13 June 22
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
The ex-White House adviser told the January 6 panel she didn’t believe her father’s election fraud claim – get ready for the Javanka rehabilitation tour!
The writing has been on the wall for a while now, but it seems Ivanka Trump finally did it: she turned against her daddy. On Thursday we learned that the former White House adviser told the congressional panel investigating the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, that she doesn’t believe her father’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. In a video deposition that was shown during the first hearing of the panel, Ivanka states that she accepted the explanations of the then attorney general, Bill Barr, to Donald Trump that there wasn’t any evidence of voter fraud, and he’d lost the election fair and square.
“I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he was saying,” Ivanka said.
I would give up a kidney to have witnessed the meltdown that Trump must have had when his favourite child publicly rejected his big lie. Did he drown his sorrows in Diet Coke? Did he storm through Mar-a-Lago smashing gold trinkets with his golf clubs? Did he call up his lawyer and write Ivanka out of his will?
Who knows. What do we know is that, oh-so-predictably, Trump reached for his phone and started firing off angry rants. On Friday the former president logged on to Truth Social, his disaster of a social media platform, and published a number of posts railing against Bill Barr. He also had some choice words about his daughter. “Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results,” Trump said huffily. “She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!)”
What a family, eh? Thanksgiving this year is going to be quite something.
Apart from the obvious fact that the Trumps are about as dysfunctional a family unit as you can get, what are we to make of the Ivanka/Donald rift? Is Ivanka finally developing a conscience? Not at all. Ivanka’s just doing what Ivanka does best, which is looking out for number one. Ivanka stuck close to her father when he was useful to her but now his star is on the wane she’s backing away quickly. In recent months Trump seems to have lost his kingmaker status and his grip on the GOP: a number of candidates he’s endorsed have been soundly defeated in their races. Last week a conservative group straw poll in Colorado placed Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, above Trump in their preference for the Republican party’s 2024 presidential nomination. DeSantis placed above Trump in a similar poll in Wisconsin. Trump is increasingly old news.
While Trump’s career seems to be on the rocks, things are going swimmingly chez Javanka. Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, made up to $640m in outside income while they were “working” in the White House and are raking in even more cash now. Jared’s new investment fund recently got $2bn from a fund led by the Saudi crown prince, who Jared spent a lot of time cozying up to while Trump was president. I’m not sure exactly what Mr Kushner did to inspire such confidence from the Saudis, but it must have been something big; $2bn is a huge amount of money. It can certainly buy you a lot of bonesaws.
Now that it seems unlikely Trump is going to be able to make any sort of political comeback, now that he is no longer of much use to Jared and Ivanka, expect the Great Javanka Rehabilitation tour of 2022 to come to a media outlet near you very soon. Expect to see a growing amount of favourable coverage about the pair; expect to see stories peppered with anonymous quotes about how Javanka spent the Trump presidency trying to do the right thing; how they desperately tried to stop the former president from disseminating the big lie. Please, whatever happens, let’s not let these people rewrite history. Ivanka and Jared could have chosen to publicly denounce Trump’s claims about the election being stolen in the immediate aftermath of the election. They could have done the right thing right away. They didn’t.
What did they do instead? Well, in the weeks following the 2020 election, Jared checked out. Instead of trying to get Trump to concede defeat he took an online MasterClass from the bestselling thriller writer James Patterson so he could get a few tips for writing his White House memoir. Ivanka, meanwhile, pandered to her father. If Ivanka really had accepted Barr’s statements about the election being stolen why did she tweet about “American Patriots” when the Capitol was being stormed? And, as ex-Trump official Stephanie Grisham said about Ivanka on CNN: “If she was truly that impacted by Bill Barr ... perhaps she could’ve done a little bit more and not stood by [Trump’s] side while he publicly pushed the Big Lie.” Indeed.
Toronto blames woman who was pushed on to subway tracks for ‘travelling alone’
According to Toronto’s public transit agency, the woman “ought to have known” it was unsafe for her to travel on public travel “alone and unassisted”. A truly outstanding example of victim-blaming. Remember, ladies, never leave the house without a male chaperone otherwise you’re asking for bad things to happen.
This week’s cast of ‘disgraced celebrities who are facing legal charges’ includes:
– Harvey Weinstein, who will face two charges of indecent assault allegedly committed against a woman in London in 1996.
– R Kelly, who will face sentencing later this month; in a memo filed on Wednesday, prosecutors said he should get at least 25 years in prison.
– Kevin Spacey, who will face a sexual abuse lawsuit in New York after a US federal judge rejected the actor’s bid to get the suit dismissed.
Did you know that it wasn’t unusual for women in medieval Europe to get paid to breastfeed?
I highly recommend this fascinating piece in JStor Daily about how in the 15th century Kingdom of Aragon people used to recognize the time and energy involved in breastfeeding, by paying mothers to do it.
Larry Nassar victims seek $1bn from FBI for botched investigation
In 2015, FBI agents knew that Nassar (who is now in prison) was accused of assaulting gymnasts, but didn’t do anything. He continued to target young women and girls for more than a year.
