30 June 20
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29 June 20
Supreme Court, in 5-4 Ruling, Strikes Down Restrictive Louisiana Abortion Law
Robert Barnes, The Washington Post
Barnes writes: "The Supreme Court on Monday provided a victory for abortion rights activists, striking down a restrictive Louisiana law that would have left the state with only one abortion clinic."
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Robert Barnes, The Washington Post
Barnes writes: "The Supreme Court on Monday provided a victory for abortion rights activists, striking down a restrictive Louisiana law that would have left the state with only one abortion clinic."
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Detroit police drove an SUV through a group of protesters on Sunday night. (photo: Twitter)
Detroit Police Ram Protesters With SUV
Violet Ikonomova, Deadline Detroit
Ikonomova writes: "Detroit police rammed a crowd of demonstrators with an SUV Sunday night then sped forward, squealing their tires and sending two who were hanging on the hood flying."
Violet Ikonomova, Deadline Detroit
Ikonomova writes: "Detroit police rammed a crowd of demonstrators with an SUV Sunday night then sped forward, squealing their tires and sending two who were hanging on the hood flying."
Tucker Carlson. (image: Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty Images)
It's Time to Defund Fox News
Diane McWhorter, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "If business types really care about social justice, they'll defund the country's most prominent purveyor of anti-justice poison. And here's an unlikely model for them to follow."
Diane McWhorter, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "If business types really care about social justice, they'll defund the country's most prominent purveyor of anti-justice poison. And here's an unlikely model for them to follow."
unt Jemima and Uncle Ben are being emancipated, and now corporate America promises to tackle the crueler substructures of racism: impediments to opportunity that, perhaps as much as police brutality, explain why George Floyd went from a second-grader with dreams of becoming a Supreme Court justice to a dead man under a cop’s knee because of a fake $20 bill. The “racial equality and justice solutions” being explored by a new subcommittee of the Business Roundtable will take time and benchmarks.
But there is an essential transformation the C-suite could set in motion immediately: Defund the toxic political culture, or at least its most conspicuous instrument, that makes progress difficult if not impossible and turns second thoughts about a mammy-esque syrup bottle into “they murdered Mrs. Butterworth,” as a recent guest on Fox News fumed.
If the CEOs mean business, they will find an unlikely but useful (if somewhat squirrely) blueprint for change in “The Year of Birmingham,” the name the civil rights movement gave to 1963’s tectonic shift on civil rights, which has lately re-entered the news cycle. Martin Luther King Jr.’s epic demonstrations that spring set the standard for the George Floyd mass marches—and for the opposition response. The German shepherds that police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor used against King’s young foot soldiers made a recent comeback as “the most vicious dogs” tweet-sicced by Donald Trump.
That’s all well known. But there’s an overlooked paradigm from 1963, and it calls out directly to the corporate elite: the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce’s marriage of necessity to the civil rights movement. By the time King disturbed what he called the “obnoxious negative peace” there, the steel-producing Pittsburgh of the South was a dying workshop town propped up by the girders of apartheid.
Because they realized they faced either change or social breakdown, the city fathers went against every fiber in their segregationist, controversy-averse conditioning to strike a deal with King. That agreement led to the desegregation of Birmingham’s public spaces a full year before it was federally mandated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964—the direct result of King’s marches. It was a remarkable, voluntary-ish end to a “Way of Life” held sacred.
Today’s newly woke business leaders are also positioned to do something transformative, swift, and unilateral, if they focus on a single variable: the political propellent crucial to the election of our first white-only president. Fox News weaponized a minority constituency to gain majority power and has also helped render Trump unaccountable by maintaining an aroused and misinformed base to body-check irresolute congressional Republicans.
More relevant to corporate priorities, Fox has jacked up partisanship into a primetime dystopia that should give sponsors pause. Do they really want the babies in their disposable-diaper commercials to share airtime with a Texas politician comparing Seattle to a Middle Eastern town taken over by ISIS?
For America’s brands, de-sponsoring Fox News may have become the smart as well as right thing to do. Here, Birmingham offers a template for risk minimization. Two years before King came to town, the Chamber of Commerce had decided it had to address the city’s race problem following a Ku Klux Klan attack against the Freedom Riders, orchestrated by Bull Connor.
Out of that emerged the so-called Senior Citizens Committee—around 75 industrialists, bankers, and executives, a municipal precursor of the Business Roundtable—who in 1963 permitted (sorta, in theory) their people to negotiate with King’s people, as long as their own names were not revealed. A real estate developer named Sidney Smyer volunteered to take the fall publicly, explaining why he was choosing economic survival over principle: “I’m a segregationist, but I’m not a damn fool.” In other words, he was doing it because he had to, not because he wanted to.
