Continuing a long cinematic legacy from many parts of the world, Haksar wagers that if the lives of the urban poor can be suitably portrayed, then anyone can identify with them. In this sense, Ghode Ko Jalebi is a rigorous cinematic manifesto, told through the lifeworld of workers in the streets of Old Delhi (aka Shahjahanabad).

To arrive at this experience of precarious life in Old Delhi, Haksar conducted seven years of ethnographic fieldwork in the city. Of course, research does not guarantee a good film, nor does it ensure genuine understanding of the context. Making art about a social world far removed from the lives of the audience is perhaps even more challenging than writing an essay or making a documentary about the same world. The urban underclass, scraping together a meagre existence on the wrong side of laws that protect property over people, offers no ready points of identification for middle-class audiences. Prevailing conventions of representation relegate the poor to being negative examples, unless they are objects of charity. In the bourgeois Indian media industry, people like us is a programming category whose self-congratulatory name forbids critique. Those who use it are nurtured and insulated from the chaos and discomfort of the wider world, regarding people like them, another industry term, as worthy of being portrayed in crime and sensational genres, but nothing more.

This industry terminology in India is based on class and caste distinctions that are treated as self-evident. A parallel to this can be found in Hollywoods treatment of race, where white and non-white characters only ever meet in limited representational modes and in specific genres. In most Hollywood films, race, like caste in India, remains a metaphysical distinction that social reforms leave mostly untouched. Caste is like race and class combined, except that the combination creates a surplus, unique to castewhat B. R. Ambedkar, Dalit leader and chief architect of Indias constitution, called a negative sociality, which prohibits ethics from operating across caste lines. In Hollywood, its rare to see story lines that bring black and white people together in forms of solidarity across the segmentations that capital creates, because producers fear that they turn off viewers. Similarly, class and caste discrimination are usually taboo topics in Bollywood; characters in films are typically upper caste, and when social differences are presented in a story, crime or comedy usually enters to thwart further inquiry.

By contrast, Haksars mode of inclusion is aesthetic, not argumentative; her philosophy is expressed cinematically rather than as a set of textual propositions. Her background as a theater director makes her attentive to issues of staging; for the viewer this registers as attention to form as such. The content of that form is the very fact of social heterogeneity.

Haksar portrays what remains of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, the melding of Hindu and Muslim cultures poetically figured in the confluence of the Ganga and Jamuna rivers. But scenes of working-class Old Delhi life clash with an aggressive majority culture powered by another kind of confluence, between politics and business interests. Like the warring dreams of the opening sequence, characters in Haksars film experience discordant temporalities that clash with each other. They navigate ancient traditions while trying to survive in todays brutal market economy.

Tamasha dekhne walon, khud tamasha na ban jaye, sings Chaddami, a street-food vendor and Lallis sparring partner, quoting a line from Laila Majnu, a seventh-century tale of star-crossed lovers, familiar to Hindus and Muslims alike. Roughly translated, it means: O viewer of entertainment, mind you dont yourself become the entertainment! In other words, be prepared to act and intervene in the world.

The film displays the full range of work that migrants from Indias heartland perform to survive in the big city. We witness the slow destruction effected by heavy manual labor (shown in the back muscles of a handcart-puller), the light-fingered moves of a pickpocket, the artistry of a street-food vendor, and the fall of a load-carrier with a heavy sack. The load-carrier, upon falling, is subject to a stream of abuse, but then, in a memorable animated sequence, his boss turns into a lizard trapped in a jar. Daily labor can be playful and generous too, whether it is an elderly woman who distributes rice gruel at her own expense, or the pickpocket Pathru, one of the key characters in the film, who masquerades as a tour guide and discloses wondrous things.

Despite the red flag and the Internationale, the film doesnt offer a workerist or ideological message in the conventional sense. Rather, Haksar invites us to build on her film, which falls somewhere between ethnographic documentary and magical realism. The range of persons and stories she assembles suggests Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris multitude: a plurality that does not yet have a name, a collective subject whose potential propels emancipatory politics in the postcommunist era. This subject seeks to emancipate itself politically without necessarily knowing in advance what it will become. The multitude thus points beyond existing politics, towards a global form that has yet to crystallize.

Several enthusiastic reviews were published after Ghode Ko Jalebis release, but they barely touched on what is distinct about the film. This might be because Haksar is doing something unprecedented. She is addressing a problem of representation that haunts Indian cinema: How to portray a stratified society to itself? She bypasses conventional narratives and prevailing social codes to address the constellation of new and ancient cultures taking shape around her. While the composite Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, with its old-world charm, is prominent in Haksars film, her aim is anything but nostalgic. She tries to render the archaic and the new in equal terms, such as Mughal architecture amidst urban detritus. Labor, whether fugitive or entrenched, whether of cunning, craft, or muscle, is both epic and ephemeral.

Since Haksars film portrays manual labor, Dalitswho belong to the lowest caste in Indias systemfeature prominently. But Haksar circumvents what Anupama Rao calls the caste question, eschewing shock or shame as a mode of expression. Haksar rather is of a generation whose secular convictions have led them to treat caste as a moribund category, rather than as something to be actively dismantled. The politics of Haksars film are found elsewherenot in any explicit program but in its depiction of what Kristin Ross calls communal luxury. For Ross, the urban underclass, usually regarded as the detritus of history, can instead offer the energies of the outmoded [and] one way to think oneself into the future. Communism too might be regarded as outmoded, but if it can still inspire progress, then the flow of history itself might have to be refigured, decentralized in Rosss words. At a time when history and politics join to present a sense of no exit from powerful regimes, Haksars film invites us to embrace the flamboyant idiosyncrasies of [the world of the urban underclass], as Kabir Mohanty writes, with an artistic rigour that makes the individuals, the situations, and the mise-en-scne resonate with a grounding almost never seen in mainstream cinema.

Despite its many obvious differences, Pier Paolo Pasolinis Accattone (1961) offers a reference point for the way Haksars film grapples with inequality. In both cases, the filmmaker focuses on the milieu of the subproletariat but without using the language of class or class struggle. And in both films the religious context of everyday life provides an iconography and a normative ethos that become artistic weapons.

Accattone is set in postWorld War II Italy, when the Italian Communist Party and the Catholic Church were both influential. Pasolini, whose unorthodox Catholicism and Marxism caused his expulsion from the party, saw the relationship between the two as necessary, if difficult. Italian Communists were the party of the future, he felt, but like Gramsci, Pasolini believed Catholicism had to be accommodated, due to its deeply rooted presence in Italian pre- and postwar culture.

Pasolinis method for addressing the pervasive hold of religion on the populace was one of negative affirmation, through heresy and profane expression mixed with a profound interest in Catholic iconography. Thus, the film centers on a defiant wastrel, Accattone, who despises work, holding it as no less objectionable than slavery. For a living, he pimps his girlfriends and abuses them for their troubles. Eventually he dies during an attempted robbery, in a motorcycle crash. But in the figure of Accattone, Pasolini sees not a degenerate but a martyr.

Throughout the film, scenes of violence, sorrow, and humiliation are accompanied by classical music by Bach and Vivaldi. The final scene shows Accattone hurt, lying on the ground, assuring onlookers that hes fine, followed by a close-up of his face and the word FINE as the credits roll. Pasolinis portrayal of Accattone commemorates a people, an underclass who in his view had never been colonized, whether as Southern peasants migrating into the city or as the subproletariat of Rome.

Phrased differently, Pasolini registered the absence of any ethical relationship between the Italian underclass and those above them in the social hierarchy. Accattones unethical behavior indiscriminately affected almost everyone around him, but he was hardly alone in his transgressions. Pasolinis audience in fact understood they were viewing the indirect reflection of a larger crime whose explicit acknowledgment was forbidden: an elite that cared nothing for the poor, and suffered nothing for their transgressions. To mirror their violations in a lumpen figure, a hero who could not be celebrated, was to compound rather than to resolve ironies, to shock rather than soothe audiences. Pasolinis enormous popularity, as well as the controversy he provoked, points to the fact that his methods were, at the time, effective. The sign under which I work is always contamination, Pasolini once remarked.

It has been said that when art no longer has the power to shock, then the social fabric has frayed so badly that even its violation evokes no response. Andr Breton invoked this view when he once lamented to Buuel that they could no longer create a scandal. However, there are always dividing lines between the permissible and the impermissible; the point is to identify them.

Contamination, heresy, profanity, and sacrilege: these remain methods of representation that remind audiences of the power and the limits of deeply shared frames of reference. They also highlight twisted and knotted problems for which no easy answer is available. Haksars approach is to avoid explicitly flagging or invoking contamination even while immersing viewers in life experiences that they might normally regard as contaminating or beneath their dignity. What worked for Pasolini will not necessarily work in the fragmented social context Haksar operates in, where religio-political consolidation has balkanized the culture. So Haksar foregrounds the persistence of a still inclusive and tolerant culture that survives against all odds, portraying it in a way that will resonant with viewers from different walks of life.

