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[CONT] genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, according to documents seen by the HuffPost US.

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In 1990, the high school dropout rate for Dolly Parton’s hometown of Sevierville Tennessee was at 34% (Research shows that most kids make up their minds in fifth/sixth grade not to graduate). That year, all fifth and sixth graders from Sevierville were invited by Parton to attend an assembly at Dollywood. They were asked to pick a buddy, and if both students completed high school, Dolly Parton would personally hand them each a $500 check on their graduation day. As a result, the dropout rate for those classes fell to 6%, and has generally retained that average to this day.

Shortly after the success of The Buddy Program, Parton learned in dealing with teachers from the school district that problems in education often begin during first grade when kids are at different developmental levels. That year The Dollywood Foundation paid the salaries for additional teachers assistants in every first grade class for the next 2 years, under the agreement that if the program worked, the school system would effectively adopt and fund the program after the trial period.

During the same period, Parton founded the Imagination Library in 1995: The idea being that children from her rural hometown and low-income families often start school at a disadvantage and as a result, will be unfairly compared to their peers for the rest of their lives, effectively encouraging them not to pursue higher education. The objective of the Imagination library was that every child in Sevier County would receive one book, every month, mailed and addressed to the child, from the day they were born until the day they started kindergarten, 100% free of charge. What began as a hometown initiative now serves children in all 50 states, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, mailing thousands of free books to children around the world monthly.

On March 1, 2018 Parton donated her 100 millionth book at the Library of Congress: a copy of “Coat of Many Colors” dedicated to her father, who never learned to read or write.

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Over the last few years, an increasing number of scholars have argued that the impact of AI is repeating the patterns of colonial history. European colonialism, they say, was characterized by the violent capture of land, extraction of resources, and exploitation of people—for example, through slavery—for the economic enrichment of the conquering country. While it would diminish the depth of past traumas to say the AI industry is repeating this violence today, it is now using other, more insidious means to enrich the wealthy and powerful at the great expense of the poor.

Artificial intelligence is creating a new colonial world order | MIT Technology Review (via jhavelikes)

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In data colonialism, data is appropriated through a new type of social relation: data relations. We are living through a time when the organization of capital and the configurations of power are changing dramatically because of this contemporary form of social relation. Data colonialism justifies what it does as an advance in scientific knowledge, personalized marketing, or rational management, just as historic colonialism claimed a civilizing mission. Data colonialism is global, dominated by powerful forces in East and West, in the USA and China. The result is a world where, wherever we are connected, we are colonized by data.

The Costs of Connection – How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating it for Capitalism (via jhavelikes)

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Marsha P. Johnson (August 24, 1945 – July 6, 1992)

 Born and also known as Malcolm Michaels Jr., was an American gay liberation[ activist and self-identified drag queen.

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Steve Schapiro     Civil Rights Worker (Later Congressman) John Lewis, Clarksdale Miss     1963

Steve Schapiro  -  1934-2022  -  Ave atque Vale

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The Wall Street Journal condemned Amnesty’s report, saying it ought to receive “the world’s opprobrium and sanction” for its “denunciation of the very existence of Israel as a refuge for the Jewish people.” The Journal placed the blame for Israel’s discriminatory laws on Palestinians, because Jewish settlers “in historic Palestine had to fight to survive against Arab militias and national armies that wanted to push them into the sea.”

The paper peppered its editorial with hoary reminders that “Israel is a democracy” because Arabs who live inside Israel’s Green Line can vote and run for office. Meanwhile, the disenfranchised Palestinians who live under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza—who are the majority of Arabs in Israel/Palestine—have only themselves to blame, because they “could have their own state with comparable rights if they had accepted the concessions that Israel offered.”

Almost 60 years ago, the Journal editorial board made a similar argument against calls to boycott apartheid South Africa; the conservative daily argued that targeting white-run South Africa was hypocritical, because activists were not also targeting Arab Algeria with “equal disdain.” Historian William Henry Chamberlin wrote in the Journal that condemnation of South African apartheid at the United Nations was “highly selective” because of strife in other UN member states, and reminded readers that white Boers had been in the country for “more than three centuries.”

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Lani Guinier, a legal scholar whose work on voting rights and affirmative action led President Bill Clinton to nominate her in 1993 to be an assistant attorney general, only to withdraw her name two months later in the face of a Republican [smear] campaign against her, died on Friday at an assisted living facility in Cambridge, Mass. She was 71.