Geico could pay $5.2m to a woman who got an STD during car sex
This story may be the best advert for car insurance I have ever seen.
The week in paw-triarchy
You know what they say, you wait for one kitten to come along and then 13 arrive at once. A guy called Robert Brantley was driving along the road in Louisiana on Tuesday when he stopped to rescue a stray kitten. Turns out 12 more were hiding in the bush and ambushed him. “Oh, my gosh, there’s more! We got a kitten problem,” Brantley exclaims in a viral video. “Who would do this? I thought I was saving one. Hot diggity dog.”
AK-47 Assault Rifle. (photo: brian.ch/Flickr)
ALSO SEE: A Bipartisan Group of Senators
Announces a Deal for School Safety and Gun Measures
The introduction you’re reading right now is already out of date or we wouldn’t be in the United States of 2022. I mean, we live in a country where, for years now, there have been more guns than people. According to the latest figures (for 2018!), almost 400 million of them and only 330 million or so of us. Oh, and by the way, of those nearly 400 million, an estimated nearly 20 million (and rising) are AR-15 military-style assault rifles. And we’re also in a country where mass shootings (those in which at least four people are struck by bullets, whether or not they die) have all too literally become everyday matters. As I was starting this introduction, there were already 243 of them this year; in other words, more than one a day so far and, sadly, the year is young. Just a day or so later, three more had been added, including a bloody shootout in the streets of Philadelphia where three people died and 12 were wounded. The bloodiest of them — as recently in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas — are truly grim but increasingly normal events.
And the shooters only seem to be getting younger in a country where, in 44 states anyone 18 or older can buy more or less anything that kills, especially those highly militarized rifles the two 18 year olds in Buffalo and Uvalde used to such deathly effect. And no matter who dies or how, it seems that the Republican Party will put its stamp of approval on unfettered gun ownership in a big way. Take it as a lesson of our moment that Chris Jacobs, a first-term Republican congressional representative from Buffalo, once endorsed by the National Rifle Association, recently came out in support of a federal assault-weapons ban. He then faced an instant backlash from within his party and, under intense pressure, decided not even to run for his seat again this year.
So, it’s good to have the second of what promises to be an ongoing series of autobiographical pieces from TomDispatch regular (as well as former sportswriter and columnist for the New York Times) Robert Lipsyte. Think of him as offering here a little inside information from his own past on what it feels like to be a young man in this country packing a weapon, while your emotions and sense of manliness run wild. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
A Country Armed to the Teeth
And Strutting Toward the Apocalypse
I was packing it illegally, but I knew that a white man in a suit and tie was unlikely to be stopped by the police and frisked, even in a city with some of the strictest gun laws in the country — laws that may soon be swept away if the Supreme Court continues what seems to be its holy war on democracy. In fact, its justices are expected to rule this month in a case that challenges New York’s constitutional right to deny anyone a permit to carry a firearm. That state’s current licensing process allows only those who can prove a “special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community.” That means you can’t pack heat just because you want to feel stronger and braver than you are or because you feel threatened by people who look different from you.
It also means that you can’t enjoy the privileges of the past. In his history of gun rights in this country, Armed in America, Patrick Charles quotes this from a piece in a 1912 issue of the magazine Sports Afield: “Perfect freedom from annoyance by petty lawbreakers is found in a country where every man carries his own sheriff, judge, and executioner swung on his hip.”
Sadly enough, carrying such firepower is thrilling, oppressive, and often leads to calamity as hundreds of police officers and the would-be neighborhood defender George Zimmerman, the killer of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, found out. It was something I, too, came to understand. Let me tell you how.
The Hunter
The Beretta was not my first gun. That was a .22 bolt-action Savage Arms rifle that my favorite uncle insisted I needed to grow into true manhood. My dad was against harboring a gun in the house, but the masculinity argument must have swayed him. He had been too old for the Army and not having served disturbed him. Uncle Irving was his best friend and a World War II vet.
I was around 12 years old, about the age most kids in gun-owning families are first armed. I was an avid fan of the Western movies of that era, which were always resolved by a gunfight. The idea of owning a gun, that symbol of manhood, genuinely excited me. Somehow, because there were so many rules and restrictions, target practice became a duty, as well as a guilty pleasure. (Many years later, I spoke with an Army sergeant who described shooting as unlimited orgasms for less than six cents each.)
In my early teens, I enjoyed plinking away in the woods, knocking off cans and bottles (Indians and outlaws, of course) until the inevitable need to actually kill something became uncontainable. I had to test myself. I was a responsible kid and heeded my dad’s ban on shooting at birds and squirrels, even rattlesnakes, but I finally begged permission to go after the rabbit pillaging mom’s vegetable garden.
I got it on the first shot!
And that was the beginning of my conflict.
It just didn’t feel as good as I had dreamt it would, even though my hunting partner, my kid sister, cheered, while my parents appeared both dismayed and impressed. In death, the marauder of our food supply turned out to be just a hungry little bunny.