Like the Senior Citizens, Fox’s corporate sponsors should act en bloc with Spartacus-like anonymity and withdraw advertising with no explanation (“our priorities have changed”) and under no threat of a boycott, other than the implied buying power of the people out on the streets. The ad hoc cancelations they typically make—such as those currently hitting Tucker Carlson— do not necessarily dent the network’s revenues and may now smack of “performative allyship.” As the Klan and the civil rights movement were lumped together in the white Southern mind as “extremists on both sides,” false equivalencies will be drawn between Fox and MSNBC. But unconstructive as the left’s ministry of truth may be, it has not taken over a cable news channel or a political party or the White House.
The Senior Citizens’ names ended up in the paper anyway, and none suffered serious reprisals any more than Nike went out of business over its Colin Kaepernick ad campaign. When white supremacists called Smyer to say they were coming to “git” him, he said they’d have to guess which tree he was waiting behind with his gun. (Instead, Klansmen killed four African-American girls attending Sunday school four months later; the last living bomber of the 16th Street Baptist Church died on Friday.) Corporations are not being asked to put their lives on the line, or even stop marketing to Fox’s followers. Thanks to the science of audience targeting, that demographic can be reached on platforms that do not keep the country whipped up in a constant state of civil war.
Even if the norms of democratic self-government could be reclaimed from what the TV president Jed Bartlet called “the church of I Hate You,” our politics would still not be released from captivity to organized money. So the corporate anguish over inequality is meaningful only if it recognizes that the business model itself is failing.
Occupy Wall Street was ignored (by both parties), and its spirit returned as a competitive socialist candidate for president. But instead of heeding the signs that capitalism is becoming irreconcilable with democracy, the party of business doubled down with Donald Trump, a caricature of self-dealing corruption, who ended up demonstrating that the market was not the boss of a pandemic-dealing God after all.
The industrialists of Birmingham did more than their share to cause the crisis requiring their rearguard conversion in 1963—they put Bull Connor in office, and they quelled cross-racial labor solidarity through such “political” organizations as the League to Maintain White Supremacy. Earlier this month, Doug McMillon, the president of Walmart, pledged to invest $100 million toward remedying inequities that his company helped foster.
Walmart was among the corporate funders of the American Legislative Exchange Council, which salted its model pro-business legislation with “culturally” galvanizing pro-gun and voter-ID state laws. Walmart and other embarrassed companies exited ALEC in 2012 after one such statute, “Stand Your Ground,” became an issue in George Zimmerman’s fatal shooting of unarmed Trayvon Martin. Out of Zimmerman’s 2013 acquittal was born Black Lives Matter.
As that rallying cry brings hope of a sea change beyond the police reforms now in play, activists should keep in mind another lesson of Birmingham: Economic power gives up only as much as it must in order to preserve itself. ALEC is still alive and busy, promoting laws to shield employers against COVID-19-related claims from self-described “sacrificial” workers.
Meanwhile, Trump rally-goers willingly “assume all risks” of gathering in his name, secure in their president’s blessing. As long as “retail sales numbers are incredible,” they “will not have died in vain.” Their passing will not be noted on Fox, but Sean Hannity no doubt sends his condolences.
Health-care workers from University of South Florida Health administer coronavirus testing June 25 at a community center in Tampa. (photo: Octavio Jones/Getty Images)
This Coronavirus Mutation Has Taken Over the World. Scientists Are Trying to Understand Why.
Sarah Kaplan and Joel Achenbach, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The mutation doesn't appear to make people sicker, but a growing number of scientists worry that it has made the virus more contagious."
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Sarah Kaplan and Joel Achenbach, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The mutation doesn't appear to make people sicker, but a growing number of scientists worry that it has made the virus more contagious."
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Members of the Rolling Stones. (photo: AP)
Rolling Stones Threaten to Sue Trump Over Using Their Songs
Danica Kirka, Associated Press
Kirka writes: "The Rolling Stones are threatening President Donald Trump with legal action for using their songs at his rallies despite cease-and-desist directives."
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Danica Kirka, Associated Press
Kirka writes: "The Rolling Stones are threatening President Donald Trump with legal action for using their songs at his rallies despite cease-and-desist directives."
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Soldiers. (photo: AFP)
Rape of Indigenous Girl by 7 Soldiers Shocks Colombia
teleSUR
Excerpt: "The rape of a 13-year-old Indigenous girl in Colombia by at least seven military soldiers has shocked several sectors of the country and mobilized human rights organizations, who called for justice."
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teleSUR
Excerpt: "The rape of a 13-year-old Indigenous girl in Colombia by at least seven military soldiers has shocked several sectors of the country and mobilized human rights organizations, who called for justice."
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A manatee swims just below the surface in Crystal River, Florida, where 'unguided boaters and swimmers have had a detrimental effect on the environment.' (photo: Brent Durand/Getty Images)
Florida Manatee Deaths Up 20% as Covid-19 Threatens Recovery
Cheryl Rodewig, Guardian UK
A manatee swims just below the surface in Crystal River, Florida, where 'unguided boaters and swimmers have had a detrimental effect on the environment.' (photo: Brent Durand/Getty Images)
he apparent environmental upside of Covid-19, such as lower pollution and emissions, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Just ask manatee conservationists in Florida.
