Category Archives: Wage Slavery

Mythology of humans natural impulse for empathy

Warfare has been a plague haunting the human species ever since our evolution to become Homo Sapiens, finally, around 300,000 years ago in Africa. Etymologically, homo means human and sapiens means wise or knowledgeable. One can see that in this 18th century anthropocentric characterization of our species, the notion of wisdom was highly overrated. What made our common Homo sapiens ancestors any wiser than the Neanderthals that they would eventually invade and annihilate? History is narrated by victors, therefore we were told that Homo sapiens were highly superior to the so-called brutal Neanderthals. It could be true in territorial ambitions, and some technological aspects, but it remains questionable in other area of social activity.

Ultimately, a taste for adventure and conquest is what drove Homo sapiens to expand their territories on Earth. It would be utterly naive to think that this progressive form of colonization was accomplished through peaceful means. No, unfortunately for our species, a propensity for aggression, for domination through warfare was always present in Homo sapiens DNA.

Despite Jean-Jacques Rousseaus cornerstone idea that humans had a natural impulse to compassion and empathy, part of our being was always selfish, brutal and predatory. This inherent, and almost genetic, conflict explains the permanence of warfare in human history. The oscillations, both individually and collectively, between empathetic and sociopathic behaviors is what could be defined as our Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde conundrum. It is simultaneously, our collective human blessing and burden, and it has defined both the incredible successes and the colossal failures of humanity.

Wars of necessity or of choice: all wars are for profit

Warfare in the 20th century was rather simple compared to todays predicaments. Either during World War I or World War II, nations had traditional alliances which were usually respected and recognized by treaties. Usually formal declarations of wars were issued before a military action -at the exception of Japans surprise attack on Pearl-Harbor. The two wars were sold by leaders to their respective populations as wars of necessity. In both cases, they were still wars fought by conscripts, as professional soldiers, a euphemism for mercenaries, are usually not eager to become cannon fodder.

While the United States cautiously, one could say cowardly, stood on the sideline during World War I until 1917, the conflict unquestionably triggered the Russian revolution, as poor Russians conscripts refused to fight the tsars war. As Marxist ideas were quickly spreading elsewhere in Europe, many French soldiers refused to fight their German brothers for the sake of capitalism. Many conscripts then knew that the so-called war of necessity was a scheme of war for profit. At the Versailles treaty, Germany was forced to pay an enormous amount to France, in gold, as war compensation. In the Middle East, in an even more substantial perennial spoils of war story, the two dominant empires of the time, the United Kingdom and France had grabbed for themselves the bulk of the Ottoman empire through the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement.

If you analyze the war of necessity versus war of choice, and correlation of war for profit during World War II, in the case of the United States, first you wonder what took the US so long to enter the war alongside their allies France and England? The answer is often murky, as many major US corporations such as Ford Motor and General Motors ,as well as policymakers such as Joe Kennedy (father of JFK), had either vested economic interests in Nazi Germany or were upfront in their support for Adolf Hitler.

Further, once the United States was attacked by Japan and finally committed to the European part of the conflict against Germany, a large part of Detroits manufacturing sector was converted to military purposes. In the United States, it is arguably more this massive war effort than FDRs New Deal which turned the US economy into a juggernaut, in a dramatic recovery from the Great Depression, which the Wall Street crash of 1929 had started. Warfare writes human history using blood and tears for ink, but the merchants of death of the military-industrial complex and their financial market affiliates always profit handsomely.

If slavery or slave labor is the ideal structure for capitalism, any war, under any pretext, is the perfect business venture, as it provides a fast consumption of goods (weapons & ammunition), cheap labor force using the leverage of patriotism defend the motherland or fatherland and infinite money to rebuild once capitalisms wars for profit have turned everything to ruins and ashes. After World War II, the US Marshall Plan was painted as some great altruistic venture, but in fact it justified a long-term occupation of Germany and incredibly lucrative contracts, some of them aimed at controlling West Germanys economy and government.

Rise of conceptual wars: war on terror & war on Covid

If the wars of the 20th century were conventional as they either opposed sovereign nations or were in the context of imperial-colonial setback, like the French war in Indochina, Algerias independence war against France, some were specifically defined by the Cold War era, like the Korea war. From World War II at the Yalta conference, two new empires had emerged as dominant: the United States and the USSR. The world had then the predictability of this duality. The collapse of the Soviet Union altered this balance, but it took a bit more than a decade to make a quantum leap.

Almost exactly 20 years ago, an event, the September 11, 2001 attack, radically changed the dynamic, as it marked the start of the conceptual war on terror. Terror is an effect, an emotion. How can one possibly wage war against an emotion? However absurd conceptually, this turning point in history allowed more or less all governments worldwide to embark into surveillance, obsession for security and a crackdown on personal liberties. Using the shock and fear in the population, which followed the collapse of the New York City Twin Towers in the US, a form of police state was almost immediately born using new administrative branches of government like the Department of Homeland Security. We still live in the post 9/11 world, as that coercive apparatus keep dragging on.

Just like in standard, more conventional warfare, capitalism doesnt create crises like 9/11, but seems always to find ways to benefit from it. In the war-on-terror era, a narrative also popular with Russias leader Vladimir Putin, the beneficiaries were and still are the global military-industrial complex, private security apparatus more like small private armies, and layers of police forces. How can one go wrong in terms of maximum profit?

In complete haste, and with a massive international support, using the trauma to influence worldwide public opinion, an attack on Afghanistan was launched by NATOs invincible armada. Were the Taliban governing the country at the time responsible for 9/11? Not so. Their fault was to host the man who was arguably the architect of the attack: enemy-number-one Osama bin-Laden, of course. The fact that most of the pilots who flew the planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were Saudi Arabian nationals was not even dismissed, it wasnt even publicly considered by governments or the corporate controlled mainstream media.

As matter of fact, many families of the 9/11 Twin Towers attack victims are still trying to get a sense of closure on a potential involvement of Saudi Arabia, at the highest level, in the tragedy to this day without much success, as a form of foreign policy Omerta seems to prevail in the US with the Saudis royal family. This was certainly not a war of necessity, it barely qualified as a war of choice, as it was a pure fit of anger against an individual and his relatively small organization, not even against a state .

Twenty years later, back to square one, with the Taliban in control of Afghanistan affairs, but NATO, the military coalition of the impulsive and ill informed are still not candidly making mea culpa, and admitting their gross ineptitude and almost criminal negligence. Colossal failure was always written all over Afghanistans bullets ridden walls, mosques and even modest fruit stands! Quagmires were also perfectly predictable in the war on terror sequels in Iraq; Libya (using French/Anglo/UAE proxies); Syria (using proxy good Jihadists), then ISIS (once many of the good Sunni Jihadists somehow decided to turn bad). Described like this the 20-year war on terrors horrendous fiascos sound like the theater of the absurd! Absurd for the successive policy makers and incompetent or corrupt planners, but tragic for the almost one million dead and their surviving families, the 38 million refugees or internally displaced, and countries like Libya, turned into wrecked failed states. Meanwhile the military-industrial complex, including the private contractors, has become more powerful than ever.

The tragically failed policies of the past 20 years have to be quantified. According to Brown University Watson Institute, and this is a conservative estimate, the human cost of post 9/11 wars is around 800,000 in direct deaths; 38 million people worldwide is the number of war refugees and displaced persons collateral victims of the war on terror; and finally, the US war on terror spending from 2001 to 2020 was $6.4 trillion. All this money extracted from the US taxpayers, and enthusiastically approved in Congress by both Democrats and Republicans, was injected into the private corporations of the military-industrial complex, the Pentagon of course, to a lesser extend, and ultimately as a billionaire-making cash bonanza into Wall Street and all global financial markets. How it works is rather simple: below are two prime examples, among countless other similar schemes, to profit from the war machine.

One quick example of war for mega-profit comes to mind. Before he accepted to be George W. Bushs running mate in 2000, Dick Cheney was the CEO of the giant construction, oil and mineral extraction firm Halliburton. Right before he started to campaign, he, of course, resigned from his CEO function and sold his huge Halliburton stock portfolio to avoid conflict of interests. Fast forward to 2003, and guess which firm is getting the lion share of private contracts for the Iraq war? Halliburton of course. Coincidence? Hard to believe. Such example of vast sums of money being recycled from the taxpayers pocket book to the coffers of private companies war profiteers are countless.

The other example is the major weapon systems manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin manufactures fighter jets like F-15, F-16, F-35, and F-21; helicopters like Blackhawks and Cyclone, as well as Drones. On January 19, 2000 the share value for Lockheed Martin was $12.10. By January 17, 2020 Lockheed Martin stock traded at $408.77 a share. The bottom line: who in the US Congress would dare to say no to funding the military-industrial complex via the US Defense Department budget? Basically nobody. It would be deemed unpatriotic and bad for the job market, considering that the military-industrial complex employs a lot of people.

Terror is out, global pandemic is in

One cannot help making an analogy between the war on terror and the new global war for profit, which is the war on Covid. As the war on terror is being exposed as a complete fiasco and receding in historys rear view mirror, global capitalism needed something else. It magically materialized as a global biological warfare against a virus.What a golden opportunity! Since March 2020 a bit later in the crisis actually the beneficiaries of the war on Covid have been, not only pharmaceutical companies, but also digital giants that benefit from remote-location work due to measures like lockdowns, online commerce; and, finally, the global financial markets.

Frances President Macron was, to my knowledge, the very first world leader to use the bellicose semantic of war on Covid. He did it in March 2020. We have seen previously that the war on terror has been immensely profitable for the nexus of global corporate imperialism, but the recent war on Covid could be even more profitable, as its protagonists/profiteers appear to be benevolent, even altruistic. The current push worldwide, and Macron was once again ahead of the game, is either to make vaccination mandatory, or blackmail the population with coercive measures like the Pass Sanitaire in France, to obey and comply.

This is the calculus and assumption that all governments and biotech affiliates are likely making. Lets say that they manage to make vaccination mandatory. Worldwide, you would have a captive market of around 7.8 billion people. Even if 800 million people globally resist vaccination, we are talking about an extraordinarily profitable market. At around $15 per dose for the best-adopted vaccines on the market, which are from Pfizer and Moderna, multiplied by two, or even better by three, as is now recommended by pharmaceutical companies and some governments, because of the Delta variant, we are talking about some serious cash flow. With booster jabs likely recommended down the line every nine months or so, we are talking about a biotech Eldorado!

