#new york state labor law posters

[venicepearl]

United States Department of Labor poster, 2010

Mary G. Harris Jones (1837 (baptized) – November 30, 1930), known as Mother Jones from 1897 onwards, was an Irish-born American schoolteacher and dressmaker who became a prominent union organizer, community organizer, and activist. She helped coordinate major strikes and co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World.

After Jones's husband and four children all died of yellow fever in 1867 and her dress shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, she became an organizer for the Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers union. In 1902, she was called "the most dangerous woman in America" for her success in organizing mine workers and their families against the mine owners.In 1903, to protest the lax enforcement of the child labor laws in the Pennsylvania mines and silk mills, she organized a children's march from Philadelphia to the home of President Theodore Roosevelt in New York.

[theculturedmarxist]

This report was written by Andrew Perez, Julia Rock and David Sirota

Draft legislation circulating in the U.S. Senate would shield employers and health care industry executives from legal consequences when their business decisions injure or kill workers, customers and patients during the COVID-19 outbreak.

The unprecedented proposal to gut legal protections — which is being depicted as moderate compromise legislation and potentially attached to badly-needed state and local aid — follows a Harvard study showing a surge in worker COVID deaths following their requests for government regulators’ help.

The Huffington Post reported on Monday that Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin is joining GOP senators in backing corporate immunity legislation. A draft of the legislative language obtained by The Daily Poster includes provisions that would:

Shield companies from all coronavirus-related actions retroactively — for at least one year, or until the pandemic is over — except in cases of “gross negligence.” Most coronavirus-related lawsuits would be forced into federal courts, which are considered more friendly to business interests.

Restrict the enforcement of longstanding laws such as the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when companies say they are attempting to comply with governments’ coronavirus guidance.

Empower the United States Attorney General to deem coronavirus-related lawsuits from workers, customers and attorneys “meritless” and then file civil actions against them as retribution. In order to “vindicate the public interest,” courts would be allowed to fine respondents up to $50,000.

Shield health care executives from lawsuits through language copied word-for-word from a statute passed in New York by Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo amid a spate of COVID deaths in that state’s nursing homes.

“Substantially Immunizing Businesses From Risky Conduct”

The legislation defines gross negligence as “a conscious, voluntary act or omission in reckless disregard of (A) a legal duty; (B) the consequences to another party; and (C) applicable government standards and guidance.”

“We are wiping out the laws of negligence,” said Michael Duff, a former National Labor Relations Board official who is now a professor at the University of Wyoming College of Law. “As a practical matter, we are substantially immunizing businesses from risky conduct.”

“What they want to do in this bill is throw every lawsuit out before it conceivably gets to a jury,” he said. “It means that a judge has the authority to dismiss a case right upfront. Because there’s no way that plaintiffs are going to be able to meet this standard — gross negligence.”

He added that the provision empowering the Attorney General to punish plaintiffs “is a bald-faced threat of reprisal for having the temerity to pursue rights.”

“That Is Not A Negotiation — That Is A Collapse”

Lawmakers released a separate $748 billion COVID-related proposal that includes expanded unemployment benefits, an extension of the Paycheck Protection Program, and funding for COVID-19 testing and vaccine distribution. It would also reauthorize a CARES Act provision allowing the government to funnel money to out-of-work defense contractors.

The latter package did not include a new round of $1,200 stimulus checks sought by Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. Only $188 billion of the proposal is new stimulus money — the other $560 billion is repurposed from the CARES Act, passed this spring.

Sanders criticized Democrats for their handling of coronavirus relief talks. “What kind of negotiation is it when you go from $3.4 trillion to $188 billion in new money?” he said. That is not a negotiation. That is a collapse.”

According to Politico, Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., and Tom Reed, R-N.Y., the co-chairs of the House Problem Solvers Caucus, are pushing to combine the two bills into one $908 billion proposal.

[creepingsharia]

A Month of Islam in America: June 2019

Another month, and another step forward for sharia in America as more censorship was exposed. A whistleblower leak confirmed that @Pinterest protects Muslims and censors any reference to “creeping sharia,” and many other non-liberal topics.

Click any link below for more details and link to original source.

Jihad in America in June

Brooklyn: Muslim Immigrant Sentenced to 20 Years for Attempting to Join Islamic State (ISIS) Mohamed Rafik Naji was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment by United States District Judge Frederic Block for attempting to provide material support or resources to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a foreign terrorist organization.  Naji pleaded guilty to the charge in February 2018.

Brooklyn: Muslim Woman Who Helped ISIS Gets 4 Years, But Will Be Out in 18 Months

With credit for time served, Sinmyah Amera Caesar will end up only serving about 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to charges accusing her of using social media to help recruit IS fighters under the nom de guerre “Umm Nutella.” She had also admitted violating a cooperation agreement with the government a — betrayal that infuriated prosecutors.

Illinois: Bosnian Muslim refugee and mother of 4  jailed for sending money, supplies to ISIS

Mediha Medy Salkicevic, a/k/a Medy Ummuluna, a/k/a Bosna Mexico, 39, was sentenced to 78 months in prison for conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.

Salkicevic, aka Medy Ummuluna and Bosna Mexico, espoused the ISIS philosophy that infidels should be killed and once said that unbelievers should be buried alive.

At the time of her arrest, she was working for an air cargo company at Chicago O'Hare Airport...

Illinois: Two Muslim converts convicted of aiding Islamic State (ISIS)

Joseph D. Jones and Edward Schimenti proudly waved a terrorist flag during a photo at a Lake Michigan park in Zion, had plotted to attack the Navy’s main U.S. training center near North Chicago and once had their eyes on planting an ISIS flag atop the White House.

Now Jones and Schimenti, both 37, have been found guilty of providing material support to ISIS.

Indiana: Yemeni Muslim who tried to join Islamic State terrorists gets 8 years in prison

U.S. District Court Judge Sarah Evans Barker handed down the 100-month sentence Friday afternoon in the case against 21-year-old Akram Musleh, U.S. Attorney Josh Minkler announced.

He admitted in the plea agreement that from about April 2016 through June 21, 2016, he offered himself to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, also known as IS, knowing it was a “designated foreign terrorist organization.”

Pittsburgh: Syrian Muslim Refugee Arrested for Planning Jihad Attack on Christian Church

Mustafa Mousab Alowemer, 21, a resident of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was arrested today based on a federal complaint charging him with one count of attempting to provide material support and resources to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a designated foreign terrorist organization, and two counts of distributing information relating to an explosive, destructive device, or weapon of mass destruction in relation to his plan to attack a church in Pittsburgh.

“Court documents show Mustafa Alowemer planned to attack a church in the name of ISIS, which could have killed or injured many people...”

Ohio: Jordanian Muslim Immigrant Sentenced to 15 Years for Trying to Join Islamic State (ISIS)

A Dayton, Ohio man was sentenced today in U.S. District Court to 180 months in prison and 25 years of supervised release for attempting, and conspiring, to join the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). 

Laith Waleed Alebbini, 28, was convicted following a bench trial in November and December 2018 before U.S. District Judge Walter H. Rice.

Alebbini attempted, and conspired, to provide material support and resources to ISIS in the form of personnel, namely himself.

Alebbini, a citizen of Jordan and a U.S. legal permanent resident, was arrested by the FBI on April 26, 2017, at the Cincinnati/Kentucky International Airport, as he approached the TSA security checkpoint.

South Carolina: Muslim - twice convicted for attempts to join ISIS and kill Americans - gets 20-year prison sentence

A federal judge has sentenced a South Carolina man who tried to join ISIS to 20 years in prison.

Zakaryia Abdin, 20, pleaded guilty in September 2018. The Ladson man was arrested in March 2017.

New York: Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant arrested in Times Square terror plot

Ashiqul Alam was arrested Thursday after arranging through an undercover agent to buy a pair of semiautomatic pistols with obliterated serial numbers, prosecutors said. Police Commissioner James O’Neill said that development was “a clear indicator of (Alam’s) intent to move his plot forward.”

The defendant, a legal resident born in Bangladesh, moved to the U.S. as a child about 12 years ago...

He talked about wanting to “shoot down” gays, referring to them with a slur; using a “rocket launcher, like a huge one,” to cause havoc at the World Trade Center; and obtaining an enhanced driver’s license so he could walk onto a military base and “blow it up,” the documents said.

Illinois: Muslim Arrested for Threatening to Bomb Aurora Casino for Allah

A recently released affidavit and search warrant claimed that 30-year-old Musatdin M. Muadinov,  while detained by police on Feb. 12, vowed to “pray to Allah” to “destroy the casino.” He further demanded to meet with President Donald Trump, saying that if his demands were not met, “we would all meet Allah,” according to the affidavit obtained by the Daily Herald.

Muadinov — who was dressed in what police described as “Muslim attire” when arrested — waived his right to remain silent.

More Jihad in America in June

Florida: Suspect sent bomb threats to judges ‘for cause of Islamic State’

Nebraska: Heavily armed Marine arrested trying to enter Air Force Base

Arizona: Muslim shared terror propaganda before attacking police officer

Brooklyn: Muslim in Jail for ISIS Support Pleads Guilty to Slashing Correctional Officer

South Carolina: Man who pledged allegiance to ISIS hid explosive device in teddy bear

Arizona: Witness in probe of 2015 Islamic jihad attack on free speech event convicted of lying to FBI

Libyan National Found Guilty of Terrorism Charges in 2012 Attack on U.S. Facilities in Benghazi

Iraqi Muslim who orchestrated jihad attack that killed 5 U.S. troops gets 26 years prison, then release to Canada

Immigration Jihad in America

Minnesota’s first Somali Muslim cop gets 12 years for murdering Australian woman

Minnesota: St. Paul’s first Somali Muslim city council member says criticizing his homophobic comments is… Islamophobic

New York: Brooklyn Mosque Blasts Islamic Call to Prayer to 20 Block Radius (VIDEO)

Somalis have Changed Minneapolis

New York: Thousands of Muslims take over two city blocks in Brooklyn to pray in the streets

Four Muslim ISIS suspects arrested in Nicaragua, likely headed for US

Islamization of America

Pennsylvania: 167-year-old Catasauqua church will become Islamic mosque

Pennsylvania: Former Easton church is now a Sunni mosque

Pennsylvania: Former daycare in residential Salisbury to become Muslim “community center”

Virginia: Residential home in Annandale to become a Muslim funeral home

Education Jihad in America

New Jersey Public School District to Students: “May Allah Continue to Shower You Love and Wisdom”

Maryland school fails Christian student for refusing Islamic prayer

New York: Cornell Univ. Muslim Students Demand More “Prayer Rooms”

Stanford administrators say advertising for conservative event threatens Muslim students

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Muslim Students Association: What Americans Need to Know

DOE Investigating Elite Colleges For Hiding Saudi, Qatari Cash from Regulators

Islamic Slavery & Sexual Jihad in America

Virginia: Three Muslim family members arrested for conspiracy, forced labor, and document servitude 

Detroit Imam: Wife-Beating Serves to Remind Her That She Misbehaved (VIDEO)

Dhimmitude in Elected Office

Trump Admin Sues Greyhound for Banning Muslim Driver from Wearing Full Length Islamic Robe 

Democrat majority passes defense authorization bill that funds transfer of remaining Gitmo jihadis to U.S.

Minnesota: City of Bloomington allows terror mosque to flout local laws (VIDEO)

Minnesota city council votes 5-0 to ditch Pledge of Allegiance (to avoid offending Muslims)

Diversity is our Strength Alert

Minnesota’s first Somali Muslim cop gets 12 years for murdering Australian woman

Minnesota: St. Paul’s first Somali Muslim city council member says criticizing his homophobic comments is… Islamophobic

Boston Police Dept’s First Muslim Captain Put On Administrative Leave Amid ‘Anti-Corruption’ Investigation

Minnesota: First Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar fined by state for unlawful use of campaign funds

Minnesota Muslim Rep. Ilhan Omar filed joint tax returns before she married husband

Fraud for Jihad

Connecticut: Muslim Grocery Store Worker Pleads Guilty in $3.2M Federal Food Stamp Fraud

Massachusetts: Muslim Restaurant Owner Pleads Guilty to Tax Fraud Conspiracy

That’s just what we had time to compile for just the month of June.

Far too many steps forward for the sharia, and only a few pushbacks, but worth noting:

New Jersey: School District Scraps Posters Calling upon “Allah” to “Shower” Students with Blessings After Threat of Lawsuit 

Rather Than Go to Trial, Terror-linked CAIR Settles with the Victims They Defrauded 

Tunisian Muslim who swore allegiance to ISIS removed from U.S.

New York: Albany mosque imam convicted of terrorism is deported back to Iraq It’s almost midnight and Americans are losing their first amendment rights to sharia supremacists and the big technology, media and politicians who support them.

Please share this report before it’s too late.

[securecheck360]

New Year Regulations that Employers Should Know Beforehand

The Year 2020 brings obligatory regulations both locally and nationwide for Employers to be aware of. Most notably, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) – the federal wage/hour law – will increase its pay package test to the “white collar” exemptions to approximately $35,000/year effective from January 1st. The Department of Labor (DOL), which is tasked with enforcing the FLSA, estimates 1.3 million currently exempt employees will be reclassified as nonexempt next year by its final rule.

Moreover, many states have enacted paid leave, background checks, drug testing, and non-compete legislation in the past year. As the New Year started, employers are accessing the next set of labor and employment laws and regulations they will face in the current year and beyond. However, as the New Year starts, employers should be sure to review overall state and federal compliance concerning employees, job categories, compensations, paid leave, job requirements, employee handbook language, and employee agreements.

As a conclusion, Securecheck360 would like to remind employers about certain changes that employers should consider while starting the year checklists.

1.      Confirm Number of Employees: Due to the latest changes in U.S. laws, both on a local and national level changes in an employer’s business may impact the regulations that apply to it. For instance, if the total number of employees reached 50 across all locations, it may have to comply with the new set of requirements. Employers should count their total number of employees to determine what laws are significant to them. Notable milestones to cross are 15, 20 and 50 employees (for instance, the Family Medical Leave Act applies to organizations with 50 or greater employees, Age Discrimination in Employment Act applies to private associations with 20 or more employees, and Title VII and the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to employers with 15 or more employees).