Haksar approaches the lives of her characters as an intimate space that is imagined differently from how it is physically lived. Just as people inhabit diverse historical temporalities, their imaginative worlds are multiple too. We are very far indeed from the poverty porn of popular Bollywood films like White Tiger (directed by Ramin Bahrani, 2021), where the mere spectacle of the poor is held as adequate critique.

Haksars characters are enmeshed in each others lives in ways that are not explicitly explained. Her cinematographer, Soumyanand Sahi, renders this existential interweaving as embodied and felt. We seem to experience space in the first rather than in the third person, moving freely and spontaneously.

Like Pasolini, the main touchstones for Haksars film are religious tradition and communism. What Haksar aims to show can only be assembled through fragments, reconstructed from witnessing, testimony, and the work of imagination, since all possibility of self-representation by her characters, and thus any comprehensive positive account, is structurally inhibited and risks becoming a fetishizing narrative of marginality.

Communism returns towards the end of the movieit is the films political thread after all. In a final dream sequence, the activist and wage worker Lalli ascends to a high perch and addresses crowds gathering beneath him, while the red flag extends above rooftops and unfurls across the city. There is no indication that he is dreaming.

Decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the triumph of capitalism, Haksars invocation of communism, long treated as a marginal presence in India, warrants discussion. Scholars once treated India as peripheral to Cold War conflicts, but that picture is changing. For example, Nehru, despite his anticolonial work and his socialist tendencies, became a favorite of Western powers for his steadfast opposition to Soviet communism. In supporting a left-leaning figure like Nehru, the rationale of the US was that the Non-Communist Left (NCL in official parlance) would be critical in stemming the tide of Soviet communism. That understanding was briefly tested when Nehrus daughter and successor, Indira Gandhi, formed a strategic alliance with the Soviet Union in 1971. (The architect of the 1971 friendship treaty between Mrs. Gandhis government and the Soviet Union was P. N. Haksar, the directors father.) Communism was no mere figure of speech. It enlarged the political options in a nonaligned country like India, and the Soviet support underwrote this possibility.

The tangible threat posed by communism in India is most clearly registered by the fear it provoked in big business and Hindu nationalists. The fall of the Berlin Wall was greeted with relief by Indias captains of industry, auguring the end of Nehruvian socialism. Communisms defeat meant that Nehruvian secularism was on its way out too. Nehrus achievement had been to attempt a third way, a nonaligned path between fully fledged capitalism and fully fledged communism, while advancing a program of secular development. This certainly won him praise, but the cost it entailed is less discussed. Nehruvian secularism was in fact part and parcel of an accommodation with a larger geopolitical context, one that depended on the Soviet counterbalance to Western capitalism. Once the Soviet Union was gone, secularisms time was up too.

Haksars idea of communism is thus not arbitrary or idiosyncratic. It is not a casual synonym for progressivism but rather has real historical resonance in the Indian context, one that the presently ruling BJP was the first to perceive and to denounce after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Haksars quiet suggestion is that Indian communism was not only crucial in inspiring pro-worker politics and attitudes of equality in the Cold War era. It remains important today as a way of signaling the potential of such attitudes and politics even after the eclipse of Soviet communism.

***

The following conversation with Haksar took place online in 2020. Much of it centers on her training in theater in New Delhi and Moscow. After this training she produced a number of plays (Indian, Russian, and Western European) that established her at the forefront of the Indian avant-garde. Haksar discusses her struggle to include urban consumer culture within a notion of the folk, as propounded by her teacher B. V. Karanth. Karanth was a major theater and film director who, along with Ritwik Ghatak, pioneered the adaptation of indigenous artistic traditions for progressive theater and film.

Arvind Rajagopal (AR): Youre experimenting with the medium of film as a newcomer, doing things that the old-timers are not thinking about because thats not their background. What traditions are you bringing to this encounter, and how can we understand their relation to your current work?

Anamika Haksar (AH): I was a student of B. V. Karanth. He had huge talent and understanding of music, of folk stories, of theater. It was like being with someone like Ritwik Ghatak. It was huge, like a banyan tree. Karanth had a very rich journey, coming from Bangalore, going to Banaras Hindu University to study Hindi literature, and then doing very varied theater. I dont think Karanth was very good in terms of methodology, but he insisted that as contemporary practitioners, we have to travel. We have to go from village to village to do the work we want to do. In our third year, he actually made us go and stay with folk drama practitioners or traditional theater practitioners, and each of us had to interview them, get to know about their lives, their practices, watch their performances. So, I think that kind of practice was very, very important.

I would also fight with him. Being a urban Delhi person, I would ask, What is all this folk business? I didnt know anything about folk. And when he was almost near his death, he said, you know Anamika, Im going to answer the question you asked me thirty years ago: Think of the people on the streets of Old Delhi or Delhi. Their songs and their memories. Their gaalis (curses). The expressions of people walking on the road are the urban folk. And I find that a very important comment. And somehow, its taken many years to even articulate this.

The Soviet Union was very rigorous in its theatrical training. Of course, we had five years of Marxism, but the whole emphasis there was on ones world outlook. Before you touched literature, before you touched anything, the question was: What do you think of your world? Or, what is the philosophy of your world? We had no idea, we were all twenty-two, twenty-three years old. Our focus was on the self, the self and the home and the region, and the self and the pain.

AR: You studied at the Lunacharsky State Institute for Theater Arts in Moscow, now called the Russian Academy of Theater Arts. Can you explain how this informed your understanding of (socialist) realism?

AH: You cant work with the actor and tell them to move from right to left or top to bottom on a physical plane. The theater implies that the actors inhabit a mental landscape. And therefore, when Im composing, Im integrating the mind, the region, the rhythm of the actor with spatial relationships, and so on. What we were taught was different from, lets say, the Europeans. I think there is a very deeply ingrained link between Soviet intellectuals and their people. So a Tarkovsky or a Dostoevsky, they knew their people, their nature. They knew their writers. I think that was part of the training that we got was to know our writers. Of course, there were many things we disagreed with. I mean, we didnt agree with the way they were talking about realism. Our teachers were trained in Stanislavski and we questioned that.

In Moscow, we learned from the theater director Anatoly Vasiliev, who challenged realism and told us that realism is allegorical and metaphorical. It is not a physical depiction of life. We learned about the Georgian artist Stureva, the Lithuanian artist Nekhroshus, all questioning accepted norms of realism. There had been debates going on. Underground letters between Lenin and Gorky, where Gorky asks questions like: What is the world of the worker? What is it that he or she seeks? What is the landscape in their mind? These kinds of questions ensure that realism doesnt just minimize the workers entire landscape to economic demands, that the artist doesnt judge it according to their own understanding. There were a whole lot of things that my generation was asking of Soviet socialist realism. It was not just about putting up the red flag and so on. But that doesnt mean that they were any less sensitive to the needs of the people. They were all very conscious. And now when I think about it, I know I sound like Im something of a Soviet agent, but honestly, the respect for labor, for working, for understanding people, came from this ethos. And it was very powerful. Everyones tired of hearing anecdotes like meeting your Soviet colleagues in the potato field. An intellectual like me would not pick up a spade and didnt know how to dig. But thats where I met my classmates on the first day of class: in a Moscow potato field.

This brings me to the question of labor and how to represent it. We are looking at the characters psychological landscape rather than merely something physical. For example, in the film, we dont see the characters just sleeping. We see them through the crevices of some other persons space. The bodies are intertwined. The living is intertwined.

AR: It is interesting that over time, the knowledge of traditions in India is being lost, for example of Hindu epics like the Ramayan and Mahabharat, in all their variations. Religious traditions used to require learning and practice; they represent a cultural archive that city dwellers no longer necessarily have. What would you say about that?

AH: We were asking the younger lot, lets say those younger than thirty-five: What do you recall about your villageany stories, any folk stories, or histories? So, in the particular places in Shahjahanabad [aka Old Delhi] we looked at, they were oblivious of history and even of things like Ramayan and Mahabharat, except for the basic story. Now, in the older generation, people would know the epics and recite them. Many of them told stories fantastically and they carried strong memories of their culture.

When I was working in street theater in 1995, we had a little handcart with books from the Soviet Union translated into Hindi: Gorkys Mother, Nikolai Ostrovskys How the Steel Was Tempered, as well as various other classic works. People devoured them. Some of the books were even stolen. Most people then were quite well educated. Today, many are very moderately educated and not as into reading. With the second generation in the city, cultural memory is disappearing. Amnesia is setting in. But still in [less developed parts of the country like] Bihar, they would have their religious songs from their village.

AR: The cinematic images you create do not necessarily reflect existing realities, but you stress the documentary character of this work. Can you explain?

AH: Through allegory or metaphor you can create a dual reality, a philosophical reality, rather than one of just a physical space. You can interpret each frame in many ways. The political connotations are deeply within the frame, and yet youre not actually mentioning anyone. No names are named. Theres simply the juxtaposition that brings out a certain political subtext.

