24 November 22
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
As a Minnesotan, I’m aware that my state is the No. 1 producer of turkeys, an ugly ill-tempered bird with a sharp beak and a single-digit IQ and no redeeming qualities except the meat. Minnesota used to produce computers and semiconductors but then Apple and Microsoft took the business away, and now our state produces 45 million turkeys a year, which means that in early October, there is a possibility that the birds could rise up and take over. We have only six million people, many of them elderly and easily confused, and if a strong westerly wind hit the penal ranches and the fowl panicked and a feathery wave swept east toward the cities and the National Guard assembled a wall of snowplows along I-35 and the stampede flowed over the mountains of carcasses and ten or fifteen million birds hit Minneapolis, late-night comics would feast on us and my state, which gave you Prince and Robert Bly, would be a joke.
And then there’s the GPS lady in the dashboard who leads us through mazes of 18th-century streets in New England towns and there are no more of those “I told you to turn left” arguments. And Google, which lets you type in “Now thank we all our God” and it gives you “With heart and hands and voices, Who wondrous things has done, in Whom this world rejoices; Who from our mothers’ arms” and so forth. And YouTube, where “Going to the Chapel” and “Under the Boardwalk” and “Sugar Sugar” and all the hits of my youth are instantly available when needed, no need to rummage through the 45s. And my WordPerfect software that makes a squiggly blue line under “Leviteracetem” until I correct the spelling to “Levetiracetam.” (My old Underwood typewriter didn’t care one way or another.)
And then I think of the phone call I made in 1992 to the sister of my sister’s classmate. I had called her, at the classmate’s suggestion, six months before to invite her to lunch and she said she couldn’t, she was going on tour with an orchestra in Asia. She was excited about going to Indonesia, Brunei, and Malaysia, which she hadn’t seen before, and I was impressed and wrote her number on the wall and six months later called back. We had a long lunch at a seafood joint on Broadway at 90th and so at the age of 49 and three-fourths I found a partner for life.
She was a freelance violinist in New York, living in a walk-up apartment on 102nd, a woman who loved her work and endured the vicissitudes of freelance, namely the occasional poverty, and never asked help from family. I was a successful writer. I lived in a little bubble, isolated, chained to a computer, a veteran of two unhappy marriages to women I made even unhappier. She was an inveterate walker who on her tour of Asia had ventured alone into strange cities, climbed hills to see temples, braved the language barrier. In New York, she kept her spirits up through penurious periods by walking six, eight, ten miles a day around Manhattan, Central Park, museums, living on crackers, cheese, and coffee.
I tried to impress her, bought box seats at the opera, took her to classy restaurants, and of course she enjoyed that, but what she liked most was good conversation. She was endlessly curious. I told stories about my evangelical upbringing, about the writing life. She is very honest. She is a hugger and my friends and family like her better than me (I’m a shoulder patter). She loves people. She’s adorable. I’m lost without her.
There is an old man in New York
Who is cheerfully popping the cork
In sheer thanksgiving
For the pleasure of living,
Thanks to Jenny and a small piece of pork.
READ MORE
Exterior view of a Walmart store. (photo: Kena Betancur/VIEWpress/Getty Images)
Author Rick Wartzman examines how improvements in pay by the retail giant fall far short of what workers are owed
In 2015, Walmart — the largest private employer in the United States — announced a series of labor policies that raised worker pay. More recently, it has converted many of its part-time workers to full-time employees. Wartzman, who had moved on to become executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University (where he is now head of the KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society), decided to commit himself to studying how and why Walmart transformed its relationship with its lowest-paid workers. He was granted an unusual amount of access by the company to its top executives, board members and employees.
His new book, Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism, chronicles the external pressures and internal self-examination that compelled the company to raise pay and provide greater opportunities for its front-line workers. He concludes that good intentions, even when followed by substantial actions, are not enough to ensure that hourly workers earn a living wage.
In an interview with Capital & Main, Wartzman (who serves on Capital & Main's board of directors) discusses what he learned about Walmart as a global standard-bearer, and why he believes that government action is needed to create a fairly compensated workforce at the retail giant and beyond.
(This interview was edited for length and clarity.)
Capital & Main: How did your perspective shift on Walmart over the years?
Rick Wartzman: In my last book, The End of Loyalty, which came out in 2017, I was very critical of Walmart's labor practices. That book covered a period from the end of World War II up to the Great Recession, so it predated all the changes I write about in Still Broke. I portrayed Walmart in The End of Loyalty as a model of 21st century capitalism, one that focused on a race to the bottom and driving labor costs as low as possible in order to fatten the bottom line and keep the stock price high and keep shareholders happy.