2.      Job Categories and Compensation: Job responsibilities, essential functions, and compensation can change throughout the year. Employers need to assess whether employees are properly categorized exempt vs non-exempt. In September 2019, the DOL increased minimum pay requirements for overtime exemptions for executives, administrative, and professional employees. Under the final ruling, the pay package level for these white-collar exemptions Increased from $23,660 per year ($455 per week) to $35,568 per year ($684 per week). The final ruling increases the annual compensation requirement for an employee to be considered a “highly compensated employee” and exempt from overtime from the current $100,000 per year to $107,432 per year. Employers must note that the highly compensated employee rule allows employers to use non-discretionary bonuses, incentive payments and commissions are rewarded at least annually to satisfy up to 10 percent of the basic salary level.

3.      Ensure Vacation and Leave Carryover: As employers finalize employees’ leave carryover and calculate vacation accordingly, they should also be sure to review local and state law’s regulating paid leave this year. More than six states and localities have enacted some type of paid leave laws to take effect in 2020. These states and local regulations affect a variety of employers, some applying to organizations with as few as 10 employees. Effective January 1, Nevada employers with 50 or more employees must provide employees with up to 40 hours of paid leave annually for any reason, with very few exemptions. Washington State has enacted a Paid Family Leave program that requires employers with 50 or more employees to pay a share of the state benefits program. Also, Washington employees are eligible to take up to 12 weeks of paid leave. These are only a few of the newly enacted paid leave laws that came into effect this year.

4.      Verify Notices and Posters: Employers must verify that they are up to date and have the latest versions of all the required posters and notices, especially in states and localities with new regulations that may impose additional posting requirements. For instance, New York State’s recent prohibition on discrimination against employees’ reproductive health decisions imposes employer notice requirements. The District of Columbia’s Paid Leave Act requires employers to post and maintain a notice to employees explaining the terms and conditions of their rights to paid leave benefits. These are the only two of several new posting requirements with which employers may be required to comply.

5.      Update Policies: Employee handbook policies should reflect your organization’s culture, expectations, and practices, as well as the current state of employment laws, starting this year. Among many common state and local trends related to discrimination, a few localities have joined California in enacting laws prohibiting employers from discriminating against racially specific hair bias. In addition to amendment of non-discrimination policies, anti-harassment, and dress code requirements, employers should also consider reviewing their grooming policies for prohibitions against natural hair, style, and textures, because these prohibitions may violate state laws.

6.      Guarantee Non-Compete Agreements Comply with Applicable State Laws: Employers should ensure non-compete agreements comply with any applicable state laws. For instance, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington have amended and enacted regulations on employee non-compete agreements. Oregon has amended its current regulation to now require employers to provide employees a signed copy of their non-compete agreement within 30 days of an employee’s termination. From the third week of January 2020, Rhode Island will prohibit employers from entering into non-compete agreements with certain employees, including non-exempt and those 18 or younger. In Washington, non-compete agreements with employees who make less than $100,000 per year are void from this January. Moreover, Washington has enacted a regulation creating a presumption that any agreement lasting 18 months or above is considered unenforceable.

Year start is a busy time for employers, but keeping up with these factors can help ensure a smoother start to the New Year.

[redlightreflux-blog]

Resistance/protest imagery in NCT’s Limitless MV: graffiti, Muhammad Ali, surveillance, arrest, complicity [analysis pt 1]

Man, so I’ve long thought the Rough version gets misunderstood as a faux-street, too-ugly-to-watch piece of low-res crap without either meaning or storyline. but I believe the MV and lyrics are full of nods to revolution, protest, and “fighting the unjust status quo” – let���s get started.

1. street graffiti as protest speech

What does protest look like? The “civil,” squeaky-clean-legal type can be voting in elections, donating to political parties, and in some countries and U.S. states, mass-assembling in public for “peaceful” demonstrations. Except sometimes people feel disenfranchised by all institutional modes of political participation. Resistance can also be illegal: violence, riots, obstructing traffic, trespassing on private property...and vandalism.

The MV begins with a blurry close-up horizontal pan across a wall of graffiti, and the boys are shown with aerosol spray cans again and again until the end – shaking them, painting with them, chilling with them in the background.

Right away, we’re faced with the puzzle of whether NCT are swaggering revolutionaries...or just angsty, privileged youths defacing public space to “rebel” against their "boring” lives. On one hand, it’s implied by the shabby warehouse littered with cheap goods – pizza boxes, a jumbo cheetos jar, posters taped over un-wallpapered walls- that they’re poor, maybe college students. Yet we see expensive luxury goods that look completely out of place: a glittering chandelier, iMacs, Sony camcorders, guitars, pro lighting kits, Doyoung’s audio mixing panel, the iPhones that they get caught on.

Are NCT 127 a gang that splurges on luxuries? Privileged college students who transplanted dorm items into an abandoned warehouse to film, edit, and produce an indie film? Or maybe they’re a resistance movement using graffiti “writing” as the only alternative media in a censored press, as El Salvador’s FMLN guerilla rebels used graffiti for recruitment, criticism of regime violence against protesters, and commemoration of their fallen from the 70s through the 90s against their brutal (US-backed) right-wing government?

I found NCT’s recurring use of camcorders to be strongly in favor of the (I think) intriguing resistance movement theory...but we’ll get to that later.

Graffiti can be a tool to alleviate boredom or gain fame (or a design career lmao), it can "beautify” urban spaces, and it can serve as gangs’ territory markers. But political graffiti is often the voice of the oppressed in cities where systemic poverty, economic and racial segregation, unemployment, crime, and police brutality ravage communities. In 1989, New York City and Los Angeles each spent over $50 million on graffiti cleanup, and other countries like Peru, Argentina, and Spain are also covered in graffiti that reflect the civil unrest among marginalized indigenous, labor, and student groups.

So is NCT hijacking or co-opting the protest speech of the oppressed? Or are they representing the resistance against injustice in the Limitless MV? I believe they’re consciously paying homage to revolutionaries and activists, as I’ll try to show below, despite the cocky Supreme outfits and sleek, pricey consumer tech.

2. homage to Muhammad Ali: the Greatest (1942-2016)

Who’s that on Mark’s shirt? Called “the Greatest,” the legendary Muhammad Ali was ranked the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time by Ring Magazine and The Associated Press, and the greatest athlete of the 20th century by Sports Illustrated. Ali won gold at the 1960 Olympics at age 18, and is still the world’s only three-time lineal heavyweight champion. He was also a civil rights activist, anti-Vietnam War protester, and a prolific philanthropist.

Muhammad Ali is famous for his 1966 refusal to fight in the then-popular Vietnam War, which he was arrested, stripped of his boxing titles, and charged with draft evasion for – the Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 1971, even though my President hilariously offered to pardon him just days ago. Ali publicly stated:

Today, Ali has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, two Academy Award-winning films based on his achievements, and has graced Time Magazine 5x, and Sports Illustrated 37 times. But his activism antagonized wealthy white America long before he became the mainstream icon that he is today.

Muhammad Ali’s protest to a then-popular war cost him 4 of his prime years as an athlete and landed him in jail, so it’s maybe not surprising to learn that the NSA’s “Minaret” program and FBI’s COINTELPRO operations had been illegally spying on him for years. In 1971, an (also illegal lmao) civilian raid on a Pennsylvania FBI office exposed over 1000 FBI records of surveillance, disinformation, and infiltration plans against civil rights and anti-war activists, and most damningly, of their 1969 assassination of 21-year-old Illinois Black Panthers chairman Fred Hampton in our boy Johnny’s hometown, Chicago.

I mention Fred Hampton and the FBI’s COINTELPRO (COunter INTELligence PROgram) because the whole Limitless MV is steeped in this...unsettling, sinister, you’re-under-surveillance discomfort that many civil rights activists felt in their resistance activities through at least the 50s and 60s. In many shots, NCT look like deer frozen in the headlights, caught off guard by the camera.

3. surveillance of activists & revolutionaries

Besides the general feeling of paranoia about being watched, there’s also shots that look straight-up taken without NCT’s consent or knowledge, as if by a secret camera, spy drone, or informant.

Which leads to the question: if NCT are just poseur revolutionaries partying with camcorders and Supreme streetwear in a warehouse, what are they so terrified of? Why do the members look scared out of their minds, as if for their lives? What danger are they constantly on the lookout for? what are they trying to hide?

I actually think this is the most important pattern to catch from the Limitless MV, even more important than the recurring imagery of resistance and protest that I’ve been writing a whole long-ass post about. If NCT fans remember nothing else about this MV, I hope they’ll remember the members’ reactions of fear, defensiveness, and hostility upon suddenly sensing the camera’s presence in each scene. Limitless is an MV with lots of “swagger” and lots of moments where NCT smiles knowingly for the camera, but there’s also these moments where they’re freaked out by the sudden presence of the camera.

Even if you don’t buy the “revolutionaries” theory, it’s still clear that there’s something profoundly, deeply wrong and disturbing going on in much of the VHS camcorder clips.

4. civil disobedience & riots –> arrests

Alright, so I’ve always thought the YouTube thumbnail for the Rough version looked like Taeil, Jaehyun, Doyoung, and Johnny getting arrested or “frisked” by police, and not just showing off their sculpted side profiles lmao. The image of an apprehended person being told to “put your hands up!” or “get on the ground!” or “put your hands up against the wall!” is burned into public consciousness.

Police want to check that the person is unarmed, or unable to reach for a weapon, hence the order to keep palms spread in plain sight.

As you can guess, unpopular peaceful protests are often labeled “riots” and result in arrests, like in the Sir William George “riot” of 1969 in our boy Mark’s own Canada, even if participants only started throwing objects to prevent their forcible removal by armed police upon their arrival.

Several other scenes also struck me as drawing heavily from the imagery of arrested protesters: while I can’t catch the hangul in the background signs (can you?), I get the vibes of police photo lineups and “mugshots” from this shot:

At least, I get that vibe from Doyoung and Taeil on the right. It’s made more discomforting because why the hell is Jaehyun upside down? he looks like he’s being...tortured? and why is Johnny holding him in that position? The boys look like they’re aware they’re being photographed, then catalogued.

In the final few shots, NCT are shown huddled together in poor lighting and throwing sparkler fireworks in arcs that remind me of “armed” protesters throwing rocks, bottles, gas canisters, or molotov cocktails at riot police.

The pose struck by someone throwing a long-range projectile looks the same no matter what the protest is against: a right-wing government, settler colonialism, locally harmful infrastructure like pipelines or military bases, strike-breaking, austerity, police violence, martial law, a verdict, state corruption, high-profile arrests and convictions, food shortages and unemployment under a left-wing government, an inauguration, etc. Anonymous graffiti artist Banksy even produced this meme-famous piece riffing on this iconic pose:

The images above are from Gaza, the Stonewall Inn in New York City, Paris, and Athens – and there’s plenty more to show from Baltimore, Standing Rock Indian Reservation, and outside of the U.S. too. But back to the act of NCT throwing ~lit~ fireworks into the air: how do we know if they’re punks who are celebrating or protesters who are rioting?

Since there’s never anyone else shown in the MV except NCT, we can’t tell for sure. But I’m inclined to take the maybe-protesting shots along with the maybe-arrested scene and the maybe-police-photo-lineup scene as belonging to one theme that also explains the graffiti, Muhammad Ali / boxing references, and the pervasive fear of being watched: the theme of resistance.

Also, intriguingly, remember how it was Taeil, Johnny, Doyoung, and Jaehyun who were maybe-arrested and maybe-photographed in a police lineup? Earlier, these guys jostle each others’ shoes in a circle, as if sealing a mutual pact with a secret handshake. Later, the same four are shown arrested.

By the way, there’s a couple of secret handshakes in this MV: gang signs? college boys antics? the identification codes of a legit resistance movement? no one knows.

If we believe Limitless to be the (sketchily told) story of NCT’s resistance, we might speculate that TI, JN, DY, and JH took mutually agreed-upon actions that resulted in their arrest and detention. Still, all of NCT lights their sparklers together, and all of NCT throws them into the air. What do you think?

It also makes you curious: what could they have done? Staged a sit-in? a walkout? a strike? a march? a riot? sprayed graffiti and got caught? or maybe, as I’ll half-seriously propose in Pt 2, they organized a forbidden film screening?

4. 🙈🙉🙊 & “monkey see, monkey do”

There’s a couple of old sayings about monkeys, human behavior, and morality. In the above shot, Yuta records as Mark arranges his body into the gold gorilla statue’s crouching position, and we’re shown this footage in the next scene.

That gold gorilla statue...can actually connect us to more meaningful interpretations of the MV. We see Mark bizarrely, weirdly, almost disturbingly, mimicking the position of the primate with great sensitivity to detail – why is it so unsettling? For me, it’s because he looks almost brainwashed or exploited while doing it. Mark is meticulously copying the example of an inanimate object, and he doesn’t laugh or show signs of having fun either. In fact, he looks almost anxious about messing up.

Later on, we see a highly symbolic shot of all nine boys placing their hands over their eyes, covering their sight as if to say, “see no evil.”

There’s no practical reason for all of NCT to cover their eyes indoors, so it’s not literal, it’s a metaphor. In Western culture, the act of deliberately impairing one’s sight evokes the idiom “to turn a blind eye.” That is, when a person knows evil is happening but doesn’t want to fix it, they can pretend the evil doesn’t exist by covering their eyes so they “see no evil.”

By the way, Kim Namjoon recently shared in a Billboard interview that BTS’s Fake Love choreo references the old “three wise monkeys” saying: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

Here, Winwin covers Taeyong’s mouth while they both steadily meet the camera’s gaze. Their stillness and the camera’s smooth zoom in HD, in such contrast from previous low-res scenes that had almost spastically shaky camera motion, emphasizes this setup as another metaphor, instead of a literal action taken by characters within the story of Limitless.

NCT is trying to send us a message in this scene, it seems: that leader Taeyong, and thus maybe all of them, are being silenced for whatever reason and can’t speak the truth. They can look us dead in the eye, but there’s certain things they can’t say out loud –maybe because of the offscreen danger that keeps them living in fear.