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Cheryl Rodewig, Guardian UK
A manatee swims just below the surface in Crystal River, Florida, where 'unguided boaters and swimmers have had a detrimental effect on the environment.' (photo: Brent Durand/Getty Images)
Unsafe boating activity, delays to environmental projects and changes in public policy are putting the gentle giants at risk
he apparent environmental upside of Covid-19, such as lower pollution and emissions, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Just ask manatee conservationists in Florida.
Keeping this threatened species safe has increasingly been an uphill battle – especially since manatees were controversially downgraded from “endangered” in 2017. But conservationists are facing unexpected challenges in the face of coronavirus. So far, the pandemic has led to more unsafe boating activity, delays to environmental project launches and even changes in public policy – none of which favor these gentle giants.
“There are several troubling factors coming together during the pandemic,” said Patrick Rose, an aquatic biologist and executive director of the nonprofit Save the Manatee Club. “Manatees were already facing accelerated habitat loss, rising fatalities from boat collisions and less regulatory protection. With Covid, we’re seeing manatees at an increased risk, both from policies that undermine environmental standards and from irresponsible outdoor activity, such as boaters ignoring slow-speed zones.”
Boaters speeding through manatee habitats can easily injure or kill the slow-moving mammals. A 1,600-pound pregnant manatee was hit by a boat near Siesta Key in May; she was rescued and delivered a healthy calf but remains in critical care, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC). In June, a manatee swimming off the coast of southwest Florida collided with a vessel, causing a rib fracture that punctured its lung. These types of collisions are so common that researchers use scars as a way to identify individual manatees.
Rose says dangerous boating activity increased in March, as boat ramps remained open while other recreation sites closed for lockdown, and it’s now on the rise again as Florida reopens.
Researchers know manatees are increasingly at risk– manatee deaths went up nearly 20% for April through May, compared to last year, and June is already exceeding the five-year average for this time. But the FWC can’t say why – due to necropsy restrictions during Covid-19, there’s no official cause of death for most of the carcasses.
“We suspect there were many more manatees killed by boating than we could determine,” Rose said.
Mike Engiles, who manages the ecotourism company Crystal River Watersports, has also noticed a spike in reckless behavior on the water, including speeding boats and littering. Crystal River is famous for having more than 70 warm springs where manatees winter.
“Once Florida started to open up outdoor recreation in early May, people swarmed to the waterways,” he said. “Unguided boaters and swimmers have had a detrimental effect on the environment. There’s an increase in trash. There are reports of destruction to the grass beds from props and anchors.” Engiles adds that swimmers have been taking home rocks meant to stabilize the river banks.
Meanwhile, guided recreation like manatee swims in Crystal River’s Citrus county – the only place in the US you can legally swim with manatees – has stopped. That means fewer expert eyes on the water, as many guides are trained to spot injured manatees and understand threats to their safety, says Engiles.
Beyond presenting immediate challenges, the pandemic is also affecting longer-term efforts for conservation.
Social distancing has necessitated delays in certain projects that once required in-person meetings – like the initiative to breach the Ocklawaha River dam, which would provide warm-water habitat for manatees. It’s a time-sensitive effort, as the 50-year-old dam is up for review this year.
But conservation work continues, despite delays and teleworking. A coalition of more than 30 organizations is currently at work on legislation to restore the Ocklawaha.
The real problem, Rose said, are regulatory changes that threaten the manatee’s ecosystem. Their impacts will long outlast any temporary gains from less waterfront construction or lower air pollution that result from quarantine.
A number of deregulation efforts have happened since March – including an executive order that rollbacks environmental protections in favor of faster development. Unsustainable coastal development can destroy seagrass, manatees’ primary food source.
Other changes, like the Environmental Protection Agency’s new policy to suspend air and water pollution monitoring requirements during the outbreak, can further harm manatee habitats. Climate change already causes cold snaps, superstorms and rising sea levels that will ultimately suppress warm springs, all potentially fatal for manatees.
Without regulatory support, the current precarious situation for Florida manatees could reach a tipping point, leading to the collapse of aquatic resources they rely on, Rose said.
“I’ve been working at this for about 50 years,” he said. “We have many more manatees today than we had then. But we don’t necessarily have a growing population. We’re bumping up against the carrying capacity of the habitat, in terms of food and warm water supply. We’ve lost tens of thousands of acres of seagrass over the past decade. The power plants, which currently supply artificial warm water, will also be closing in the coming years, making our fight to protect natural warm springs habitat all the more critical.”
Rose says there’s room for recovery, but only with the necessary protective measures in place. In all likelihood, given the current trends, the need to advocate for manatees will be around much longer than the pandemic.
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