Her cousin Sherrie Russell-Brown said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

Descended from a long line of lawyers, Ms. Guinier made her name in the 1980s as an unorthodox thinker about whether America’s legal institutions, even after the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, needed to change further to realize true democracy.

She argued, for example, that the principle of “one person, one vote” was insufficient in a system where the interests of minorities, racial or otherwise, were inevitably trampled by those of the majority, and that alternatives needed to be considered to give more weight to minority interests.

Ms. Guinier was a 43-year-old professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School when President Clinton nominated her for the post of assistant attorney general for civil rights. But she quickly came under fire from Republicans for her progressive views on voting rights and quotas.

Her work was not without its liberal critics: Some scholars questioned whether her ideas about voting were in fact democratic, as she claimed, and several Democratic senators voiced their concerns about her nomination to President Clinton.

But her Republican opponents also made clear that their campaign was a matter of opportunity. Still stinging from the Supreme Court nomination battles over Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, they were looking for payback, and saw her liberal views as an opportunity to hit the president early in his term.

“Clinton has not had to expend any political capital on the issue of quotas,” Clint Bolick, a [Republican] lawyer and activist who helped lead the charge against her, told The New York Times in 1993, “and with her, we believe we could inflict a heavy political cost.”

Mr. Clinton eventually bowed to pressure and withdrew her nomination in June 1993, calling some of her positions “anti-democratic.”

Ms. Guinier returned to teaching. She also wrote a memoir about her nomination experience, “Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback Into a New Vision of Social Justice,” published in 1998. That same year, she moved to Harvard Law School, where she became the first woman of color to receive tenure.

While the rest of the country remembered her for her failed nomination, she continued to make strides as a legal scholar and teacher. She pioneered research on implicit bias in the classroom and workplace. Later in her career she opened a wide-ranging critique of merit, especially the way it distorts institutions like her own.

Many of her positions have since moved into and informed the mainstream, especially her criticisms of voter redistricting processes.

“The ability to see so far down the line was her gift,” Heather Gerken, the dean of Yale Law School, said in a phone interview. “She had a deep understanding of the insidious ways that power corrupts institutions, even institutions acting in good faith.”

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Rest in power. #DesmondTutu

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https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/

Since 2015 the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative has been conducting real-time attribution analysis of extreme weather events as they happen around the world. This provides the public, scientists and decision-makers with the means to make clear connections between greenhouse gas emissions and impactful extreme weather events, such as storms, floods, heatwaves and droughts.

We research and develop scientific tools and methodologies to perform timely and robust assessments of whether and to what extent human-induced climate change played a role in the magnitude and frequency of extreme weather events.

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The House’s vote to hold Mark Meadows in contempt has presented the Department of Justice (DOJ) with the question of whether to prosecute the former White House chief of staff, forcing it to weigh the major legal and political consequences that could come with breaking from longstanding executive branch policy.

The DOJ’s stance for decades, throughout both Democratic and Republican administrations, has been to support testimonial immunity for the president’s close advisers when faced with congressional subpoenas - the very policy Meadows and his attorneys have pointed to as he refused to show up for a deposition.

Charging Meadows with contempt of Congress for defying subpoenas from the House Jan. 6 Select Committee would represent a departure from that historical trend and poses more complicated considerations for the department than its decision to prosecute Stephen Bannon, who was not a White House official when he helped Trump sow distrust in the 2020 election results.

“For several decades, DOJ has taken the view that close advisers to the president are absolutely immune from congressional subpoena - that Congress has no ability to force them to testify,” said Jonathan Shaub, a constitutional law professor at the University of Kentucky. “That’s the doctrine DOJ most has to grapple with in deciding whether to prosecute.”

The DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), which provides the executive branch with advice and binding legal policy, has held in several memorandums over the years that executive privilege provides the president’s close advisers with immunity from congressional subpoenas for their testimony.

But some say that the select committee’s pressing need to investigate the Capitol riot outweighs the executive branch’s institutional interests in maintaining its standing in such interbranch disputes, and that President Biden’s decision to waive executive privilege over Meadows’s testimony and records simplifies the choice facing the DOJ.

Kel McClanahan, an adjunct law professor at George Washington University who has criticized the expansive views of executive branch authority that the OLC has historically adopted, believes that the Biden DOJ can bring charges against Meadows without disavowing its own stance on presidential privilege.