I’ll add that I believe the “see no evil” part is meant to evoke the unsettling idea that people, especially youth, are ignoring the present-day evil or injustice in their own countries – the complicity of their willful blindness. The recurring lyrics “wake me u-up” and “open your eyes”( 눈을 떠 봐 오) in the chorus reinforce this association. Back to Mark mimicking the gold gorilla, the old pidgin saying “monkey see, monkey do” refers to the act of learning or mimicry without either knowledge or concern for the consequences.

Is this a critique of youth uncritically adopting the beliefs of their parents and mainstream society without thinking about the systemic injustices they condone and perpetuate? I think the answer depends on the viewer’s interest in politics and comfort with interpreting works that haven’t been explicitly explained by a creator lmao.

conclusion & lyrics.

I think I’ll stop Part 1 here lolol, since there’s still so, so much left. The plan is for Part 2 to introduce the origins of Third World Cinema and the Korean Independent Filmmakers Association (KIFA) as possible influences but, most definitely, amplifiers for the images of resistance used in the MV. Part 2 will address the...uh, limitless cinematic storytelling styles used in the Rough version, and the effects of editing them together into one MV to tell one story.

I also super-duper recommend @seasquared​‘s “Direct Address” essay for a more complete idea of the viewer’s gaze as intruder into NCT’s world – though I sort of interpret the boys’ unpreparedness for the camera’s presence as more of a metaphor for resistance movements’ existential paranoia at being “caught” by the establishment than as a critique of fans’ objectification of idols:

Oh baby it’s you It’s only the beginning, the limitless me || 이제 시작이야 무한의 나 From the start of the East to the end of the West || 동의 처음과 서의 끝 쪽부터 The light gets stronger || 빛은 암흑 속 퍼질 As it spreads through the darkness || 수록 강해져 가 Open your eyes || 눈을 떠 봐 오 My song is getting louder || 점점 커져가 나의 노래가 Did you see? That hot and explosive world? || 봤니 뜨겁고 터질듯한 세계 Can you hear? We have become one || 들리니 우리는 하나가 돼 Baby I don’t want nobody but you

[trans from colorcodedlyrics.com]

If we choose to interpret “the light” as a revolutionary movement, which my eagerly politics-following ass thinks is a meaningful exercise, the lyrics and MV might suddenly start to paint a story of NCT as underground revolutionaries who meet and fall in love with a new friend, eventually begging the friend to join them in the resistance.

I absolutely love it – Limitless then simultaneously becomes a greasy recruitment message (”baby I don’t want nobody but you 😘”) and a desperate plea for a fellow citizen to join the cause against oppression. (”open your eyes”) But it’s also a passionate love song, and I’m a total hoe for the scorchingly intimate hunger the lyrics convey. The obvious “thirsty, thirsty, f-or love” bit aside, the speaker in the lyrics is urgently seeking intimacy: both a personal connection, and a sense of belonging within something greater than himself.

I need a connection, I want it like crazy I need you I need something to make us feel each other completely I need you

Help me so I can do well Sometimes, I get lost Eventually, we are all connected You know this Like finding a big ocean At the end of a desert Your existence is limitless

Change the heavy world Look how free we are, so free Inside, only you are allowed The one to take my heart, that is you

I think it’s interesting to ask: is Limitless more of a love song that borrows its ferocity from the metaphor of revolution, or a revolutionary manifesto that amplifies its fervor with the universal passion and frustration of youth?

I think it’s similar to asking if the MV is more of an “aesthetics” moodfilm that boosts its own glamor by appropriating the imagery of resistance movements (graffiti writers), activists (Muhammad Ali), and hardships (arrest)...or if the MV is itself a story of resistance against oppression, and only dons the gloss of expensive streetwear to add a spirit of youthful cockiness and anti-establishment swagger to the cause.

But in reality, aren’t things more complex than that? The spirit of any revolution and the passions and frustrations of its youth have always fed and strengthened each other, I think. It feels only honest and hard-hitting that a song about youth-led revolution would also be a hungry, impatient love song.

I hope you enjoyed reading this – I’ll die of joy if you decide you want to comment, discuss, message, or interact with me or other fans in whatever way about any of this!

~ masterlist link ~

[shirlleycoyle]

Amazon Unlawfully Confiscated Union Literature, NLRB Finds

Amazon illegally prohibited an employee from giving workers pro-union literature, confiscated that literature, and gave workers the impression that their organizing activity was being surveilled at the company's Staten Island fulfillment center in New York, according to National Labor Relations Board charges and other documentation reviewed by Motherboard. 

An NLRB investigation found that Amazon illegally prohibited Connor Spence, a Staten Island employee involved in union organizing, from distributing pro-union literature in a break room on May 16—and then confiscated the literature—also in violation of U.S. labor law, according to evidence provided by the NLRB to the union’s attorney. 

Connor Spence, a 25-year-old warehouse worker in Amazon's JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island, who filed the unfair labor practice charge, told Motherboard that on May 16, he was in the break room distributing leaflets about unions and copies of a notice that Amazon had to post in a Queens warehouse for violating workers’ union rights, when an Amazon security guard approached him and told him he did not have permission to distribute the leaflets.

“He took the union literature away and wouldn’t give it back,” Spence told Motherboard. “I filed the charge so that there’s accountability in place that prevents them from doing this in the future.” 

Following the defeat of a high-profile union drive at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama this April, Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island have been busy organizing their own independent union, known as Amazon Labor Union. 

“Amazon is very obviously anti-union. They cross the line a lot when it comes to stopping workers from unionizing,” Spence said. “Unfortunately labor law isn’t very strong in our country, but I’m hoping Amazon cares about its image and these stains on their record.” 

The finding comes on the same day as an NLRB officer in Alabama released a report recommending the rerun of a union election in an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. The Bessemer campaign marked the highest profile effort to date to unionize an Amazon warehouse in the United States, and inspired groups of Amazon workers around the country to take steps toward unionizing. The NLRB’s report on the Bessemer election found that Amazon illegally discouraged labor organizing, in part by pushing post office officials to install a mailbox outside the warehouse where workers were urged to drop their mail-in ballots, which an NLRB officer wrote “destroyed the laboratory conditions and justifies a second election.”

In recent months, Amazon has spread anti-union messaging similar to that used in the Bessemer union drive at its Staten Island warehouse with text messages that said “Don't be misled by union organizers wearing Amazon vests,” signage in bathrooms, monitors throughout its warehouse.

The NLRB investigation also found that Amazon illegally created the impression of surveillance of workers’ organizing activity at JFK8 on May 24.

Most weeks, large groups of workers have gathered for union barbecues on the sidewalk outside the warehouse with hotdogs, hamburgers, baked ziti, and seafood mac and cheese. Spence said that on May 24, a group of pro-union workers was holding one of these barbecues under a couple of tents, when a security guard approached from a nearby parking lot and held up her phone to take photos of the organizers. Motherboard reviewed a photo of the security guard taking photos. 

Amazon Labor Union

Under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, it is illegal for employers to interfere with or retaliate against workers involved in union activity, including by surveilling or creating the impression of surveillance of union organizing. During the past year, the NLRB has repeatedly found evidence that Amazon has illegally violated these laws. 

“The penalties for violating the [NLRA] are meaningless,” said John Logan, an expert on the union avoidance industry at San Francisco State University. “[For Amazon], it’s the cost of doing business. You can make a case that Amazon falls into the category of the worst offenders, a poster child for labor law violations.”

In Spence’s case, the NLRB has made a finding of merit to the charges, and has indicated that it plans to issue a formal complaint. A finding of merit is not an official decision, but a crucial step in an ongoing proceeding. Amazon will now have the opportunity to settle. If Amazon does not agree to do so, then the NLRB will schedule a hearing before an administrative law judge. 

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment about Spence’s charges and its anti-union activity in Staten Island, but told Motherboard regarding the election in Bessemer, “Our employees had a chance to be heard during a noisy time when all types of voices were weighing into the national debate, and at the end of the day, they voted overwhelmingly in favor of a direct connection with their managers and the company. Their voice should be heard above all else, and we plan to appeal to ensure that happens.”

Amazon Unlawfully Confiscated Union Literature, NLRB Finds syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[architectnews]

All Architects Must Be Covid-19 Architects

How the Georgia Senate January 5th election will affect global architects, President Biden Architecture, US Building News

All Architects Today Must Be Covid-19 Architects

Historic US Election Review of Architectural Aspects: Architectural Column by Joel Solkoff, PA, USA Dec 21, 2020

Architecture under President Biden Part III

Joel Solkoff’s Column Vol. VI, Number 6

Reproduced by permission toybox tech; available as a poster https://ift.tt/2J9bkdV

“You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” — Abraham Lincoln

Representative Marcia Fudge, Democrat, Eighth Congressional District of Ohio. Photo in the public domain

No New Housing: Impact of the Trump 2020 HUD Budget

On March 11, 2019, the Trump Administration released its Fiscal Year 2020 Budget Summary. The White House is proposing more than $9 billion in cuts to critical housing programs. The House of Representatives FY 2020 Spending Bill would increase the funding levels of those programs by more than $3 Billion.

Selected ProgramsFY19 FinalFY20 Trump ($/% Change)House FY20 ($/% Change)Community Development Block Grant (CDBG)$3.365 B$-3.365 B / -100%$0.235 B / 6.98%Public Housing Capital Fund$2.775 B$-2.775 B / -100%$0.08 B / 2.88%Public Housing Operating Fund$4.653 B$-1.79 B / -38.47%$0.1 B / 2.15%HOME Investment Partnerships Program$1.25 B$-1.25 B / -100%$0.5 B / 40%Housing Choice Voucher Renewals$20.313 B$-0.197 B / -0.97%$1.087 B / 5.35%Section 202 Housing for the Elderly$0.678 B$-0.034 B / -5.01%$0.125 B / 18.44%Section 811 Housing For Persons with Disabilities$0.184 B$-0.027 B / -14.67%$0.075 B / 40.76%Project-Based Rental Assistance$11.747 B$0.274 B / 2.33%$0.843 B / 7.18%Total For Select Programs$44.965 B$-9.164 B / -20.38%$3.045 B / 6.77%

Thank you www.affordable housing.com

DATELINE Saturday December 19, 2020. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, New York. I have moved to New York City, where I was born. to escape the inpending death toll rural Lycoming County will experience within the next few weeks. After the virus is controlled, I will return to beautiful Williamsport Pennsylvania and its architectural treasures on February 14th. I am currently in the hospital to take care of a series of too long neglected health problems anticipating that I will receive the coronavirus vaccine shortly.

I took this self portrait in June 2015 of the less than friendly disability entrance to Trump’s International luxury hotel and apartment condominium complex at Columbus Circle. Following the principles of unversal design would have been preferable if Trump’s de facto instructions were not based on stairs and hoopla.. I waited an unnecesryily long time for the elevator and became soaked as a consequenc. Hell of a way to treat a cancer patient returning to my friend’s place after therapy. This is how The New York Times described the building in April, 1996:  “Fancier than Trump Tower. Glitzier than the Trump Taj Mahal. Pricier than Trump Palace or Trump Parc. Its glossy brochure trumpets Trump International as ‘the most important new address in the world.’

How the outcome of two senate races in Georgia will affect global architecture commisions

Let us start the analysis of the Georgia January 5th election with the big picture.

The big picture: As of yesrerday, 313,797 children, women and men have died from the crnavirus according to the Centers for Disease Control base in Atlanta. On the glass is half filled for architects, take joy from President elect Joe Biden’s selection of Rep. Marcia Fudge to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Here is Rep. Fudge from her official website: “Congresswoman Marcia L. Fudge is a committed public servant who brings a hard-working, problem-solving spirit to Congress and to the task of creating jobs, protecting safety net programs, and improving access to quality public education, health care and healthy foods.  First elected in 2008, she represents the people of the 11th Congressional District of Ohio.

Congresswoman Fudge serves on the Committee on House Administration, House Committee on Agriculture and House Committee on Education and Labor.  She is the Chair of the Committee on House Administration Subcommittee on Elections and Chair of the Committee on Agriculture Subcommittee on Nutrition, Oversight and Department Operations.  She serves on the Subcommittees on Conservation and Forestry (Agriculture), Civil Rights and Human Services (Education & Labor) and Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions (Education & Labor). In the 115th Congress, the Congresswoman served on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce Subcommittees on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education and on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions.  She also served as Ranking Member on the House Committee on Agriculture Subcommittee on Conservation and Forestry and a member on the Subcommittee on Nutrition.  She is a member of several Congressional Caucuses and past Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. ++++

++++ Congresswoman Fudge consistently fights for voter protection, equitable access to a quality education from preschool through post-secondary programs, child nutrition, food stamp (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) recipients, access to locally grown, healthy foods, fair labor practices, and civil and human rights, among other issues. Additionally, she remains a steadfast advocate to strengthen and preserve Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Congresswoman Fudge has served the people of Ohio for more than three decades, beginning with the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office.  She was later elected as the first African American and first female mayor of Warrensville Heights, Ohio, where she led the city in shoring up a sagging retail base and providing new residential construction. Congresswoman Fudge earned her bachelor’s degree in business from The Ohio State University and law degree from the Cleveland State University Cleveland-Marshall School of Law. She is a Past National President of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., and a member of its Greater Cleveland Alumnae Chapter. Congresswoman Fudge’s work ethic, problem-solving approach, and ability to build collaborative relationships have earned her a reputation among her colleagues in Washington and at home as an insightful leader and knowledgeable legislator. As a dedicated public servant, she begins each morning with a firm promise “to do the people’s work.” It is this simple philosophy that defines Congresswoman Fudge as a Member of substance and character who always keeps her promise.” ####

Our Delusional President Trump flew to Georgia this week to campaign for Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler

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Senator David Perdue, Incumbent Republican

Wikipedia – David Alfred Perdue Jr. (/pərˈduː/; born December 10, 1949) is an American businessman and politician. A member of the Republican Party, he has served as the senior United States Senator for Georgia since 2015.

After 12 years as a management consultant, Perdue became the senior vice president for Reebok. He later joined PillowTex, a North Carolina textile company.[2][3] He subsequently served as CEO of Dollar General.

