ACLU THIS MONTH IN CIVIL LIBERTIES: What is Redistricting and Why Should We Care?, Safe and Healthy Schools Lead With Support, Not Police, Apple's New 'Child Safety' Plan for iPhones Isn't So Safe, Crenshaw on Teaching the Truth About Race in America, Freedom of the Press is Under Attack, Federal Court Delivers Qualified Immunity Win For Religious Freedom, Things to Know About the Revival of Trump-Era "Remain in Mexico" Policy 4SEP21

 

YOUR DISTRICT, YOUR VOTE

What is Redistricting and Why Should We Care? Every voter has a vital stake in redistricting because it determines the composition of districts that elect public officials at every level of government. With 2020 Census data now in hand, states are moving fast to redraw district lines. While all these numbers and maps might seem dull, they are fundamental to our democracy. Here's a breakdown that explains what's at stake. Read more

SUPPORT OUR STUDENTS

Safe and Healthy Schools Lead With Support, Not Police Communities across the country are pushing their schools to divest funding from police and reinvest funds in student mental health and other supportive services. But federal funding plays an important role, and Congress must do its part. That's why we're calling on Congress to pass the Counseling not Criminalization in Schools Act, critical legislation that would eliminate federal funds for police in schools and instead redirect those funds to supportive services for students. Read more

PRIVACY PITFALLS

Apple's New 'Child Safety' Plan for iPhones Isn't So Safe Apple recently announced upcoming changes in how it handles photos on iPhones. These changes are a step toward significantly worse privacy for all iPhone users, and are especially troubling for activists, dissidents, whistleblowers, members of oppressed groups like LGBTQ people, people of color, those facing religious persecution, and other vulnerable people. Read more

AT LIBERTY PODCAST

Kimberlé Crenshaw on Teaching the Truth About Race in America As of August, 27 state legislatures and 165 national and local organizations have made efforts to restrict education on racism. To help us understand what's happening, pioneering CRT scholar and Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw joins us to unpack the contemporary pushback against anti-racist education and connect it to the historical repression of civil rights movements. Listen now  |  More episodes

JUSTICE FOR JOURNALISTS

Freedom of the Press is Under Attack During Trump's presidency, our country repeatedly suffered his administration's attacks on the First Amendment, including freedom of the press. Now, the Biden administration's Department of Justice is quietly taking up the Trump mantle to fight free press, free speech, and government transparency in court. Read more

CHURCH OR JAIL

Federal Court Delivers Qualified Immunity Win For Religious Freedom Pray with us or go back to jail: That's the unfathomable choice given to Mark Janny by his parole officer after his release from prison into a Christian mission. When Janny, an atheist, refused to attend services, his parole was revoked. This month, a federal appeals court rebuked the parole officer and affirmed one of our most fundamental and enduring constitutional commands: The government cannot punish you for refusing to pray. Read more

WAITING AT THE BORDER

Things to Know About the Revival of Trump-Era "Remain in Mexico" Policy After a whirlwind of court actions this month, the Biden administration will be forced to restart a Trump-era border policy that sent tens of thousands of people seeking asylum to dangerous conditions in Mexico to await their court dates. Here's what you need to know about the past, present, and future of this harmful policy. Read more

It's not a labor shortage — it's a wage and workers rights shortage 2SEP21

 AMERICAN Labor Day, the first Monday in September, created to keep American workers from joining forces with the rest of the world for fair wages, benefits and workers rights. The rest of the world celebrates Labor Day (with good reason) on 1 MAY. They are protected and provided for because of the struggles and activism of previous generations of workers. Americans continue to face exploitation, discrimination, neglect and abuse, in short class warfare to protect and increase the profit margins of corporate America and the politicians they have bought. This from The Hill just might document a new American labor movement....

It's not a labor shortage — it's a wage and workers rights shortage

BY LANE WINDHAM, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 09/02/21 09:30 AM EDT

As we approach Labor Day, America’s working people are deep into a protracted general strike. Millions are refusing to go back into low-wage, no-benefits jobs that require they abandon dignity and rights at the workplace door. Their struggle has brewed for 40 years as wages stagnated, benefits vanished and public policy offered working families little reprieve. Employers complain that too few people are returning to work, but America’s “labor shortage” is really a shortage of good wages and workers rights on the job. 

Recent jobs reports show an uptick in the numbers of workers returning to work, but payroll tallies are still more than 5 million shy of pre-pandemic levels. Restaurants, retailers and hospitality firms say it is especially difficult to hire, and some blame generous unemployment checks. However, even those states that have rescinded supplemental unemployment benefits are finding that many people remain hesitant to take the sorts of jobs that are on offer.   

The pandemic shook up what workers want and expect from a job. America cheered front-line workers during the early days of the pandemic, banging pots and pans for health care workers, honking for delivery drivers, and thanking cashiers. But these workers’ wages remain too low to cover rising housing, education and health care costs. You’d need an average of $25 an hour to rent a modest two-bedroom apartment, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, and minimum wage workers can’t afford rent anywhere in the nation. An extra dollar or two more just isn’t cutting it for most people, especially when they’re putting their health on the line.   