“I think that they would say, ‘Well, this is an exception to the OLC opinion because in the OLC opinion, OLC did not entertain the concept of the president explicitly authorizing testimony,’” McClanahan said. “The OLC opinion was whether or not senior staffers could be compelled to talk by a third party, and in this case, they’re not being compelled to talk by Congress, they’re being compelled to talk by the president agreeing with Congress. [They will come up with some] pretzel-like way to say 'we agree with everything in the OLC opinion, but look over there,’ and do the prosecution.”

Courts have twice rejected the claims of testimonial immunity Meadows is seeking to assert, most recently when a federal district court judge ruled in 2019 that former White House counsel Don McGahn had to comply with a House subpoena as part of an impeachment inquiry into Trump.

But the matter has never been settled by the higher courts, Shaub said, leaving room for the executive branch to push its expansive interpretation of the law surrounding congressional subpoenas for White House staffers.

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New reports about Donald Trump’s estrangement from his old friend and ally Benjamin Netanyahu are understandably being interpreted from the point of view of the long and tangled relationship between the United States and Israel, in which the appearance of smooth cooperation during the Trump administration hid numerous fissures, arguments, and misunderstandings. It’s clear that the abandonment most Republicans had long advocated of America’s traditional hands-off “honest broker” posture toward Israelis and Palestinians didn’t resolve all differences.

But from the perspective of understanding our former and perhaps future president, there is one terrifying new data point, as reported at Axios on Friday by Israeli journalist Barak Ravid:

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu were the closest of political allies during the four years they overlapped in office, at least in public. Not anymore. “I haven’t spoken to him since,” Trump said of the former Israeli prime minister. “F**k him.”

Trump repeatedly criticized Netanyahu during two interviews for my book, Trump’s Peace: The Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East. The final straw for Trump was when Netanyahu congratulated President-elect Biden for his election victory while Trump was still disputing the result.

“The first person that congratulated [Biden] was Bibi Netanyahu, the man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with … Bibi could have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake.”

Actually, Bibi was far from the first head of state to acknowledge Biden’s victory. What really honked off Trump was that Netanyahu acknowledged the victory at all, particularly at a time when other Trump allies like Vladimir Putin and Jair Bolsonaro were still holding back. And Bibi’s betrayal wasn’t some back-channel feeler toward the soon-to-be-American president (a matter of self-preservation for any Israeli government, particularly one for whom close ties with Washington was a principal asset), but in a video the whole world could see! Notes Ravid:

For Bibi Netanyahu, before the ink was even dry, to do a message, and not only a message, to do a tape to Joe Biden talking about their great, great friendship — they didn’t have a friendship, because if they did, [the Obama administration] wouldn’t have done the Iran deal …

Other than exhibiting Trump’s reptilian reaction to any positive remarks about his enemies, his decision to cast Bibi into the outer darkness for raining on the “stop the steal” parade when it was just getting under way means the Big Lie litmus test Trump is demanding that every Republican politician in America pass (or at least not flunk) is actually global. Not just American pols but entire sovereign nations and their leaders will be adjudged by their subscription to his anti-democratic ravings. Presumably any foreign leader looking forward to the possibility of dealing with a Trump restoration in 2025 will have to be careful not to say anything negative about MAGA-world preparations for a more competent election coup, should one prove necessary after Election Day in 2024. Thus, the 45th president is building international support for the counterrevolution he continues to lead.

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#politics#January6thCommittee#TrumpCoup#GOP#Liz Cheney#Donald Trump

During a hearing with the select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) read almost directly from the criminal code, suggesting the committee could refer former President Trump for criminal charges.

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The Trump family has long treated rules and laws as nuisances that are only for the little people. And the news that Donald Trump tested positive for covid-19 before the first 2020 presidential debate shows that this tendency may be even more depraved and malevolent than you thought…

Multiple news organizations, including The Post, have now confirmed from former Trump aides that he tested positive for coronavirus on Sept. 26, 2020, three days before his Sept. 29 debate with Joe Biden. So he had reason to believe he might have been infected heading into the debate…

The Guardian reports that the book then relays the following:

Meadows says Trump took that call as “full permission to press on as if nothing had happened.” His chief of staff, however, “instructed everyone in his immediate circle to treat him as if he was positive” throughout the Pennsylvania trip.

In other words, everyone around Trump was apparently told he was potentially contagious, and he even appeared potentially symptomatic, even as Trump roared into the debate as if the opposite were true. If this is right, then what happened at the debate is even worse than you thought.

That’s because multiple people around Trump, including his wife, Melania Trump, and his kids Donald Jr. and Eric, all sat maskless at the Sept. 29 debate, according to contemporaneous reports, despite the fact that debate attendees were required to wear masks.