Perdue ran for U.S. Senate in 2014, defeating Democratic nominee Michelle Nunn. He is running for reelection in 2020 against Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff. As neither candidate received more than 50% of the vote in the November 3 election, they face each other in a January 2021 runoff election. After the November election, Perdue called for the resignation of Georgia’s top elections official and claimed without evidence that there were unspecified “failures” in the election. He later supported a lawsuit by Trump allies seeking to overturn the election results.[5]

Perdue was linked to the 2020 Congressional insider trading scandal for allegations of STOCK Act violations. The allegations arose after he sold stocks before the 2020 stock market crash using knowledge speculated to be from a closed Senate meeting After reviews by the Senate Ethics Committee and the U.S. Department of Justice, Perdue was not charged with any crimes. The Justice Department closed its inquiry in mid-2020.

Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff

N.B. Two years ago I doanted $18 to Jon Ossoff’s campaign for the House of Representatives from Georogia. The election was to fill a vacant seat that happened when Re. Azar left thye House to become a an awful Secretary of Health and Humman Services for President Trump. The number 18 has spritual signifcance because the Herew alphabet applies numbers to lwtters. The Hebrew word for life [chai] is 18. In synagogues, i ndoners add 18 to their conytibutons to their synagogue. Also works for causes. In 1952 and 1956 my mother donated $18 to the Presidential campaigns of Adkai Stervenson.Photo in the public domaine.

Wikipedia: Jon Ossoff: “Thomas Jonathan Ossoff (/ˈɒsɒf/; born February 16, 1987) is an American politician and investigative journalist. He is the Democratic Party nominee for the 2020 U.S. Senate election in Georgia, running against Republican incumbent Senator David Perdue. Neither candidate reached the 50% threshold on the November 3 general election, triggering a runoff election on January 5, 2021.

Ossoff was the Democratic nominee in the historically expensive 2017 special election for Georgia’s 6th congressional district, which had long been considered a Republican stronghold. After finishing first, but without a majority in the all-party primary election, he lost the runoff with 48.2% of the vote to Republican Karen Handel‘s 51.8%. Since 2013, Ossoff has been managing director and chief executive officer of Insight TWI, a London-based investigative television production company that works with reporters to create documentaries about corruption in foreign countries. ####

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e-architect’s Architects for Change Webinar Sereis resumes Valentine’s Day February 14 2021

Stay tuned to our calendar for details

Coming soon to Joel’s problem, further analysis of the Georgia senate race and the impact of its outcome on the country at large.

My editors beckon: “All right, stop writing, Joel.”

Isabelle Lomholt and Adrian Welch, Editors at e-architect Joel Solkhoff, PA, USA: Selfie, Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, USA Please feel free to phone me at US 570-772-4909 or send an e-mail jsolkoff@gmail.com Copyright © 2020 by Joel Solkoff. All rights reserved.

The firm produced BBC investigations about ISISwar crimes and death squads in East Africa. Ossoff was also involved in producing a documentary about the staging of a play in Sierra Leone.

’Joel’s previous article Nov 12, 2020 Architecture under the Biden Presidency Sen. Kelly Loeffler And Raphael Warnock Face Off In Georgia Senate Runoff Debate – NBC News NOW – YouTube The election is on January 5, 2020.

Architecture Columns

Architecture Columns – chronological list Special Wooden Floors for Renzo Piano’s Whitney in New York New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Queens Library Renzo Piano’s Whitney Neighborhood Detroit Dying Special Report Disability-Access Architecture

US Architecture

American Architecture American Architects Joel Solkoff’s Column Vol. IV, Number 2 Joel Solkoff’s Column Vol. IV, Number 1 Special Wooden Floors for the Whitney Detroit will be a Trendy City Belt and Suspenders Routine – Joel Solkoff’s Column Joel Solkoff’s Column Volume II No. 6 Joel Solkoff’s Column, Vol.II, Number 7 Comments / photos for the Architecture under President Biden – page welcome

The post All Architects Must Be Covid-19 Architects appeared first on e-architect.

[newstfionline]

Headlines

Pandemic retools diplomacy as world leaders gather virtually (AP) With COVID-19 still careening across the planet, the annual gathering of its leaders in New York will be replaced this year by a global patchwork of prerecorded speeches, another piece of upheaval in a deeply divided world turned topsy-turvy by a pandemic with no endpoint in sight. As U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres put it: “The COVID-19 pandemic is a crisis unlike any in our lifetimes, and so this year’s General Assembly session will be unlike any other, too.” This is the first time in the 75-year history of the United Nations that there will be no in-person meeting. Gone will be the accompanying traffic jams, street closures for VIP motorcades, stepped-up security to protect leaders and noisy crowds in the halls of the sprawling United Nations complex overlooking New York’s East River. Only one diplomat from each of the U.N.’s 193 member nations will be allowed into the vast General Assembly hall. All will be socially distanced and masked. World leaders are not barred from coming to speak in person. But presidents, prime ministers, monarchs and ministers travel with large entourages and at a time of pandemic and quarantine requirements, including in New York City, the General Assembly members agreed that crowds needed to be avoided.

U.N. chief says no action on U.N. Iran sanctions due to ‘uncertainty’ (Reuters) United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the Security Council on Saturday he cannot take any action on a U.S. declaration that all U.N. sanctions on Iran had been reimposed because “there would appear to be uncertainty” on the issue. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last month that he triggered a 30-day process at the council leading to the return of U.N. sanctions on Iran on Saturday evening that would also stop a conventional arms embargo on Tehran from expiring on Oct. 18. But 13 of the 15 Security Council members say Washington’s move is void because Pompeo used a mechanism agreed under a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, which the United States quit in 2018. “There would appear to be uncertainty whether or not the process ... was indeed initiated and concomitantly whether or not the (sanctions) terminations ... continue in effect,” Guterres wrote in a letter to the council, seen by Reuters. “It is not for the Secretary-General to proceed as if no such uncertainty exists,” he said.

Ricin Is Said to Have Been Sent to White House (NYT) Letters sent in recent days to the White House and to local law enforcement agencies in Texas contained the lethal substance ricin, and investigators are trying to determine whether other envelopes with the toxin were sent through the postal system, a law enforcement official briefed on the matter said on Saturday. The letter to the White House, which was addressed to President Trump, was intercepted, as were the letters to a detention facility and a sheriff’s office in Texas. Ricin, which is part of the waste produced when castor oil is made, has no known antidote.

Southern California wildfire grows, burns nature center (AP) The destruction wrought by a wind-driven wildfire in the mountains northeast of Los Angeles approached 156 square miles (404 square kilometers) Sunday, burning structures, homes and a nature center in a famed Southern California wildlife sanctuary in foothill desert communities. Firefighters were, however, able to defend Mount Wilson, which overlooks greater Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Mountains and has a historic observatory founded more than a century ago and numerous broadcast antennas serving Southern California, from the Bobcat Fire. The Bobcat Fire started Sept. 6 and has already doubled in size over the last week. It is 15% contained as teams attempt to determine the scope of the destruction in the area about 50 miles (80 kilometers) northeast of downtown LA. Thousands of residents in the foothill communities of the Antelope Valley were ordered to evacuate Saturday as winds pushed the flames into Juniper Hills.

Sweden spared surge of virus cases but many questions remain (AP) A train pulls into the Odenplan subway station in central Stockholm, where morning commuters without masks get off or board before settling in to read their smartphones. Whether on trains or trams, in supermarkets or shopping malls—places where face masks are commonly worn in much of the world—Swedes go about their lives without them. When most of Europe locked down their populations early in the pandemic by closing schools, restaurants, gyms and even borders, Swedes kept enjoying many freedoms. The relatively low-key strategy captured the world’s attention, but at the same time it coincided with a per capita death rate that was much higher than in other Nordic countries. Now, as infection numbers surge again in much of Europe, the country of 10 million people has some of the lowest numbers of new coronavirus cases—and only 14 virus patients in intensive care. Whether Sweden’s strategy is succeeding, however, is still very uncertain. Its health authorities, and in particular chief epidemiologist Dr. Anders Tegnell, keep repeating a familiar warning: It’s too early to tell, and all countries are in a different phase of the pandemic.

Hackers leak personal data of 1,000 Belarusian police on weekend of protests (Reuters) Anonymous hackers leaked the personal data of 1,000 Belarusian police officers in retaliation for a crackdown on street demonstrations against veteran President Alexander Lukashenko, as protesters geared up for another mass rally on Sunday. “As the arrests continue, we will continue to publish data on a massive scale,” said a statement that was distributed by the opposition news channel Nexta Live on the messaging app Telegram. “No one will remain anonymous even under a balaclava.” Security forces have detained thousands of people to tackle a wave of protests and strikes, their faces often obscured by masks, balaclavas or riot helmets. Some protesters have physically torn off the masks of some officers.

In South Korea, Covid-19 Comes With Another Risk: Online Bullies (NYT) The scandal that riveted South Korea’s online busybodies began when Kim Ji-seon checked into a beachside condominium in February. A 29-year-old office worker planning a June wedding, she had nothing more salacious in mind than meeting with members of her church to organize a youth program. Then Ms. Kim tested positive for the coronavirus—and the details of her life became grist for South Korea’s growing culture of cyberbullying and misinformation. Using sophisticated digital tools, the South Korean authorities publicly revealed Ms. Kim’s age, gender, church name and recent whereabouts. Extrapolating from these details, online trolls accused Ms. Kim of belonging to a religious cult. They matched her itinerary with that of another church member who had tested positive and concluded she was cheating on her fiancé. “I was flabbergasted,” said Ms. Kim, now 30, in an interview. “How could they make fun of people who were struggling for their lives? But with an IV stuck in my arm, I could not do much about it from my hospital bed.” Governments around the world have grappled with misinformation and outright lies about the coronavirus. In South Korea, that struggle has become uniquely personal. South Korea owed much of its relative success in finding those infected with the virus to its aggressive use of surveillance camera footage, smartphone data and credit card transaction records. But it has also empowered trolls, harassers and other 21st-century scourges.

Singapore—a poster child for globalism—is taking a nativist turn (Washington Post) When Internet users circulated the LinkedIn profiles of ethnic Indian employees at Singapore-based financial institutions and accused them of stealing jobs, Rindo Ramankutty quickly set his account to private mode. The 36-year-old Indian national has lived in this majority-Chinese city-state since 2011 and feels at home. But over the past decade, the tech worker has witnessed increasing vitriol online against his compatriots. Although officials have condemned the abuse, a thread of nativism has entered mainstream discourse as Singapore, which has ambitions of supplanting politically troubled Hong Kong as Asia’s financial hub, takes a hard look at how open it wants to keep its borders. Unlike in Europe and the United States, where immigration debates generally revolve around undocumented or low-wage labor, middle-income professionals are the source of anxiety here. The perceived number of Indians in finance “is particularly sensitive to Singaporeans who want to work in those jobs,” said Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh, a sociopolitical commentator who has been critical of what he calls Singapore’s “growth at all costs” policies. He added that many countries would face a larger backlash if their middle-class populations had similarly high concentrations of expatriates. Racism is undoubtedly a factor behind some of the nativism. About 49 percent of ethnic Indians in 2019 said they faced discrimination in the housing rental market. Nonetheless, race-based violence is almost nonexistent and outrightly xenophobic politicians have been repeatedly rejected at the polls.

Deadly airstrike in Afghanistan kills at least 10 civilians, 30 Taliban fighters despite ongoing peace talks (Washington Post) While Afghan government and Taliban negotiating teams talk peace in Doha, the two sides continue to carry out deadly attacks leaving dozens dead in Afghanistan itself. On Saturday, two airstrikes carried out by Afghan government planes in the northern province of Kunduz killed at least 10 civilians and more than 30 Taliban fighters, according to local officials. South of Kabul in Paktika province also Saturday, two local officials were assassinated, including the deputy police chief. No group claimed responsibility for the killings, but Afghan officials believe armed groups linked to the Taliban are behind a string of similar attacks. Peace talks, launched last week between the Taliban and the Afghan government in Doha, were hailed as a historic opportunity to end decades of war. But while the two sides have met a handful of times, they haven’t agreed on the basic format of the negotiations, including what exactly will be discussed and in what order. Statements from both delegations stressing the need for “patience” suggest neither side expects a quick resolution to the talks.

US sends mechanized troops back into Syria (Army Times) Bradley fighting vehicles have headed back into eastern Syria, the Pentagon announced Friday, a move that comes after a tense encounter with Russian forces left four U.S. troops lightly injured last month. The return of mechanized units also comes as the U.S. military deployed Sentinel radar and increased the frequency of fighter jet patrols over U.S. forces in that part of Syria, according to U.S. Central Command spokesman Navy Capt. Bill Urban. U.S. and Russian officials traded blame in late August after troops from both countries collided in northeast Syria while on patrol. A Russian vehicle sideswiped a light-armored American one, injuring four U.S. troops, while two Russian helicopters flew about 70 feet over top the altercation, U.S. officials said following the incident. For their part, Russian officials said U.S. troops were blocking their ground patrol and Russian military police “took the necessary measures to prevent an incident and to continue the fulfillment of their task.” Russian forces are in the country backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and have long called for U.S. troops to leave.

[suffragettecity100]

Women’s Work is Never Done

84. Women’s Work

Women have always been part of the workforce as both paid and unpaid labor. While wealthier women could choose work as an option, most poorer, widowed or single women had no choice; they had to go to work but the playing field was not equal and neither was the pay. 

In a “San Francisco Call” article (June 23, 1910) suffragist Dr. Sophonisba Breckinridge argued the need for women to learn to value their work and demand higher wages, “...while woman was a keen and shrewd maker, buyer and manufacturer, she knew little of bartering for her own wages”. She believed that the advancement of women across all industries would also help lead to equal pay.

In 1911, while working for the National Consumers League in New York City, suffragist Francis Perkins witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. She was horrified by the event and vowed to do something about it. Teddy Roosevelt recommended her as Executive Secretary for the  Committee on Safety and she helped create the New York State Factory Investigating Commission which inspected factories to make sure that safety standards were in place. In 1932, Perkins became the first woman to be appointed to Secretary of Labor. She was instrumental to the success of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and helped America navigate the Great Depression. 