Was there something missing in the experience or maybe in me, I wondered? Where was the joy I expected in actually gunning something down? Nevertheless, I paid lip-service to what I thought I should have felt, turning the backyard ambush into the equivalent of an Ernest Hemingway safari, a tale told heroically until it became satirical. (Hemingway was my generation’s avatar of toxic masculinity in literature and in life. And, of course, he killed himself with a gun.)
My sister and I skinned our prey and kept those dried-out rabbit’s feet for years. But ever since, the idea of hunting, if nothing gets eaten, seemed noxious to me and, as the years passed, I began to think of sport hunters as the leatherette men, a gang of poseurs.
Though I kept that rifle, I never fired it again.
The Shootist
Covering police stories early in my newspaper career, I found myself regularly around guns that were almost never drawn on duty, weapons worn by men and women mostly discomforted by their weight and bulge. But I found that I was still fascinated by them. It was only the idea of using them for hunting that bothered me then, not guns themselves.
Still, weapons training in the Army in 1961 turned out to be no fun. The instructors were even more restrictive than Dad and I proved to be a mediocre shot at best.
Basic training turned out to be boring and disappointing. I had, at least, hoped to get myself in better shape and work on some of those manly arts that were still on my mind, like hand-to-hand combat. But that didn’t happen. After basic, I was dumped into clerk/typist school, the Army’s numbing attempt to teach soldiers to be all they could be by doing paperwork. The secretarial training drove me so crazy that I went on sick call and started spending nights in the beer garden at Fort Dix, which only made everything worse.
Then, one night, en route to getting wasted again, I wandered into a free shooting range sponsored by the National Rifle Association (NRA). Oh, joy!
Unlimited orgasms, rifles and handguns, jolly instructors. I was still gripped by the fantasy of manly fun. The next thing I knew, I had joined the NRA by mailing in a card from one of its magazines. My mood lifted and, incredibly, I graduated at the top of my clerk/typist class. I then floated through the rest of my six-month active-duty enlistment in the Army information office, trigger happy all the way.
Back in civilian life, writing sports stories for the New York Times in the early 1960s, I discovered that my manhood credentials were unassailable, especially to the guys I now think of as the Bystander Boys. Those were the everyday dudes who genuflect to alpha males, especially the sports heroes they assumed I drank with. Those were specious creds, although it would take me years more to figure that out. Back then, I wasn’t yet paying attention to the various kinds of faux manhood that were around me everywhere. Quite the opposite, I was living my own version of it. Especially when I got my beautiful little Beretta.
My frat house roommate Marty, a naval officer, brought back one for each of us from a Mediterranean cruise. It fit our fantasy lives then. After all, we’d both studied combat judo with a drunken ex-Marine on a tough street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. We were both delusional apprentice bad asses at a time when actor Humphrey Bogart was considered a profile in manhood. We liked the way he smoked and handled a gun in his films. In addition, we had both read the James Bond novels and were proud that 007’s early pistol of choice, the Beretta, was now ours, too.
The Gunslinger
To say that I felt bigger and harder with the Beretta in my pocket is true, even if it reduces the experience to a phallic cartoon (which, of course, is just what it was). But there was more. It was proof that I was neither weak, nor soft, and didn’t have to feel as vulnerable as I actually did covering stories on the mean streets of the city. It meant I could walk at night in the South Bronx assuming that I’d be able to respond to anything, that I would never have to run or surrender my wallet to some teenaged mugger.
So went my weaponized imagination then. I felt primed for action. I was daring the world, strolling through New York with what I took to be the pigeon-toed rolling swagger of that classic star of so many cowboy and war movies, John Wayne. I even began to fancy that I projected a dangerous aura that would intimidate anyone with bad intentions toward me.
Soon enough, I knew, that feeling of invulnerability would have to be tested. The emotional weight of that gun seemed to demand it. I would have to use it and it wouldn’t be on a rabbit this time.
I felt feverish with the desire for (and terror of) engagement. I suspect that a kind of temporary insanity set in, that I was gun crazy, drowning in testosterone — and the memory of that gives me a feeling for the state of mind of the mad boys now regularly slaughtering people in our country. And here was the strangest thing in retrospect: I don’t remember ever thinking that I didn’t really know how to use that gun, that I’d had no training with it, never even fired it. And in those days, there was no YouTube to show me how.
And then came one lunatic night on Manhattan’s lower East Side. For a magazine story, I was shadowing a young doctor who worked for a non-profit group visiting sick kids in their squalid rooms. Nervous that the drugs and syringes he was carrying in his medical bag might make him a target, he was hugging the shadows of the dark street as we made our way to his car, half a block away. Suddenly, a group of loud young men appeared, drinking beer. The doctor grabbed my arm. He wanted to duck back into the building we had just walked out of.
Filled with bravado, however, I pulled him along, my other hand in my pocket. I was suddenly on fire in a way that reminded me of my teen self and the rabbit. No punks were going to chase me off that street. I glared at them. They glared right back, but then separated so we could walk quickly through them to our car. I promptly flopped into the passenger seat, suddenly exhausted, wiped out by my own stupidity, my own madness.