Indian realism, as we received it, mainly from the British school, is naturalistic. My film experiments with an Indian realism use metaphor and allegory and an understanding of the psychology of the human being, the psychological landscape of the actor, to create multidimensional meanings.

For me this is a way to respond to the inadequacy of the documentary genre; its a way to bring this psychological awareness together with physical reality. We did many factual studies to prepare to shoot the film. We studied the diseases among the citys working people, how many gardens and fountains have now become car parks and malls and flyovers in Old Delhi, and so on. But then again, if it becomes a regular documentary, then no ones ever going to look at it.

One definite rule is that I am not inventing anymore. So even the fictional characters are based on very real people who we know. And all the dialogue is taken from real people. We have used all this as a way of getting into the reality. But reality is not self-evident. In our epics and our folk tales, we always tell a story from an example, from another story. We are never actually direct. The meaning is hardly on the surface.

AR: Folk traditions can coexist with modern representation, but at the same time it is a struggle to unearth them since they are under erasure. How do you address that in your work?

AH: By way of example. In my play Raj Darpan, one of the things I show is that in Calcutta, when the first proscenium frame came up, folk traditions were deemed obscene by the Dramatic Performances Act of 1876, which still holds in Indian law. A preexisting reality, which was multi-perspective and polyphonic, was reduced to a single perspective. For the British there was only one way of perceiving things, to make it naturalistic rather than trying to bring in the dialectics of that reality. Its that kind of multilayered reality that I would like to convey in my work. Its not a simple reality. In one gesture, you connect to sometimes two or three thousand years of history.

For example, when you go to Old Delhi, you see the labor market. Where they are laboring is a medieval spice market. You are looking at old Mughal history. Then suddenly in the middle you find a plaque commemorating the 1857 Mutiny, next to a water storage tank. Someone singing a folk song is from a village. In one scene we have a man having his bath from a plastic bucket standing under a Mughal arch.

You cannot show this through the kind of realism that Indian cinema on the whole uses. You know, Indian cinema does exactly what we used to do in theater, which is a conventional realist approach, with a physical conception of space: the camera goes right to left. Theres no inner dialogue.

One way we respond is with the specific ways we choose to use the camera. If you remember the scene where Pathru [Sahu, who plays the pickpocket Pathru] is against the wall, thats a psychological gesture. He is saying, I loved her, but she went for someone else. And hes against this cracked surface, trying to gather stability. Its not there, hes grasping at a reality that escapes him. I thought it was gorgeous to record. It has a completely different quality than if we had done it realistically.

Convention might consider workers to be poor and deprived. But there are people, friends of mine, folk artists, they will be living in some eight by four room. They may have only two sets of clothes. But there would not be a spot. Their two shirts will be impeccable. They will be ironed. The complete, complete dignity of people.

Im connecting this to Raghubir [Yadav, who plays the character of the street-food vendor Chaddami]. When hes making that kachori hes sculpting it to perfection. For him that itself is a serious act and it is something Ive seen in many people. I feel these are the things that are more important, you know, in teaching us really what labor is about, what life is about. And I feel these details are very important.

I want to also convey that dignity of labor. Very ordinary men are doing extraordinary things. Half of them dont even have muscles. But, you know, theyre picking up hundred-kilo sacks. Theyre earning next to nothing and in some years, will have tuberculosis, arthritis. The compassion and dignity of people living such lives comes through again and again. Whats holding this together? There is something essentially deeply compassionate and tolerant in our society, which is the point I want to make in this film.

And I think that point is coming through. My biggest victory is that a young man whos an RSS guy [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the countrys major right-wing Hindu-nationalist volunteer organization] saw the film and he said to me, Im making you my guru. Im from a village. I understand the traditions and the difficulties that these people are coming out of, and yet theyre very honest. I see what you are doing.

We have to find that idiom in which you cut across and find a way of saying something very important, in a language that has nothing to do with technology, that actually penetrates into peoples psyches.

AR: The all-too-widely-stated notion that the poor are obsessed with their material deprivation is very effectively dismantled in your film. What kinds of dreams did they talk about in your interviews with them?

AH: All the time people who we interviewed were talking about all kinds of dreams and aspirations that were not about subsistence. There was a great utopia and desire for people to do something larger than their own lives, even while being poor. I actually know a trade union leader who Lalli is based on. All his life, he goes to court and fights for someone who is being evicted, or for their unpaid wages. I wanted to bring out this being who is spending all his life in this way. Hes actually dreaming of this new world, theres a dreaming quality of utopia. Thats the best parts of communism in practice.

AR: Its an aesthetic and political dilemma: any attempt to overcome the fragment and make it something more complete immediately runs up against the threat of censorship, so the fragment becomes a way to preserve some possibility of intervention. But it is also necessarily incomplete because you would like to say more than you are able to say.

AH: We are dealing with the street, where every minute something is changing, the police arrive, youre being harassed, youre taken out of your situation. And good things happen toosomeone has suddenly come in and announced their marriage. So why then have a structure that is palpable all the time, telling you all this is going to happen? The lives of the city are very random. So this random structure is something that is chosen.

Link:

Postcommunist Aesthetics: A Conversation with Anamika Haksar - Journal #120 September 2021 - E-Flux

By Nicole LeBlanc

The writer, a resident of Silver Spring, is a disability policy and advocacy consultant.

As we enter Year 1 of the Biden administration and Year 2 of this nightmarish pandemic, it is now more important than ever that we pass meaningful reform that focuses on moving away from segregated settings to a world where paying livable wages and ending benefit cliffs is part of the new normal for all people with disabilities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shined a bright light on the dangers of segregation and discriminatory employment practices like paying subminimum wage. In addition, it has highlighted the need to ensure that essential workers like direct support providers, retail and so forth, are paid decent wages for the work they do.

Many people with disabilities who are at high risk of catching or dying from COVID often work in jobs deemed essential. The practice of paying workers with disabilities subminimum wage based on their productivity has been around since the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act under Section 14C. Many people of color compare 14C subminimum wage to slavery. 14C is one clear example of the systemic ableism that exists in our society. 14C subminimum was does not promote self-determination or support people with developmental disabilities in becoming self-supporting.

Lastly, segregated employment is system-centered not person-centered.

As we look toward the next 30 years of the American with Disabilities Act we need to raise expectations for all adults with disabilities and their families on the value of real jobs for real pay. The time is now for the Era of Low Expectation Syndrome to come to an end.

We must move to a world of high expectations and presuming competence and employability. Disability service system transformation can be exciting and scary at the same time, but its worth it.

Right now, the COVID-19 pandemic has given us the perfect opportunity to redesign our society and systems to be more inclusive of the rights and wants of people with disabilities. There are numerous bills in Congress that can support people with disabilities in achieving the American Dream of Competitive Integrated Employment often known as Real Jobs for Real Pay.

One bill of importance is the Raise the Wage Act that would raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and end the practice of paying subminimum wage over five years. Another big bill is the Transformation to Competitive Integrated Employment Act that if passed would provide money to states to support them in moving away from outdated models that pay people with disabilities subminimum wage in sheltered workshops and other segregated settings.

In order for this to be successful it is vital that states invest in infrastructure to support disability provider agencies to develop person-centered employment programs that help get people with developmental disabilities jobs and careers in the community at minimum wage or higher.

One big piece of this is paying livable wages to direct support professionals and job coaches who play a major role in our success living and working in the community. People with disabilities, especially those who self-direct their services need staff stability in order to be successful living and working in the community.

In addition, we also need to create effective training programs on successful job coaching as part of our transformation to Real Jobs for Real Pay. Other major reforms we must focus on is overhauling the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and other public benefit programs to eliminate work disincentives that keep people with disabilities trapped in poverty.

As the minimum wage rises across the nation we are going to see more and more people with disabilities falling off the cash cliff. In other words, for a non-blind worker with a disability who works 25 to 30 hours a week at $15 an hour you will hit the SGA, or substantial gainful activity, earning caps of $1,310 much faster than someone who is blind. For the blind community, the SGA earnings limit is $2,190 for 2021.

An easy way to solve this problem includes eliminating all earnings limits and just treat SSI and SSDI as universal basic income. As a society we must face the reality that the economic cost of living with a disability is much higher compared to those without disabilities. A second solution would be to raise the SGA limit to the same level as the blind community and adopt the $1 for $2 benefit offset above SGA.

In the SSI program your income goes down $1 for every $2 you earn. Using the $1 for $2 offset in the SSDI program would allow people with disabilities to earn more money and not worry about falling off the benefits cliff so fast. This is especially important for people with disabilities who live on their own in cities and states with very high cost of living.

Getting rid of benefit cliffs will also go along ways toward reducing the stress and anxiety that comes with working part time with a disability as we move away from segregated work settings that pay people with developmental disabilities subminimum wage. In addition, many people with disabilities face barriers to achieving full-time employment ranging from stamina issues to attitudinal barriers like ableism in the business world.

In the area of work incentives we must expand what counts as an impairment-related work expense (IRWE). One area that is due to an overhaul is what counts as an IRWE in the area of transportation.