June 5, 1920, Public Law No. 66-259 established the Women's Bureau within the U.S. Department of Labor. It is federally mandated to “formulate standards and policies which shall promote the welfare of wage-earning women, improve their working conditions, increase their efficiency, and advance their opportunities for profitable employment”. In 1920 women made up 20% of the workforce. As of 2020, women make up close to half of the workforce (47%).

The first Director of the Women’s Bureau was Mary Anderson. She was also the longest serving director having held the position from 1920 until 1944. In her autobiography, she stated, “I think our most important job was issuing the standards for the employment of women. It was the first time the federal government had taken a practical stand on conditions of employment for women, and although the standards were only recommendations and had no legal force, they were a very important statement of policy and were widely used in all parts of the country.”

However it was the rise of modern appliances and indoor plumbing that liberated more women than the vote. Having more free time allowed women to enter the workforce and pursue other interests outside of domestic responsibilities. Professor Emanuela Cardia, from the Department of Economics of University of Montreal did a major study on the impact of technology and women in the workforce. In 1890, 25% of American households had running water and 8% had electricity. In 1950, 83% had running water and 94% had electricity. In 1900, women spent an average of 58 hours per week on household duties. By 1975, those same chores only took about 18 hours. That’s a 40 hour difference; enough time to have a full time job or several leisure pursuits including getting an education or being politically active.

This week’s song pick:

“She Works Hard for the Money” by Donna Summer https://youtu.be/ci8uvhiU9LE

#SuffragetteCity100 #SufferingForSuffrage

Episode 84 Sources:

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/about/history

https://www.fdrlibrary.org/perkins 

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1910-06-23/ed-1/seq-6/

Article about the impact of modern technology on women’s economics

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090312150735.htm

The origin of the old adage “a man may work from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done”, is unknown, but it may have its roots in this English broadside from 1629. (Historically, a broadside is a poster or flyer printed on only one side.) 

http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/folk-song-lyrics/Womans_Work_is_Never_Done.htm

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A Selection of Relevant Archival Collections at Yale

The following is a list, by no means comprehensive, of archival collections relating to immigration history that are held in Yale’s special collections. Use Archives at Yale to search for other archival collections at Yale.

Click on collection titles below to link to the online finding aid for each collection. 

Abbreviations used: BRBL = Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, DIV = Divinity Library Special Collections, MSSA = Manuscripts and Archives.

American Immigration Conference Board Records (MS 614) MSSA: Correspondence, writings, printed materials, clippings, and other papers of the American Immigration Conference Board, an anti-communist organization devoted primarily to severely limiting immigration. The papers also contain materials relating to various immigration legislation during the 1930s.

Maurice Rea Davie Papers (MS 1359) MSSA: Correspondence and printed matter sent by the National Institute of Immigrant Welfare to Davie, a member of the Institute's Board of Directors. Most of the letters concern either requests for Davie to speak, or such routine business matters as committee meetings, dues, and financial problems.

United States War Relocation Authority. Poston, Arizona, Relocation Center Collection (MS 803) MSSA:  Scrapbooks, record books, and memorabilia chiefly relating to the educational and library activities at the Relocation Center. Nine scrapbooks made and bound by the students document topics of academic study, student memoirs describing their feelings on being relocated, and Americanization agendas in school curriculum. A printed yearbook is also included.

Felix S. Cohen Papers (WA MSS S-1325) BRBL: The papers document Felix S. Cohen's professional career as a civil servant, private attorney, law professor, and author. Cohen (1907-1953) was a lawyer with special interest in natural resources, statehood and economic development for American territories, Indian affairs, immigration, and human rights. He received a B.A. from The City College of New York, an M.A. in philosophy from Harvard in 1927, a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1929, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School in 1931.

Harry Weinberger Papers (MS 553) MSSA: Correspondence, legal papers, notes, and other materials documenting Weinberger's career as a lawyer who specialized in civil liberties cases and, later in his career, copyright law. The one hundred and sixteen (116) case files include legal briefs, writs, and memoranda prepared by Weinberger and his staff, and similar material prepared by opposing attorneys, as well as materials relating to U.S. immigration and deportation policies. Correspondence files include letters with clients and individuals interested in a specific case. Weinberger's clients included: Alexander Berkman, Grover Cleveland Bergdoll, Emma Goldman, and Eugene O'Neill.

Dutton Family Papers (RG 63) DIV:  The collection is valuable for the documentation it provides concerning a New Haven area clergy family during the period 1800 to 1880. Daily events and family relationships are revealed in substantive family correspondence. Of particular interest are Samuel Dutton's notebooks from his student days at Yale. The bulk of the collection is comprised of manuscript sermons written by Aaron and Samuel Dutton during their pastorates in Guilford and New Haven. These sermons touch on topics such as slavery, the Civil War, "Millerism", temperance and immigration.

William Kent Family Papers (MS 309) MSSA: Correspondence, writings, topical files, biographical files, scrapbooks, and other material relating to William Kent's businesses, political activities, and family. The papers document his activities as a municipal reformer in Chicago and Northern California; his interests in conservation, recreation, public control of water power, and opposition to Asian immigration; his campaigns for election to Congress; his service in the U.S. House of Representatives (1911-1917) and on the U.S. Tariff Commission; and his business interests in cattle ranches in Nebraska and Nevada.

Right Wing Pamphlet Collection (MS 775) MSSA:  An collection of pamphlets, assembled by Manuscripts and Archives staff from a variety of sources, containing "conservative, reactionary, or right wing" publications on a wide range of topics including: China, anti-communism, Christian groups, race relations, immigration, and economics, 1917-2010.

Charles Nagel Papers (MS 364) MSSA: Correspondence, letterbooks, scrapbooks, writings, topical files, photographs, and clippings which document the career of Charles Nagel. The papers highlight Nagel's legal practice and detail his role as counsel to Adolphus Busch and the Anheuser-Busch breweries. Files relating to Nagel's cabinet term include discussions of patronage appointments and efforts to win support for President Taft's re-election through the foreign language press, and his concerns as secretary of commerce and labor, including the 1910 census, the abolition of pelagic sealing, and fair enforcement of immigration laws.

Social Ethics Pamphlet Collection (RG 73) DIV: Pamphlets, brochures, typescripts, booklets, comic books, posters, cartoons, letters, memoranda, offprints, etc., documenting various aspects of social issues, including immigration, in America and throughout the world during the mid-twentieth century. See especially the term “Nativism.”

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How World War I strengthened women’s suffrage

While American women had been fighting for the right to vote for decades prior to the ratification of the 19th Amendment on August 18, 1920, it was not until World War I that their cause for political independence regained momentum, says Stanford legal scholar Pamela S. Karlan.

As women filled jobs vacated by men fighting the war overseas, public attitudes toward women’s role in American democracy began to shift dramatically. By 1918, President Woodrow Wilson acknowledged to Congress that women’s role in the war effort was vital to the war effort, explained Karlan.

“Suffragists conscripted rhetorical claims advanced in favor of the war, and pointed to women’s key role on the home front, to bolster their arguments in favor of domestic expansion of voting rights,” said Karlan, the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law in an interview with Stanford News Service. “Times of crisis can be opportunities to make real progress.”

The 19th Amendment

As part of the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment that granted women the right to vote, Stanford scholars reflect on this milestone in a three-part series:

Feminism’s anti-slavery origins

Left out of the vote

When crisis catalyzes change

Here, Karlan discusses what the 19th Amendment accomplished and the challenges that persist today. For example, while white women have encountered few legal obstacles to voting since the amendment’s ratification, Black Americans have endured persistent racial discrimination – despite the 15th Amendment’s parallel prohibition denying citizens the right to vote on account of race or color.

Karlan is one of the nation’s leading experts on voting and the political process. She has served as a commissioner on the California Fair Political Practices Commission, an assistant counsel and cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and a deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Karlan is the co-author of leading casebooks on constitutional law, constitutional litigation and the law of democracy, as well as numerous scholarly articles.

  What did the 19th Amendment accomplish?

The 19th Amendment guaranteed that women throughout the United States would have the right to vote on equal terms with men. Prior to the 19th Amendment, while many western states had given women the right to vote, most states east of the Mississippi River restricted the right to vote only to men.

  What does the 19th Amendment symbolize to you?

It symbolizes that women in the United States are full citizens, entitled like all others to participate actively in self-government.

  1917 poster for the New York state campaign for voting rights for women. (Image credit: U.S. Poster Collection, Hoover Institution Library & Archives)

The franchise did not happen overnight, but through decades of campaigning by women’s suffragists. What makes constitutional change, especially the franchise, so challenging? What resistance and obstacles did these activists encounter?

The Supreme Court held, in the Minor v. Happersett case, in 1874, that the Constitution did not prohibit restricting the franchise to men. What made formal constitutional change hard to accomplish was, in part, that the existing electorate in most of the country was entirely male and the mechanism for formally amending the Constitution runs through existing legislative bodies – many of which were entirely, or predominantly, elected by men. What made changes in constitutional interpretation – for example, in interpreting the equal protection clause – so difficult, was that public attitudes often treated women as less rational and independent than men, and therefore less qualified to participate in public affairs.

  What might activists today learn from the suffrage movement?

Sometimes, activists don’t recognize that times of crisis can be opportunities to make real progress. The suffrage movement seemed stalled by the first decade of the 20th century. But World War I changed the dynamic and ultimately strengthened the suffrage movement. The industrial demands of modern war meant that women moved into the labor force and contributed to the war effort on the home front. In 1918, President Wilson, who had ignored suffrage completely in his 1916 address to Congress, gave an address in which he supported suffrage “as a war measure,” noting that the war could not be fought effectively without women’s participation.

Moreover, the United States claimed it had gone to war to make the world “safe for democracy.” Suffragists conscripted rhetorical claims advanced in favor of the war, and pointed to women’s key role on the home front, to bolster their arguments in favor of domestic expansion of voting rights, For example, in her article about suffrage and the 19th Amendment, Justice O’Connor reports that “when the new Russian Republic extended the vote to women following its revolution, suffragists taunted President Wilson with the lack of similar progress in the United States.”

“Constitutional change comes about through people … pressing for their rights.”

—PAMELA S. KARLAN

The Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law

What did the 19th Amendment fail to accomplish, and what can be done to continue to promote the franchise among voters?

In narrow terms, the 19th Amendment was stunningly successful, especially in comparison to the 15th Amendment, which in essentially identical language forbid denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color. White women throughout the U.S. have faced very few legal barriers to voting since the amendment’s ratification. By contrast, racial discrimination in voting – the form of discrimination prohibited by the 15th Amendment – persisted in a prevalent and explicit form for essentially a century, essentially denying Black women in the South the right to vote until passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And even today we continue to see all kinds of barriers to full and equal participation by minority citizens.

The United States has a decentralized, politicized system for regulating the franchise that stands in sharp contrast to most other developed democracies. We need to enact laws with real teeth in them that enable every citizen to register, to cast a ballot and to have that ballot counted.

  What do you tell your students about the 19th Amendment?

I often start my Constitutional Law course with two things – a short video of the House of Representatives opening its session by reading the Constitution, in which Rep. John Lewis was invited to read the 13th Amendment, and an excerpted version of the opinion in Minor v. Happersett. This is designed to remind them that there are many methods of interpreting the Constitution – Minor showcases them all – and that constitutional change comes about through people – some of them, like Lewis, younger than my students even – pressing for their rights outside the courts.

Media Contacts

Stephanie Ashe, Stanford Law School: (650) 723-2232, sashe@law.stanford.edu

source https://scienceblog.com/517887/how-world-war-i-strengthened-womens-suffrage/

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This Week Within Our Colleges: Part 13

The University of San Francisco this week is scheduled to host a segregated orientation dedicated to black students. The day-long event billed as having been “designed by Black students, faculty, and staff to welcome new Black students to the USF Black Experience” will “address the specific and particular needs of Black students at USF.” The orientation is being run by Ja’Nina Garrett-Walker, who in 2014 implemented a campus-wide campaign called “Check Your Privilege,” where students were encouraged to walk around wearing t-shirts with their particular privileges, such as white, male, straight or Christian, displayed across themselves. 

It didn’t take very long for academics to jump on the racial strife in Charlottesville in order to (once again) denounce white society in general. University of North Carolina law professor Erika Wilson and University of Detroit Mercy’s Khaled Beydoun argue that “white supremacists aren’t fringe segments, they are just part of the racist white supremacist American policies such as immigration limits and requesting people to show ID to vote.” In addition, the professors point out the “white privilege” on display by the nationalists protesting the removal of a civil war statue, as they feared no repercussions by not wearing any masks which proved white society’s “presumption of innocence.” Or maybe because they actually weren’t doing anything wrong... ”Wilson and Beydoun also connected the Confederate flag to the Third Reich, pointing out that it’s a criminal offense in Germany to display anything Nazi related and the same has to be applied to Confederate flags or symbols in the United States. Hopefully, these law professors remember there’s a little thing called the First Amendment.

Stanford University is set to offer a class this fall called “White Identity Politics,” during which students will “survey the field of whiteness studies” and discuss the “possibilities of abolishing whiteness,” according to the course description. Questions to be posed throughout the semester include: “How is white identity to be understood in relation to white nationalism, white supremacy, white privilege, and whiteness?” Ernest Miranda, a spokesman for Stanford, said “abolishing whiteness’ is a concept with the belief that if white people stopped identifying politically as white, it would help end inequalities.”

A Kansas State University professor wants you to take children’s books “just as seriously” as those written for adults, as they are full of hidden racism. English professor Phillip Nel asks the, er, important questions in his book - Was the Cat in the Hat Black? which deals with the “hidden racism in children’s books.” The professor says the Cat in the Hat is a “racially complicated figure,” one influenced by blackface minstrelsy. “What’s interesting about children’s literature is racism often hides in it in ways that we don’t notice, in ways that we don’t see, in ways that we’re not even consciously aware of.” So in other words, it doesn’t exist until you create the idea of it existing? Gotchya! 