Just thinking about it now, almost 60 years later, my spine tingles, my muscles lock, and I feel a deep sense of shame, especially for endangering that young do-good doctor. And the possible outcome, had I done something truly stupid? I imagine the gun snagging on my pocket lining as I tried to pull it out for the first time and shooting myself in the foot or, far worse, shooting someone else. I never carried a gun again.
The Unarmed
When I gave the Beretta back to Marty, I told him only a piece of the truth. I said I was afraid of getting busted with it in a city with such rigorous gun laws. I promised to visit the pistol in California, where he would soon be living. And I did. I shot it there for the first time at a commercial range, along with Marty’s new .45. He was rapturous, but I was just going through the motions. There was no excitement or pleasure. I had changed.
I was done with guns and felt like a fool for ever thinking differently. But because of my experience I do understand why, in this thoroughly over-armed land of ours, so many others consider such weaponry (and far more powerful and deadly versions) so important to who they are. Having experienced a sense of that identity myself, I don’t look down on them for it. And I understand that behind the mostly male pleasure in being armed can lie complex feelings. As historian Adam Hochschild noted in the New York Review of Books several years ago:
“The passion for guns felt by tens of millions of Americans also has deep social and economic roots. The fervor with which they believe liberals are trying to take all their guns away is so intense because so much else has been taken away.”
Even more troubling is that many of them believe they will need those guns for defense against the rampaging gangs (calling themselves militias?) that would rise after the possible collapse of American democracy as we’ve known it, which any number of armed men don’t trust to protect them anyway. (Thank you, Donald Trump, most Republicans, and, alas, my old benefactor the NRA!)
Is stocking up on AR-15s and thousands of rounds of ammunition paranoia or preparation? While a Beretta would never be enough, it turns out that such lesser guns have done most of the damage to Americans. Mass murders with military-style automatic rifles, especially school shootings, have reaped so much of the attention, but it’s been handguns that have killed far more Americans every year, most often via suicide (which is why it’s so sad to see so many of us increasingly arming ourselves to the teeth).
More than half of the 45,222 gun-related deaths in 2020, the last year for which we have solid statistics, were suicides, while “only” (yes, put that in scare quotes) 513 of them were thanks to mass shootings, defined as an incident in which four or more people are shot, even if no one is killed.
Handguns, not long guns, were involved in 59% of the 13,620 deaths classified as murders that year as well, while assault rifles were involved only 3% of the time. So banning those military-grade weapons, manufactured to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible, while distinctly a sane idea amid this mounting firearms insanity of ours, would probably have little real effect on our proliferating gun culture. Given the politics right now, it’s hard to imagine any administration attempting to begin the disarming of America.
Unfortunately, it’s easier to imagine a future government eager to build that arsenal to ever more destructive extremes, both at home among individuals and throughout the world as arms merchants, the ultimate in gun culture.
It’s not hard to imagine this country strutting all too manfully toward the apocalypse with more than a Beretta in its pocket.
Robert Lipsyte is a TomDispatch regular and a former sports and city columnist for the New York Times. He is the author, among other works, of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland.
Smoke rises after a military strike on a compound of Sievierodonetsk's Azot chemical plant. (photo: Reuters)
Moscow said to control 70% of Ukrainian city, where destruction of bridge leaves residents with only one route out
“Russians continue to storm the city, having a significant advantage in artillery they have somewhat pushed back the Ukrainian soldiers,” said Serhiy Haidai, governor of the Luhansk region, in a morning report on his Telegram channel. “The Russians are destroying quarter after quarter,” Haidai said, adding that the Russian army had been “partially successful at night” and controlled 70% of the city.
The destruction by Russian forces of a bridge over the Siverskyi Donets River leaves stranded civilians with just one remaining bridge to escape west to the neighbouring city of Lysychansk, which is also being shelled but remains in Ukrainian hands.
“If after new shelling the bridge collapses, the city will truly be cut off. There will be no way of leaving Sievierodonetsk in a vehicle,” Haidai said.
There are fears that a scenario similar to the one seen in the southern port city of Mariupol, where hundreds of people were trapped for weeks in the Azovstal steelworks, could play out in Sievierodonetsk’s Azot chemical plant, where Haidai said 500 civilians were sheltering, 40 of them children.
Haidai said the Ukrainian side was negotiating the evacuation of civilians from Azot with Moscow but so far failed to reach an agreement. “We are trying to agree, with the help of [Ukrainian deputy prime minister] Irina Vereshchuk, to organise a corridor, so far it has been unsuccessful,” the official said. “Azot’s shelters are not as strong as in Mariupol’s Azovstal, so we need to take people out with security guarantees.”
Sievierodonetsk has become the focal point of Moscow’s efforts to advance in eastern Ukraine, where Russia wants to capture the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, which are collectively known as Donbas, after its failure to quickly seize Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, at the beginning of the war.
Ukrainian troops were fighting street by street to hold on to the city, with both Ukrainian and Russian forces suffering heavy losses, Roman Vlasenko, head of Sievierodonetsk district administration, told local TV. “Our boys are holding on but the conditions are tough,” he said. Vlasenko said the city had been without communications and normal services for a month.