As an example of the heavenly jolt of joy vaccines have already injected into the arms of the Masters of the Universe of global finance, Moderna stock on January 2, 2020 traded at $19.57 a share. On August 11, 2021, Moderna stock traded on Wall Street at $440.00 a share. It is rather obvious, besides various stimulus package schemes applied in all countries to boost economies and prevent a massive Covid economic recession, global financial markets, with the big hedge funds pulling the strings, have become addicted to vaccines. It is no wonder that all major Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have already made vaccination mandatory for their employees. It is no wonder either, why stock markets, like the CAC40 in France, have reached record high despite a severe contraction of the real economy.

I previously mentioned the real cost of the 20-year war on terror as being $6.4 trillion for the United States alone. It is not yet possible to quantify the real cost of the so-called global war on Covid. One can suspect it will be very high as well, and its human cost higher in term of diminished personal liberties. The negative side effects of the war on Covid are mainly sociological and psychological, as it has already increased human isolation and fragmented communities. This 18-month old pseudo war on a virus has also withdrawn global resources and focus from the only war of necessity, the one critical for our species survival: namely the war on climate collapse.

War on climate collapse is a war against capitalism

The war on Covid could even last longer than the war on terror. Cynically, the reason for this is that the war on Covid has worked wonders for the benefit of corporations and the super-rich. It has also allowed for governments that are supposed to be neoliberal economically and progressive socially to become paradoxically authoritarian. A prime example, in this instance, is again Emmanuel Macrons government in France. As long as wars, invented or not, either conventional or conceptual, can be used to extract a profit, they will remain the modus operandi for the billionaire class and their political surrogates. It might sound Utopian, but lets just imagine for a moment what humanity could do collectively to address the climate crisis existential threat, if we were going to implement a global policy of massive cuts in military spending and security apparatus.

Trillion of dollars could be allocated to the true emergency that will determine our survival or extinction. What could be more critical than this for our children and grandchildren? Climate collapse is on its way. During this entire summer, large areas of Earth were on fire, and others were flooded. Killer storms will keep coming relentlessly at us. Before 2050 many coastlines will be submerged, causing more than 1 billion people worldwide to become the climate collapse refugees. This is not a projection or speculation, it is documented by the scientific community.

Unfortunately, the reason why our Banana Republic styles of governments are not willing to fight this war of necessity, the war on climate change, is because it can only be really fought by getting rid of the capitalist system altogether. Radical approaches are needed, such as scrapping capitalisms holy precept of permanent economic growth and its correlation of population growth. The remedies to try to mitigate the unfolding climate collapse would be many tough pills to swallow, because its about drastic systemic changes. Such as a zero-growth, sometime called negative-growth, economic model, which even Green parties at large do not embrace. The notion of Green New Deal is ludicrous. Green politicians either do not get it or are complete hypocrites if they are not also staunch anti-capitalists.

Another issue almost never addressed by Green politicians anywhere is the one of overpopulation. The rapid growth of the human population is a fundamental factor for capitalism as it provides two critical elements: plenty of cheap labor as well as a continuously growing consumption base. Case in point, in 1850 or at the start of the industrial revolution, the global world population stood at around 1 billion people; currently, or 171 years later and not much time in term of human history, it stands at around 7.8 billion. Some demographic projections forecast that it will reach between 10 to 13 billion by 2100. Needless to say, from a purely physical standpoint, this is entirely unsustainable as the surface of Earths landmass has gone unchanged. The problem with overpopulation, as an issue, is that almost everyone in every culture rightly views his or her ability to procreate as a fundamental right. My News Junkie Post partner, Dady Chery, and I, we know that even to bring up overpopulation as an issue is extremely unpopular. However, it has to be done.

Without a massive reduction in carbon emissions, we are on track to pass the fatal mark of a 2-degree Celsius global warming, not by 2050 but by 2035. In other words, a wrench has to be jammed into the gear of the infernal machine created by humans since the mid-19th centurys industrial revolution. Carbon emitting fossil fuels, of any kind, have to stay in the ground. Combustion vehicles should be banned promptly, and massive subsidies should be given to produce extremely affordable and fully electrical cars immediately.

Many in the West point the finger at the big carbon emitters, which are China, India and Brazil. But they are not the only culprits for the nearly criminal inaction of our governing instances. The populations of countries that rely heavily on extraction must put a severe pressure on their politicians or vote them out of office. One thinks, of course, of the Gulfs usual suspects like Saudi-Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, but other major players are almost as nefarious as far as having an economy built on energy or mineral extraction. A short list of the main countries heavily involved in the fossil fuel extraction business, either for domestic consumption or exports, would be: Russia, The United States, Canada, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, and Iran.

Would the various radical changes including capping human population growth- which seem to be objectively needed be painful? Certainly. But the alternative option, which is basically to keep the course of this giant high-speed bullet train without a pilot that is global capitalism, amounts to a medium-term collective suicide.

Editors Notes: Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire. Photographs one, five, nine, ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen and fifteen by Gilbert Mercier; photograph two by Gianfranco Goria; photograph three from the archive of Halloween HJB; photograph four from the archive of Recuerdos de Pandora; photographs six, seven and sixteen from the US Army archive; photograph eight from the archive of Christopher Dombres; and photograph eleven by Jeremy Hunsinger.

Live interview of Gilbert Mercier on this topic with Inayet Wadee on South African based radioSalaamedia, August 11, 2021.

Original post:

Forget Wars on Covid and Terror: War on Climate Collapse Is the Only War of Necessity for Human Survival | NEWS JUNKIE POST - NEWS JUNKIE POST

By Comer Yates, Rene Boynton-Jarrett & Maryanne Wolf

Comer Yates is the executive director of the Atlanta Speech School, which houses the free and universally accessible Cox Campus. Rene Boynton-Jarrett is a social epidemiologist and pediatrician at Boston University School of Medicine and the founding director of the Vital Village Community Engagement Network. Maryanne Wolf is a neuroscientist, literacy advocate, and the director of the Center For Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the University of California, Los Angeles Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and author of the book Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (HarperCollins, 2018).

As we make strides in halting COVID-19s lethal course, every parent is forced to consider, Will my child be safe when they return to school without the repeated interruptions the virus imposed in the past year?

We already know the answer. Too many schools havent been safe for children or their teachers since long before the current pandemic erected further barriers to childrens learning. Therefore, it cannot be an option to return to the same education system that has failed to meet the needs, hopes, and potential of the children most harmed by systemic inequities and racism.

As Frederick Douglass is widely quoted as saying: Once you learn to read, you will be forever free. A century and a half later, the converse is equally true for too many children who never attain a level of literacy that allows them to reach their full potential. Only 35 percent of Americas 4th graders read proficiently, and access to educational opportunity and literacy in the United States remains overwhelmingly defined by ZIP code, race, socioeconomics, and ethnicity. As has been well chronicled, childrens reading levels at 3rd grade form one of the most meaningful academic benchmarks by which we can predict, while not perfectly, whether they will lead a life of self-determination or one that is too often decided for themas measured by graduation rates and the opportunity to earn a livable wage.

In failing to set so many students up for future success, we have not only cheated our children, but we have failed our teachers. K12 teachers experience daily stress that is among the highest of the 14 professions included in one Gallup study (measured before the pandemic)equal only to nurses and physicianswith 78 percent of teachers reporting mental and physical exhaustion at the end of each day. Its no wonder. They have been fighting a constant battle to help their students thrive in a system set up to fail them, generation after generation. Teaching remotely for many months has not lightened those stress loads nor revised the necessary objectives ahead.

Heres an urgent two-point plan to fix whats been fundamentally broken for generations as we think about what classrooms should look like in the 2021-22 school year ahead and beyond:

First, we must change our universal assumptions around how young children learn. Advances in brain science make it clear that we must teach every child to listen rather than demand they be quiet. Interactive serve and return language engagement can foster relationships with adults that make space for vulnerability, support, agency, and healing. These relationships also help children build not only psychological strength but actual brain capacity to learn through the forming of social-emotional neural pathways. These pathways carry students from preliteracy language development, through to explicit reading instruction, to deep reading, and ultimately to the will and ability to make the greatest difference in the lives of others.

Second, we must equip our teachers with the tools necessary to be part of the fight against this cycle of injustice. Elementary and pre-K educators need the social-emotional skills and the necessary training in the science-backed explicit instruction every child needs through 3rd grade to read deeply. Reading deeply allows children to think beyond preconceived ideas and ultimately to act with the freedom to chart their own course. Structural inequities like underfunding education by ZIP code and institutional racism also demand action, but well-trained teachers themselves have a huge role to play in a just future.

It took us less than a year to develop and begin administering a vaccine for COVID-19, but research scientists determined 20 years ago what was required to end our countrys illiteracy epidemic. The unspeakable toll we inflict on children through systemic biases and behaviors amounts to denial of access to that science for those who need it most. Where is the urgency to acton policies and empirically derived practiceson the science of reading?

Healthy child development quickly crumbles without connections built through language in safe emotional spaces. Building the capacity to engage with the words, thoughts, and feelings of others is a neurological nonnegotiable. The fully tested science demonstrates that these connections are crucialfrom the last trimester of pregnancy through age 8 and beyondfor construction of the deep reading brain. The solution requires early social-emotional engagement, language input and exchange, and development of childrens executive functions like self-regulation in the first five years. In the following five years of every childs life, we need teachers who understand both the science and the poetry of teaching children to read and think with all their intelligence.

All this amounts to a literacy treatment that we, in the United States, have dispensed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, instead of distributing it universally. For no population has this inequity and silencing been more devastating than for generations of Black children. At a time when it was illegal to teach enslaved children to read, families risked everything to teach their children in pit schools in the middle of the night, drawing letters in the dirt in total silence to avoid bounty hunters, in a perilous effort to attain the freedom of which Frederick Douglass spoke.

Centuries in the making, the silence that was born in slavery remains cruelly imposed upon parents and teachers to shield their children from the mortal dangers of perceived noncompliance or using ones voice too soon or too powerfully. The truth is that none of our children will be safe and freenot next fall, not everuntil we make and keep Douglass promise for all our children.

Go here to see the original:

The Coming Literacy Crisis: Theres No Going Back to School as We Knew It - SaportaReport

EIFF is back! This years historic edition is the first large in-person film festival gathering in the UK since March 2020. For obvious reasons the programme isnt as big as in previous years, but that hasnt stopped the festival from delivering a terrific line-up of cinema from all over the world for you to enjoy.