Then you flash forward, and I was giving some book talks about The End of Loyalty for the Federal Reserve and at the Aspen Institute, and there were some Walmart executives in the audience. Part of my speech was about the need for more employer provided skills training for front-line workers in particular. That skills training provided by companies had really eroded over the past 40, 50 years, along with pay and benefits and job security. It was another aspect of the social contract between employer and employee that had unraveled.
At the same time, in my day job at the Drucker Institute, I had, along with some colleagues, started to develop a lifelong learning system, which would make it easier for people to be able to discover and access the courses and classes that they needed to learn new skills.
Walmart ended up becoming an early funder of that project, along with Google and some others. But Walmart was a huge, significant funder. I was shocked, having been this harsh critic for so long, that my institute got this funding.
I got a window into the company in a way I hadn't had purely as a journalist. And I started to meet people who frankly surprised me. They self-identified, a number of them, as progressive. They said they had specifically come into Walmart to help make change, particularly around the way the company treated its front-line workers. They had in fact raised wages in 2015. And many of the folks I was meeting had helped drive that process. And it occurred to me that maybe I should take a fresh look at things.
Did you think that relationship created a conflict for you as a journalist?
No, I really didn't.
This book is not a screed against Walmart, and it's also not a hagiography that holds them up as the great corporate savior. I think it recognizes the good they've done and ultimately concludes it's not enough, and that's where I land.
They hate the title of the book, Still Broke. And it refers to their workers obviously still not having a living wage even after all the positive change they've made. It refers to, in many ways, Walmart therefore still being broken, and really our larger system in this country and society being broken. The title works on all three of those levels.
In terms of any conflict from my institute having received Walmart funding, I wrestle with this in the book, but what I say is that I'm always, as a journalist, going to call it as I see it.
In 2015, after Walmart raised its pay for its workers, its stock price took a beating. Does that keep other companies from making a move like Walmart did in 2015 or even today have a deterrent effect on Walmart doing more of that?
Walmart saw $20 billion of market cap go "poof" in one day. The stock lost 10% of its value. Just took an enormous hit. There have been others over the years, from American Airlines to Chipotle, same thing. They've raised pay and the stock's taken a 5% hit or whatever. And so this is all too typical and underscores the pressure that companies are under from Wall Street.
Now, when Walmart presented to the financial community what its higher wages would mean for the bottom line, it actually also gave something to Wall Street. It announced that same day that it was going to repurchase up to $20 billion of its stock. Companies buy back their own shares for all kinds of reasons, but it's generally viewed as a giveaway to stockholders. It generally is designed to pump up the stock price. And Walmart announced this big stock buyback the same day. It obviously wasn't enough. Wall Street was focused on the investment in workers, and there were some other investments Walmart was making in technology, and the stock price got clobbered when it became clear that profits would be squeezed, at least in the short term.
Walmart has in fact spent more on stock buybacks than pay raises, correct?
Yes. In fact, let me give you one more set of numbers, which I think may be the most telling in the book. From 2015 when Walmart implemented that first wage increase, up until the end of last year, the company invested $5 billion to $6 billion in higher pay and better benefits. They have, to their credit, more full-time workers now and fewer part-timers. They've invested a lot in worker training. All of these positives add up to $5 billion to $6 billion. That's real money. That's nothing to sneeze at. Again, a remarkable transformation.
But over that same period, from 2015 to the end of last year, Walmart bought back $43 billion worth of their stock. As journalists, we're taught to follow the money. Companies like Walmart talk a lot about embracing stakeholder capitalism and taking care of providing value for all of their stakeholders, including their workers. And to some degree, that's obviously true; they've invested $5 billion to $6 billion. But that doesn't necessarily mean shareholder primacy — putting shareholders first — is dead. You can just follow the money and see.
And were those pay raises since 2015 game changers for workers and industry?
Context is really important here. The initial pay raise that Walmart made was to its starting pay. And at the time, back in 2015, the starting pay at Walmart averaged $7.65 an hour. That was a tick over the federal minimum wage, which then, and unfortunately still, was stuck at $7.25 an hour. Walmart then boosted that to $9 an hour and then $10 an hour in a two-step, two-year process. Today, the company's starting pay is $12 an hour. And so directionally, that's all really good.