Journalism grants offered through Brandeis University are being offered to everyone as long as you are a woman and not white.They happily explain why they are denying white journalism students grants, saying “Without greater diversity in journalism, some very important stories are never pitched, some assignments never made, facts never gathered, and serious abuses of power never uncovered.” Those selected will receive up to $10,000 as part of the program. 

A University of Michigan student, whose research interests include gender and sexuality and childhood, released a research paper which suggests that preschool teachers are the reason most people identify as heterosexual. “Reproducing (and Disrupting) Heteronormativity: Gendered Sexual Socialization in Preschool Classrooms,” published in the journal Sociology of Education observed just nine preschool classrooms over the course of 10 months to come up with this wild theory. Heidi Gansen says that preschool teachers are both constructing and disrupting gendered sexuality in multiple ways. She wrote that teachers affect preschoolers’ gendered sexuality by “actively promoting or encouraging heterosexual discourses and practices and ignoring sexualized behaviors.” Gansen specifies that not once did the teachers suggest that it was appropriate for the girls to play the dad, or even have a household with two moms. Gansen finishes by complaining that even in the preschools with the most progressive teachers of all the ones she observed, “children still engaged in heteronormative practices with peers,” adding that “these findings demonstrate the importance of teachers actively working to disrupt heteronormativity, which is already ingrained in children by ages 3 to 5.” Those damn kindergarten teachers, making kids grow up to be straight. 

A workshop offered at the University of Texas at Austin teaches students bisexuality, pansexuality and “fluid sexuality” should be embraced and supported. Called “Interrupting Monosexism,” the workshop aims to interrupt “biphobia and bi-erasure” and “brainstorm actions for supporting the work of bisexual, pansexual and fluid advocates,” according to the university’s website. Other workshops hosted by the center include “What Do Thriving Queer Communities Look Like,” “Histories of & Accountability to Trans Feminisms,” “Identifying & Interrupting Everyday Intersectional Sexism” and “Intersectionality & Allyship.”

Students at Sarah Lawrence College, a posh, private liberal arts college in New York consistently ranked one of the most expensive colleges in the nation, recently called on peers and others to pay female campus activists for their “emotional labor.” Posted mostly by black students, their beg for money states “In honor of the labor that women and femmes of color do for Sarah Lawrence every month of the year, give your $$$” A discussion about white students’ lack of interest unsurprisingly quickly ensued. 

The New School in New York has published an extensive guide on “microaggressions” to warn students that such behavior can be “as damaging as ‘explicit’ aggression.” According to the guide, even “experiences that are not intentionally hostile or physically threatening can be harmful,” and thus it is critical for The New School as “a university community” to “acknowledge and work to decrease these kinds of hurtful experiences.” Microaggressions, the guide contends, can come in verbal, nonverbal, and environmental forms. What are environmental microaggressions you may be wondering? “Monuments, artwork or posters in public spaces that are predominantly white cisgender men and women,” for instance, are deemed "environmental microaggressions." Professors who fail to ask students for their preferred pronouns, or who assign too many books written by "white cisgender men," are likewise considered guilty of micro-aggressing against students.

Incoming freshmen at Vassar College will be required to complete a series of diversity-themed workshops as part of their new-student orientation. The expansive 15-day orientation also features exclusive events, such as a dinner for “first-generation and undocumented students,” plus an “LGBT Center Open House” and a “Women’s Center Open House.” An explicit goal of this year’s New Student Orientation is to help students begin “engaging and appreciating social justice,” noting that students will embark on “the journey towards self-awareness, community awareness, identities, and affirming belongingness within our own communities.” 

A feminist professor at Grinnell College is offering a course this fall on “American Whiteness” that will focus on “attacking racism by making whiteness visible.” The professor declined to provide a current syllabus, but a previous offering of the same course described America as a "racist nation" due to the pernicious effects of "whiteness." Professor Karla Erickson, a self described “feminist ethnographer,” will teach the four-credit special topics class. In the 2015 syllabus, it states “Whiteness is, among much else, a very bad idea,” quoting Kansas University Professor David Roediger. “It is quite possible to avoid criticizing white people as individuals but to criticize the idea of white people in general.” Well that makes sense. 

Southern Methodist University has finally reversed its decision to relegate a 9/11 memorial display to a secluded area of campus. The school has also revised the policy that had been cited to justify rejecting the original request to host the 9/11 Never Forget event on the campus. The university had initially denied the memorial at the usual location on campus in accordance with a policy guaranteeing “the right of all members of the community to avoid messages that are harmful or harassing." In a statement published last week, SMU apologized and reiterated the importance of honoring the victims of the 2001 attack.

A Clemson University professor is comparing President Trump’s ban on transgender soldiers to “Nazi eugenic propaganda,” calling it “ableism deployed to incarcerate or kill disabled people.”

A Vanderbilt University professor complained in an academic journal article that mathematics is too “white and heteronormatively masculinized.” Citing the “masculinization of mathematics,” Luis Leyva then suggests that the apparent “gender gap” in mathematical ability is socially constructed (as opposed to arising from inherently different cognitive abilities) and therefore women are being kept out of mathematics in order to keep the field “masculinized.” 

A University of Iowa professor wrote an academic journal article explaining how she endeavors to "dismantle whiteness in my curriculum, assignments, and pedagogy." Jodi Linley argues that unless her "mostly white" students are made to confront their privilege, they will be "complicit" in perpetuating white supremacy. Linley says her commitment to designing classes that fight white privilege began as soon as she became a professor in 2014, at which point she resolved to “develop courses that both unveiled and rejected” the notion that “neutrality and objectivity are realistic and attainable.” She offers up five strategies other professors can use to deconstruct white privilege in their own classes, such as making sure white students know that teachers will be interrupting oppression that occurs in classroom settings and segregating students by race. “For white students, talking about race with an all-white group of peers facilitates their realisation that they are raced beings, thus revealing their own white ignorance.”

New York University is looking to hire a tenure-track professor to teach subjects such as “racial justice activism” and “intersectional queer and transgender politics.” Despite declaring its commitment to "equal treatment and opportunity" for all applicants, NYU also says it intends to “substantially increase the proportion” of faculty from “historically underrepresented groups." The university has a lengthy wish-list of subject areas that it would like the new professor to address, most of which relate to racial and/or gender-based identity politics. NYU is “particularly interested” in topics like “postcolonial and decolonial studies, intersectional queer and transgender politics of race, critical race theory,” and “Africa and African diaspora media studies.” In addition, the school would like the new professor to be familiar with issues of “digital media and racial justice activism,” and “class and racial disparities in media access and adoption.”

The University of Georgia has made Professor Richard Watson remove a “stress reduction policy” from two of his course syllabi after facing national backlash for the practice. He had adopted a policy that would allow students who felt “unduly stressed by a grade for any assessable material or the overall course” to “email the instructor indicating what grade you think is appropriate, and it will be so changed” with “no explanation” required. Watson did concede this policy might hinder the development of students, although it’s become clear that’s no longer important in higher education today. 

Less than one month into the job, North Carolina State University's new Director of Multicultural Student Affairs has big plans, including segregating student housing by skin color, providing a new housing option exclusively for 'women of color.' Nashia Whittenburg describes it as a refuge for female minority students to "deal with some of the microaggressions you might have had to deal with throughout your entire day." “The point and purpose is if you are student of color and you may not see anybody who looks like you in class, here is your opportunity to get some support and to deal with some of the microaggressions.” 

During a recent six-day conference in Portland, Oregon, archivists attended a presentation on “Identifying and Dismantling White Supremacy in Archives.” The panel called on archivists to “decenter whiteness by valuing materials produced by people of color and communities of color,” and “explicitly prioritize materials produced by people of color and communities of color.” At another panel promoting the Black Lives Matter movement, one presenter was quoted as saying, “If white activists don’t use their privilege to give the platform over to POC, their activism is exploitive.”

A private investigator hired by Regis University has determined that a conservative student did not violate any laws or university policies by holding a “Social Justice Bake Sale.” Regis had accused the student of violating “university policy and federal law” and even blocked him from their twitter account after holding a satire bake sale, selling cookies at different prices depending where the group sit on the oppressed rankings. The private investigator concedes that “there are insufficient facts to find that his conduct violated specific Regis policy or law,” though he notes that “numerous students were justifiably offended by this ‘bake sale.’” 

A University of California, Davis microbiology professor is claiming a victory over the patriarchy after his complaints led organizers of an academic conference to invite more female speakers. Professor Jonathan Eisen noticed most of the invited speakers were white males, so he announced that he would contact each of them directly to ask that they withdraw. He bragged about going to great lengths checking the speakers’ race, genders and pronouns to ensure that his assumptions were correct. Eisen went on to urge attendees, sponsors and presenters to boycott the meeting, billing the event as “The White Men’s Microbiome Congress.” Eisen succeeded in generating enough pressure to elicit an apology along with assurances that future events would “represent the diversity of the scientific fields.” 

[art-arch-urb]

Refusal after Refusal

What if we acknowledged that we had fallen out of love with architecture and couldn’t remember why we loved it in the first place? That we had given up on building long ago because we had no interest in collaborating with developers, in designing money-laundering schemes or parking garages for foreign capital? And what if we told you that now we even found architectural discourse repulsive? That we had seen the logos for the oil companies emblazoned at the bottom of the biennial posters and couldn’t look away?That we had read the disinterest on the faces of the public and could relate? That we had watched academics lecture about labor practices while exploiting their assistants and overworking their students? That we had tried to warn each other about abusers and assaulters and were reprimanded for it by our heroes? What if we confessed that all this made us depressed, that we could barely summon the energy to get out of bed, let alone to work? What if we told you that we were beginning to think work itself was the problem?

2. The summer was hot. The hottest on record in Los Angeles and Montreal, Glasgow and Tbilisi, Qurayyat and Belfast—though records are easily broken these days. Everything appeared out of focus. The edges of our thoughts were blurred. According to studies, heat makes you lazy and unhappy. But sometimes your unhappiness supersedes your laziness, and sometimes your laziness indicates something about your unhappiness. We decided to try learning from our laziness.

3. It was Karl Marx’s son-in-law, the Franco-Cuban radical journalist and activist Paul Lafargue who first articulated a “right to be lazy.” He equated work, and its valorization, with “pain, misery and corruption.”He argued for its refusal. “A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway,” Lafargue writes. “This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny.”

4. But, as Marcel Duchamp reminds us, “it really isn’t easy to be truly lazy and do nothing.”

5. “Sleep is a sin,” say the architects. Equipped with coffee or speed, they avoid it at all costs—sacrificing the body for the sake of the project, for the eternally recurrent deadline. When finally the suprachiasmatic nuclei demand submission to the ticking of the circadian clock, they curl up beneath their desks. They wear all black to minimize time spent worrying over clothes. They marry other architects for the sake of having a synchronized schedule. According to a recent study, archi­tecture students sleep less than any others, averaging 5.28 hours per night. More often than not, this is a performative demonstration of their dedication to their studies rather than a necessity, a time-honored ritual of masochistic devotion. In his 2013 book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep, Jonathan Crary interrogates the neoliberal dictum that “sleeping is for losers.” Where time is money, sleeping is “one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism.” Architects embody this attitude, imagining the stakes of the project—a luxury condominium, an arts center—as life or death. In fact, considering that sleep deprivation has been linked to premature death, it is their own lives that are put on the line.

6. Yesterday I woke up around 8:30 a.m. and took 450 milligrams of bupropion, 50 milligrams of Lamictal, 5 milligrams of aripiprazole, and 200 milligrams of modafinil, all swallowed in one gulp of coffee. (The modafinil—a medication used to treat shift work sleep disorder, among other things—is new, added by my psychiatrist last month when I complained I was having trouble working, or doing much of anything.) A few hours later, I took 20 milligrams of Adderall. Only then was I able to write this paragraph.

7. Beginning with their schooling, architects are routinely required to invest more money than they will ever receive in compensation and workplace protections. While the typical college student in the United States accrues an average of $29,420 in student debt, the architecture student is saddled with an average of $40,000.After graduation, the architectural employee can expect to work 70 hours a week for approximately $70,000 per year—or $15 an hour. And yet, as Bjarke Ingels has stated about the profession’s long working hours, “That’s the price you pay but the reward you get is that you do something incredibly meaningful if you actually love what you’re doing and you’re doing meaningful work."

8. In other words, architecture is a form of labor that masquerades as a labor of love. It contains within it the promise of fulfillment, of happiness. In her book The Promise of Happiness (2010), Sara Ahmed interrogates the normative function of happiness, how it serves as a means of orienting behavior and, in the process, is often deployed as a justification for oppression. That is, what it means to be happy is circumscribed culturally. “In wishing for happiness we wish to be associated with happiness, which means to be associated with its associations,” Ahmed writes. Work should make us happy and fulfilled—even more so when it’s “creative,” an assumption imbued with classist undertones. This draws young people toward architecture school; it makes the burden of debt, harsh working conditions, and low wages appear as an acceptable “price to pay.”

9. But, as the figure of the dissatisfied “CAD monkey” illustrates, the labor of architecture falls short of this promise. Conditioned to believe that fulfillment emerges from creative autonomy and expression, architects instead find themselves laboring over bathroom details or stair sections, and a sense of alienation emerges. It’s a feeling that parallels that of the industrial laborer described by Marx—more so than many architects would like to admit. In classic Marxist theory, workers are estranged from the fruits of their labor, which are taken away from them in the process of becoming rendered as commodities. Because it is understood as nonalienating work, to feel alienated in architecture becomes a sort of double-estrangement. Not only are you estranged from the labor, you are estranged from architecture itself.

10. While working as a studio manager at a New York architecture firm, my colleagues would often remark wistfully that they could rarely attend lectures or engage with discourse as I was able to do. Models, budgets, schematics, client meetings, site visits, overtime, and weekends at the studio had ravaged both their physical and spiritual capacities to participate in the field in a role beyond producing architecture with a capital A. Their passion had become their drudgery; their very own commitment to architectural work became the barrier between contributing to what they had imagined architecture could do and how it apparently must be.