Whilst the majority of films this year are being screened at Edinburghs legendary Filmhouse Cinema, the festival is also offering a number of screenings, Q&As, and In Person events to be viewed digitally through the dedicated streaming platform Filmhouse at Home. The popular Film Fest in the City is also back, with free screenings of cinematic favourites taking place in St Andrew Square. There are also three special event screenings, with films being shown simultaneously at partner cinemas around Scotland.

Featuring a diverse range of UK, European, and international premieres, EIFF 2021 looks set to be a fantastic showcase of new features, classic films, documentaries, shorts, animations, and so much more. As always, Entertainment Focus will be there to help you find the very best films to watch, so look out for our reviews as they drop. In the meantime, we have gone through the programme with fine-tooth comb and picked our selection for the must-see films at this years Edinburgh International Film Festival.

This years opening gala is Pig, directed by Michael Sarnoski and starring Nicolas Cage as a reclusive truffle hunter whose beloved pig is kidnapped. The marketing for this film has been somewhat misleading, making it seem like a Taken or John Wick style vengeance thriller. Prepare to have your expectations subverted by this emotional and meditative drama.

Having split critical opinion at Cannes, Annette makes its UK premiere at EIFF. Directed by enfant terrible Leos Carax (Holy Motors) and written by iconic pop duo Sparks, this extravagant and eccentric musical stars Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard as a comedian and opera singer whose new-born child Annette, turns their lives upside down.

Making its European Premiere at EIFF, Jennifer Ngos politically urgent documentary takes us onto the frontline of the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Exploring the oppressive legislation that sparked the demonstrations, and the violent clashes with police that followed, Ngos film is told through the eyes of four anonymous activists. One not to miss.

EIFF usually hosts an entire strand of horror, but this year theres only a couple in the curtailed programme. One of them is The Night House, directed by David Bruckner (who brought V/H/S to Edinburgh in 2012, and more recently directed the terrifying The Ritual) and starring Rebecca Hall. This complex psychological thriller about a woman who is haunted by the recent death of her husband is sure to put a chill in your bones. One to watch with the lights on.

Filmmaker and musician Quentin Dupieux brings his latest film Mandibles to EIFF. Coming hot on the heels of his most recent film Deerskin which was only released in the UK last month, his latest absurd comedy follows two simple-minded friends who discover a giant dog-sized fly trapped in the boot of a car. They decide to take it home and domesticate it, in the hope of getting rich. As you do. If you enjoy your comedy with a side-order of unpredictable surrealism, this ones for you.

Rakel is a 23-year-old cartoonist who discovers she is pregnant. She doesnt want a baby, but it is far too late for an abortion. When an animated cartoon baby suddenly materialises from her own doodles, she embarks on a humorous journey encountering new people and circumstances that might help her come to terms with her situation. Taking an irreverent look at unplanned pregnancy, this insightful Norwegian comedy, based on a graphic novel, is making its UK premiere at EIFF.

The plight of the modern migrant comes under the spotlight in this lean and thrilling drama from director Haider Rashid. Following a young Iraqi trying to migrate into Europe on foot, Europa explores the brutal reality of the Balkan Route, as he tries to cross from Turkey into Bulgaria, where if it isnt the harsh landscape trying to kill you, it is nationalist migrant hunters with guns. Definitely one not to miss.

Canadian filmmaker Shannon Walsh shines an uncomfortable light on the global gig economy upon which so much of contemporary life is reliant, in this complex and compelling documentary. Exploring the massive disconnect between technological convenience of having everything you need via an app on your phone, and the invisible millions working in wage slavery to make your same day delivery a reality. In light of the past 18 months, this is essential viewing.

Writer-director Ruth Platt returns to Edinburgh with this spine-chilling ghost story, about a lonely child living in a large vicarage, full of darkness and empty spaces. When a visitor in the night talks the girl into taking something which doesnt belong to her, she sets off a train of events which may make her worst nightmares come true. If youre in the mood for some dread-filled horror, add this one to your watchlist.

After Thunder Road and The Wolf of Snow Hollow anything directed by Jim Cummings is an immediate must-see for us. This time he is on co-writing and co-directing duty with PJ McCabe in this biting satirical thriller. Cummings stars as a Hollywood talent agent, who shortly before his wedding receives an invitation for an anonymous, no-strings-attached, sexual encounter. Unable to get the idea out of his mind, he accepts, and thats when his perfectly ordered life begins to fall apart.

Tickets on sale now athttps://www.edfilmfest.org.uk

Read more here:

The must-see films at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2021 - Entertainment Focus

Other studies clearly evidence the outsized impact of lack of access to healthy food, climate change, unequal education, and the coronavirus pandemic on Black and brown Americans.

There is also a life expectancy racial gap. Take the roughly 30-minute walk or ride two stops on the Orange Line from Roxbury to Back Bay; thats the distance between where the average life expectancy is 59 years old to where its 92, according to a 2012 Virginia Commonwealth University study. It may be worse now, because the pandemic widened the life expectancy racial gap nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Its also true that policies born of racism harm everyone, not just Black and brown folks. Take for example the practice of paying tipped employees below the minimum wage, which was widely adopted in postbellum America as a way to avoid paying former slaves. Broadly speaking, racism has cost the US economy $16 trillion since 2000, according to a study by Citigroup.

If, as our nations foundational documents claim, we were all bestowed the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness at our creation, then every American should have a vested interest in ending the persistent systemic racism in our society. But the Pew report shows that Americans just dont see it that way.

While 78 percent of Democrats said they believe the increased attention on historical racism and slavery is a positive development, only 25 percent of Republicans said the same.

When it comes to solutions to systemic racism, 74 percent of Democrats said more needs to be done to achieve racial equity, according to the study. But only 22 percent of Republicans agreed.

The divide extends to views about the very existence of racial inequities in America. While 85 percent of Democrats said that white people benefit from the advantages denied to Black people, 78 percent of Republicans said white people do not enjoy such privilege.

The political divide on the issue of race is not new, but it is widening.

These are not new divides between the parties, but they have grown in recent years, said Jocelyn Kiley, associate director of research at Pew.

Its not hard to see why. The crescendo of calls for racial justice, and its embrace by Democrats, has coincided with a fundamental shift in the core value powering the modern Republican Party: grievance. Gone are the days when substantive issues like fiscal policy, limited government, taxes, and health care drove the Republican agenda. The party is now sustained largely by its own victimhood.

The biggest example of this is the GOPs ongoing embrace of the big lie about the 2020 election being stolen and baseless claims of election fraud that are driving a wave of state-level voter suppression laws at a rate not seen since the Reconstruction era.

But the Republican lodestar of ax grinding is also evidenced in its immigration rhetoric, including recent false claims that the new surge in COVID cases is caused by migrants crossing the southern border, and in its efforts to redefine the Black Lives Matter movement as a dangerous terroristic organization that poses a threat to police officers and the white, suburban way of life.

Its also turned critical race theory a phrase that has been conflated with basic race consciousness in school history curriculums into a buzz term that scares parents into believing their children are being taught to feel guilty about being white.

Small wonder that efforts on Capitol Hill to restore the Voting Rights Act or at the very least agree on a bipartisan police reform package have, so far, proven fruitless. Few issues have remained as politically polarizing as race in America, and policy solutions are impossible when the nation cannot agree to a common set of facts even when the data supporting them stare them in the face.

Kimberly Atkins Stohr can be reached at kimberly.atkinsstohr@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @KimberlyEAtkins.

Go here to see the original:

On the issue of race, politics get in the way of the facts - The Boston Globe

While movements like Stop Asian Hate can galvanize much-needed attention to the racialized violence Asian American communities face, we must recognize the ways that this victimhood is often twinned in the U.S. imagination with Black criminality, while seemingly always sidelining women.

What do MaKhia Bryant, Breonna Taylor, Daoyou Feng, Jiangqing Jessica Klyzek, Merlita Gargullo and Valentina Pasion have in common?

They are members of racialized groups subjected to state-sanctioned misogynistic violence. Yet, like many other women of color who were killed in the U.S., they have been rendered invisible in public responses to such violence. For decades now, violence against men of colorYusef Hawkins, Vincent Chin, Abner Louima, Rodney King and George Floydhas been the template for understanding who is subjected to racist violence and how to respond to this issue.

It is essential to include women of color, including both Black and Asian American women, when we think about racist violence in America. Despite necessary correctives like the #SayHerNamecampaign, gendered violence is often treated as exceptional rather than as an organizing feature of maintaining U.S. racial hierarchy. This is precisely why the debate about critical race theory is so important: It teaches us about the urgency of interrogating systems of oppression rooted in white supremacy and seeing their impact on women of color.

From the plantation slavery era in the U.S., African Americans have been treated as a threat to the prevailing social order. Even after emancipation, African Americans were constrained in their freedom to move, think, congregate, work, create families of choice, and express a self that was not contained by white supremacy. This happened through Black codes, Jim Crow laws and discriminatory practices in housing, employment, education, healthcare, political participation and legal representation.

Mainstream media has also created and refined racist representations of African Americans as lazy, dishonest and destructive, presenting them as archetypes using simplistic binaries to explain and justify violence. Importantly, these representations are gendered as well.

Mirroring the ubiquitous Black male rapist stereotype is the sexually promiscuous and aggressive Black woman archetypically represented by the figures of the jezebel and sapphire. These representations were evidenced in the 15th century and carried through to 20th century representations of the welfare queen. Black mothers are represented as toxic to real estate values, test scores, beauty standards and respectability, always prone to dispense violence, including against their own children.

In the wake of the 1960s civil rights unrest, the U.S. pathologized Black communities on the basis of such stereotypes, declaring Black mothers undeserving of support from the welfare state. These gendered constructions of Black criminality make it easier to represent Black women as deserving victims of violence, where violence is the necessary corrective to their stepping out of place.

Similarly, violence against Asian and Asian American women began as early as the Page Act of 1875 with the racist and sexualized profiling of Chinese women perceived to be a threat to the moral fabric of U.S. society. These representations crystallized on screen with the fetishization of Asian women as exotic lotus blossoms to be consumed, or dragon ladies to be feared and contained. Such Manichean representations lend themselves to violence and even state-sanctioned death, evidenced both in U.S. military camptowns in Asia, as in the case of Jennifer Laude in 2014, or as victims of police brutality in urban cities in the U.S., as in the case of Jinqing Jessica Klyzek in 2013.

With the mythical model minority construct, Asian and Asian American women experience a different kind of symbolic violencerepresented as model workers, on the one hand, and exploitable subjects on the other. We see this in the preference for Asian women in low-wage or care work industries because they are perceived to be self-sacrificing, quiet, docile or willing to work long hours; this very perception resulting in their labor exploitation.