In recent years, Walmart has raised pay for others in different roles, and so the company's average wage is now a little bit over $17 an hour. Again, in the context of Walmart being Walmart and its long history of tamping down wages, that's real progress. That is a remarkable transformation, in my view.
But where does that leave workers? Even with all the progress, the average Walmart worker still makes less than $29,000 a year. That is not a living wage anywhere, really, in America.
That is a huge problem. And it is typical of so many industries that we know of, not just retail, but fast food and caregiving and agriculture and warehousing and gig work — industry after industry. These are folks who serve us and really take care of us and then are often left at the end of the month turning to Medicaid or food stamps to make ends meet. These are people who face painful tradeoffs between food and medicine and paying their rent. These are awful choices in the richest country on Earth.
You reached the conclusion that in the United States, we need a government mandated federal minimum wage of $20 an hour. What, in doing this work on Walmart, got you to that conclusion?
In the eyes of many, Walmart has really embraced stakeholder capitalism and is taking positive steps.
But again, at the end of the day, its average worker is making less than $29,000 a year. It still has far too many workers — I think one is too many — on Medicaid and food stamps. It has workers struggling to make ends meet, folks who wake up every day and work hard. And so what this showed me is we can only solve this as a collective. Corporate America will never go far enough or fast enough on its own. This needs to be a public solution. We need a government-mandated living wage of $20 an hour.
Another dimension you look at in your book is Walmart's long history of antagonism to labor unions. Has their corporate perspective on unions evolved at all?
No, this is one place that Walmart has not evolved at all. What has changed is that it is no longer an active issue. For all intents and purposes, the United Food and Commercial Workers has given up trying to organize Walmart. It's just proved too big a mountain to climb. It's too vast.
But Walmart's posture has not changed. It views any union as an interloper. Executives say, "We don't need any third party organization coming between us and our beloved associates." It's the same rhetoric that every union-busting company uses. You can hear the same sort of language from Amazon and Starbucks today. It's the same playbook, and it's one that Walmart, in many ways, wrote.
And is the diminished presence of unions another reason why you think the government mandated minimum wage has to be the solution?
I really do. Walmart is the biggest employer in America, so in some ways they set the standard. But they're also just a symptom of company after company in industry after industry that has this army of low paid workers.
Look, I'm not naive. With government so polarized it is hard to get things done. We can't even get to a $15 an hour minimum wage or even $10.
I'm sure people will say, "$20 an hour — that is so radical." But again, what I think is radical is living in the richest country on Earth and having tens of millions of people struggle in the way I've described.
READ MORE
Attendees listen to Donald Trump speak at a rally in Warren, Michigan, on 1 October 2022. (photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images)
US Corporations Gave More Than $8 Million to Election Deniers’ Midterm Campaigns
Ed Pilkington, Guardian UK
Pilkington writes: "Some of the best-known corporations in the US, including AT&T, Boeing, Delta Air Lines and the Home Depot, collectively poured more than $8 million into supporting election deniers running for US House and Senate seats in this month’s midterm elections."
Brands such as the Home Depot and Boeing donated to candidates who falsely claimed that Trump won presidency in 2020
A study by the non-partisan government watchdog organization Accountable.US, based on the latest filings to the Federal Election Commission, reveals the extent to which big corporations were prepared to back Republican nominees despite their open peddling of false claims undermining confidence in democracy. Though many were ultimately unsuccessful in their election bids, the candidates included several prominent advocates of Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him.
At the top of the list of 20 corporations backing election deniers through their political action committees (Pacs) is a familiar name in the world of rightwing agitating – Koch Industries. According to the Accountable.US review, the Koch energy conglomerate spent $771,000 through its Pac on Republican candidates with a track record of casting doubt on elections.
Koch Industries is the second-largest privately owned company in the US. It is notorious for using its largely oil-related profits to push conservative politics in an anti-government, anti-regulatory direction under its owner brothers, Charles Koch and David Koch, the latter of whom died in 2019.
Close behind Koch is the American Crystal Sugar Company Pac, which spent $630,000 supporting election deniers running for federal office; the AT&T Inc Employee Federal Pac, which contributed $579,000; and the Home Depot Inc Pac, which gave $578,000. Lower down on the list comes the media giant Comcast Corporation & NBC Universal Pac, which contributed $365,000; and the Delta Air Lines Pac, which gave $278,000.
The $8m contributed by the top 20 corporations was just a slice of overall corporate giving to election deniers in the 2022 cycle. An earlier analysis by Accountable.US found that, in total, election deniers benefited to the tune of $65m from corporate interests.