Currently you can only count taxis as an IRWE if you live someplace where there is no transit. If you live in a place where there is public transit you are expected to use it unless you get something from your doctor that says you are unable to use regular public transit and need Metro Access-also known as paratransit. Paratransit is often the only thing you can deduct as an IRWE.

In the last 10 years transit options have evolved to include Uber and Lyft ridesharing, and it is past time that our public benefit system allow taking Uber or Lyft to work as an IRWE regardless of what other options are available in our community. I say this because it is far too common for people to work in places that you can get to by car in as little as a 30- to 35-minute ride from home. However, when it comes to taking public transit or paratransit, the commute to and from work can often be 1 to 2.5 hours longer than it needs to be.

Many people with disabilities cant tolerate long commutes, especially for those of us with autism and other disabilities who get car sick or nauseous from being in vehicles in the backseat for long periods of time. Other work incentive reforms we need to expand on are deductions for medical and dental services not covered by insurance like someone with autism and anxiety being able to deduct things such as massage, acupuncture, dental care cost, alternative medicine, and the cost of independent direct support staff used during both work and nonwork hours.

I say this because many adults with autism without intellectual disability do not qualify for Medicaid home-community-based services and having access to job coaching and home support is vital to our success in the community. For young adults the student earned income exclusion should be expanded to age 29 from 22 so that more people with disabilities can attend college and training programs that may help them achieve greater economic stability outside of the traditional jobs typically done by people with disabilities like food, filth, flower and filing.

The silver lining of COVID-19 pandemic is that it provides us with a great once-in-a-lifetime chance to make the social safety net for the disability community truly person-centered by ending systemic barriers that prevent us from achieving true community inclusion and self-sufficiency without the stress of benefit cliffs.

The era where being disabled is like a full-time job must end. As allies and advocates we must fight harder now more than ever to make the lives of the disability community easier. In the long term, COVID-19 is going to create a larger population of people with disabilities and chronic health conditions due to the effects of long-haul COVID.

In my opinion, the impact of this pandemic virus feels similar to days of the polio epidemic era. It is my hope that we can use the lessons from this nightmarish pandemic to create a world more accommodating and accepting of disability as a society.

As the old saying goes, It shouldnt have to happen to you for it to matter to you. If we all live long enough, we will all join the Disability Club. Climate change and disability are not partisan issues nor should they be.

The rest is here:

Opinion: The Time for Disability Employment Reform Is Now Maryland Matters - Josh Kurtz

Workers at Amazons Bessemer warehouse could get the greenlight to hold a second union vote in the coming weeks, setting up another showdown between one of the worlds most valuable companies and its embattled employees.

In early August, the Atlanta regional office for the National Labor Relations Board said Amazon violated labor laws by interfering in Aprils union vote. Workers wanted to have more control over the companys fast paced environment and change the highly controlled environment where output and even breaks are timed.

Alongside its findings, the federal agency recommended holding another vote, a decision that now rests with the NLRBs regional office in Atlanta.

In coming to its decision, the NLRB said the evidence against the Jeff Bezos-founded company demonstrated that the employers conduct interfered with the laboratory conditions necessary to conduct a fair election.

Amazon said in a statement that the vote should stand.

Our employees had a chance to be heard during a noisy time when all types of voices were weighing into the national debate, said the statement. And at the end of the day, they voted overwhelmingly in favor of a direct connection with their managers and the company.

Having the vote overturned is a big step toward a potentially big win for Amazons employees and could become an impetus for improved workers rights across the country and in the South, according to Daniel Cornfield, professor of political science at Vanderbilt University and editor of the Work and Occupations academic journal.

This decision is an important victory and extends to workers beyond the South, said Cornfield, who added that the new pro-union administration in the White House likely affected the decision. Certainly, the actions of the president, as well as national politicians, and the NLRB can send a message to workers everywhere who are trying to unionize that they have the right to do so and that the employer must allow them to do so.

Despite raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour, Amazon has been the target of multiple unionization efforts. Amazon employees in Staten Island, New York, also recently lost a disputed unionization vote. The NLRB found that Amazon interfered in that May vote but has not made similar recommendations to hold another.

In response to Amazon, which is the one of the worlds largest private employers and has never lost a union vote in the U.S., the International Brotherhood of Teamsters voted in June to create a division that solely focuses on Amazon.

Unions in decline

In the past 60 years, union membership in the South and in the rest of the country has declined by about two-thirds, but while union membership is still relatively strong in some northern states, the continued erosion has left unions in the South on the brink. Since 1964, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping records, union membership nationally fell from just under 30% of all workers in 1964 to just over 10.8% last year, the lowest since records began.

In the South, around 15% of workers were unionized in 1964, falling to just over 5% today.

Because of that gradual slide and general anti-union sentiment, major manufacturers have increasingly identified the South as a place to do business often having the deal sweetened by lucrative fiscal incentives such as tax breaks, hard cash, and even free land.

Those enticements have brought in billions of dollars in investment to the South, ever since Nissan began pumping out vehicles in Smyrna, Tennessee, at the start of the 1980s. The plant heralded the start of a major foreign and domestic automobile manufacturing hub that today is present in nearly every Southern state.

Today, GMC has a presence in Texas, Kentucky and Tennessee. Ford has two plants in Kentucky, while Toyota has manufacturing plants in Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and Kentucky. The list of major automobile manufacturers goes on, with Honda, Mazda, Nissan, Hyundai, Kia, Volkswagen, Volvo, BMW, and Daimler all operating in the South.

But very few have a union.

Some of the plants have attempted unionization over the years, but most havent even tried. Even the successful ones have been held up by years of court challenges. The Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama, has a union, but it required a federal appeals court to uphold the results.

But for every successful union, there are several failures.

Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga failed in their efforts back in 2014 and again in 2019 despite having executive backing, while strong words from former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley kept a union from forming at Boeing the same year. The NLRB accused Boeing of moving part of its manufacturing hub to the South in retaliation for past union strikes at its Seattle manufacturing hub.

That complaint was later dropped.

Among the biggest perks, however, are the low-cost workers, lack of regulations and a region where anti-union sentiment has been embedded in the psyche of workers and businesses since the end of slavery. But these companies have brought tens of thousands of well-paying jobs that typically pay above the area median, helping working class families in impoverished regions build wealth. While the costs involved in attracting major companies to do business in the South have often been high, the rewards are numerous.

Black and White

Unionizing in the South has a thorny history that, like so many other things Southern, can trace its complexities through slavery, race and politics.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, white dock workers in New Orleans, for example, competed with formerly enslaved men, who because of destitution and repression were still considered cheap labor, according to the book, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, class and politics 1863 1923.

The new competition evoked a racist reaction from white workers, who called for the deportation of their Black counterparts back to Africa. When Black workers formed a union in 1872 and attempted to integrate the white union, they were ridiculed.

We were scoffed at, said Black union president R.T. Matthews at the time, and rebuked by white men who work along shore, telling us constantly that the negroes broke the wages down, and it caused all to suffer.

The citys elite pounced on that racial division, using Black dock workers when white workers went on strike, and vice versa. The situation caused hostility and undermined union efforts for decades, noted the book.

That hostility echoed across the South and the roadblocks to Southern unions continued.

Not long after the end of World War II, the Congress of Industrial Organizations launched Operation Dixie, an attempt to increase union membership in the South. It was believed that raising wage levels among workers in the South would consolidate the huge wage gains won by unions in the North. The move was in part an attempt by Democrats to transform the conservative politics of the region.

Operation Dixie fell flat in part because of the Jim Crow laws at the time. Just like the dock workers of New Orleans 70 years before, racial divisions persisted, preventing white and Black workers from unionizing.

Southern unionization was dealt a further blow by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which made it harder for unions to strike and is still in force today. The act was passed in the aftermath of the major strike wave of 1945 and 1946. Over those years, five million people went on strike, and included the biggest strike in U.S. labor history. Not long after that, the United States entered into the second Red Scare, a period of anti-communist sentiment that, among other things, tied unions with long-feared prospect of communism. Lasting a decade starting in 1947, the Red Scare saw laws passed that prohibited members of the Communist Party in America from holding office in unions and other labor organizations.

Today, the tactics used by corporations to deter unionization are vastly different. The NLRB official noted that among the tactics Amazon used to interfere with the Alabama union vote was pressing the U.S. Postal Service to install a vote card collection box near the warehouse entrance. The box was then covered in an Amazon-branded tent with cameras pointed at it. The NLRB said the setup gave the impression to workers that they were being monitored.

While Amazons workers in Bessemer will likely have another chance to be the first U.S.-based union within the company, it will still be a formidable task.

Large corporations can marshal tremendous legal resources to intimidate and scare workers, said Cornfield, who also said that the recent decision against Amazon shows how large corporations routinely act against employees. The important thing to think about with Amazon being charged with intimidating workers is very important for two reasons.