In the much publicized Speck Massacre of 1966 in Chicago, two Filipina nurse survivors, Merlita Gargullo and Valentina Pasion, get memorialized as good and hard-working girls, while their exploitation under the U.S. Exchange Visitors Program that was created to fill Americas nursing labor shortage is rendered invisible, as Catherine Ceniza Choy states.

Racist violence also operates by pitting communities of color against one another, occluding violence against women of color, even as it invisibilizes how groups are racialized differently. The racial construct of the model minority has long served as a racial wedge and counter to narratives of Black criminality. During the 1992 Los Angeles uprising two examples of Black criminality figured in media explanations of why the uprisings happened: the killing of 15-year old Latasha Harlin by Soon Ja Du, a convenience store owner, and police violence against Rodney King.

The violence against both was explained by appealing to notions of Black criminality, blaming them for the violence they experienced. In Latashas case, the Korean American woman was presented as the victim who was defending her property. The media representation of this story ignored the negative effects of deindustrialization and disinvestment in predominantly Black and Brown low-income communities across the U.S., while shoring up presumptions about Black criminality and Asian American victimhood.

When harm is done to Black womenwhether in the form of police and state violence as in the case of Breonna Taylor, or through the layered histories of mistreatment that cost the lives of Black girls like MaKhia Bryant and Latasha Harlinthe twinned responses of blame (what did she do to deserve this?) and acceptance (thats just what happens in Black communities) remain the default responses.

Something different happens when Asian American women face violence. The Stop AAPI collective recently presented evidence of 3,795 incidents of hate, with women reporting such incidents 2.3 times more than men. The public registered surprise when these statistics were circulated, largely on account of the stereotypes about Asian American womens passivity and victimhoodnot having done anything to deserve violenceas if any group ever deserves violence.

Such discourses actually feedrather than discourageviolence against Asian American women. While movements like Stop Asian Hate can galvanize much-needed attention to the racialized violence Asian American communities face, we must recognize the ways that this victimhood is often twinned in the U.S. imaginary with Black criminality, while seemingly always sidelining women.

Re-centering women in our analyses expands the terrain of violence to include sexual, reproductive and economic violence as important sites of analysis. It helps us see how racialized violence is often predicated on gendered understandings, as feminist scholars such as Andrea Ritchie, Mariame Kaba and others have shown. This nuanced analysis amplifies the insurgent thinking advanced by critical race theory (CRT), which ensures we see the violence produced by white supremacy and provides a lens for analyzing the impact on communities of color.

Following the pandemic and the countrys proclamation of the value of essential workers, this lens allows us to see the intertwined effects on Black and Asian women careworkers in Chicago; both are providing this labor in an exploitative system that rhetorically espouses an ethic of care but ultimately renders their lives disposable. Similarly attentive to how the COVID-19 pandemic has produced as well as visibilized violence against Asian women and Black women are activist collectives like the Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective, as well as youth-led efforts like the Linda Lindas that are leading the way in forging Afro-Asian and feminist solidarity.

In these polarized times, the work of expanding our analytic horizons is all the more urgent; it calls for engaging not only with Afro-Asian solidarities that counter anti-Asian and anti-Black racism, but also intersectional and feminist analyses that include the voices of women of color. If we accept that no individual or group deserves to be mistreated, marginalized or scapegoated for problems that were not of their making, then we are one step closer to supporting each others struggles.

If you found this articlehelpful,please consider supporting our independent reporting and truth-telling for as little as $5 per month.

Up next:

Here is the original post:

Afro-Asian Solidarities and Reclaiming the Erasure of Women - Ms. Magazine

Pro-Trump protesters gather in front of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Jon Cherry / Getty Images)

At the heart of Adam Serwers The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present and Future of Trumps America is a sustained attempt to pinpoint the ideological and social currents that brought Trump to the White House. There are, of course, conflicting interpretations of what constitutes the essential appeal of Trumpism. Some prioritize economic factors, like white working-class reactions to expanding income inequality. Others look to geopolitics and see a decade-long global disillusionment with democracy that has given rise to the election of right-wing nationalist leaders around the world. Still others point to philosophical explanations, such as the rise of the post-truth society, in which propaganda, social media, and rampant conspiracy have replaced research, expertise, and objective truth when it comes to explaining the election of Trump in 2016. Although Serwer is mindful of some of the explanations, his bookwhich is primarily composed of essays he wrote covering the Trump presidency as a staff writer at The Atlanticoffers a historical and cultural explanation for Trumpism. In particular, he defends a backlash thesis in which Trumpism must be seen as the white supremacist reaction to a segment of societys cultural and political decline.1

Serwer therefore sees Trumpism as a cruel backlash, to the the election of Barack Obama, the possibility that Hillary Clinton might be his successor, the swift acceptance of gay marriage, the growing diversity of cities, and the threat of immigration increase. Faced with these existential threats, Trumps supporters look to him to use the power of the state to wage war against the people who threaten their white supremacist vision of America. The adage The Cruelty is the Point, then, indicates the resentful delight that Trump and his supporters exude in their attempt to crush their opponents in the hope of re-establishing their version of the real America. As such, the forces that led to Trumps election, argues Serwer, are anything but some kind of aberration brought on by economic inequality. Instead, Serwer sees such forces as an essential element in long-term political conflicts, which he traces back to the failures of the Reconstruction Era.2

How, though, did a nation that has such a long history of being cruel elect Barack Obama twice? Moreover, what makes Trumpism unique, given the recent electoral successes of right-wing nationalist governments around the world? Might this reality not indicate the failures of a global liberal economic system? And, more generally, how can cruelty be overcome? I spoke with Serwer about his thinking on Trumpism, including its historical origins, and the cruelty he believes is intrinsic to it.3

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins4

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: Why do you think the essence of Trumpism is cruelty? 5

Adam Serwer: I describe it that way, but Donald Trump also thinks the essence of Trumpism is cruelty. Whether its encouraging police to brutalize suspects, pardoning war crimes against Muslims, or carrying out a policy of child separation, Trumps answer to any dilemma is the ruthless application of state force and the humiliation of its targets. We just disagree over whether the things hes doing are good.6

DSJ: Why was Obama so easily able to beat two white Republican presidential opponents in 2008 and 2012? Were Americans less cruel during this time? 7

AS: Part of what I try to do in this book is draw a line tracing the long history of cruelty in American politics to the present, so that the Trump era is more understandable and less mystifying. America exists because of the displacement and slaughter of the continents original inhabitants, and was built in large part on forced labor. That is going to pose some clear contradictions for a country that aspires to the notion that all men are created equal, and necessitate justifications for why that idea does not apply to vast categories of human beings.8

That said, you can see the evolution of the Republican Party over the political races of those years. In 2008, John McCain tried to tamp down the slander of birtherism when confronted with it. By 2012, Mitt Romney was apologizing for his moderate record in Massachusetts, declaring himself severely conservative, and indulging birtherism while campaigning in Michigan, joking about how no one has any questions about where he was born, and seeking Trumps endorsement. After Romney lost, the Republican Party briefly considered moderating before going all in on white identity politics, in part inspired by Steve Bannons interpretation of an essay arguing that many white voters stayed home in 2012.9

By 2016, the party had selected the nations most prominent birther as their standard-bearer, precisely because the hard lines he drew around American citizenship attacked the legitimacy of the first Black president. Trump won the Republican nomination not only because he was cruel, but because he was the most sincere in his expression of that cruelty.10

Obama was an exceptional politician, and the politics of cruelty are not invinciblebut they can be very effective.11

Readers like you make our independent journalism possible.

DSJ: You state in the books introduction that American journalism is afflicted by a presentism, a kind of goldfish memory that struggles to think outside the present or recent past. Part of this most certainly has to do with the Obama presidency. To overcome such presentism, your book makes frequent reference to the Reconstruction era (186577) and its failed promises to secure racial equality after the Civil War. Where do you see continuity, and discontinuity, between those years and more recent times? 12

AS: Reconstruction is the first time Americans genuinely try to build a multiracial democracy, an effort that is ultimately nullified by a huge backlash that embraces the politics of white identity. The idea of Black equality is radicalizing for much of the white South, and they use white supremacy as a way to rally whites across class lines against the possibility. Southern Democrats are often explicit about this, but they also borrow language from white Republicans in the North, in presenting their attempt to entrench racial hierarchy as a good government crusade against corruption and a way to interpret Black efforts as the desire to use government to obtain spoils they are unwilling to work for.13

More explicitly, something similar happened after the election of Barack Obama. And while there are many other factorsthe panic of 1873 seriously weakened the Reconstruction project, much as the slow recovery from the Great Recession buoyed Trumpthe ideological narrative that swept Trump into office was that the multiracial coalition that elected Obama had stolen what rightfully belonged to the Republican base, and Trump would restore the proper order of things.14

DSJ: Many professional historians are very reluctant to use history in this manner out of fear that they would be projecting present-day concerns and values onto the past, and thus misinterpreting historical facts. Of course, the latest aggravation of these anxieties is on display in the ongoing controversy over the 1619 Project. Where do you stand on this controversy, and how do you see it connecting to your own attempt to use history to understand the present? 15

AS: I think that Americans are constantly arguing about the past to make sense of the present, especially professional historians. The Dunning Schools negative portrayal of Reconstruction was a crucial part of the intellectual support for Jim Crow; W.E.B. Du Bois called it propaganda and offered a Marxist counter-interpretation that turned out to be far more accurate. Civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. embraced C. Vann Woodwards Strange Career of Jim Crow. Woodward himself commented to a friend in 1966, as the backlash to the civil rights movement was beginning, that all the classic 77 signals are up. John Hope Franklin wrote a history textbook that caused a massive controversy because conservatives felt its frank portrayal of Black and Native American history was too negative and insufficiently patriotic. Today, you can find David Waldstreicher in The Atlantic arguing with Sean Wilentz over the role of slavery in the Constitution, after Wilentz scolded Bernie Sanders in the New York Times.16

There are some arguments in the 1619 Project I agree with, and some I dont. But to the extent that it was arguing that events like slavery and segregation continue to shape racial disparities in the present, thats not seriously contestable, which is why the arguments have moved on to things like whether it proclaimed the United States irredeemably racist.17

Its important to draw relevant distinctions between past and present, and to hew to historical fact. Like anyone else who writes about my history, I try my best to do both. But history is how we make sense of the present, and people who, say, defend Robert E. Lee by insisting that many white people thought slavery was not wrong in 1861 are also projecting present-day concerns and values onto the past. They are trying to preserve an interpretation of the past that is precious to them.18

DSJ:The historian Eric Foner, whose work on Reconstruction you regularly cite, observed in 2010, in the pages of The Nation, that the financial bailouts of 2008 had aroused resentments that should not be ignored, even if they [were] often couched in extreme and racist language once the Obama administration took office. He went on to say that the economic policies of the Obama administration were fixed to the advantage of the wealthy and that the government was indifferent to the plight of ordinary Americans. Critics on the left, and even some on the right, would regularly use economic explanations of this nature to explain why Trump won the presidency in 2016. Why do you prove so critical of such economic explanations?19

AS: First off, Foner is a giant. Second, I find many of the left critiques of the Obama administrations response to the Great Recession compelling and persuasive, particularly when it comes to the size of the stimulus and the administrations weak effort to stem the fallout from the housing crisis.20

Thank you for subscribing to our Books & the Arts newsletter.