The new study suggests that top corporations that chose to use their financial muscle to enhance the chances of election deniers waged a non-too-successful gamble. The Washington Post has chronicled how 244 Republican election deniers ran for congressional seats in the midterms, and, of those, at least 81 were defeated.
Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, said that the fact that election deniers at both the federal and the state level struggled at the polls should make corporations reconsider their strategies. Backing candidates who advanced conspiracy theories harmful to democracy could damage their public reputations.
“Voters’ rejection of numerous election objectors at the polls should send a clear message to corporations that prioritizing political influence over a healthy democracy could threaten their own bottom line,” Herrig said.
The Guardian reached out to several of the top 20 corporate donors for their response. The Home Depot said that its associate-funded Pac supports candidates “on both sides of the aisle who champion pro-business, pro-retail positions that create jobs and economic growth”.
AT&T and Delta did not immediately reply.
The decision to support election-denier candidates stands in contrast with the strong public stance initially taken by several of the corporations in the wake of the 6 January 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol.
Boeing released a statement days after the insurrection in which it said it “strongly condemns the violence, lawlessness and destruction that took place in the US Capitol”. In the 2022 cycle the Boeing Company Pac contributed $418,000 to support Republican candidates who had been vocal in forwarding lies questioning the validity of the 2020 presidential election.
Boeing declined to comment.
Among the individual candidates whose bid for federal office was supported by top corporations was Derrick Van Orden, who won a close race to represent a swing district in Wisconsin with backing from Koch Industries. Van Orden, a former Navy Seal, was inside the Capitol grounds on January 6.
Scott Perry received support from the Kochs, AT&T, Boeing and other corporations in his successful campaign to hold onto his House seat in Pennsylvania. Perry was deeply involved in attempts to block Biden’s victory in 2020, and in the weeks after January 6 sought a presidential pardon from Trump.
READ MORE
A Cook County Sheriff’s Office investigator places an electronic monitoring device on a man before he is released, inside the electronic monitoring discharge facility at the Cook County Jail in 2018. (photo: Armando L. Sanchez/Tribune News Service/Getty Images)
Reform advocates said Cook County policies violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the new law, with Illinois lawmakers pushing to undo even more reforms.
“They said if you have work movement, you’re not supposed to get your essential days, because your essential days qualify for work,” recalled Raymond, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym to protect his privacy. “I told them that doesn’t make sense.”
Raymond had unknowingly run into a policy quietly implemented by Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart. He wasn’t getting his “essential days,” guaranteed by law, because he also had regularly scheduled permission to go to work.
In 2021, Illinois passed a criminal justice reform bill called the Pretrial Fairness Act that, among other things, extended modest additional privileges to people under electronic monitoring, commonly known as EM. Dart installed a policy to unilaterally limit those privileges — limits that reform advocates said violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the new law.
The law guarantees twice-weekly movement for essential tasks, such as going to the grocery store or a doctor’s appointment, to “any person” subject to house arrest while awaiting trial for criminal charges. Some people under EM, however, also have court orders allowing for recurring movements, such as going to work or attending school. Dart’s office systematically excludes the latter group with regularly scheduled days — people like Raymond — from taking advantage of the extra essential task days bestowed by the reform law.
“Absent a court order specifying days, each participant shall be given a schedule assigned by the contracted vendor,” reads a policy document from Dart’s office obtained by The Intercept through the Freedom of Information Act, referring to the private firm contracted by the sheriff to administer the EM program.
A spokesperson for Dart confirmed that the policy excludes people with fixed movement schedules. “For individuals with court-ordered movement, free movement is not automatically applied,” Matt Walberg, the communications director at the sheriff’s office, wrote in an email. “However, individuals in these situations can request additional movement.” Walberg disputed that the policy is at odds with the law, stating that because the provision about essential movement “follows the paragraph allowing for specific orders of approved movement, it is clear that free movement is to be granted in cases where the individual does not have court or Sheriff’s authorized movement.”
Dart has been publicly critical of the EM reforms, amid a broader campaign of opposition to the Pretrial Fairness Act, ahead of the January 1, 2023 start date of the law’s most substantial provision: the elimination of money bail.
“Passing the law was really the first baby step toward changing the structure of our courts,” said Sarah Staudt, a senior policy analyst at the Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts. “We know that there are lots of judges across the state who don’t agree with the elimination of cash bail. We know there are lots of court administrators and sheriffs and state’s attorneys who feel the same way.”