Its a very visible act which demonstrates to the American public that large corporations do act illegally to prevent workers from unionizing. And the other being that the public learn that large corporations do have tremendous capacity to dissuade workers from unionizing in legal ways. That educates the public and workers everywhere that perhaps the whole system of union campaign conduct is weighted in favor of the employer, especially these humongous companies that have tremendous resources to deter people.

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Alabama's Amazon union fight and the South's long, often racist, history with labor organizing - Reckon South

AFTER MORE than six months in office, the Biden administration seems inclined to adopt the utopian vision of democracy promotion as a guiding principle of U.S. global strategy. This doctrine, or, if you prefer, persuasion, holds that America should, as far as possible, bend the world in accordance with the preferences of the United States and its largely European allies. Fortunately, President Joe Biden is a man of experience and pragmatic instinct. Whatever his impulses, he so far has been careful not to burn Americas bridges and, to the contrary, has taken steps to improve ties with key European allies, to restart dialogue with Russia, and to reduce somewhat the intensity of confrontation with China. Such tactical flexibility, however, does not change the fundamental direction of U.S. foreign policy, which at times is almost Orwellian in its tendency to emulate concepts of the former Soviet Union. It was a core belief of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky that the USSR, for its own security, could not tolerate the existence of the so-called capitalist environment. They assumed that capitalists would never accept coexistence with the new communist state and therefore rejected the status quo as an unrealistic option. Today, alongside the European Union, the United States has adopted the position that its mission is to promote democracy worldwide. Leaders in Washington regularly argue that if they fail to take up this mission, authoritarian governments will exploit American restraint and join forcesnot just to undermine American power, but to destroy democracy itself, depriving the United States of its cherished freedoms.

It is remarkable that this concept has become a key tenet of American foreign policy without any serious debate in Congress, in the media, or within the foreign policy community. At the heart of this approach is the presupposition that democracy is inherently superior to other forms of government, both morally and in terms of its ability to deliver prosperity and security. Democracy promotion is assumed to be a longstanding part of the U.S. foreign policy tradition rather than a radical departure from it. The Biden administration talks as though the world at largeapart from evil tyrantswill welcome its push for democracy and accept the self-evident righteousness of America and the European Union, rather than put up powerful resistance that may damage American security interests, American freedoms, and the American way of life.

YET DEMOCRACY does not have a stellar record throughout history. The best that can be said of it, as Winston Churchill once observed, is that under most circumstances it remains superior to all other tested forms of government. But for that to be true, democracy must be truly liberal, based on law, and include credible protections for minority rights. Such safeguards often are not taken. From its very conception, democracy has been marred by the original sin of slavery. Ancient Athens, the earliest known democracy, not only tolerated slavery, but was in fact founded on it. Citizens and slaves formed two sides of the Athenian political system. As historian Paulin Ismard writes, slavery was the price to be paid for direct democracy. Slaves allowed citizens to step away from work and to directly participate in government, attending assembly meetings and holding public office.

In the United States, the Founding Fathers similarly tolerated slavery, making its implicit incorporation in the U.S. Constitution. The constitutional concept of relations between the states presupposed the existence of slavery, and it required a civil war to bring about Abraham Lincolns emancipation of slaves in 1863. The Russian Empire remarkablyand without any bloodshedabolished serfdom altogether in 1861, unlike in the United States where slavery was, for the sake of political expediency, permitted to exist in some Union states until the end of the Civil War. Even thereafter, American democracy continued to deprive women and African Americans of the right to vote for several more decades. It is not self-evident that a democracy that limits political rights to a minority of white men is inherently so superior to a benevolent authoritarian state that possesses some elementary rule of law and embraces the concept of equal protection for its subjects. Contemporary examples include Russia under Alexander II, whose legal reforms introduced for the first time in Russia the concept of equality before the law, or Germany under Otto von Bismarck, who established the first modern welfare state by offering health insurance and social security to the working class. Closer to our own time, the enlightened authoritarianism of Singapores Lee Kuan Yew lifted millions out of poverty and maintained harmony in a multi-ethnic country.

UNTIL THE end of the Cold War, democracy promotion was not a constituent element of the U.S. foreign policy traditionthe term democracy does not even appear in the U.S. Constitution. The United States did not wage war to spread democracy, even in its own sphere of influence in the Americas. The NATO alliance, at its very inception in 1949, was directed squarely against the Soviet geopolitical threat and willingly embraced authoritarian members such as Portugal under Antnio de Oliveira Salazar, whom many considered fascist. Other American allies of the early Cold War period included South Korea and Taiwanneither of them a democracy at that time. Why did the United States ensure the protection of these non-democracies? It was to protect them from takeover by U.S. adversaries. In the process, this policy allowed American allies to have the freedom of choice, democratic or otherwise. After World War II, America positioned itself as the true leader of the free worldallowing nations with different interests, systems of government, and traditions to determine their own destiny.

The democracy promotion credo is, by contrast, quite different. It goes far beyond the protection of the international status quo and advocates an openly revisionist policy, one that is designed not simply to contain other top non-democratic nations but to change their systems of government. When it comes to major powers, profound transformations of this nature usually arise through internal change or outright military defeat; economic and diplomatic pressures alone typically do not accomplish that muchunless, of course, as in the case of Japan before Pearl Harbor, they trigger a war with clear winners and losers. The Biden administration does not talk about regime change, but its words and actions contribute to a suspicion in Beijing and Moscow alike that regime change would be precisely the result of yielding to American pressure. At a time when the United States is deeply polarizednot only over its foreign policy priorities, but over its fundamental valuespursuing such an ambitious, setback-prone foreign policy while simultaneously undertaking a transformational domestic agenda is reckless.

Most importantly, democracy promotion is unnecessary (at least on geopolitical grounds) because there is little evidence that China and Russia, when left to their own devices, would be eager to form a global authoritarian alliance. Neither power shows much inclination to view geopolitics or geoeconomics primarily through the prism of a presumed great democracy-autocracy divide. China seems perfectly willing to establish close economic ties with the European Union and, for that matter, even the United States. Chinese objectives appear quite traditionalgaining influence, developing friends and clients, without being particularly concerned one way or the other about their standard of liberty. Unlike the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, China isnt championing an international network of communist movements. When it comes to bullying neighbors, particularly in the South China Sea and beyond, Beijing makes little distinction between relatively democratic countries like the Philippines and autocratic ones like Vietnam. Despite the common challenge they face from the United States, Beijing and Moscow remain reluctant to conclude a formal political or military alliance. Their actual military cooperation goes little beyond largely symbolic military maneuvers and limited exchanges of military information. Both countries emphasize that they are aligned against the United States and, to some extent, the European Union, but they have not formed any meaningful alliance. China, for instance, did not recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea and even became the number one trading partner of Russian adversary Ukraine. Russia is likewise rarely reluctant to sell advanced military hardware to Chinas rival, India. It therefore remains a fundamental American interest not to create a self-fulfilling prophecy that pushes China and Russia closer together.

EVEN IN the relatively stable U.S. political systemwhere institutional safeguards have usually functioned under the most difficult circumstances, from Watergate to the Trump-Biden transitionit is widely agreed that foreign meddling is unacceptable. Why then do U.S. officials and politicians expect that China and Russia, without similar democratic legitimacy and without legal safeguards to protect their elites in case of defeat, are prepared to accept foreign interference in their fundamental internal arrangements? China and Russia are hardly natural allies, but this fact does not mean that the creation of an assertive alliance of democracies would not push a reluctant Xi and Putin together. The perception of an imminent common threat might force both leaders to conclude that whatever their differences in tactics, political cultures, and long-term interests, in the short run at least, they must work together to oppose the danger of democratic hegemony. If Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin reach this conclusion, it will be increasingly difficult for them to speak to the United States with different voiceseven on issues where it would be perfectly logical in terms of their substantive interests to do so.

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Dangerous Illusions - The National Interest

People telling themselves Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election are delusional toddlers crying about wanting their binky back. Theyre not rational people capable of dealing with factual reality.

The reality is there were more than 65 federal court cases surrounding the 2020 presidential election. Trump failed to prove any voting inconsistencies in every case. Many judges ruling on the cases were appointed by Trump himself. The lawyers who brought the cases to court are now being sanctioned, fined and some are due to lose their law licenses because their cases were so spurious it was a violation of court rules to present them.

These court cases and the refusal to accept the outcome of a free and fair election are part of an ongoing coup by Trump and his brain-dead minions. Republicans claiming Trump won know deep down he lost. They just relish the freedom to tell the lie when they know he didnt. Theyre addicted to the chaos their lie creates and the power grabs they can make while people are distracted.

People refusing to admit Trumps well-earned defeat are subscribing to anti-American, fascist autocratic ideal. They attempted an insurrection on Jan. 6, and are committing an ongoing coup by refusing to accept the results of a free and fair election.

Theyre claiming issues with election integrity because they lost fair and square and are too childlike to deal with factual reality.

They just cant admit the Trump family is a crime family running a con on them.

A local fishing guide with decades of fishing on the Clearwater and Snake rivers wants to make a living catching fish.