Please enter your email below and subscribe to our bi-weekly collection of the best of the Books & the Arts.

Thank you for subscribing to our Books & the Arts newsletter.

The problem is that they are not, by themselves, a sufficient explanation for how Trump got elected. For example, Black and Latino voters, who suffered greater losses in wealth and experienced a far slower recovery, were among the most resistant to his appeals in 2016. Economic crises can provide an opening for a demagogue like Trump, but theyre insufficient as a blanket explanation absent a willingness to believe, say, that more racial discrimination in lending would have prevented the housing crisis. The ideological lens that makes Trumpism compelling as an explanation for your struggles has to be there.21

DSJ: Does the backlash thesis you argue for work at the global level? The recent political successes of nationalist movements are a global phenomenon, as demonstrated by India, Turkey, Brazil, and across Europe. Given these global circumstances, is there a reason that you do not place the American experience of racial inequality in an international context? For instance, you say that you are inspired by W.E.B. Du Boiss critical work on Reconstruction, and Du Bois connected racism to economic imperialism. Is there a reason why your book doesnt make such international connections, especially given the contemporary reality of global nationalist movements?22

AS: Du Bois was much smarter than me and had a greater body of knowledge to draw from as a result. Im not going to feign expertise in the politics of nations I havent studied. There are obviously certain trends that seem to be happening in many places, from the rise of right-wing nationalism to educational polarization. I dont think its a coincidence that much as in the United States, these battles are frequently about the nature of citizenship and who truly belongs in a given country. America has always been a multiracial nation, even when it was not a multiracial democracy, and not every country dealing with this phenomenon has that history, which is one I am familiar with.23

I speak fluent Italian, and I would still feel uncomfortable about writing an essay about the strangeness of support for La Lega in southern Italy. Who am I, a person who has never set foot in India, to write a book pontificating on the origins of Hindu nationalism?24

That said, the book does argue that American imperialism abroad erodes democracy at home. I note in one chapter that Republican support for imperialism helped cement the post-Reconstruction bipartisan consensus in favor of white supremacy and develop new subclasses of citizenship. And in another chapter, I contend that the War on Terror, as well as the absence of both temporal and geographic limits on that project, had a corrosive effect on democracy that helped elect Trump.25

DSJ: Lets turn to the present and specifically immigration. You provide an excellent analysis of the egregious cruelty of Trumps family separation policy. You also, however, mention that deportations were lower under the Trump administration than the Obama administration. Recently Vice President Harris said that Guatemalans should not try to come to the United States. Democrats, too, seem to be cruel when it comes to immigration. Is this what you mean when stating: politicians wearing the smiling face of liberalism can provide a more effective faade for cruelty than those who make cruelty public purpose? 26

AS: Yes. But, also, our immigration system was designed to be cruel, and the difference with Trump is that he ramped up the cruelty while also attempting to scuttle the redeeming factors of the system, such as asylum and refugee admissions. But you cant prevent a system designed to be cruel from performing its function simply by putting someone else in charge of it. And we can already see how the continuities between Biden and Trump on immigration are rendered invisible by right-wing hysteria about the border, and demands that migrants be dealt with as inhumanely as possible.27

We have this strange feedback loop on immigration, where people demand migration at the border be stopped with harsher and harsher measures. But because migration cannot be stopped through mere brute force, it just creates more demand for more brute force, and less support for policy measures that might actually help manage migration flows. This is very good for the immigrant detention-industrial complex, but it doesnt solve the problem nativists say they want to solve, because making the system less cruel would defeat the purpose for them.28

DSJ: You state that Trump was elected to destroy Obamas legacy. Obama has recently stated that Biden is finishing the job his administration started. Do you agree with Obamas assessment? 29

AS: One of the more promising signs about the Biden administration is that they seem to have internalized many of the left-wing economic critiques of the Obama administration, something we saw with the speed and ambition of the coronavirus relief bill. But theres also been a great deal of hype about a supposedly FDR-sized presidency, even though Biden has yet to pass a permanent expansion of the welfare state on the order of the Affordable Care Act.30

You now have tens of millions more people who have been able to access government health care, thanks to the Medicaid expansion, and it would be even more if not for the Roberts Court and the leadership of Republican-controlled states in the South being content to deprive their own residents of the support they deserve. I would be happy if the Biden administrations record on progressive legislation eclipsed Obamas record. But that hasnt happened yet.31

DSJ: Many liberals are predicting a doomsday scenario in which Republicans win the House and the Senate in next years midterm elections, allowing them to rewrite the rules to win future elections that will pave the way for an authoritarian state. The conclusion of your book seems to share something like this anxiety. Can you elaborate?32

AS: I think its very clear that Republicans want to insulate their hold on power from the electorate. In states like Wisconsin, because of gerrymandering and geographic concentration of Democratic constituencies, its basically impossible for Democrats to gain a majority in the legislature. And what that means is that the party that controls the legislature is not beholden to any civic obligations toward parts of the public that are powerless to remove them. It severs the link of accountability that is necessary for democracy. In extreme cases like the Jim Crow South, it leaves the nonvoting population subject to exploitation and brutality. In the case of Trump, it meant that during the pandemic he was willing to let Americans in blue states die because he did not consider them his people and so their deaths should not be considered part of his record.33

That doesnt mean the methods Republicans are employing will necessarily work, although thats no reason to simply allow them to do it. People want to be free, and mechanisms that rely on the permanence of a given coalition will eventually fail, because coalitions change and people change. But you can do tremendous damage in the meantime. Less likely than a full- blown authoritarian state is a whiter, more conservative, and more unrepresentative electorate in which the majority of Americans have little say in how they are governed. And unfortunately, we have a Supreme Court that, much like the post-Reconstruction court, views attempts to shield Black suffrage from disenfranchisement as illegitimate federal government interference in state matters, and is slowly writing the 15th Amendment out of the Constitution.34

DSJ: Can cruelty be overcome? Some might think of cruelty, for instance, as a permanent character flaw. Isnt the overcoming of cruelty necessary for what you describe as the New Reconstruction? How can it come about? 35

AS: Cruelty is part of human nature; its not inherently a right-wing or left-wing thing. Individually we can resist it, but its always going to be a part of us. What is not inevitable is a system that incentivizes the politics of cruelty, in which a party of white identity is constantly trying to disenfranchise, marginalize, and destroy the constituencies of the more multiracial party in order to maintain its hold on power, and in which cruel deeds become heroic acts of resistance against an imagined apocalypse.36

The Republican Party has chosen Trumpism because of the way the American system is structured; they can hold on to power with a minoritarian base that is ideally geographically distributed to win the Senate and the electoral college, and to win the House through favorably drawn districts. It is logical, if immoral, under this system, for the Republican Party to continue to try to win elections by persuading their voters that trans children, or Taliban-style Islamic law, or migrant invasions, are on the verge of destroying their way of life and all they hold dear.37

The New Deal coalition altered the Democratic Party from an institution devoted to white supremacy to the party of civil rightsthat was not because their leaders suddenly experienced personal growth. It was because they became beholden to constituencies that forced them to change. Similarly, the only thing that can change the present dynamic is a system in which the Republican Party is forced to reach outside its hard-core base in order to hold power.38

Editors Note: A question regarding the 2008 financial crisis has been changed in order to reflect the Obama administrations involvement in the passage of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. The Act was passed under the Bush administration and a Democratic majority Congress, and key components were implemented by the incoming Obama administration. The question originally stated that the Act had passed during Obamas term.

View post:

The Long History of American Cruelty - The Nation

Its a hybrid film. Its half documentary and half bible. So describes Milo Rau, Extended Play advisory board member and arguably the most controversial practitioner of documentary theatre in Europe, when interviewed about his 2019 film The New Gospel. An interdisciplinary production, or rather, a process, The New Gospel stems from a political campaign for migrant farm workers in Southern Italy, investigates its actual events, leaders, and participants, and extracts its course of resistance into a contemporary biblical fable on the silver screennot only as a mystified historical account of the campaign itself, but also a documentary of The New Gospels own creative process. In the 110-minute run, The New Gospel takes us on a three-fold journey: the life and death of the most influential religious founder in the history of the world, the pursuit of migrant worker activists of legal rights and fair pay, and the making of the film that reconnects the ancient (and stalled, perhaps) spiritual tradition with its secular socio-revolutionary roots.

Matera, a small town in Basilicata, Italy, is an elaborate site choice that serves Milo Raus vision of hybridity. A historical town dating back to Graeco-Roman ages, Materas primeval look has made it a screen double for ancient Jerusalem since the 1960s, featured in renowned biblical period films such as Pasolinis The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964) and Mel Gibsons The Passion of the Christ (2004). However, what is hidden behind Materas archaic scenery is the modern socio-economic system that sustains its aura and cultural functionality. The agricultural corporations in Southern Italy rely heavily on the cheap labor of migrants who came to Europe across the Mediterranean. Oftentimes not able to obtain legal residency in EU, a large number of African migrant workers is forced to endure heavy physical labor with meagre wage, destitute of sufficient housing or healthcare conditions. In this group of migrant workers, Milo Rau and his creative team find a contemporary counterpart to the very original bedrock of Christianitythe displaced, denied, and deprived human beings summoned under a solitary call against the exploitative systemwhether the ancient Roman empire, or the modern capitalist agricultural industry and the EU state apparatus.