As numerous reporters personally witnessed at the time, Trump’s family members did this after rebuffing a direct request to mask up from a doctor with the Cleveland Clinic, which helped organize the debate. That doctor even offered them masks, and they declined…

Physician Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University and a Post contributing columnist, points out that going maskless among other people — while knowing you might have been exposed — could put those people at risk.

“People who have close contact with individuals who test positive for covid should be in quarantine,” Wen told me. “If they had known that they were in close contact with someone who tested positive and were symptomatic, they shouldn’t have gone to the event at all.“

Wen added that their refusal to wear masks may have meant “that they knowingly exposed others and flouted public health guidelines.”

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The once and future mass-resignation and what it means for working people

Once upon a time, a terrible disease swept the lands, prompting a great wave of resignations as low-waged workers walked off the job, rejecting offers of pay raises that would have been unthinkably lavish just a few years earlier. Their bosses went nuts.

The former employers of these workers slammed them as lazy and greedy, and called upon their fellow bougies to take up “unskilled” labor and scab those proles back into the workplace. When that didn’t work, they passed laws that banned desperate bosses from bidding up wages. That didn’t work either, so new crimes were put on the books that made it easier to slam unemployed people in notoriously cruel prisons. That failed, too, prompting cuts to the already grossly inadequate welfare system, trying to starve workers back into their jobs.

That also failed. In the end, the situation led to a mass redistribution of wealth and a period of unheralded pluralism and opportunity for workers whose families had been stuck in low-waged, dead-end work for generations.

This isn’t a covid story. It’s the story of the post-Black Death labor markets in England, where desperate noblemen passed the country’s first labor law, the 1349 Ordinance of Labourers. Chroniclers of the day urged “knights and churchmen” to get into the fields and shame their social inferiors back into harness.

https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/seth/ordinance-labourers.asp

This threat didn’t get the peasants back into the fields, so the law threatened out-of-work people with prison, capped wages at pre-Black Death levels, and banned begging at funerals (“practically the only form of social welfare available”).

The failure to force workers back into the fields left landholders unable to profit from their lands, prompting sell-offs that created the middle class. Real incomes doubled. This is a pattern that follows every pandemic, according to an NBER paper that found that after every pandemic, wages shoot up and the return on capital tanks:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26934/w26934.pdf

I learned about all this from David Dayen’s brilliant longread for The American Prospect, “The Great Escape,” featuring the voices of workers who have — or are thinking of — walking off the job.

https://prospect.org/labor/great-escape-why-workers-quitting-pandemic-trauma/

As Dayen points out, the great resignation includes workers in all kinds of jobs, not just low-waged ones, but resignations are concentrated at the bottom of the wage-scale. It’s not hard to see why: Dayen recounts the stories of workers in national chains that were bought out by private equity looters whose much-vaunted “efficiencies” boil down to slashing wages and imposing cruel and dangerous conditions on workers.

There’s Caroline Potts of Murfreesboro, TN, who loves dogs and was excited to get at job as a groomer at Petsmart. It seemed like a dream-job, but Potts learned she was expected to meet impossible quotas, working at a rate made the experience traumatic for dogs. She also learned that Petsmart management was only paying lip-service to its policy of excluding dogs with seizure disorders or problems with stressful environments. She worried that she was going to preside over the death of one of these dogs. To make things worse, her customers were routinely abusive to her and her employer did nothing to shield her from their bad conduct.

Potts was locked into a two-year noncompete contract and was only able to quit for a rival company by begging her manager to release her from it. Needless to say, many workers in noncompetes won’t be so lucky — and fast-food restaurants lead the nation in the use of noncompete agreements.

Zella Roberts worked in fast food — she was a Sonic carhop in Asheville, NC. When Sonic got scooped up by Roark Capital, the new owners switched to exclusive app- and credit-card-based ordering, with no facility to tip employees. But Roberts was being paid $5/hr, a “tipped minimum wage” premised on the worker being able to make up the difference from tips. It’s illegal to pay tipped minimum wage to workers who can’t collect tips, but that didn’t stop Sonic.

It’s not just fast-food and pets. Ed Gadomski was a 32-year veteran of the IT department in CT’s Waterbury Hospital. When Leonard Green & Partners bought the hospital, they laid him off and then offered him his old job at $13.46/h, a third of his former wage, with no pension or health-care (at a hospital!).