During many years of service, this guide has watched different years of fish returns. What his decades-long experience tells him is that barging small fish down to the ocean is far and away the best method for bigger returns of fish.

The biggest fish returns have come after fish were barged. Its worked every time. So why doesnt Fish and Game continue to barge fish?

Most likely, it would cost fish people jobs who write stupid fish studies.

Experience is the best teacher there is. So use some common sense, Fish and Game, and barge fish.

The ocean is still the problem area for fish. Its over-fished and polluted.

Barging gets fish by all predators on the way down.

On the way upriver, we need to get rid of predators and make the gillnetters go back to the type of nets and boats they had when the treaties were written.

Come on, Fish and Game. Use some common sense and barge. Its way cheaper and proven to work.

... Recently a written complaint against Rep. Priscilla Giddings was submitted to the House Ethics Committee. Under House Speaker Scott Bedkes signature were 23 others. ...

All were liberals, having a low Idaho Freedom Foundation score. ...

Giddings did not present anything that had not already been written in news articles about the Rep. Aaron von Ehlinger incident. ...

It was noted by Rep. John Gannon, a retired attorney on the Ethics Committee, that making the name of Jane Doe public was not illegal. Gannon went on to state that the issue was of minor significance.

Yet, Reps. Brent Crane and Wendy Horman took great measures to convince the watching public that this was a major issue, saying Giddings had lied innumerable times and had not been cooperative. ...

Horman also stated that Giddings failed to call any witnesses present in the audience to testify. ...

Subpoenas requested by Giddings for defense witnesses were not prepared by the committee in a timely manner, making it impossible for all subpoenas to be delivered before the hearing. ...

The charge that Giddings chose to call no witnesses was false. ...

I find it difficult to respect the House Ethics Committee and its actions of censure. To issue dishonest statements about the accused and to not allow both sides of the issue to be heard is a blatant disregard for honesty, the rule of law and higher ethical standards. Such actions make a mockery of the very reason there is an Ethics Committee.

Lewiston citizens: Im writing this from the heart.

When the city of Lewiston decided to initiate a mask mandate, it opened my eyes to the fact that they thought we, the citizens, werent capable of taking care of our own health. Who do you think was the first one to step up and protest this overreach of our city government? It was Wilson Boots.

I was right beside him when City Manager Alan Nygaard grabbed Boots by the arms to remove him from the room of an open city council meeting. Is this the type of power you want to let continue?

Boots has continued to fight for our rights and is running for Lewiston city mayor. I stand behind him and will be voting for a man who has no ulterior motive. He wants to see Lewiston prosper by bringing in more businesses that will help our city be self-sufficient, lower taxes and uphold our constitutional rights.

Lewiston SMART worked hard to get Proposition 1 on the ballot this year. If you want to get rid of the city manager type of government for Lewiston, vote no on Proposition 1.

We need a strong mayor form of government. In my opinion, Boots is the only choice for that position.

Dan Johnson is also running for mayor. Another career politician in our city government? No thank you.

Pop quiz: Politically, America needs to wake up to resist the radical left agenda?

Yes, Americans need to wake up.

Beyond the fact that waking up is the barest state of consciousness (no one is fit for any action moments after shaking off a nights slumber), Americans are not asleep.

Heres reality: Americans are complicit, complacent or incompetent.

A percentage of Americans happen to agree with the public policy trend, so they actively work to undermine America as it was founded.

An equal percentage dont care about political realities because they think politics irrelevant.

And last, I submit, the largest group of Americans does oppose leftist tyranny but cannot compete in the arena of ideas to defeat Marxist ideology. We are standing at the precipice of losing the American republic not because of the complicit or complacent; we are losing because of our philosophic incompetence. We have abandoned what made America possible: reason and John Lockes Second Treaties of Government.

Lockes work was the first time anyone identified the individual as the primary creator of all improvements, the rightful heir of his own work and the foundation of social organization. Lockes work was the first reasoned moral defense of the individual and related social organization, capitalism.

Lockes work inspired the Founding Fathers to resist the complicit, reject the complacent and wage war against British tyranny to protect inalienable individual rights to life, liberty and happiness.

Pop Quiz: Lewiston, give a moral defense of the individual and capitalism.

Awww, Priscilla Giddings, R-White Bird, you poor baby. Did the mean old House Ethics Committee vote to censure you and remove you from only one minor committee assignment? How dare they?

All that you did was to exacerbate the horrendous trauma of a 19-year-old rape victim by publicizing her name, her personal information and her photos, thus enabling your followers with scrambled brains to demonize her. What was unethical about that? After all, werent you highly ethical when you piously defended the accused rapist?

These same people whom Twin Falls Times-News columnist Stephen Hartgen aptly labeled the Idaho Slavery Foundation stood and applauded you when you entered the meeting of the ethics committee. Was that not enough adulation for you?

But you showed everybody, didnt you? You showed your contempt for that silly old ethics committee by being insulting, obfuscating, splitting hairs, and dodging answers to simple, straightforward questions (Idaho Statesman, Aug. 3).

People of Idaho, make no mistake: Giddings has no ethics. She does not show respect for anyone else and is arrogantly self-centered. She does not represent the rational people of Idaho. Giddings egregious disdain toward a rape victim is abhorrent and she must be held accountable.

When the full House of Representatives votes on the Ethics Committees recommendations in the future, it must do the honorable thing and boot out this rotten apple.

If they do not, shame on them.

In her Aug. 12 letter, Marlene Schaefer notes that the absence of reported flu cases seems conspiratorial. She might find relief in the theory of viral interference. See the Youtube channel of Dr. Zubin Damania, which he named ZdoggMD: Where did flu go? Viral interference, explained (six months ago). Also hopeful, The delta surge may collapse faster than you think (one week ago).

If you really want to imagine where society is heading, read some of the best science fiction ever written, much of which has become science fact.

Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury all had predictions of what was to be in the realm of space travel, society and where we could be going in a world gone completely mad.

Fahrenheit 45 is one, predicting the downfall of books by restricting and punishing free thought by burning them so only what you were told was the proper way to think and behave.

Now we are entering a phase where we must present papers to authorities to prove weve been inoculated against COVID-19 and the delta variant. Seems like a throwback to the period just before World War II when papers had to be shown to move through a neighborhood or city freely.

Going back to the sci-fi writers, maybe we should all get those pretty little bar code scanner tattoos on our wrists so our government can keep more accurate track of where we are, where we are going and whether or not weve been vaccinated. Im sure the information would be held safely in a big computer data base somewhere.

We would all be much safer, wouldnt we, if our government had more complete control of our movements across borders, state lines and city boundaries?

Dont take offense. This was written tongue-in-cheek, just to make people think about ... whether we want to go down this dark path.

See the article here:

Aug. 22 Letters to the Editor, Part 3: Our Readers' Opinions - Lewiston Morning Tribune

Aug 20th 2021

This By-invitation commentary is part of a series by outside contributors on the future of American powertaking a broad look at the forces shaping the country's global standing in the 20 years since 9/11, from the rise of China to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. More articles are available here.

The Economist Today

A daily email with the best of our journalism

THE MULTITUDES remained plunged in ignorance and their leaders, seeking their votes, did not dare to undeceive them. So wrote Winston Churchill of the victors of the first world war in The Gathering Storm. He bitterly recalled a refusal to face unpleasant facts, desire for popularity and electoral success irrespective of the vital interests of the state. American readers watching their governments ignominious departure from Afghanistan, and listening to President Joe Bidens strained effort to justify the unholy mess he has made, may find at least some of Churchills critique of interwar Britain uncomfortably familiar.

Britains state of mind was the product of a combination of national exhaustion and imperial overstretch, to borrow a phrase from Paul Kennedy, a historian at Yale. Since 1914, the nation had endured war, financial crisis and in 1918-19 a terrible pandemic, the Spanish influenza. The economic landscape was overshadowed by a mountain of debt. Though the country remained the issuer of the dominant global currency, it was no longer unrivalled in that role. A highly unequal society inspired politicians on the left to demand redistribution if not outright socialism. A significant proportion of the intelligentsia went further, embracing communism or fascism.

Meanwhile the established political class preferred to ignore a deteriorating international situation. Britains global dominance was menaced in Europe, in Asia and in the Middle East. The system of collective securitybased on the League of Nations, which had been established in 1920 as part of the post-war peace settlementwas crumbling, leaving only the possibility of alliances to supplement thinly spread imperial resources. The result was a disastrous failure to acknowledge the scale of the totalitarian threat and to amass the means to deter the dictators.

Does Britains experience help us understand the future of American power? Americans prefer to draw lessons from the United States history, but it may be more illuminating to compare the country to its predecessor as an Anglophone global hegemon, for America today in many ways resembles Britain in the interwar period.

Like all such historical analogies, this one is not perfect. The vast amalgam of colonies and other dependencies that Britain ruled over in the 1930s has no real American counterpart today. This allows Americans to reassure themselves that they do not have an empire, even when withdrawing their soldiers and civilians from Afghanistan after a 20-year presence.