Addressing his nation during his nightly video address, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said forces in Sievierodonetsk were fighting for “every metre”.
“The key tactical goal of the occupiers has not changed. They are pressing in Sievierodonetsk, severe fighting is ongoing there – literally for every metre,” the president said, adding that Russia’s military was trying to pour “poorly trained” reserves into Donbas.
The UK Ministry of Defence said in its latest intelligence report that river crossing operations were likely to be among the most important determining factors in the course of the war.
The key, 90km-long central sector of Russia’s frontline in Donbas lies to the west of the Siverskyi Donets river and in order to achieve success in the current operational phase of its offensive, Russia was “either going to have to complete ambitious flanking actions or conduct assault river crossings”, the MoD said,
Last month Russia incurred heavy losses during multiple attempts to cross the river. In one attempt, Russia is believed to have lost more than 80 vehicles as a result of Ukrainian fire, according to open-source estimates.
Also on Monday, Amnesty International accused Russia of war crimes in Ukraine, saying attacks – many using banned cluster bombs – on Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv had killed hundreds of civilians.
“The repeated bombardments of residential neighbourhoods in Kharkiv are indiscriminate attacks which killed and injured hundreds of civilians, and as such constitute war crimes,” the prominent rights group said in a report titled “Anyone can die at any time.”
'In HBCUs nationwide, My Sister’s Keeper, an organization launched by The Black Women’s Health Imperative is working to promote reproductive justice, among other issues.' (photo: giuseppelombardo/Shutterstock)
Should more abortion restrictions come rolling out, Black women leaders are working to ensure anyone and everyone gets access to the services they need.
Marcela Howell, founder and executive director of In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda says that she and her partners began organizing as soon as Trump got elected into office. She and other Black leaders say that they are not at all surprised by the draft opinion, and are preparing to support every individual looking for resources should it come to pass.
“None of this is different. This has been happening forever,” Linda Goler Blount, president and CEO of the Black Women’s Health Imperative told NBC News. “It’s in the news, perhaps in a different way. But there’s nothing new about this.”
Howell shared that while the entire nation will feel the impact of abortion restrictions always hit low income communities the hardest. The Hyde Amendment disallows federal funds to be used for abortions. This means that programs like medicaid will not cover the cost for the service.
“There are all these kinds of barriers that have been set in front of women of low income, which are predominantly women of color. And those barriers have been there,” Howell said. “So Roe has always been the floor, not the ceiling.”
However, for the 23 states that have passed “trigger laws,” the ban would go into effect almost immediately, forcing most of those seeking services to travel elsewhere. In response, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot pledged $500,000 to help city residents do just that. Other organizations leaders are doing the same.
In HBCUs nationwide, My Sister’s Keeper, an organization launched by The Black Women’s Health Imperative is working to promote reproductive justice, among other issues. The org has developed an app to help campus dwellers find health resources and facilities near them.
In Baton Rouge’s Southern University chapter, Yazmine Pleasant, a junior and member of My Sister’s Keeper says the matter of what would become necessary if Roe v. Wade was to be overturned. Pleasant tells NBC news that her group finds it particularly important to secure abortion services for victims of rape and invest, and additionally provide mental health resources for them. For Blount, who is not just an activist but an epidemiologist as well, figuring out how to provide medication abortions to those in areas like Mississippi, where there is a sole abortion clinic.
LaTosha Brown, a founder of Black Voters Matter, said Black people “don’t have the luxury of organizing just from a single issue. A notion Black feminists have held since the turn of the 20th century.
“What resonates with the way that we’re organizing is that we organized this as a connected issue — abortion rights, voting rights —all of those things are all connected,” Brown said. “They’re not different.”
Even the White House is now paying interns. (photo: Shealah Craighead/Official White House)
Unpaid internships benefit schools and employers, but aren’t fair to college students footing their own tuition bills.
But the correct response ought to be collective embarrassment that this gig has been unpaid for so long — and that so many more internships, both in Washington and across America, remain so.
Millions of college students work for money each summer because they need it and their financial aid office tells them to go earn some. Then there are those White House interns from previous administrations — often white, sometimes rich and, by summer’s end, presumably very well connected — buffing their résumés.
Is the problem evident? It first clicked in for me in the early 1990s when my interview for a summer internship at Chicago magazine was going well until I found out that I’d be working for free.
When I started asking questions — what was a financial aid recipient like me supposed to do to make enough to afford school, and isn’t this all a form of classism? — the tenor of the meeting took a turn. I didn’t get the offer.
Only decades later are we now arriving at what the White House calls this “significant milestone.” But what happened in the years in between, and who’s responsible for what did not happen and hasn’t happened yet?
Unpaid internships are distinctively American in so many respects. First, there’s the baseline expectation of paying your dues, rather than being paid for work you do. Then comes the pressure to gain experience in what seems like an “ever more competitive economy with just a few winners,” as Ross Perlin, the author of “Intern Nation,” put it to me in an email this week.
Finally, we have lawsuits. Condé Nast, known for its magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair, shut its U.S. internship program down after former interns sued. A suit by former interns who worked on films for Fox was settled, after a federal appeals court ruled that interns are not entitled to payment under federal and state minimum-wage laws if they are the “primary beneficiary” of the work.