11. I read somewhere that depression is the failure of your neurons to fire like they used to. There’s something ghostly to it: you have the memory of a feeling, of an association, but can’t conjure it anymore. Is there such a thing as a depression specific to architecture? How would it be characterized? I wrote a note on my phone: “The loss of belief in the possibility of designing a different world. Nostalgia for the future.”

12. To express dissatisfaction or alienation in architecture carries deep risks. For one, it could cost you your job. “If you aren’t happy, then leave. Others would kill to have your job.” It could also brand you as an outcast, as if marked by some internal failure or incapacity for feeling what everyone else does. And such a killjoy would ruin the mood of the office. That is, as Ahmed asserts, happiness is framed as a duty to others.18 Misery is contagious and therefore irresponsible. So, regardless of how overworked you are, how alienated you are from the products of your labor, how underpaid you are, how often the boss touches your ass, you must grin and bear it. There’s a reason why architects rarely organize to fight back against exploitative work conditions. Be happy, or else.13. According to Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, a mandate to appear happy, which they term the “performance/pleasure apparatus,” underwrites neoliberalism more broadly.19 Today, the individual must not only produce more but also enjoy more—and, pivotally, this surplus of pleasure must be performed. Pleasure serves as a signifier of the subject’s value within a socioeconomic system in which self-edification is substituted for the social and responsibility is privatized. The flip side of the burned-out professional is the determined young architect who spends their free time attending lectures or writing essays or designing their own projects. Such work is valorized as a signal of their commitment to the field and an indicator of their value as an intellectual practitioner. This fuels a culture in which the products of extra-professional labor are exhibited in journals or galleries, often without adequate compensation. We’re told we should feel honored to have such work recognized at all. In other words, today, nothing is work, and everything is work. Even our bodies and minds are objects of labor.14. I was working hard on an essay about work—about the disconnect between discourses on architectural labor and the broader economic context in which the discourses themselves are produced. I stumbled upon an interview with Antonio Negri in which he explains how, by 1965, the architecture school in Venice had become a center for political agitation and organizing. In early 1968, students from Venice and Padua joined forces with the workers at a nearby Porto Marghera factory, the largest petrochemical complex in Italy, where “two kilometers from the most beautiful city in the world hundreds of workers were dying of cancer, literally poisoned by their work.”20 Negri states that the union of students and workers “worked out quite smoothly because they had been in constant contact for a decade: the school of architecture was a gathering place for the working class.”2115. This struggle was a major event in the development of autonomia operaia, or autonomism, a political movement that defined postwar Italian politics and in which Negri played a central role. The solidarity between the academy and the factory was a significant aspect of autonomism, which reconceived of the position of the intellectual within leftist politics. Rather than develop theories upon which to base organizing, the intellectual should learn from work, from the workers and their lived experience. In this way, the autonomists transitioned from a demand for better working conditions to a critique of work itself, in which they understood labor as a totalizing process of subjectivization that sat­urated not only the factory but all of society. They thus displaced the centrality of the static figure of the worker and the working class with an understanding of social class as always in a state of becoming, transforming alongside conditions of work. Work itself—its valorization and the power this gave it over the experience of life—was the problem. “Refusal of work means quite simply: I don’t want to go to work because I prefer to sleep,” writes Franco “Bifo” Berardi. “But this laziness is the source of intelligence, of technology, of progress. Autonomy is the self-regulation of the social body in its independence and in its interaction with the disciplinary norm.”2216. But wait, haven’t we had this conversation before? Isn’t the struggle against work what we studied tirelessly to ace our papers? We worked our bodies and our minds through the night to prove we understood what the refusal of work was about, to prove our political awareness, to garner a critical edge, to be diligent students. But clearly this feverish ambition prevented us from recognizing ourselves as the products of its failure. Why regurgitate the past if not in order to understand how it landed us here, at 4:00 a.m., exhausted, verging on panic, and for what? 17. As Berardi elaborates, struggles for autonomy produced a new monster, laying the foundations for neoliberal economics and governance.23 When workers demanded freedom from regulation, capital did the same. The monotony, rigidity, and harsh conditions of the industrial factory gave way to flexible hours and jobs (in the Global North), but also deregulation, precarity, and the withdrawal of social protections. This shift was ideological and cultural, as well as economic.18. “Work is the primary means by which individuals are integrated not only into the economic system, but also into social, political, and familial modes of cooperation,” argues Kathi Weeks. “That individuals should work is fundamental to the basic social contract.” Under the contemporary neoliberal regime, work has come to be regarded as “a basic obligation of citizenship.”24Within the realms of politics, the media, and even sociology, the persistent messaging of its importance has generated a singular world-building experience where working remains the only means of belonging. “These repeated references to diligent work,” as David Frayne remarks, “function to construct a rigid dichotomy in the public imagination.”25 Those who work acquire social citizenship, while those who do not are leeches. Within this dichotomy, work becomes a choice: there exist only those who choose to be productive and those who choose to do nothing. “Which are you? The sleeper or the employee, the shirker or the worker?”2619. What if we told you we don’t refuse much of anything? What if we told you that we ate up praise like a spoonful of honey? What if we said that the validation always evaporates too quickly? Like a sugar-addled rush, we work on the premise that the next project will leave us satiated. We make promises to stop, to slow down, to regroup, to prevent the inevitable burnout, which leaves us languid and shrouded in shame. We wonder what all the research amounts to, what the interviews and panels in galleries and lecture halls even do or mean. 20. If the autonomist refusal of work helped produce a society in which there is nothing but work, what strategies are left for us? What would it mean to refuse after refusal? To stake out a position of alterity to the contemporary work ethic in order to find the room to question where we’re going, what’s driving us, and to what end?21. To work is to be normal. To work is to be socially acceptable. In order to comprehend the commitment to the drudgery and exploitation of working life, Lauren Berlant argues that normativity must be understood as “aspirational and as an evolving and incoherent cluster of hegemonic promises about the present and future experience of social belonging.”27 To rally for any kind of alternative beyond the moral imperative to work would be to cast oneself almost entirely outside the realm of affiliation, and even personhood.22. Architecture, today at least, is like work, an end in itself. It is autotelic—or, more precisely, a constituent element within the autotelic metabolism of contemporary capitalism. The need for shelter is hardly the driving motivation behind the majority of new builds. Rather, demolition and construction serve as the two poles of a coiling system of endless production for the sake of production. Financial speculation, warfare, and environmental desecration belong to its arsenal. All together, this system constitutes a global force responsible for the lion’s share of global carbon emissions. It results in the mass displacement of the poor and marginalized. In short, shelter is not the ends of architecture—it is its collateral damage. It is a question not of architecture or revolution but, rather, of architecture or survival.23. “If design is merely an inducement to consume, then we must reject design,” said Adolfo Natalini of Superstudio. “[I]f architecture is merely the codifying of the bourgeois models of ownership and society, then we must reject architecture; if architecture and town planning is merely the formalization of present unjust social divisions, then we must reject town planning and its cities—until all design activities are aimed towards meeting primary needs. Until then design must disappear. We can live without architecture.”2824. Let’s back up a bit. What produces this all-consuming, obsessive indifference to architecture? On the one hand, the profession and the academy are sites of violence, ridden with sexism, heterosexism, racism, classism, ableism. But, perhaps even more than that, we have yet to find a work of architecture that is capable of changing the status quo. On the other hand, we’re obsessed with the belief that it could, since, at the end of the day, all architecture changes the status quo—converting land into capital, emitting carbon dioxide, displacing people. In other words, we acknowledge architecture as immensely powerful but find ourselves—and all architects or architectural thinkers—powerless. Architecture, it seems, has been swallowed up by external forces and put in the service of the smooth functioning of the city and of flows of capital. We can’t imagine an architecture capable of disrupting this. Formalism is a dead end—novel forms are just a means to produce new terrains for the expenditure of surplus capital. We have little control over program since we’re beholden to patronage. Meanwhile, criticism has no bite; speculation, no value; theorization, no impact. Academia and institutions defang all thought. 25. We believe that the problem of work is at the center of all this. The need to work—a shared condition for all but the very wealthy—means we can’t really turn down a client or an opportunity to exhibit or an adjunct teaching position. Refusal, done alone, is a privilege few can afford. But, alongside that, the culture of work has seeped into our souls. Affirmation produces dopamine. Success signals security (even if, in actuality, it doesn’t offer it). Everything we do is for the sake of capital, whether social or material. We look for opportunities to tear each other down so that we can rise up an imaginary rung on an imaginary ladder instead. We are cowards, unwilling to bite the hand that feeds us strychnine-laced food. We can’t pause to think. We’ve lost all hope in the future.26. When commissioned to write this essay, we were asked to provide “concrete alternatives” to the present—but how could we? All we can speculate on is having the time to do so. All we can imagine is a horizon, hazy and distant, in which we discover, or remember, how to refuse—together.

http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/46/refusal-after-refusal?fbclid=IwAR3OA3zuZGwx0-VuEEM2QWZlP44uF2N6MFKoD8M2fUudNZnkNjnj4brp2nk

[fapangel]

MSM is spinning the proposed immigration reform as a reduction of legal immigration from the Obama era but I've been unable to find numbers of whether there was an increase during the Obama administration. Nonetheless, I do think a point based system for entry to allow for more skilled immigrant to come is overall a better move for the US rather than just a simple lottery. Your thoughts?

Before anything else, I want you to see what I saw on NBC News tonight - skip the biased article and just watch the 1 minute clip from NBC News’s August 2nd 6PM broadcast. Note Senator Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, who’s commentary I will transcribe for posterity: 

“The biggest flaw in this proposal is the notion that there are long lines of Americans waiting to pick fruit, work in hospitals, and hotels, and restaurants, and meat processing plants; exactly the opposite’s true.” 

Let me boil that statement down to its essence: “we need those spics to do the scut-work white people are too good for.” This phrase, “immigrants do jobs Americans won’t do,” is a common utterance on the Left, but it’s still shocking to see a US Senator admit to it in as many words on national TV. I know people who live in rural, poverty-stricken Red America, and you know where they work? They often work in restaurants and meat-packing plants. Not that this asshole would know - to him and Democrats like him, Hispanic immigrants are just cheap labor to maintain the lawns of their expensive homes, to bring them food at restaurant, and to do all the other scut work of society - and cheaply. There aren’t any jobs “Americans won’t do,” if you pay them what it’s worth - ever seen an episode of Dirty Jobs? But that, apparently, would “wreck the economy,” according to reliable RHINO Lindsey Graham, (whom most Republicans would like to see right behind McCain on Musk’s Mars to Stay rocket.) Good thing we’ve got all those Mexicans to do the back-breaking labor on the cheap, eh? 

It’s not just Dickface Durbin saying this - ABC News, and New York Times have also published passionate screeds attesting to the necessity of that poor underclass to maintaining our way of life. From the NYT: 

Why? Immigrant workers aren’t a “cheap labor” alternative, as so many Americans think. They are the only labor available to do many unskilled jobs, and if they were eliminated, most would not be replaced. Instead, whole sectors of the economy would shrivel, and with them, many other jobs often filled by more skilled Americans.

If the spics don’t pick our cotton for us, who will? Not those fucking Americans!

In 1960, half of all the native-born men in the U.S. labor force were high school dropouts eager to take unskilled outdoor jobs in agriculture and construction. Today, fewer than 10 percent of the native-born men in the work force lack high school diplomas. But the economy still generates plenty of unskilled jobs, and most unskilled immigrants don’t displace American workers. They fill niches — not just farmhand, but also chambermaid, busboy and others — that would otherwise go empty. And they support more skilled, more desirable jobs — foremen, accountants, waiters, chefs and more — at the businesses where they work and others in the surrounding community.

It’s almost like they knew it was a waste of time to finish high school when they could get a job paying good money down at the sawmill - but only if they started their apprenticeship now. But that world’s over and done with - having a high school degree makes you physically incapable of flipping burgers, digging ditches, or picking fruit. True story. 

Just raise the wage, you say, and an American would take the job? Not necessarily, and very unlikely if it’s a farm job. Farmers have been trying that — for decades. They raise the wage. They recruit in inner cities. They offer housing and transport and countless other benefits. Still, no one shows — or stays on the job, which is outdoors and grueling and must get done, no matter how hot or cold or otherwise unpleasant the weather.

That’s right - American farmers, already laboring in an industry with narrow profit margins, turned their backs on that vast pool of dirt-cheap, asks-no-questions labor and went to the inner city to hire Americans that’d cost them more money, instead. Nostalgia is powerful, but even if the Red South is as racist as Democrats believe, somehow I doubt lots of American farmers were journeying to the inner city and asking the predominantly black youth there if they were interested in picking cotton on their fucking farms. 

And of course, at some point, there are limits to how high a wage a grower or dairy farmer can pay before he is forced out of business by a farmer who produces the same commodity in another country, where the labor actually is cheap. 

Which we could handle easily with import/export controls, if not for those fucking free trade proponents - like most Democrats, eh? Of course that doesn’t do you any good when the cheap labor is already in the country and being used by your own domestic competitors.

But worst of all would be the jobs lost for Americans. According to economists, every farm job supports three to four others up and downstream in the local economy: from the people who make and sell fertilizer and farm machinery to those who work in trucking, food processing, grocery stores and restaurants. 

A harvest-season fruit picker isn’t a fucking farm job. A farm job is a year-round thing, and there aren’t many of them. I live in rural Michigan, a very agriculture-heavy state, and I have a pony. An actual, living, breathing pony, who eats hay, hay that we purchase from a local farmer. He and his wife run a huge farm and they run it alone, as their sons are too young to do any of the serious work. He does this via automation - the shed under which he stores the hay that we buy also shelters two massive farm tractors, three bale wagons, a combine, and various other attachments and heavy equipment. In our own barn we have a Farmall Cub and a Farmall Super C, two crop-row tractors from yesteryear. They’re about one-quarter the size of those modern New Holland tractors. In fact you can watch the size progression, from the Farmall C to the beefier Farmall H to the imposingly large Farmall M. Tractors increased in size as farms got bigger and more corporatized, and as smaller farmers had to reduce labor and increase automation to stay competitive. For those crops that aren’t harvested en-masse by combines, I’m sure we’ll find some way to pick the fruit. That Farmall Super C in my barn was owned by my great-grandfather - the 3-point implements it used to haul around his farm are still in our possession. My mother picked fruit - for a dime a bushel basket - so she could earn money to buy hay for her own pony. Somehow, they managed. Hell, I managed - I was 12 years old when I was helping my folks put up hay we cut and baled off our own property to help feed our animals. 