Yvan Sagnet is one of the migrant workers. In 2011, he came from Cameron to Italy, and worked as a seasonal low-wage farmhand in a tomato plantation near Nard. For Yvan Sagnet, his fellow workers are essentially living in the same circumstance as slaves two millennia ago. Despite their labor congealed in all kinds of farm products that circulate restlessly in the markets and households of Italy, the migrant workers themselves are deprived of proper means to sustain their basic needs to survive in this country. Moreover, these workers constantly suffer from inhumane torture and humiliation from gang masters and landowners. Yvans experience is reflected in an interview at the very beginning of The New Gospel. At a humble shelter in the Matera ghetto, an African farmworker tells Milo Rau in front of the camera that he has to work at an hour wage of merely 5 Euro because he has no rights to argue for a fair salary as an illegal immigrant. Determined to bring change to this unbearable situation of modern slavery, Yvan dedicates himself to social activism. Since 2011, Yvan has been organizing strikes among his co-workers in the tomato field, and has been making efforts to bring their struggles to legislative and institutional levels, which is pressing the Italian justice system to respond to the discontent of migrant workers.

With The New Gospel, Milo Rau is inciting the Italian and European society to reconsider the contemporary relevance of their spiritual foundation, to interrogate who Jesus would be today, and what Jesus would do. Rau proposes a radical answer in his artistic choice to cast Yvan Sagnet as Jesus and the migrant farmworkers involved in Yvans activism as the disciples. For a hybrid text, it is an unavoidable question whether The New Gospel intends to pose a religious reading upon Yvans campaign that could threaten to diminish its materialist socio-economic pursuits, or if the film is citing from the core canon of Christianity in order to articulate its political connotation. Instead of limiting The New Gospels interpretative potential on either way of thinking, Milo Rau and Yvan Sagnet are trying to synthesize spirituality, the omnipresent base-color of Southern European everyday life, and political activism, the most urgent endeavor to end injustice hidden behind the seemingly peaceful mechanism that supports this way of life.

Yvan Sagnet himself was raised with Catholic upbringings; but the actual struggle of life brought a Marxist touch to his understanding of the Gospels. Yvan remarks: When you start to read the New Testament, you have a guy whos an activist for the landless people and the periphery of the Roman Empire: that is exactly the situation that we have in Italy now. In the New Testament, the apostles are all migrants who have lost their homes because of the invasions of the Romans, which is exactly the situation in Italy now. A bold yet invigorating re-interpreter of Christian preachings, Yvan embodies a Marxist Jesus in The New GospelFor me one sentence from the Bible became the leading sentence of our film, when Jesus says, Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. Yvans activism, as well as his performance in the film as Jesus, is a powerful reminder that the requests for justice and human dignity are already written in the European and Italian law; the only question is to fulfill them. Yvans purpose has never been political activism against capitalism per se, but rather the revolutionary reiteration of the long European tradition, however stale and irrelevant it might seem.

As an advocate of process over product, Milo Rau and his theatre-activism company International Institute of Political Murders (IIPM) bring Yvans agenda one step forwardnot merely into the artistic crystallization of documentary film, but also an actual social movement called Rivolta della Dignita (Revolt of Dignity). According to Milo Rau:

I think it really has become a biblical film adaptation for our time, with the first black Jesus in European film history and with a cast that is diverse in the best sense of the word. Besides international stars and politicians, activists, farm workers and normal citizens play the leading roles. Mary Magdalene is a main figure in our film, some of the apostles are female and interesting fact most of the apostles of our new Jesus are of Muslim faith. But what pleases me most is that our film had a real impact. As a consequence of the Revolt of Dignity, as you can see at the end of the film, the first Houses of Dignity were founded around Matera: houses where the previously homeless extras of the film can now live in dignity and self-determination. And this with the support of the Catholic Church!

Such a keen combination of art and activism is the most crucial guideline for Milo Rau. In IIPM and NT Ghent, where he works as the artistic director, Milo Rau has been practicing his unique, contemporary understanding of Gesamtkunstwerkthere is no boundary between art and life, artworks and social conflicts, art production and mundane labor, or art institutions and communities. Upon his appointment in 2018 at NT Ghent, Milo Rau published ten rules as the guideline of his theatrical practice, known as The Ghent Manifesto. The three most fundamental rules read as below:

One: Its not just about portraying the world anymore. Its about changing it. The aim is not to depict the real, but to make the representation itself real.Two: Theatre is not a product; it is a production process. Research, castings, rehearsals, and related debates must be publicly accessible.Three: The authorship is entirely up to those involved in the rehearsals and the performance, whatever their function may be and to no one else.

On July 9th and 10th 2021, Howlround and The Foundry Theatre presented the first showing of The New Gospel in the United States. Accompanying a 48-hour streaming of the film for a North American audience, two panel discussions around The New Gospel built a bridge between the topicality of European refugee crisis and the Black Lives Matter Movement in the USA. Hosted by David Bruin, a Zoom panel took place on July 9th under the title how are artists seizing power today. Milo Rau, Luis Alfaro, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Alec Duffy and Emily Johnson were engaged in a heated discussion around a series of artists-led movements at the onset of COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd, and reflected on the political art making methodologies in the American theatre. On the following day, Dread Scott, Kristina Wong, Virginia Grise, Toshi Reagon and Carlton Turner gathered online in response to the question, how are artists and organizers building solidarity between art and movements.

Community was undoubtedly the top one keyword in every artists vocabulary. Against the broken landscape of the American identity upon the pandemic and systemic racism, artists are almost desperate to suture the wounds within and between communities with artistic attempts and institutional reformations. Behind initiatives like WeSeeYouWhite American Theatre, Amplifying Activism and so on, there has been a constant endeavor to establish a sense of collective and solidarity, to expand the inclusiveness of communities, to cure the social pathogens embedded in the genetics of art institutions in order to change the whole social systemin spite of the formalism, rosiness and idealist naivety these slogans might be charged with.

Among his American colleagues, Milo Rau was particularly quiet in the conversation around his work, seemingly due to the absence of the real protagonist on and off the screen, Yvan Sagnet, along with his fellow African farmworkers. BLM protests and racism in America have never been neglected in the agenda of The New Gospel despite its Europe specific subject matter. There is a scene in The New Gospel when a white Italian Matera local is auditioning for the role of a Roman soldier, and he mimics a violent racist attack as if torturing Jesus. This highly disturbing moment triggered an emotional exchange in the Zoom room around the sadistic drive behind racist hate crimes in the white American collective unconscious; however, for Yvan Sagnet and Milo Rau, whats more disturbing than the manifestation of hate crimes is the dialectical moment after this scene, where the violent white actor seamlessly transforms into the soft, mild-mannered disciple that gently takes the black Jesus down from the cross.

Yvan comments: The film is saying: There is evil in humans, but it comes from somewhere. We are always talking about racism, but were not connecting it with where this violence comes from. Milo Rau proposes a deeper investigation in the violent structure of globalized capitalism where the core of racism is rooted. Such investigation is manifested in the real, raw footage of black bodies laboring in the beautiful, idyllic tomato gardens around Matera. It cant be articulated or carried out in a Zoom room or an art institution. It takes you deeper into the field. It takes you out there into the world.

To learn more about The Civilians and to access exclusive discounts to shows, join our email list atTheCivilians.org.

Post Views: 168

Originally posted here:

Milo Rau, Yvan Sagnet and The New Gospel: What can an African Jesus Tell us about Racism and Globalized Capitalism? - Extended Play - Extended Play

Ever since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, domestic workers have been legally excluded from common workplace protections. On July 29, the historic Domestic Worker Bill of Rights was reintroduced to Congress. Almost 92 percent of domestic workers are women, mostly immigrants and women of color. (Instagram)

Every day, over two million workersoverwhelmingly women and majority women of colorgo to work in our homes, said Ai-jen Poo, the executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA). In these homes across the nation, those 2.2 million workers care for children and elders, clean and support people with disabilitieswithout any legal protections.

Ever since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, domestic and agricultural workers have been legally excluded from common workplace protections. The result is an increasingly vulnerable and precarious profession: Only 16 percent of domestic workers have a written agreement with their employer; over one-third of domestic workers do not get meal and rest breaks; and 23 percent of domestic workers report feeling unsafe at work.

Domestic workers, organizers and activists have been working with members of Congress to mend the precarity of domestic work. On July 29, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and Sen. Ben Ray Lujn (D-N.M.) reintroduced the historic Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, first introduced by Jayapal and then-Senator Kamala Harris in 2019.

If passed, the bill would close the loopholes that exclude domestic workers from federal labor and civil rights laws and it would create critical new benefits and protections for domestic workersincluding requiring employers to provide a written agreement about pay, duties, schedules, breaks, and time-off policiesgiving these workers stability and respect, said Gillibrand.

Today, millions of Americans rely on us to take care of their health, families and homes, and the pandemic clearly highlighted that, said Glenora Romans, a Houston-based caregiver and health worker and a member of the NDWA.

At an NDWA press conference for the reintroduction of the bill, Romans spoke to the irony of working in an industry that is both essential and undervaluedas nursing homes became the epicenter of the pandemic and school closures left parents without childcare options, domestic workers did not have the option to work from home.

The COVID-19 pandemic only highlights the cruel gaps in our labor laws as millions of courageous domestic workerswho are disproportionately working-class women, women of color, and immigrant womenhave risked their own health and the health of their families to keep America afloat, said Jayapal. They are being called essential but treated as expendable.

Amid COVID-19, the Biden administrations investments in care work and human infrastructure will assist domestic workers to an extent, but theyre not a full solution.

It doesnt fix the heart of the problem, which is that in 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act exempted domestic workers, farm workers and other jobs disproportionately held by Black and brown Americans, said Jayapal. The exclusion was not accidental. It was intentional100 percent by design, and on purpose.

The history of domestic workers in the United States begins with slavery and the forced reproductive labor of Black women. Later, immigrantsthe majority of whom were AAPI and Latina womenjoined the ranks of domestic workers, where abuse was normalized, as well as the devaluation of labor and oppression of the workforce. The exclusion of a profession that is extremely racialized and gendered is an extension of the legacy of ensuring dependable, cheap and exploitable labor.

At the press conference, Romans described a personal experience where an employer verbally promised pay for a seven-hour job. Upon completioneven though the agreed-upon amount was less than $100Romans was only given part of her pay. To this day, she is still waiting on the rest of her money.

Etelbina Hauser, a house cleaner in Washington state who also spoke at the press conference, spoke about a similar experience: Previous employers have stolen more than 20 hours of pay from me, they have stolen tips that should be mine. They take advantage of the fact that many of us dont have a written contract.

High levels of wage theft, discrimination, workplace accidents and sexual harassment characterize the domestic work industryalong with a staggering 90 percent of domestic workers going without any benefits at allmaking Romanss and Hausers experiences unjust, yet common.