Despite its high covid-19 mortality, America is not recovering from the kind of trauma that Britain experienced in the first world war, when huge numbers of young men were slaughtered (nearly 900,000 died, some 6% of males aged 15 to 49 died, to say nothing of 1.7m wounded). Nor is America facing as clear and present a threat as Nazi Germany posed to Britain. Still, the resemblances are striking, and go beyond the failure of both countries to impose order on Afghanistan. (It is clear, noted The Economist in February 1930, after premature modernising reforms had triggered a revolt, that Afghanistan will have none of the West.) And the implications for the future of American power are unnerving.

So many books and articles predicting American decline have been written in recent decades that declinism has become a clich. But Britains experience between the 1930s and the 1950s is a reminder that there are worse fates than gentle, gradual decline.

Follow the moneyStart with the mountains of debt. Britains public debt after the first world war rose from 109% of GDP in 1918 to just under 200% in 1934. Americas federal debt is different in important ways, but it is comparable in magnitude. It will reach nearly 110% of GDP this year, even higher than its previous peak in the immediate aftermath of the second world war. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it could exceed 200% by 2051.

An important difference between the United States today and the United Kingdom roughly a century ago is that the average maturity of American federal debt is quite short (65 months), whereas more than 40% of the British public debt took the form of perpetual bonds or annuities. This means that the American debt today is a great deal more sensitive to moves in interest rates than Britains was.

Another key difference is the great shift there has been in fiscal and monetary theories, thanks in large measure to John Maynard Keyness critique of Britains interwar policies.

Britains decision in 1925 to return sterling to the gold standard at the overvalued pre-war price condemned Britain to eight years of deflation. The increased power of trade unions meant that wage cuts lagged behind price cuts during the depression. This contributed to job losses. At the nadir in 1932, the unemployment rate was 15%. Yet Britains depression was mild, not least because abandoning the gold standard in 1931 allowed the easing of monetary policy. Falling real interest rates meant a decline in the burden of debt service, creating new fiscal room for manoeuvre.

Such a reduction in debt-servicing costs seems unlikely for America in the coming years. Economists led by the former treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers, have predicted inflationary dangers from the current fiscal and monetary policies. Where British real interest rates generally declined in the 1930s, in America they are projected to turn positive from 2027 and rise steadily to hit 2.5% by mid-century. True, forecasts of rising rates have been wrong before, and the Federal Reserve is in no hurry to tighten monetary policy. But if rates do rise, Americas debt will cost more to service, squeezing other parts of the federal budget, especially discretionary expenditures such as defence.

That brings us to the crux of the matter. Churchills great preoccupation in the 1930s was that the government was procrastinatingthe underlying rationale of its policy of appeasementrather than energetically rearming in response to the increasingly aggressive behaviour of Hitler, Mussolini and the militarist government of imperial Japan. A key argument of the appeasers was that fiscal and economic constraintsnot least the high cost of running an empire that extended from Fiji to Gambia to Guiana to Vancouvermade more rapid rearmament impossible.

It may seem fanciful to suggest that America faces comparable threats todaynot only from China, but also from Russia, Iran and North Korea. Yet the mere fact that it seems fanciful illustrates the point. The majority of Americans, like the majority of Britons between the wars, simply do not want to contemplate the possibility of a major war against one or more authoritarian regimes, coming on top of the countrys already extensive military commitments. That is why the projected decline of American defence spending as a share of GDP, from 3.4% in 2020 to 2.5% in 2031, will cause consternation only to Churchillian types. And they can expect the same hostile receptionthe same accusations of war-mongeringthat Churchill had to endure.

Power is relativeA relative decline compared with other countries is another point of resemblance. According to estimates by the economic historian Angus Maddison, the British economy by the 1930s had been overtaken in terms of output by not only Americas (as early as 1872), but also Germanys (in 1898 and again, after the disastrous years of war, hyperinflation and slump, in 1935) and the Soviet Union (in 1930). True, the British Empire as a whole had a bigger economy than the United Kingdom, especially if the Dominions are includedperhaps twice as large. But the American economy was even larger and remained more than double the size of Britains, despite the more severe impact of the Great Depression in the United States.

America today has a similar problem of relative decline in economic output. On the basis of purchasing-power parity, which allows for the lower prices of many Chinese domestic goods, the GDP of China caught up with that of America in 2014. On a current-dollar basis, the American economy is still bigger, but the gap is projected to narrow. This year Chinas current-dollar GDP will be around 75% of Americas. By 2026 it will be 89%.

It is no secret that China poses a bigger economic challenge than the Soviet Union once did, since the latters economy was never more than 44% the size of Americas during the cold war. Nor is it classified information that China is seeking to catch up with America in many technological domains with national-security applications, from artificial intelligence to quantum computing. And the ambitions of Chinas leader, Xi Jinping, are also well knownalong with his renewal of the Chinese Communist Partys ideological hostility to individual freedom, the rule of law and democracy.

American sentiment towards the Chinese government has markedly soured in the past five years. But that does not seem to be translating into public interest in actively countering the Chinese military threat. If Beijing invades Taiwan, most Americans will probably echo the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, who notoriously described the German bid to carve up Czechoslovakia in 1938 as a quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing.

A crucial source of British weakness between the wars was the revolt of the intelligentsia against the Empire and more generally against traditional British values. Churchill recalled with disgust the Oxford Union debate in 1933 that had carried the motion, This House refuses to fight for King and country. As he noted: It was easy to laugh off such an episode in England, but in Germany, in Russia, in Italy, in Japan, the idea of a decadent, degenerate Britain took deep root and swayed many calculations. This of course is precisely how Chinas new breed of wolf-warrior diplomats and nationalist intellectuals regard America today.

Nazis, fascists and communists alike had good reason to think the British were succumbing to self-hatred. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, George Orwell wrote of his time as a colonial policeman in his essay Shooting an Elephant. Not many intellectuals attained Orwells insight that Britains was nevertheless a great deal better than the younger empires that [were] going to supplant it. Manyunlike Orwellembraced Soviet communism, with disastrous results for Western intelligence. Meanwhile, a shocking number of members of the aristocratic social elite were attracted to Hitler. Even readers of the Daily Express were more inclined to make fun of the Empire than to celebrate it. Big White Carstairs in the Beachcomber column was an even more absurd caricature of the colonial type than David Lows Colonel Blimp.

The end of empiresAmericas empire may not manifest itself as dominions, colonies and protectorates, but the perception of international dominance, and the costs associated with overstretch, are similar. Both left and right in America now routinely ridicule or revile the idea of an imperial project. The American Empire is falling apart, gloats Tom Engelhardt, a journalist in The Nation. On the right, the economist Tyler Cowen sardonically imagines what the fall of the American empire could look like. At the same time as Cornel West, the progressive African-American philosopher, sees Black Lives Matter and the fight against US empire [as] one and the same, two pro-Trump Republicans, Ryan James Girdusky and Harlan Hill, call the pandemic the latest example of how the American empire has no clothes.

The right still defends the traditional account of the republics foundingas a rejection of British colonial ruleagainst the "woke lefts attempts to recast American history as primarily a tale of slavery and then segregation. But few on either side of the political spectrum pine for the era of global hegemony that began in the 1940s.

In short, like Britons in the 1930s, Americans in the 2020s have fallen out of love with empirea fact that Chinese observers have noticed and relish. Yet the empire remains. Granted, America has few true colonies: Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands in the north Pacific, and American Samoa in the south Pacific. By British standards, it is a paltry list of possessions. Nevertheless, the American military presence is almost as ubiquitous as Britains once was. American armed-forces personnel are to be found in more than 150 countries. The total number deployed beyond the borders of the 50 states is around 200,000.

The acquisition of such extensive global responsibilities was not easy. But it is a delusion to believe that shedding them will be easier. This is the lesson of British history to which Americans need to pay more heed. President Joe Bidens ill-advised decision for a final withdrawal from Afghanistan was just the latest signal by an American president that the country wants to reduce its overseas commitments. Barack Obama began the process by exiting Iraq too hastily and announcing in 2013 that America is not the world's policeman. Donald Trumps America First doctrine was just a populist version of the same impulse: he too itched to get out of Afghanistan and to substitute tariffs for counterinsurgency.

The problem, as this months debacle in Afghanistan perfectly illustrates, is that the retreat from global dominance is rarely a peaceful process. However you phrase it, announcing you are giving up on your longest war is an admission of defeat, and not only in the eyes of the Taliban. China, which shares a short stretch of its vast land border with Afghanistan, is also closely watching. So is Russia, with zloradstvoRussian for Schadenfreude. It was no mere coincidence that Russia intervened militarily in both Ukraine and Syria just months after Obamas renunciation of global policing.

Mr Bidens belief (expressed to Richard Holbrooke in 2010) that one could exit Afghanistan as Richard Nixon exited Vietnam and get away with it is bad history: Americas humiliation in Indochina did have consequences. It emboldened the Soviet Union and its allies to make trouble elsewherein southern and eastern Africa, in Central America and in Afghanistan, which it invaded in 1979. Reenacting the fall of Saigon in Kabul will have comparable adverse effects.