This is a strange and murky standard, and few striving teenagers will have the nerve to test it in open court. Push hard enough in a lawsuit, and it becomes part of the public record. Then every future employer sees you suing an employer right there on the first page of your Google search results.
For anyone seeking legal clarity about whether an unpaid internship at a for-profit entity is in fact a job for which compensation is necessary, the Department of Labor offers a seven-part test. It includes whether training is similar to what interns might get in a classroom and whether their “work complements, rather than displaces, the work of paid employees” while providing those educational benefits. “Unpaid internships for public sector and nonprofit charitable organizations, where the intern volunteers without expectation of compensation, are generally permissible,” the memo adds.
Amid this squishiness, employers have seen fit to put people to work in about one million unpaid internships per year, according to an estimate from the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Of the students who are not interns, 67 percent would like to be, according to a different survey from the center. Having an existing job and not being able to afford the low wages were two reasons respondents checked off when reporting obstacles to taking an internship, though “unsure how to find internship” was the reason they cited most.
Handing them the $20.76 per hour that paid interns make on average, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, would presumably make it easier to take any position they could find. So what — and who — could make employers pay everyone?
In theory, President Biden could go further by issuing an executive order ending unpaid internships throughout the federal government. White House representatives did not respond to several messages asking why he didn’t (and for comment on the hoped-for demographics of their future interns).
Last June, Mr. Biden issued an order instructing various agencies to “promote” and “increase” paid internships. It was a start, with anything like an end likely to be years away. There are, among other things, budgetary practicalities. At the White House, money for the interns is coming from newly enacted legislation.
While the gears of government grind, the State Department offers unpaid internships abroad for now. Unless your family happens to live outside the United States or has a home there, you’re potentially on the hook for travel and living expenses. Good luck to my fellow financial aid kids, though the department intends to offer only paid spots starting next year.
Gatekeepers of various sorts could help reduce the prevalence of these uncompensated positions, if they were willing. There appears to be no groundswell of college or university career counseling offices refusing to post unpaid internship listings and barring employers that don’t pay their interns.
“Higher education has been complicit,” said Carlos Mark Vera, co-founder and executive director of Pay Our Interns, an advocacy organization that lobbied the White House to make its change.
Then there’s the glaring issue of schools that offer course credit for internships.
Schools benefit from this arrangement in two ways, said David C. Yamada, a professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston and an expert on the rules around internships. First, intern-for-credit programs can allow institutions to collect tuition for that credit, even as students are working out in the world and don’t need classroom space or an instructor standing in front of it for four months.
Then, it allows a school to say it’s providing valuable career preparation. “If I hear another university invoke the phrase ‘Hit the ground running,’ I think I’m going to scream,” he said.
The gatekeeper with the most power here might be Handshake, a company you may have never heard of. In the nine years since its founding, more than 650,000 employers have used it to reach students for both internships and entry-level jobs, often via their career counseling offices. Unpaid internships would decrease pretty sharply if the company refused to post openings for them, thus cutting off the supply of ready labor to employers that wish to hire students without compensation. I challenged Handshake to throw down this gauntlet, and it declined to do so.
It is saying many of the right things, though, and doing at least some of them. “We believe unpaid internships shouldn’t be the norm, and we actively discourage them on Handshake because they often exacerbate inequities in early careers,” its chief operating officer, Jonathan Stull, told me in an emailed statement.
They aren’t the norm on Handshake’s platform. Of the internship listings there this year, 75 percent have been paid, on average, at any given time. Among employers that work most closely with the company, 99 percent of the internships that they post are paid. Handshake also reminds employers that paid internship postings attract 32 more applicants per job than unpaid ones.
Who’s not listening to the company? The three worst fields are nongovernment organizations (just 17 percent of internship postings are paid); politics (27 percent); and movies, TV and music (30 percent).
The fourth is journalism, media and publishing, with 32 percent of Handshake’s internship listings in that category paid. Aaaaargh. For what it’s worth, in the New York Times newsroom, our interns and yearlong fellows are paid, and the fellows get benefits, too. My old friends at Chicago magazine do pay what they now call their research assistants.
Fixing all of this means reckoning with imbalances of power. Teenagers don’t have much, and they need internships on their résumés to get ahead. Schools have some, but there’s a lot about the status quo that works for them. Any edict from Handshake would cause it to lose at least some listings, sending users over to LinkedIn or Indeed.com. And federal and state governments move slowly.
Still, shining a big bright light works sometimes. Not long after Condé Nast settled the lawsuit that former interns had filed, it started a paid fellowship program that lasted for a few years.
Then, last year, when concerned employees were forcing the company to have many more conversations about equity and inclusion, it restarted its internship program. The group was Condé Nast’s most diverse collection of interns ever.
And this time, the company is paying.