The specific provisions of the bill aim to address every area of vulnerability experienced by domestic workers.

One of the things I was most proud of was the process we engaged in to write the legislation. It was a process that took almost a year, and it included at the table domestic workers who knew the problem and knew the solution, said Jayapal.

If passed, the bill would:

Upon introduction, the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights already had more than 100 co-sponsors in the Housewhich bodes well for the future of the bill.

Gillibrand shared two avenues for passing the legislation in the Senate. The first would be to add the bill to the reconciliation prepared by Senate Democratsalthough provisions could only be budgetary instead of procedural and policy-based. The other: Do away with the filibuster.

The passage of the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights means transforming labor law to create true conditions of economic, racial and gender justice. The bill is the first step towards a future organizers have been working towards, where with a protected domestic workforce, all people are better able to make the best choices for themselves and their families.

We all want the freedom of living in America and [to] work safely with dignity and respect, said Romans. The need for a strong labor and human rights infrastructure for domestic workers is especially important when considering the projected growth of the care work industry in coming years: Between an aging population and a comparatively low risk for automation of care work jobs, it is certain that the demand for domestic work will not subside.

As Hauser said, Care jobs are the jobs of the future, and we must make sure that they are good jobs.

If you are interested in ensuring the passage of the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, contact your representatives and support organizations like the NDWA.

If you found this articlehelpful,please consider supporting our independent reporting and truth-telling for as little as $5 per month.

Up next:

Continue reading here:

The Case For the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights: "Called Essential, Treated As Expendable" - Ms. Magazine

Spain's southern region of Andalusia attracts two very different kinds of foreigners: those that flock to its beautiful beaches every year and the growing army of migrants that harvest fruit and vegetables in what has been coined as Europe's back garden.

It's an unfortunate term: while holidaymakers stay at expensive apartments, thousands of fruit pickers reside in poverty-stricken, plastic shantytowns.

Many people come and tell us they are going to save us," says Ayoub, 20, an illegal Moroccan immigrant living in a shantytown in the Almeria district of Nijar. "They take our picture, but nothing changes. Nothings ever going to change.

Easy on the eye, Ayoub has been here since he was 17. He has the equivalent of the first year of the Spanish baccalaureate and tried to continue his education in the nearby town of San Isidro, but found there was a waiting list of 200.

The only thing that has changed for him since he arrived is that half the shantytown where he has made his home was burned to the ground in an alleged act of revenge.

This place used to be full of drugs and whore houses, Ayoub explains, pointing to the area once occupied by 60 other shacks, and now fenced off and dug up into unsightly mounds by the landowner to avoid a resurgence.

What is left is an estimated 600 immigrants inhabiting the remaining hovels where the dust alleys are strewn with garbage, the toilet is a dried-up riverbed and electricity is stolen from the lines overhead. The few families and children that were there have gone.

Now its just young and middle-aged men, many from Morocco and Mali. Like them, Ayoub works in the plastic greenhouses that sprawl for miles inland, away from the glittering Mediterranean and the Cabo de Gata natural park where European tourists enjoy long noisy lunches, blissfully unaware of the harsh reality behind their salad bowls.

The coastline in this province of Andalusia where a family apartment costs upwards of 250 a night in the high season has long been a magnet for the French and British holidaymakers as well as for Spaniards.

But while the numbers of vacationing foreigners have dwindled due to COVID travel restrictions this year, the numbers seeking work have soared as the economic situation in Africa grows ever direr.

According to Spain's interior ministry, migrant arrivals by sea alone amount to 15,317, an increase of 56.4% compared with 2020.

At the start of July, more than 800 came ashore in the resorts of San Jos, Villaricos, Cabo de Gata and Carboneras.

Like the tourists, they come in summer when the weather is better, only they head in opposite directions.

While the tourists tan themselves by the Mediterranean, the migrants make their way into the Sierra de Cabo de Gata to the plastic sea where the majority will be absorbed into the growing army of workers who spray and harvest Europes fruit and vegetables.

According to the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty, two-thirds of fruit and veg consumed in Europe are sourced from here. Almeria is known as Europes garden, though anything further from that description would be hard to imagine.

Stretching across 31,000 hectares of arid land, the worlds biggest greenhouse means theres no shortage of work in this province whose fortunes have been turned on their head by plastic, making it one of the richest in Andalusia.

The migrants Mediterranean is in expansion and, according to the secretary of the workers union, Comisiones Obreros (CCOO), Maximo Arevalo, 90% of the hard labour is done by migrants, both legal and otherwise, such as spraying, picking and cleaning the plastic roofs of the tunnels.

But as this plastic sea grows, so do the shantytowns, the ensuing segregation and the numbers of workers being treated inhumanely.

According to human rights lawyer Ruben Romero from Cepaim, a pro-integration NGO, between 4,000 and 5,000 migrant workers in Almeras district of Nijar are living like Ayoub in shacks cobbled together from plastic sheeting and debris in which they freeze in winter and boil in summer. In the province, the numbers may be as many as 10,000.

Regarding pay, Saidou Konkisre, 30, says its a case of maana: Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Theres never money.

Arriving in Spain in 2013 after working his way north from Burkino Faso, Saidou is the first immigrant worker in Spain to see his former employer receive a prison sentence for exploitation and abusive work practices. In broken Spanish, he explains how his boss, Francisco Gomez Mas of Joma Invernaderos SL, confiscated his passport and refused to pay him and eight others for long 12-hour days in his greenhouses in the district of El Ejido. At the end of the shift, Saidou was expected to guard the farm equipment in a shed near Roquetas del Mar with no access to running water or toilet facilities and no sleeping quarters. He was promised 10 a night.

The first month, he paid, says Saidou. Then the second and third, he stopped. He wanted to fight us when we asked for our money. My boss now has also not paid me. Now it is over a month late. All the bosses are bad, he says with resignation.

Saidou has legal status, thanks to his decision to tell the police what was going on at Joma Invernaderos; instead of deporting him, the police relayed his story to the CCOO workers union, who put the wheels of justice in motion. He was given 5,000 in damages and now has a bed in a flat in San Isidro he shares with eight others for 80 a month.

CCOO secretary, Maximo Arevalo says the abuse and exploitation are not systematic but that there are many cases in which workers are subject to terrible conditions.

The immigrants are afraid and theres a lack of information. Theyre scared that if they tell the police, they will be deported or sacked. Their bosses tell them what to say during inspections as well as to police or journalists. The farmers have the worst collective labour agreement in the country. They should pay 7.28 but they are paying 3 or 4; 5 at most.

The president of the umbrella association of producers (COAG), Andrs Gongora says the farmers, particularly the small ones, are struggling to keep their heads above water as the buyers dont offer a stable price for their produce.

We need the supermarkets to tell us how much they are going to pay. Its very difficult to work with uncertainty, he explains.

Many of the immigrants also believe the farmers are out of cash.

The bosses dont have money, Ousman, 24, from Mali tells me. Arevalo, however, dismisses any suggestion of this being an excuse for unpaid or low wages. What I see is the wealth, he says. The car the boss drives into the farm, the golf club he belongs to, the lifestyle. The excuse that theres no money is not valid. If you cant pay the people working for you, reduce the size of your farm.

Cepaim lawyer Romero believes that around 50% of producers are not treating their employees as they should while the other 50% are trying to do right by their staff.

There are bosses that are really helpful in providing all the documentation to get their employees legalised and there are those who havent paid their workers for months. Or those who get them to work for nothing more than food and board, he says. Its very diverse. Some of our best experiences have been with small farmers; we give out awards for producers that nurture diversity and equality.

COAGs president says there are 17,000 fruit and vegetable producers in Almeria and estimates 10% of them are organic, all using acres of plastic without exception How else would they do it? he enquires.

Asked if there was a difference between how the organic producers and the ordinary producers treat their workers, Romero from Cepaim responds with a categorical no. Produce that, by definition, might suggest a more ethical and honest means of production is not necessarily above reproach, a view backed by reviews on Google for several organic companies. Welcome to the place where slavery is still current, says one of Biosabor; and, Theres bad hygiene but worst of all is the inhuman degrading treatment on behalf of some of the people in charge, says another.

As Arevalo says, when it comes to organic, its not just about the pesticides and chemicals and saving water: Theres a social contract too and that is something that also needs to be complied with.

Organic or otherwise, Gongora is horrified that all the producers are being tarred with the same brush. He himself is a small producer with one worker from Mali whom he pays the official minimum wage of 7.28.

I cant say all the farmers are doing the right thing because that would be hypocritical. But to put us all in the same sack seems unjust, he says. Also, there are processes for filing complaints. This is not a banana republic.

Gongora also objects strongly to the suggestion that the producers are responsible for providing the immigrants with accommodation.

I dont understand how anyone can use housing as a motive to attack the farming sector without looking further into the problem, he says. The shantytowns break my heart. But I think it is a social and political problem and, between us all, we have to ensure it is possible for these people to live in decent conditions. Blaming one sector of society simply creates a tense, hostile atmosphere.

Cepaim lawyer Romero agrees that the responsibility for decent housing should be shared but also points out that a large part of the problem is bureaucratic.

Anyone wanting to rent an apartment is asked for payslips and maybe even insurance, he says. Whos going to rent to someone without papers, who doesnt speak the language and isnt registered with the local authorities? The council needs to make it easier for undocumented immigrants to register on the local census.

In a bid to eradicate at least some of Almerias 92 shantytowns, the local Nijar authorities have launched a pilot scheme this year offering land on which the producers can build accommodation for their workers. The plot in question is 3,000 metres squared the area of Ayoubs shantytown that burned to the ground was 8,000 metres squared. According to Romero, it is a start but does not address the scale of the problem. Its not nearly enough, he says.

Meanwhile, several kilometres away, in the trendy resort of San Jos, hotel owner Joaquin Villegas Rodriguezs concern over the migrants takes an altogether different shape. They come for handouts, he says. They can get 400 for each child from the government. And why should the farmers get them their papers? It costs them 600 and the next day, they dont turn up for work. They go elsewhere.

Seemingly unfazed by the prospect of the greenhouse plastic blowing into the Mediterranean or the impact of the squalid shantytowns that line the route to the beach, Villegas is worried the night-time landings could damage business.

There may be tourists on the beach who will feel alarmed, he says. Some of the Moroccans coming are delinquents. The Moroccan authorities have opened the jails and are sending them to us as revenge for the conflict over the Sahara.

Villegas is not the only one in the area who believes these stories. The extreme right Vox party won almost 35% of the vote in the 2019 general election in the district of Nijar and the province of Almeria has been flagged up by the Spanish Ministry of the Interior for a growing number of hate crimes.