The Pretrial Fairness Act, which was passed as part of a larger bill called the SAFE-T Act, has long been opposed by police, prosecutors, and Republicans in the state. As its provisions have gone into effect, local media, policymakers, and elected officials — including Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a Democrat — have tried to undermine it by pointing to pretrial reforms as a driver of crime, despite evidence to the contrary. While ending money bond is a step toward reducing wealth-based discrimination in pretrial detention, it does not prevent courts from locking up people who are awaiting trial if there is a public safety reason for doing so.
Opposition to ending cash bail intensified in the run-up to last week’s election. A right-wing political action committee funded by Republican mega-donor Dick Uihlein ran a racist disinformation campaign about bail reform that included sending out fake newspapers with sinister headlines and mugshots of Black men.
Democratic lawmakers, meanwhile, have taken the bait. While they have not gone as far as calling to repeal bail reform, some are considering a measure that would keep more people incarcerated before trial. In September, Democratic state Sen. Scott Bennett introduced a bill to “address concerns by local law enforcement” that would water down a reform requiring citations rather than arrests for minor crimes, expanding the universe of people who could be jailed pretrial and imposing a presumption of jail time for certain charges. A few months earlier, during the final hours of the spring legislative session, the state House passed a bill introduced by one of the lead sponsors of the SAFE-T Act that would allow judges to revoke essential movement permissions for people facing forcible felonies — a special category of charges relating to violent crimes.
Bennet introduced his bill amid negotiations between lawmakers, stakeholders, and advocates over a trailer bill that would amend the SAFE-T Act, a priority for passage as the Illinois legislature convenes for a six-day veto session that begins this week. The Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice, an advocacy coalition that worked with the Legislative Black Caucus to pass the Pretrial Fairness Act, is advocating for changes that would strengthen the law’s protections. Police groups are pushing to gut it — with advocates worried they want to scrap it entirely.
Though public debate has largely focused on money bail, the EM reforms are on the chopping block as well. Within the last month, both Dart and Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown have called on lawmakers to curtail them.
Efforts like the one in Illinois to undo reforms are happening across the country. The passage of significant reforms — and the election of prosecutors who stopped or reduced their offices’ use of money bail for people accused of low-level offenses — is consistently met with fierce resistance. Earlier this year, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul controversially rolled back the state’s landmark 2019 bail reform law.
Bina Ahmad, a California-based civil rights attorney, said the anti-reform campaign in Illinois appears to follow the same playbook that was used to gut bail reform in New York, where she had worked as a public defender. “It’s one large machine that is running to keep people in jail and make money off of their slave labor in jail, and employ hundreds of thousands of police officers and correction officers and wardens and all the people who make money off of the system,” she said. “The real reason is not fear for public safety. The real reason is racism, money, and power.”
Over the last few years, nationwide activism around the rights of accused people before they face trial surged. Stressing the constitutional principle that people are innocent until proven guilty, reformers targeted policies like the imposition of money bail, pretrial detention, and so-called alternatives to incarceration like electronic monitoring.
Researchers, advocates, and journalists noted that electronic monitors do more harm than good, including by making it hard for people to get their lives back on track. A 2020 report by the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Pretrial Practices found that there is no research to indicate that EM advances public safety or makes it more likely that people will appear in court.
Raymond, who was put on a monitor after being arrested at a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest, said the terms of his house arrest made stable employment a challenge. He had a court order allowing him to go to his part-time retail job on a regular schedule. When he moved to a location farther away from work, though, he said the sheriff’s office declined to fully accommodate his need for more commute time. “Getting home is treacherous,” he said. “If they say get in by 6 and I walk in by 6:02 … that’s jail.” That was a risk he was unwilling to take, so instead Raymond quit.
Cook County’s pretrial EM program was introduced in 1989 as a way to reduce overcrowding in local jails. In time, it grew into one of the largest and most restrictive pretrial EM programs in the nation. It also ensnares Black people at highly disproportionate rates, according to an analysis by Chicago Appleseed. “It’s the only program I have encountered where the sheriff has unilateral authority to re-incarcerate people he believes have broken the rule of the program,” said Staudt. “Most programs use EM as a way to monitor people’s location, not as a way to incarcerate them.”
About 21 percent of people on GPS monitors as of October 28 had been awaiting trial for more than a year, with an average span of 7 1/2 months, according to The Intercept’s analysis of the sheriff’s data.