Dresses donated by sexual assault survivors from Amish and other plain-dressing religious groups hang on a clothesline beneath a description of each survivors' age and church affiliation, on Friday, April 29, 2022, in Leola, Pa. The exhibit's purpose was to show that sexual assault is a reality among children and adults in such groups. Similar exhibits held nationwide aim to shatter the myth that abuse is caused by a victim's clothing choice. (photo: Jessie Wardarski/AP)
A withering report on sexual abuse and cover-up in the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.
A viral video in which a woman confronts her pastor at an independent Christian church for sexually preying on her when she was a teen.
A TV documentary exposing sex abuse of children in Amish and Mennonite communities.
You might call it #ChurchToo 2.0.
Survivors of sexual assault in church settings and their advocates have been calling on churches for years to admit the extent of abuse in their midst and to implement reforms. In 2017 that movement acquired the hashtag #ChurchToo, derived from the wider #MeToo movement, which called out sexual predators in many sectors of society.
In recent weeks #ChurchToo has seen an especially intense set of revelations across denominations and ministries, reaching vast audiences in headlines and on screen with a message that activists have long struggled to get across.
“For us it’s just confirmation of what we’ve been saying all these years,” said Jimmy Hinton, an advocate for abuse survivors and a Church of Christ minister in Somerset, Pennsylvania. “There is an absolute epidemic of abuse in the church, in religious spaces.”
Calls for reform will be prominent this week in Anaheim, California, when the Southern Baptist Convention holds its annual meeting following an outside report that concluded its leaders mishandled abuse cases and stonewalled victims.
The May 22 report came out the same day an independent church in Indiana was facing its own reckoning.
Moments after its pastor, John B. Lowe II, confessed to years of “adultery,” longtime member Bobi Gephart took the microphone to tell the rest of the story: She was just 16 when it started, she said.
The video of the confrontation has drawn nearly 1 million views on Facebook. Lowe subsequently resigned from New Life Christian Church & World Outreach in Warsaw.
In an interview, Gephart said she’s not surprised that so many cases are now coming out. She has received words of encouragement from all over the world, with people sharing their own “heartbreaking” stories of abuse.
“Things are shaking loose,” Gephart said. “I really feel like God is trying to make things right.”
For many churches, she said, “It’s all about covering up, ‘Let’s keep the show going.’ There are hurting people, and that’s not right. I still don’t think a lot of the church gets it.”
Hinton — who turned in his own father, a former minister now imprisoned for aggravated indecent assault — said the viral video demonstrates the potency of survivors telling their own stories.
“Survivors have far more power than they ever think imaginable,” he said on his “Speaking Out on Sex Abuse” podcast.
#ChurchToo revelations have emerged in all kinds of church groups, including liberal denominations that preach gender equality and depict clergy sexual misconduct as an abuse of power. The Episcopal Church aired stories from survivors at its 2018 General Convention, and an archbishop in the Anglican Church of Canada resigned in April amid allegations of sexual misconduct.
But many recent reckonings are occurring in conservative Protestant settings where a “purity culture” has been prominent in recent decades — emphasizing male authority and female modesty and discouraging dating in favor of traditional courtship leading to marriage.
On May 25 reality TV personality Josh Duggar was sentenced in Arkansas to more than 12 years in prison for receiving child pornography. Duggar was a former lobbyist for a conservative Christian organization and appeared on TLC’s since-canceled “19 Kids and Counting,” featuring a homeschooling family that stressed chastity and traditional courtship. Prosecutors said Duggar had a “deep-seated, pervasive and violent sexual interest in children.”
On May 26 the Springfield (Missouri) News-Leader reported on a spate of sex abuse cases involving workers at Kanakuk Kamps, a large evangelical camp ministry.
Emily Joy Allison, whose abuse story launched the #ChurchToo movement, said the sexual ethic preached in many conservative churches — and the shame and silence it breeds — are part of the problem. She argues that in her book, “#ChurchToo: How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing.”
Allison told The Associated Press that addressing abuse requires both a change in church policy and theology. But she knows the latter is unlikely in the SBC.
“They need to undergo a transformation so radical they would be unrecognizable at the end. And that will not happen,” Allison said. Reform work focused on “harm reduction” is a more realistic approach, she said.
Some advocates hope the front-burner focus on abuse could lead to lasting reforms — if not in churches, then in the law.
Misty Griffin, an advocate for fellow survivors of sexual assault in Amish communities, recently launched a petition drive seeking a congressional “Child’s Rights Act.” As of early June, it had drawn more than 5,000 signatures.
It would require that all teachers, including those in religious schools and homeschool settings, be trained about child abuse and neglect and subject to reporting mandates, and would also require age-appropriate instruction on abuse prevention for students. Griffin said such legislation is crucial because in authoritarian religious systems, victims often don’t know help is available or how to get it.
“Without that, nothing’s going to change,” said Griffin, a consulting producer on the documentary “Sins of the Amish.”
The two-episode documentary, which premiered on Peacock TV in May, examines endemic abuse in Amish and Mennonite communities, saying it is enabled by a patriarchal authority structure, an emphasis on forgiving offenders and reluctance to report wrongdoing to law enforcement.
The Southern Baptist Convention, whose doctrine also calls for male leadership in churches and families, has been particularly shaken by the #ChurchToo movement after years of complaints that leadership has failed to care for survivors and hold their abusers accountable.