Many point to a link between Vox and the farmers, but it is not one Gongora cares for. He bristles when I mention the contradictory nature of the alliance, given that Vox wants the illegal immigrants used to pick the fruit and veg deported. I dont give tuppence for Voxs views, he says. All the COAG farmers want is for the immigrants to be more easily documented and legalised.

Legal status generally takes three years in Spain; three years working in the plastic tunnels; three years inhaling chemical sprays and sweltering in temperatures of up to 50 C. Ayoub has almost done his time worked out his sentence as it were.

Once he has, he believes hell clear out. There are plenty of shacks like these in Morocco, he says, looking around at the wretched state of his home. I didnt come here to live in a plastic house.

Every weekday, Uncovering Europe brings you a European story that goes beyond the headlines. Download the Euronews app to get a daily alert for this and other breaking news notifications. It's available on Apple and Android devices.

View original post here:

Europe's vegetable garden is ridden with poverty, plastic and contradiction - Euronews

Is the Supreme Court too partisan, too politicized? How might we reform it without making things worse? Is the nations top judicial authority even democratic?

These questions and more are under consideration by a bipartisan commission of legal experts tasked by President Joseph Biden in April to study the origins of the debate around Supreme Court reform, the Courts role in the American constitutional system, and the legality and wisdom of current proposals for reform.

As part of its analysis, the 36-member commission, 16 of whom are Harvard Law School faculty or alumni, solicited testimony from scholars across the political spectrum to weigh in on the debate.

During public meetings held on June 30 and July 20, the commission invited seven scholars from Harvard Law School HLS Professors Nikolas Bowie 14, Noah Feldman, Charles Fried, Michael Klarman, Vicki C. Jackson, Stephen Sachs, and Visiting Professor Rosalie Abella to share both oral and written remarks.

On a June 30 panel about the contemporary origins of the debate around reform, Bowie, an assistant professor of law who teaches and writes about federal and state constitutional law, asked commissioners to look further into the past to understand current problems.

The public debate over reforming the Supreme Court began at least 150 years ago when the Supreme Court held that Congress had no power to limit the spread of slavery, said Bowie. President Abraham Lincoln disagreed with the Court, asserting that if its opinion stood Americans would cease to be their own rulers, he added. The president and Congress passed laws and constitutional amendments restricting slavery anyway, but the Court deprived them of their strength and then presided over the proliferation of Jim Crow laws, said Bowie. The Supreme Courts shameful trajectory on civil rights was temporarily reversed in its decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), he said, but for the past 50 years, the Court has resumed invalidating federal civil rights laws, tightening a chain of precedent around American democracy.

Credit: Lorin Granger Nikolas Bowie

In Bowies view, the Supreme Court is an anti-democratic institution whose main problem is judicial review. The question presented by judicial review is not whether the Constitution should be enforced, he told the commission, but rather what should happen when the president, over 500 members of Congress, and four justices of the Court interpret the Constitution to permit a particular law, and yet five justices disagree and think the law is unconstitutional, and consequently overturn that law, as was the case when the Court invalidated key pieces of the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

[The commission] should advocate for reforms that will help bring democracy to our workplaces, our legislatures, and our fundamental law before we lose what democracy we have, Bowie concluded in his written remarks.

On the same panel, Feldman, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law and director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law, noted that that the present interest in SCOTUS reform stems not from an unpopular decision or set of decisions, as was the case in prior debates, but rather by a change in the unwritten norms surrounding the confirmation process for justices.

Credit: Deborah Feingold Noah Feldman

Feldman outlined what he saw as the Courts three main roles: protecting the rule of law, ensuring fundamental rights to liberty and equality, and overseeing the democratic process. Although the Court has not always gotten it right, he said, as the Supreme Court has evolved, it has become an integral and irreplaceable constitutional institution within the framework of our constitutional democracy.

Because of this critical role, Feldman said, the question in front of the commission should be whether under our current circumstances, weakening our Court through substantial reforms and I have in mind court packing and most forms of jurisdiction stripping would enhance or undermine the institutional legitimacy of the Court, which legitimacy enables it to fulfill these functions.

Feldman said his view was that such reforms would be disastrous, and that we should not assume that other unspecified institutions would emerge to cover the functions of protecting the rule of law, ensuring fundamental rights, and overseeing the democratic process.

According to Charles Fried, Beneficial Professor of Law, who offered written testimony on the Courts function in Americans constitutional system, the judiciary is revered because it is viewed as the guarantor of the rule of law, and it embodies the notion that we are subject to law and not to any passing political regime.

Credit: Martha Stewart Charles Fried

Fried, who served as U.S. solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan, acknowledged that the confirmation process has become more contentious and the public has increasingly begun to view it through a partisan lens, even though the judiciary still enjoys the highest public regard of all the organs of government.

Fried recommended reforms that would limit justices to one non-renewable 18-year term, with nominations to be staggered in such a way that each president would have two appointments during each term. This way, he wrote, the stakes for each confirmation would be lower, and there would no longer be an incentive to nominate younger and younger justices.

Speaking on a July 20 panel about the Courts composition, Michael Klarman, Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History, struck a more urgent tone, detailing what he saw as an immediate threat to American democracy by the GOP, the Courts contributions to that problem, and why he advocated for court expansion.

Over the course of four years, said Klarman, President Donald Trump degraded long-accepted norms by attacking the press and judicial independence, politicizing the Justice Department, delegitimizing elections, refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, and more. And, as Klarman put it in his written testimony, to the astonishment of at least half the nation, the Republican Party proved overwhelmingly complicit with Trumps authoritarian bent, refusing to reign in his behavior or hold him accountable through oversight or impeachment. Even after initially condemning the January 6 Capitol riot, said Klarman, Republicans have largely reassessed their position, fix[ing] upon a strategy of minimizing the violence insisting that many of the demonstrators were Antifa, rather than Trump supporters, and denying that Trump bears responsibility for the attack.

Credit: Leah Fasten Michael Klarman

Klarman insisted that these issues were not new, and that since at least 2000, state legislatures have tried to restrict voting and solidify political advantage through partisan gerrymandering. Worse, he said, the Supreme Court has furthered these GOP political advantages over the years, nullifying the Voting Rights Acts preclearance provision, upholding voter purges, and making it difficult to prove racial discrimination in redistricting efforts. Klarman added that SCOTUS had also unleashed money in politics, enabling the wealthy to influence political outcomes and block widely popular policies like paid parental leave and a higher minimum wage. From Klarmans perspective, the best way to address these crises is to expand the Court to defend democracy.

Also testifying on July 20, Vicki C. Jackson, Laurence H. Tribe Professor of Constitutional Law, shared her expertise on term limits. Jackson believed it was time to revise justices unlimited tenure on the Court for three major reasons. First, she said, many other countries and most U.S. states have term limits or mandatory retirement ages for their judges. And, as people live longer, some of the disadvantages of indefinite tenure of judges remaining in office even though their health is failing, and for very long periods of time, blocking new appointees may be becoming more likely to occur, wrote Jackson in her submitted testimony.

Credit: Phil FarnsworthVicki C. Jackson

Secondly, there is a troubling gap between public voting in national elections, and which partys presidents have appointed members of the Court, taking away indirect democratic input on SCOTUSs makeup one of the reasons for the Courts legitimacy, according to Jackson. As an example, she contrasted President Carters zero Supreme Court appointments with President Trumps three.

Finally, she said, constitutions are supposed to provide a framework for peaceful resolution of disputes. Losers of elections, of court cases accept the results because they trust the overall fairness of the system. But, Jackson said, the Courts current structure may contribute to doubts about overall fairness.

Like her colleague Fried, Jacksons suggested reforms included an 18-year nonrenewable staggered term which would provide for two appointments during each four-year presidential term, a change she said might require a constitutional amendment to achieve. Alternatively, a less effective but perhaps more achievable by statue proposal, said Jackson, would be to allow each president to appoint at least one justice every four-year term, with the Courts size floating up or down as needed. Jackson also pointed out that mandatory retirement might pose constitutional problems, given the weight placed on permanency at the framing. Instead, Jackson suggested, pension boosts could be used to incentivize earlier retirement among justices.

On another panel, Stephen Sachs, Antonin Scalia Professor of Law, cautioned commissioners to think deeply about how proposed reforms could impact not only the Courts ability to make judgements, but also the publics perception of it.

Stephen Sachs

In considering reforms preserve judicial independence, implored Sachs, adding that the Courts job is to apply cases before it and enforce the limited powers of each governmental branch.

Next, put politics in its place If you want a less political judiciary, you need a more political amendment process, he said. In other words, move political fights out of judicial conference rooms, and into state houses and the halls of Congress. A Court that can get away with constitutional amendment on the cheap is always going to be a target for partisan capture.

Finally, warned Sachs, beware unforeseen consequences of many proposed reforms. It is much easier to build than to destroy. Traditions of judicial independence that we have built up over time can be demolished much more quickly than one might expect, he said.

In considering potential reforms, the members of the commission have to be honest with each other and the public, concluded Sachs, adding that Americans would see through partisan changes to the Court. Reforms that are not perceived by both sides as enhancing the Courts legitimacy are not going to work at doing so.

In a final panel on July 20, Rosalie Abella, who will be the Pisar Visiting Professor of Law starting July 1, 2022, offered some closing remarks based on her experience as a justice on the Canadian Supreme Court.

Abella began by outlining what had happened since Canada adopted its Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. The addition of the charter led to a Copernican revolution in Canada, she said.

Credit: Philippe Landreville Rosalie Abella

In considering its new mandate, the court was innovative, it was bold, and it was transformative, and committed to new values of social justice and equality, said Abella. It adopted a theory of living constitutionalism that saw the charters role as growing and expanding over time to meet new social and political realities.

The court was hugely popular among the Canadian public, she said, but also received some conservative pushback in the 1990s. But, democracy is not and never was just about the wishes of the majority, she said, adding Canadians came to understand that this commitment to the protection of rights strengthened, rather than detracted from, its democracy.

Around the world today, though, these values are in danger, warned Abella, and if democracy and human rights are at risk anywhere, they are at risk everywhere.

Ultimately, concluded Abella, There can be no democracy without respect for rights, no respect for rights without respect for courts, and no respect for courts without respect for their demonstrably independent, impartial, nonpartisan, and fearless defense of democracy and rights.

Read the original post:

Harvard Law School experts testify before the Presidential Commission on SCOTUS - Harvard Law Today - Harvard Law School News