Before this year, program participants were required to get permission from the court or sheriff to leave home for any reason, a process that required advanced notice and burdensome verification. In December, Deputy Public Defender Amy Thompson said that 1,600 people on EM at the time were not able to leave home at all. (The county court’s Adult Probation Department runs a separate EM program, about which there is little publicly available information.)
Last year’s reforms were meant to relieve such barriers to allowing people to address basic needs.
The sheriff’s EM policy sets a fixed schedule for essential movement for people on house arrest, during which time they do not need specific permission to leave home. Yet Dart’s office “continues to nickel and dime people about this movement in ways that are really punitive,” Staudt said.
Staudt was referring to the policy excluding certain populations from essential movement. While the size of the EM population fluctuates daily, numbers provided by the sheriff’s office give insight into the number of people impacted. On November 7, 335 out of 2,012 people on EM had court-ordered movement schedules and were thus not assigned to an essential movement schedule.
The sheriff’s policy states that, for those excluded from essential movement, “one-time movement may be approved without a court order.” That process, however, can be difficult to navigate.
Earlier this year, Lee Mitchell, a 30-year-old photographer in Chicago who was on electronic monitoring, was asked to attend a training session for a new job. Though he had a court order allowing him to leave home for school and work, the training fell outside his approved movement hours, so he had to get separate permission from the sheriff’s office. He submitted documentation for the training, but the sheriff’s office asked for more information. Mitchell’s new employer did not get back to him in time, so he ended up missing the session.
“It’s a hassle. I feel like I’m doing things more than once, and it’s repetitive. Why should I have to do this when I already got permission from the judge, a signed court order saying, ‘You open up his movement,’” said Mitchell, who was arrested during the 2020 racial justice uprising. “That means it don’t matter what the job is or what the hours are. I don’t feel that the employer should have to provide additional documentation.”
Walberg, the sheriff’s spokesperson, wrote that “verification to support the requested movement is necessary to prevent fraudulent requests.” He added: “The Sheriff’s Office works hard to balance the approval of necessary movement that will enable participants to be successful while on the program with our responsibility to ensure participants are abiding by the orders of the court.”
Mitchell’s case was resolved in October, about 19 months after he was placed on a monitor. “I’m still trying to get things together that I couldn’t get together in the two years I was on house arrest,” he said. “Now it’s like I’m actually playing double to get my life in order.”
When he was the director of the Illinois Justice Project, Sharone Mitchell, now the top public defender in Cook County, was a leader of the push to eliminate money bail. Now, he is worried that legitimate public concerns around safety are being used to double down on carceral responses and erode due process protections. “There are lots of people that find political value in blaming reform for the failures of the status quo,” said Mitchell, who was appointed to his post in March 2021.
Still, he has been optimistic about the rollout of the electronic monitoring reforms. In addition to the essential movement provision, the new law also requires courts to review EM orders every 60 days and states that a person must be in violation of the terms of their home confinement for a full 48 hours before they can be charged with felony escape. The latter change is meant to ensure that people don’t face serious charges for minor violations or technical issues with their ankle monitors.
“It’s not working to where we want it to work,” Mitchell said, “but these changes have produced real results for accused people in this county.”
In a March interview, Mitchell added that he didn’t believe other officials were being intentionally obstructionist. “On balance, the leadership here in Cook County — whether it’s the sheriff’s office, the state attorney’s office, the public defender’s office — in general have been very receptive to these changes,” he said. “But certainly everybody doesn’t agree on everything. I think you see sometimes battles in interpretation, battles of implementation.”
Only a few weeks after Mitchell’s interview, however, Dart made clear that his office disagreed with more than how to implement the law. On April 1, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Dart had called for a repeal of essential movement, “at least for those charged with violent crimes.” (The premise of the article is that crime is rampant among EM participants allowed to “roam freely,” despite reporting that only 1 percent of participants had been arrested while on essential movement time.)
That sort of change had previously been proposed by Democratic state Rep. Margaret Croke, who consulted Dart’s office before introducing the legislation, according to emails obtained by The Intercept under FOIA. Last December, a few weeks before the EM reforms kicked in, Croke, who represents majority white neighborhoods on Chicago’s north side, met with Jason Hernandez, the sheriff’s executive director of intergovernmental relations. Afterward, Croke’s chief of staff sent an email that clarified the representative’s interest in the program: “I’m curious if any data exists somewhere for how many EM program participants end up either: 1) violating the terms of their participation 2) end up engaging in another illegal activity.”