Arguments so facile that even someone with third-hand knowledge can see through them is one thing, but this is so obvious that the fucking Washington Post, of all places, has a relatively level-headed and informed article covering the matter that perilously resembles actual journalism. It both acknowledges the miserable conditions and low pay of the workers, and dismisses the sweeping claims of absolute economic necessity with actual numbers, provided by subject matter experts.

In absence of established economic necessity, how else are we to interpret statements like Dickface Durbins, but as endorsing class-based systems of oppression? The phrase “jobs Americans won’t do,” the NYT columnist’s equating having a high school diploma with the willingness to do unskilled labor, and Dick Durbin’s own commentary all speak to the same basic hubris: that Americans find these jobs beneath them. I have a 4 year college degree - but I’ve worked manual labor myself, and I never considered burger-flipping to be beneath my dignity. I guess the elite class, the ones that grow up in fabulously wealthy communities and adore their Nature Hikes in the National Parks but let the poor people mow their lawns on a hot day, see things differently. When you combine the Left Wing’s passionate and frequent arguments to the necessity of unskilled, underpaid immigrant labor to supporting our way of life, the inherent elitism that colors their tone and worldview of Americans who “won’t” do these jobs, and above all their unstinting efforts to inhibit the enforcement of immigration law or any initiative to halt illegal immigration, it’s impossible to see their position as anything but encouraging the formation of a permanent underclass of second-class citizens. What happens when those immigrants, or their children, get educated? Get those high school - or even college degrees - that so inhibit their willingness to work menial labor jobs? What happens to our economy then, if we have no cheap, miserably desperate people to exploit for the labor that our economy apparently depends so heavily upon? By their own logic, it would be bad for the country if those poor Hispanics ever worked their way out of the poverty ghetto. 

This is the true import of what Dickface Durbin openly stated on national prime-time television. It’s also the strongest argument I can possibly make in favor of Trump’s proposed immigration reform - it is anathema to the class-based exploitation the “progressive left,” self-anointed champions of the poor and down-trodden, argue for so passionately. 

[newingtonnow]

P. T. Barnum: An Entertaining Life

By Gregg Mangan

P. T. (Phineas Taylor) Barnum of Bridgeport, Connecticut, was one of the greatest entertainment entrepreneurs in history. His traveling shows, museums, and world-famous circus helped him amass a multi-million-dollar fortune on his way to becoming personal friends with such iconic figures as Abraham Lincoln, Queen Victoria of England, and Mark Twain. His inventive marketing campaigns solidified his standing as the father of modern advertising and showmanship.

P. T. Barnum – Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Working in an age when blue laws throughout the United States restricted socially acceptable forms of entertainment, Barnum provided amusement and wonder to the masses. He sought out attractions from around the globe that he used to exploit the public’s curiosity and desire for the thrilling and the risque. Historian Irving Wallace noted that, as a showman, Barnum gave “New York, and then America, and finally the world, the gift of enjoyment.”

The Early Life of a Practical Joker

P. T. Barnum was born on July 5, 1810, in Bethel, Connecticut, a small town about four miles southeast of Danbury. His father, Philo Barnum, was a farmer, tailor, tavern keeper, and grocer, who had 10 children by 2 wives. Phineas was Philo’s sixth child and the first by his second wife, Irene. Throughout Phineas’s childhood, Bethel was a stronghold of conservative values dominated by the Congregational church. To combat the drudgery and routine of everyday life, men like Phineas’s maternal grandfather (also named Phineas) resorted to one of the few socially permissible forms of entertainment, the practical joke.

Barnum recalled that his grandfather “would go farther, wait longer, work harder, and contrive deeper, to carry out a practical joke, than for anything else under heaven,” as biographer A. H. Saxon noted. It was his grandfather’s boisterous personality and love for harmless and amusing deception that Phineas employed during his meteoric rise in the entertainment industry.

The “Prince of Humbugs”

Druidish Band Company advertisement, 1849 from one of Barnum’s early musical acts – Connecticut Historical Society

Phineas was described as a strong student who excelled in mathematics and despised physical labor. He worked for his father on their farm and later in a family-owned general store. After his father’s death in 1825, Barnum liquidated the family assets and went to work at a general store in Grassy Plains just outside Bethel, where he met and married Charity Hallet, his wife of the next 44 years.

His career as the self-proclaimed “Prince of Humbugs” was launched at the age of 25 when a customer named Coley Bartram entered the grocery store Barnum had started with John Moody. Bartram knew Phineas had a weakness for speculative investments, and he was looking to sell a “curiosity.” Joice Heth, an African American woman alleged to be 161 years old and former nurse to founding father George Washington, drew crowds of curious onlookers willing to pay for the chance to hear her speak and even sing. Barnum jumped at the opportunity to market her performances.

Never one to risk understatement, Barnum marketed Joice Heth as “the greatest curiosity in the world,” according to Raymund Fitzsimons in his book Barnum in London. He flooded the New York area with posters and advertisements. When interest in Heth began to wane in New York, Barnum took her through New England, attempting to increase sales by claiming Heth was using the proceeds from the tour to buy her great-grandchildren out of slavery.  When interest in Heth began to fade a second time, Barnum sent an anonymous letter to the Boston press claiming that Heth, who was a small elderly woman, was not a person at all but instead an automaton—a word then for a mechanical figure—made  of whalebone, springs, and rubber. Barnum later claimed that the public’s need for amusement justified his hoaxes. While there is no record of Barnum ever saying, “There is a sucker born every minute,” biographer Wallace wrote that the showman did say “the American people liked to be humbugged.” If “humbugging” and exaggeration pleased his audiences, Barnum saw no harm in it. Since Barnum’s time, however, humbugs that involved making public spectacles of individuals based on their race or physical characteristics have received deserved scrutiny by a number of scholars.

Museum his “Ladder” to Fortune

Mr. & Mrs. Tom Thumb, Commodore Nutt, Minnie Watson, and P.T. Barnum – Connecticut Historical Society

In 1841 Barnum learned that Scudder’s American Museum, a collection of $50,000 worth of  “relics and rare curiosities” located in New York City on lower Broadway, was for sale. His purchase and grand reopening of the attraction as “Barnum’s American Museum” was what he called “the ladder” by which he rose to his fortune.

Barnum was relentless both in tracking down oddities and in promoting his museum. He set powerful floodlights and giant flowing banners atop his building. He advertised free roof-top concerts and then supplied the worst musicians he could find in hopes of driving crowds away from the noise and into the relative peace of the museum. Once inside, patrons were treated to a spectacle of “giants,” Native Americans, dog shows, a working replica of Niagara Falls, and even the famous Feejee Mermaid (later revealed to be a monkey torso and fish tail meticulously joined together). In the three years leading up to Barnum’s purchase, Scudder’s American Museum had grossed $34,000. In the first three years of its operation under Barnum, the newly renamed museum grossed more than $100,000.

In 1842, during a stopover in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the showman discovered Charles Stratton, a boy who would elevate Barnum’s fame to international levels. Stratton was four years old at the time of their meeting, was only 25 inches tall and weighed 15 pounds. Playing on America’s fascination with exotic European attractions, Barnum marketed Stratton as “General Tom Thumb, a dwarf of eleven years of age, just arrived from England.” Barnum and Stratton packed houses in America and embarked on a European tour where they met Queen Victoria of England, King Louis-Philippe of France, and other monarchs.

An 1897 poster advertising The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth – Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Retirement and a Disastrous Book

After managing a 150-concert tour for “Swedish Nightingale” Jenny Lind—a tour that brought him to new peaks of fame in the early 1850s—Barnum settled into the first of several uneasy retirements. He spent time with his wife and three daughters in his Bridgeport mansion, which he had named “Iranistan.”  There, in his elaborate Moorish-style mansion, he wrote a controversial autobiography that detailed the degree to which he had duped audiences while amassing his fortune. The backlash from its release in 1855 was severe, and readers felt betrayed and swindled by Barnum’s deceitful practices. The New York Times accused Barnum of obtaining success through “the systematic, adroit, and persevering plan of obtaining money under false pretenses from the public at large,” as quoted in the foreward to a 2000 edition of Barnum’s autobiography. Barnum spent years rewriting and attempting to control the damage from his book’s revelations.

A Career in Politics

After a series of poor financial decisions, including an investment in the bankrupt Jerome Clock Company of New Haven, Barnum was broke and forced to go back out on the road. In 1858 he gave a series of lectures around London entitled, ironically, “The Art of Money-Getting, or Success in Life,” that were very popular. His lectures and dedication to his New York museum helped revitalize his popularity, which eventually encouraged Barnum to run for public office.

“It always seemed to me,” Barnum once wrote (and is quoted in Wallace’s biography), “that a man who ‘takes no interest in politics’ is unfit to live in a land where the government rests in the hands of people.” Taking this philosophy to heart, Barnum won election to the Connecticut Legislature from the town of Fairfield in 1865. He fought for the citizenship of black men and women as proposed in the Fourteenth Amendment and worked to limit the power of the New York and New Haven Railroad lobby. Barnum’s successes got him reelected a year later. His most satisfying political work came during a one-year stint as mayor of Bridgeport in 1875. While in office, he crusaded to lower utility rates, improve water supplies, and close the city’s houses of prostitution.

The years that encompassed his political career also included a second failed attempt at retirement, the death of his wife Charity, a marriage to Nancy Fish a year later, and the launch of what became his most famous entertainment venture, the circus.

Barnum & Bailey Circus

In April of 1874 P. T. Barnum’s Great Roman Hippodrome had opened on an entire square in New York City between Fourth and Madison avenues. Barnum traveled around the world purchasing animals and attractions for the new Hippodrome. Despite the confidence that he owned the “Greatest Show on Earth,” Barnum saw a rival circus, known as International Allied Shows, as a threat to his success. He entered into merger negotiations with Allied’s James A. Bailey, laying the foundation for what ultimately became the Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Iranistan, residence of Mr. Barnum, ca. 1851, Bridgeport – Connecticut Historical Society and Connecticut History Illustrated

“Mr. Barnum, America”

In his later years, Barnum enjoyed reading and became a collector of oil paintings, never losing his passion for a good practical joke. He also never seemed to tire of his iconic status, reveling in the fact that a letter reached him all the way from Bombay (now Mumbai), India, that was addressed simply to “Mr. Barnum, America.”

Barnum died in his sleep on April 7, 1891, at his home in Bridgeport—a waterfront mansion named Marina; Iranistan had been destroyed by fire in 1857. After his death, Charles Godfrey Leland, a former Barnum employee quoted in the Wallace biography remembered him as “very kind-hearted and benevolent and gifted with a sense of fun which was even stronger than his desire for dollars.” On measuring his professional career, Barnum was credited by the Times of London as pioneering the profession of “showman on a grandiose scale,” and The Washington Post declared him “the most widely known American that ever lived.”

Gregg Mangan is an author and historian who holds a PhD in public history from Arizona State University.

from Connecticut History | a CTHumanities Project https://connecticuthistory.org/p-t-barnum-an-entertaining-life/

[digitalmark18-blog]

This Burger King Employee Was Shamed on Social Media. Now Her Story Has People Truly Stunned

New Post has been published on https://britishdigitalmarketingnews.com/this-burger-king-employee-was-shamed-on-social-media-now-her-story-has-people-truly-stunned/

This Burger King Employee Was Shamed on Social Media. Now Her Story Has People Truly Stunned

She was the lowest of the low, in some people’s eyes: an employee at Burger King.

Even worse, in their eyes, she was doing something unusual–lying on a cardboard box on the sidewalk outside during her break, trying to get a few badly needed minutes of sleep.

Of course that meant she was fair game for someone else to shame online, and use her to try to get views, shares, and likes on social media. That’s exactly what a man who spotted her did.

He woke her, mocked her, called her a name, and dropped multiple F-bombs in his short interaction.Then he posted the whole thing on Facebook. 

“Yo! What are you doing? Why the [censored] are you sleeping on the ground?” he says in the video. “This [censored] crazy as [censored]!” 

It worked. His video took off. He tore her down and built himself up, and he likely never would have thought about her again. 

Except that the truth came out. 

A teacher paying off her student loans

A manager at the Burger King shared the woman’s real story.

“She’s a teacher, and she’s trying to pay off her student loans and everything by working several jobs,” the manager told the Cheektowaga Chronicle. 

People can surely relate to that. The average American now owes $35,000 in student loans when he or she graduates from college. And the average starting salary for a school teacher in New York state is about $44,000.

So, just about everyone who hears the woman’s true story reacts with sympathy and respect. She’s exhausted from having to work her full-time day job and then moonlight on the weekends serving burgers and fries. 

“We don’t have outside seating, so she was sitting on the sidewalk trying to take her break, which she is allowed to do under the labor law,” the manager continued, adding, “People need to mind their own business and find out the real story before they go posting crap on social media.”

Everyone is fighting a battle

The whole thing is unfortunate and disturbing, but probably not surprising.

We reward people now for their social media prowess. The entire influencer industry is based on it. And we’ve created technology that allows jerks like the guy who recorded and posted the video in this story to get a few minutes of fame, or at least viral bragging rights.

Harsh comments and mildly weird things that would have once been forgotten almost instantly now can live on forever.

Understandably, the employee is upset about the video, and wants to remain anonymous. We’ll honor that here of course. (There’s a version of the video embedded below, but it has the employee’s face blurred, and it’s hosted separately so the added views won’t benefit the original poster.)

I suspect few people reading this article would ever do something like this. It’s a better class of people normally reading these articles.

But we do all make snap judgments, even judgments that we’d regret if we only knew the full story.

So why allow yourself to make their fight a little more difficult?

An edited version of the video is below. Again, this version blurs the employee’s face so she can’t be identified.

[embedded content]

Source: https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/burger-king-teacher-student-loans-working-social-media-viral-facebook-2018.html?cid=hmhero