Meanwhile, women are still shouldering the bulk of unpaid child and elder care, a balancing act that the pandemic has made nearly impossible. Nearly 2 million women dropped out of the labor force during the pandemic, and many did so in order to take care of their kids or sick parents. It’s no coincidence that the sectors having the most difficult time staffing up — food service and retail — are majority female occupations. Women are looking at their paltry options and voting with their feet by staying home.   

This isn’t the first time Americans withheld their labor to turn big societal changes in their favor. W.E.B. Du Bois posited in his masterful "Black Reconstruction in America" that enslaved people engaged in a general strike when they ran away from plantations, took up arms and sabotaged cotton production, forcing President Abraham Lincoln’s decision to end slavery. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first Depression-era revision to labor law gave employers the upper hand, general strikes in San Francisco, Minneapolis and the textile industry helped convince him to pass the National Labor Relations Act. 

The U.S. is at another such historical crossroads due to the pandemic, and working people are weighing in by staying home. In the 1970s, employers started creating the kinds of bad jobs that are now the norm; they started hiring part-time, contract labor, lowering wages and benefits, and attacking workers unions with new vehemence. Meanwhile, U.S. policy didn’t keep up. It abandoned working people to the whims of corporations and the market. America’s working women and men are now looking at these bad jobs and the lack of governmental oversight and support, weighing the risks and personal costs, and deciding that they just aren’t doing it anymore.

Working people’s reluctance to rush back into poorly paid and precarious jobs could help bolster Democrats’ chances of passing the $3.5 trillion budget resolution agreement, which marks a long-overdue expansion of the federal social safety net. This legislation could help get people back to work and keep them there because it gives workers many of the supports they need to navigate today’s economy. It would expand child care, create universal pre-K, boost affordable housing, offer free community college, enact paid family and medical leave, support long-term home care, and expand Medicare. Alongside higher wages, these wraparound supports would mean that people who wait tables, deliver packages and ring up customers can finally pay rent, afford health and child care, and even send kids to college. 

This Labor Day, working women and men are deeply fed up and ready for the kind of economic game changer that will improve their lives for decades to come. Until they see more rights and support, they might just choose to stay home. 

Lane Windham, Ph.D., is the associate director of Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor and author of “Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide.”

MOTHER JONES DAILY; Does Banning the Taliban From Social Media Actually Help Afghans?, The anti-vax lawyer representing January 6 rioters has suddenly gone missing, It took approximately zero seconds for hawks to make the Afghanistan withdrawal about China, As Hurricane Ida strands thousands, the police would rather focus on "anti-looting" patrols, Florida's COVID surge is taxing its ability to purify drinking water, England Intends to Ban Single-Use Culinary Plastics—Very Slowly,A New Website Catalogs More Than 250 Black Films Currently Streaming

 

 

August 31, 2021

It's the last day of August, and the United States' involvement in Afghanistan is officially over.

As the Taliban claims victory, more than 100 Americans remain in the country, though the State Department has said that it plans to assist those who want to leave. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said yesterday that more than 123,000 people had been safely flown out of Afghanistan, including about 6,000 US citizens.

Meanwhile, conservative war hawks are spinning US withdrawal from Afghanistan as a win for China. Social media executives are grappling with the thorny issue of whether to ban the Taliban from their sites. And President Biden will have to figure out how to continue diplomatic relations with a Taliban-run government.

Biden just discussed the future of US foreign policy in Afghanistan. Watch his remarks here.

—Abigail Weinberg

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England Intends to Ban Single-Use Culinary Plastics—Very Slowly

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SOME GOOD NEWS, FOR ONCE

A New Website Catalogs More Than 250 Black Films Currently Streaming

Forget the idea that Black cinema primarily depicts a singular set of storylines and themes centered on shared trauma, says screenwriter Maya Cade, who spent a year cataloging more than 250 currently streaming Black films from between 1915 and 1979. Her effort to make that rich history easily accessible culminated in the launch of the Black Film Archive last week. From silent films to horror flicks to blockbuster comedies and romance, Black cinema spans ever-expanding genres and generations, now archived on her site.

In her introductory note, Cade writes that the films appearing in the archive “have something significant to say about the Black experience; speak to Black audiences; and/or have a Black star, writer, producer, or director.” The intentionally broad criteria is an attempt to expand the ways Black films are framed. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that the act of making Black film history accessible is the act of transforming collective memory,” Cade told me. “To intentionally preserve is to remember, and to remember is to reimagine what the future can hold. Here, the films can be many things, and among those things are being remembered, treasured, and seen.”

Beyond archiving, Cade is also one of the vanishingly few people to use Twitter to spread joy, bringing snippets of cultural history—and countless gems from cinema as a whole—to her followers’ feeds every day. She’ll continue updating the archive monthly and maintaining a supplemental newsletter. Explore the rich range of Black film: If you find yourself with an hour to spare, pick a movie and start streaming.

—Abigail Weinberg

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