Nearly 30 minutes later, Croke followed up. “Can you please share with me what violent crimes the Sheriff’s Office would like to see restricted from being eligible for the EM program? I want to start having conversations with my fellow legislators on the topic,” wrote Croke, copying fellow Chicago-area state Rep. Ann Williams. “I think we can all agree that individuals charged with murder should not be allowed to participate on the program. Furthermore, I imagine more people will be on the EM program after the end of cash bail.”
Hernandez did not answer Croke’s questions by email, but he invited the lawmakers to tour the EM program and meet with leadership. (The visit never materialized due to scheduling conflicts.)
On January 4, Croke again wrote to Hernandez, this time sharing two draft bills. The first sought to prevent people accused of certain violent crimes or sex crimes from having “free unrestricted liberty from 7am to 7pm.” The second was a draft of a bill to expand the list of criminal charges that would make an individual ineligible for pretrial release to home confinement. Croke never introduced the first bill, while the second was introduced on January 12 and then languished in committee.
“It’s important to me when drafting legislation to engage the key stakeholders and entities that will be impacted to ensure we are creating meaningful legislation,” Croke said in an emailed statement to The Intercept. She attributed her interest in electronic monitoring to an increase in constituent outreach about the issue and pointed to a Chicago Tribune article that reports a claim from Lightfoot’s office that more than 130 people were arrested for violent crimes while out on EM in 2021. A follow-up analysis by the Tribune, however, found serious flaws with the mayor’s data methodology.
Mitchell, for his part, maintained his optimism after the November election. “The voters of Illinois spoke this week, rejecting candidates who ran on fearmongering, misleading attacks on the Pretrial Fairness Act and the wider SAFE-T Act. Historic reforms to our state’s criminal legal system are clearly supported by Illinoisans and are on track for implementation in January,” he said in an emailed statement. “That said, good faith negotiations are ongoing to clarify some details of the reforms during the Illinois legislature’s upcoming veto session.”
Most counties in Illinois don’t have pretrial EM programs, yet lawmakers from around the state weighed in on proposals to weaken the reform. In April, Democratic state Rep. Jehan Gordon-Booth said the legislature should change the essential movement provision — even while conceding that “it’s not an issue anywhere outside of Cook County,” more than 150 miles away from her district in central Illinois.
State Rep. Martin Moylan, a Democrat who represents a suburban district northwest of Chicago, introduced a bill that would make it a felony to tamper with an EM device or signal. The bill, which Croke co-sponsored, was repeatedly scheduled for a hearing but ultimately did not advance.
The bill lawmakers eventually coalesced around — the one allowing judges to take essential movement away from people charged with forcible felonies — could be seen as the legislature’s response to rising crime rates in Chicago. But it’s not based on any statistical evidence, said Alexa Van Brunt, the director of the MacArthur Justice Center Clinic at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.
Van Brunt pointed to recent analyses by researchers at the University of Chicago Crime Lab that found it very unlikely that people on EM are responsible for Chicago’s recent increase in gun violence. “To introduce a provision to really make it much more difficult for people to reenter society and take care of their families without any basis in social science is just punitive,” she said, “and really actually achieves the opposite of the goal intended.”
Dart reiterated his opposition to the EM reform in an October budget hearing, claiming that his office is forced to turn off GPS monitoring during a person’s period of essential movement, otherwise the alerts they get for people leaving home with permission would drown out the alerts for people leaving home illegally. The law does not require him to stop tracking people’s locations, and as WBEZ reported, “even if the alerts are turned off, the EM bracelet still tracks a person’s location.”
Meanwhile, a group of nationwide advocates and academics have turned their attention to the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts, which houses a bureau created in the aftermath of the Pretrial Fairness Act dedicated to “increasing equality” in pretrial processes. In a letter sent last week, the advocates expressed concerns that “certain decision-makers” will push back against the law’s progress by either expanding the use of EM or failing to fully implement the provisions of the law. “We encourage you to promote the use of non-punitive programs as part of pretrial release and refrain from expanding the use of pretrial electronic monitoring,” they wrote. “If EM is used, we implore you to ensure that the conditions of EM maximize movement and participation in family and community life, rather than converting homes into jail cells.”
READ MORE
People wait in line for a Black Friday sale at a Best Buy store in Overland Park, Kan., on Nov. 23, 2017. (photo: Charlie Riedel/AP)
In 2022, it’s a different story. Most major U.S. retailers will be closed on Thanksgiving Day. Target says this is a permanent change and that it won’t open again on the holiday. Walmart, too. “It’s a thing of the past, we’ll be closed on Thanksgiving,” Walmart U.S. chief executive John Furner said recently.