The end of American empire was not difficult to foresee, even at the height of neoconservative hubris following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. There were at least four fundamental weaknesses of Americas global position at that time, as I first argued in Colossus: The Rise and Fall of Americas Empire (Penguin, 2004). They are a manpower deficit (few Americans have any desire to spend long periods of time in places like Afghanistan and Iraq); a fiscal deficit (see above); an attention deficit (the electorates tendency to lose interest in any large-scale intervention after roughly four years); and a history deficit (the reluctance of policymakers to learn lessons from their predecessors, much less from other countries).

These were never deficits of British imperialism. One other differencein many ways more profound than the fiscal deficitis the negative net international investment position (NIIP) of the United States, which is just under -70% of GDP. A negative NIIP essentially means that foreign ownership of American assets exceeds American ownership of foreign assets. By contrast, Britain still had a hugely positive NIIP between the wars, despite the amounts of overseas assets that had been liquidated to finance the first world war. From 1922 until 1936 it was consistently above 100% of GDP. By 1947 it was down to 3%.

Selling off the remaining imperial silver (to be precise, obliging British investors to sell overseas assets and hand over the dollars) was one of the ways Britain paid for the second world war. America, the great debtor empire, does not have an equivalent nest-egg. It can afford to pay the cost of maintaining its dominant position in the world only by selling yet more of its public debt to foreigners. That is a precarious basis for superpower status.

Facing new storms Churchills argument in The Gathering Storm was not that the rise of Germany, Italy and Japan was an unstoppable process, condemning Britain to decline. On the contrary, he insisted that war could have been avoided if the Western democracies had taken more decisive action earlier in the 1930s. When President Franklin Roosevelt asked him what the war should be called, Churchill at once replied: The Unnecessary War.

In the same way, there is nothing inexorable about Chinas rise, much less Russias, while all the lesser countries aligned with them are economic basket cases, from North Korea to Venezuela. Chinas population is ageing even faster than anticipated; its workforce is shrinking. Sky-high private-sector debt is weighing on growth. Its mishandling of the initial outbreak of covid-19 has greatly harmed its international standing. It also risks becoming the villain of the climate crisis, as it cannot easily kick the habit of burning coal to power its industry.

And yet it is all too easy to see a sequence of events unfolding that could lead to another unnecessary war, most probably over Taiwan, which Mr Xi covets and which America is (ambiguously) committed to defend against invasiona commitment that increasingly lacks credibility as the balance of military power shifts in East Asia. (The growing vulnerability of American aircraft carriers to Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles such as the DF-21D is just one problem to which the Pentagon lacks a good solution.)

If American deterrence fails and China gambles on a coup de main, the United States will face the grim choice between fighting a long, hard waras Britain did in 1914 and 1939or folding, as happened over Suez in 1956.

Churchill said that he wrote The Gathering Storm to show:

how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous; how the structure and habits of democratic States, unless they are welded into larger organisms, lack those elements of persistence and conviction which can alone give security to humble masses; how, even in matters of self-preservation the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger [how] the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bulls-eye of disaster.

He concluded the volume with one of his many pithy maxims: Facts are better than dreams. American leaders in recent years have become over-fond of dreams, from the full spectrum dominance fantasy of the neoconservatives under George W. Bush to the dark nightmare of American carnage conjured up by Donald Trump. As another global storm gathers, it may be time to face the fact that Churchill understood only too well: the end of empire is seldom, if ever, a painless process._____________

Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and managing director of Greenmantle, a political-economic advisory firm. His latest book is Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe (Allen Lane, 2021).

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Niall Ferguson on why the end of Americas empire wont be peaceful - The Economist

On February 25, 2016, 22-year-old Shawna Lynn Jones died from a blow to the head by a falling boulder while fighting the Mulholland Fire in Malibu, California. She was part of Malibu 13-3, a 12-person crew of inmates who work as firefighters under supervision of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the U.S. Forest Service. A Los Angeles Times article about her death stated that Jones was the first woman and just the third conservation camp inmate to die since the program began in 1943. Just is quite the word to use in such a sentence, considering the cruelty of the system that led to Joness death. In her new book Breathing Fire, writer Jaime Lowe offers a vivid picture of the injustices that affected Jones and her fellow firefighters.

Expanding on a 2017 feature she wrote for The New York Times Magazine, Lowe examines the fallout from Joness death and tells the story of the thousands of women inmates who help fight Californias wildfires every year. Male inmates have been firefighting since 1946, and women were given the option to do so in the 1980s. Public officials considered this a matter of fairness, Lowe writes, and in fact incarcerated women also tend to see the firefighting work program as a desirable alternative to the inhumane conditions of prison. The compounds that house inmate firefighters, called conservation camps,have better food and living conditions than the states prisons, and they offer participants the chance to earn credits that go toward shortening their sentences. In the book, Lowe describes getting to know many incarcerated firefighters who tell her the work has changed their lives for the better or that theyre hoping to get jobs in firefighting or forestry when theyre out.

But Lowe makes a clear distinction between professional firefighting in the free world and the carceral systems employment of inmates as firefighters. All the women I spoke with could see the benefits of the firefighting program, but most bristled at the idea that they had volunteered, Lowe writes, citing the litany of reasons an inmate would consider such a dangerous job more desirable than the conditions in prison, which include sexual assault, neglect for the sick or mentally ill, and poor nutrition. Volunteer is a relative term for the incarcerated.

And for all the comparative perks, offering wildland firefighting as an alternative prison experience is certainly not a much more humane way to treat prisoners. Inmate firefighters are paid a salary of just five dollars a day, which includes the 24-hour periods when they are on call for fires, plus one dollar per hour when actively firefighting. They work on the ground as hand crews, hiking in to clear vegetation early on in the fire and mopping up by stomping out embers at the end. Basically, the hand crews are the ones in the trenches, a camp commander named Keith Radey tells Lowe, and theyre mostly made up of inmate crews. Depending on the year, inmates might make up as much as 30 percent of Californias wildland firefighter crews. And while program spokespeople emphasize that inmates are considered just as capable as professional firefighters, they never train with live fire. Many of the women recount how scared they were to see a real fire for the first timewhile fighting it. In a striking scene, as a particularly erratic fire barrels toward one inmate crew, their foremen tell them that theyre seeing action that most free world firefighters never see.

Lowe spends a couple of chapters tracing the history of the fire program back to the ugly roots of Californias carceral system and slavery practices. The countrys first female firefighter, for example, was a Black woman named Molly Williams who worked as a servant for the man who had once enslaved her. The man was part of a volunteer firefighter corps, and Williams sometimes stepped in for crew members during fires. Historians often frame Williamss 19th-century heroism as entirely voluntary, despite the questionable power dynamics of her situation. In the 1900s, inmate labor drove the westward expansion of Los Angeles and the construction of the Pacific Coast Highway. More recently, women and people of color have been particularly affected by the war on drugs and three-strikes laws (still in effect in California) that give repeat offenders sentences of 25 years to life; the number of incarcerated women in the U.S. increased more than 750 percent between 1980 and 2019.

As the inmate population in California has grown, the number of incarcerated firefighters has too, doubling from the 1960s to today. And officials have never been coy about the reason; many have lauded conservation camps as cost-effective solutions to prison overcrowding and fire management. Because its so much less expensive than hiring more firefighters at a fair wage, the California prison systems forestry program saves taxpayers about $100 million a year, and has saved the state $1.2 billion since its inception. In 2014, the office of Californias Attorney General (then led by Kamala Harris) argued against reducing the number of inmates in state prisons because it would severely impact fire camp participation in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought.

Whether or not the women have had a positive experience at the conservation camps, most of their stories amply illustrate that the U.S. carceral system is not built for justice or protecting inmates. Even the women who love the program so much that they want to become firefighters when they get out of prison will likely be barred from many of those jobsor at least required to jump through lots of hoops to applybecause of their felony convictions. In 2017, Lowe met a woman at a conservation camp named Alisha, who told her that she was already taking classes in hopes of getting a job on an engine when shes out. In 2020, when Lowe told Alisha about a new law that makes it slightly easier for former inmates to get firefighting jobs, Alisha said, Oh god, thats so dope. I wish I was out. By that time, shed been given a life sentence after an attempted robbery, because it was her third offense.

Lowe, who began reporting this book in 2016, excels at detailing the injustices that make up these womens lives. She spends much of the book following a handful of womens stories from childhood to arrest to conservation camp. It seems wise to devote so much space to this level of personal narrative; in recent years Californias women inmate firefighters have seen no shortage of press coverage, much of which treats the program as a novelty or discusses it in broad, statistical strokes. Breathing Fire brings nuance to the lived experiences of the women inmates who are helping the state face an increasingly grim future of wildfire, and to Jones, the first of them to die on the job. But it never losessight of the central truth: they should never have been asked to do this in the first place.

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The Incarcerated Women Risking Their Lives to Fight Wildfires - Outside