Predictably, regular large-business abuses are sinking to the level of private equity. Reina Abrahamson of Salem, OR was a Wells Fargo customer rep working from home. She was put on minimum salary for six months while Wells processed a request to supply her with a 100 foot Ethernet cable that would reach from her home router to her computer (she supplemented her wages driving for Doordash).

Amazon is a leader in labor abuses. At Stephanie Haynes’s job at an Amazon warehouse in Joliet, IL, she was given tasks that were literally impossible to perform while maintaining six feet of social distance — like lifting a pallet with a co-worker. Haynes lost her fiance to covid and decided it wasn’t worth risking her own life to help Jeff Bezos grow his fortune, so she walked off the job from March to July 2020.

We know only a fraction of what goes on at Amazon warehouses, and that’s by design. Monica Moody was fired from her Amazon warehouse in Charlotte, NC for talking to the press about her labor conditions.

The “essential workers” of the pandemic died in droves — a study found that the highest covid mortality among working-aged people was among cooks, warehouse workers, construction workers, bakers, etc:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.21.21250266v1.full.pdf

Dayen writes that as intolerable and dangerous as these workers’ jobs were during lockdown, they got worse afterward, when stir-crazy, traumatized, short-tempered customers showed up to scream at them and even assault them as they tried to enforce masking rules and vaccine requirements for entry.

No wonder workers are quitting. But they’re not just quitting — they’re also striking, with or without a union. America has experienced a vast, wildly under-reported wave of wildcat strikes. Take the Jack in the Box franchise in Sacramento where un-unionized workers struck twice. As Leticia Reyes — a worker who took part in both strikes — tells it, the first strike was prompted by management’s refusal to fix the AC during a 109’ heat wave. “The first time, she wouldn’t listen to us, she ignored us. The second time, she told us it wasn’t high temperatures, it was us workers going through menopause.”

The workers got the AC fixed…and their manager got fired. And then the workers struck again, in protest of wage theft (they weren’t getting their mandatory paid breaks and overtime). The owner and his cronies crossed the picket line and tried to do the workers’ jobs…and couldn’t. After three days, management caved.

Says Reyes: “I am no longer scared to speak up. Big companies need us as workers and we should not be afraid to speak up.”

Practically the only place you’ll learn about stories like this one is in Payday Report (“Covering Labor in News Deserts”), a crowdfunded site that has chronicled 1,600 walkouts throughout the pandemic:

https://paydayreport.com/

Viral phenomena like #QuitMyJob and photos of handwritten “We all quit” signs hint at the true scale of the great resignation, and they inspire others to do the same. There’s good indications that employers are finally responding with better pay, benefits and conditions, but there’s no reason to think they’ve had a true change of heart. If the labor market changes, they’ll claw back those gains in a heartbeat.

But as with the 14th century post-plague labor markets, our workforce’s unwillingness to go back has proved remarkably sturdy. For example, red states that canceled covid relief early in a bid to starve workers back into dangerous, degrading, underpaid jobs are experiencing the same shortages of low-waged workers as blue states where benefits continued without interruption. Part of that might be due to a genuine worker shortage — 2m workers took early retirement during the pandemic, and a legacy of Trump’s ethnic cleansing policy has starved many sectors of precarious and desperate workers.

Cementing these gains over the long term will require institutional shifts: the threshold for a wildcat strike is very high, but labor action gets easier as labor gets organized. New unions are popping up across the country, and existing unions are finding unsuspected reserves of militancy. 1.3m Teamsters have new leaders who are committed to organizing grocery stores and Amazon warehouses:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/19/hoffa-jr-defeated/#teamsters-for-a-democratic-union

And striking nurses and Teamsters, and workers at factories from Kellogg’s to John Deere, are pushing to eliminate the disastrous “two-tier” contracts that destroy union solidarity, rendering unions toothless:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/25/strikesgiving/#shed-a-tier

Companies that seemed immune to unionization, from Amazon to Dollar General to Starbucks, are now fighting pitched battles against their workers using tactics that grow thinner and less credible by the day, as John Oliver documents with characteristic scathing hilarity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk8dUXRpoy8

Provisions in the Build Back Better bill don’t go as far as the PRO Act, but they will still add to the union movement’s tailwind.

But it’s workers, not law, who ultimately control the outcome. I’ll give the last word to Christine Johnson, a historian at Washington U in St Louis, whose work on the Ordinance of Labourers is cited by Dayen:

“If you don’t actually change the structures of power, and you don’t actually enact some changes in the labor and social hierarchies, it’s not going to produce lasting improvement in conditions of labor.”