At its annual meeting, the SBC will consider proposals to create a task force that would oversee a listing of clergy credibly accused of abuse. But survivors criticized that proposal and are calling for a more powerful and independent commission to perform that task and also review allegations of abuse and cover-up. They’re also seeking a “survivor restoration fund” and memorial dedicated to survivors.
Momentum for change grew as survivors such as Jules Woodson, who went public in 2018 with a sexual assault accusation against her former youth pastor, were emboldened to tell their stories.
“I felt like, ‘Thank God there’s a space where we can tell these stories,’” Woodson said.
Such accounts led to the independent investigation, whose 288-page report detailed how the SBC’s Executive Committee prioritized protecting the institution over victims’ well-being and preventing abuse.
The committee has apologized and made public a long-secret list of ministers accused of abuse.
Woodson said seeing her abuser’s name on it felt like a double-edged sword.
“It was in some ways validating that my abuser was on there, but it was also devastating to see that they knew and yet nobody in the SBC spoke up to warn others,” she said.
Woodson added that she is still waiting for meaningful change: “They have offered minimal words acknowledging the problem, but they have offered zero reform and true action which would show genuine repentance or care and concern for survivors or the vulnerable people who have yet to be abused.”
Activists in Bonn. (photo: Plant Based Treaty)
A group of young activists believe the answer is a global shift towards plant-based diets, and they are not afraid to make their voices heard. The campaigners disrupted a meeting at the UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany, on Friday to call for a Plant Based Treaty.
“This is a do or die decade, particularly when it comes to the methane crisis,” Plant Based Treaty campaigner Yael Hanna said in a press release emailed to EcoWatch. “We need an immediate and rapid shift away from animal-based foods to plant-based foods in response to the climate emergency. The science presented by the IPCC is irrefutable, a vegan diet is the optimal diet for the planet and we need to negotiate a Plant Based Treaty now.”
The call for a Plant Based Treaty has been endorsed by more than 750 organizations, nearly 600 businesses, 16 cities and states and nearly 40,000 individuals. The treaty has three demands:
- Relinquish: Stop all new land-use change for animal agriculture and factory farming.
- Redirect: Transition food and agricultural systems towards plant-based alternatives.
- Restore: Heal damaged ecosystems through rewilding and reforestation.
The campaigners see the treaty as a companion piece to the Paris climate agreement and justify it based on findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). For example, the IPCC’s 2020 Special Report on Land Use found that a global switch to a vegan diet could save nearly eight gigatons in greenhouse gas emissions and more than double that amount if land currently used for animal agriculture was restored to nature. The treaty has also been endorsed by IPCC scientists.
“The science is definite,” IPCC expert reviewer and Director of the Climate Emergency Institute Dr. Peter Carter said in the press release, “global climate catastrophe cannot be averted without the elimination of meat and dairy in our diet, and that must happen fast. Ethically, all unnecessary methane sources have to be cut as fast and far as feasible. That means global veganization is now a survival imperative.”
The campaigners want the treaty to be part of the texts from the Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture that will be presented at the upcoming COP27 UN climate talks in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. The Koronivia decision is a decision under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that recognizes the role of agriculture in responding to the climate crisis, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. However, the campaigners said that major powers including the U.S. and Brazil had resisted calls for including a just transition to a plant-based food system in the final Koronivia documents.
In response, young activists from groups including Plant Based Treaty, Youth Constituency of UNFCCC, Climate Action Network and Demand Climate Justice interrupted the Koronivia negotiations in the Santiago de Chile conference room at the ongoing Bonn climate talks on Friday. The campaigners entered the room before negotiations began at 9:45 a.m. and stayed for the duration of the meeting. Each delegate was given a copy of the position paper “Appetite for a Plant Based Treaty. The IPCC repeatedly demonstrates that a vegan diet is the optimal diet to drastically reduce food related emissions.”
“Animal agriculture is the primary driver of accelerating methane, deforestation and loss of carbon sinks, ocean acidification, and biodiversity loss,” the paper reads. “In fact, farming animals for their flesh, skin, and secretions impacts more planetary boundaries than any other industry.”
In particular, treaty proponents are concerned about methane emissions, 32 percent of which are caused by agriculture. The UN said that methane emissions need to fall by 45 percent by 2030 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, but methane levels reached a record 17 parts per billion in 2021.
“Cutting methane is the biggest opportunity to slow warming between now and 2040. We need to face this emergency,” IPCC lead reviewer Durwood Zaelke said in the paper.
In addition to disrupting negotiations Friday, activists are also passing out vegan hot dogs to delegates to protest lack of plant-based options available at the Bonn talks. They handed out more than 500 of these hot dogs on Thursday from a food truck at the conference entrance and were asked to move farther from the venue because sales of the mainly meat options inside had dwindled.
The Bonn climate talks are a bridge between last year’s COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, and the upcoming COP27. They began June 6 and will conclude on June 16, according to the UNFCCC website.
Special Coverage: Ukraine, A Historic Resistance
READ MORE
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.