Why the about-face? Partly, this reflects how the pandemic changed the way people shop. For much of 2020, millions of people didn’t want to go into brick-and-mortar stores, even for a deal. Americans of all ages became expert online shoppers. On top of that, supply-chain drama and delays prompted shoppers to hunt for gifts earlier. The notion of having a make-or-break Black Friday weekend for sales suddenly seemed extremely risky, especially if stores might not have much merchandise in stock. Now, deals typically start earlier and last longer.
“The entire Black Friday weekend has become less impactful,” said Mark Mathews, the National Retail Federation’s vice president of research development and industry analysis. “There’s also been a change in mind-set from consumers to, ‘I’m going to get those deals, even if I don’t go out on Black Friday.’ ”
The other driving force is the “Great Resignation,” perhaps better described as the Great Reassessment of Work. Retailers can’t find enough employees to open on Thanksgiving, and they don’t want to risk a mass resignation by forcing people to work that day.
Job-quitting hit an all-time high last holiday season. A record 5 percent of the retail workforce walked out last December alone. It was easy to get a higher-paying job elsewhere. But it wasn’t just about the pay. Workers who quit often say it was because they were tired of being mistreated. The pandemic made people decide it wasn’t worth sacrificing time with family or the cost to their physical and mental health to be yelled at by customers, demeaned by bosses and ordered into work on what was supposed to be their day off. Retailers responded by increasing pay — and by closing stores earlier and giving days such as Thanksgiving off. (Many hospital and emergency personnel will still be working, but that’s different from optional activities such as retail.)
Amparo Rojas worked at Walmart for more than 20 years as a manager in the baby department. She enjoyed the job, except around Black Friday. For years, her family had to eat Thanksgiving “dinner” at lunchtime so she could report to work that Thursday afternoon. And the notorious sales brought out the worst in shoppers.
“People were throwing things in my face if we didn’t have the right color. Or they would yell, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing,’ if they couldn’t find anything,” said Rojas, who is now retired. “We had to just smile. We couldn’t answer back to the customers.”
The few stores still opening on Thanksgiving this year include some pharmacies and supermarkets, discount shops such as Dollar Tree and Dollar General, and outdoor sports stores Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops. None responded to a request for comment about why they plan to open on that special Thursday.
As the economy slows, attention is focusing on when a recession could hit and how high unemployment might go as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to tame inflation. Workers will inevitably lose some of the leverage they have enjoyed the past two years. Already, the quit rate in retail has fallen significantly (to 3.7 percent a month), and retail job openings have dropped back to closer to pre-pandemic levels.
But a lasting impact of the Great Resignation is that workers aren’t willing to do exactly what they did before. White-collar employees are fighting returns to the office, while many hourly workers seek flexible schedules so they can take time off for health reasons and for family and hobbies.
Workers still exude tremendous power in many industries, as can be seen in high-profile strikes threatening to shut down America’s freight rail just before the holidays and unionization efforts at Starbucks and elsewhere. Workers remain emboldened — for now. They often begin their job searches looking for more pay, but then focus on perks, including holidays and flexible hours.
The new normal is not yet fully set. But some changes — such as most retailers closing on Thanksgiving Day — are something we should all be thankful for.
READ MORE
Opposition politician Ilya Yashin stands in the glass defendants cage prior to a hearing at the Meshchansky District Court in Moscow as he faces 10 years in prison on charges of spreading fake information. (photo: Maxim Shipenkov/EPA)
The opposition figure faces up to 10 years in prison for denouncing Putin’s war in Ukraine.
The trial against Yashin, a 39-year-old Moscow city councillor, begins during an unprecedented crackdown on dissent in Russia, most of whose opposition activists are either in jail or exile.
Yashin refused to leave after President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine on February 24.
He is an ally of jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny and was close to Boris Nemtsov, an opposition politician assassinated near the Kremlin in 2015.
Standing in a defendant’s cage in Moscow’s Meshchansky District Court on Wednesday, Yashin was seen laughing, doing a thumbs-up and stretching, the AFP news agency reported.
Wearing a dark green hoody and jeans, he was also seen smiling at his parents in the front row.
Spreading ‘fake’ information
Yashin was arrested in June while strolling through a park in the Russian capital.
He faces up to 10 years behind bars on charges of spreading “fake” information about the Russian army under legislation passed after Putin launched the attack on Ukraine.
The reason for the case against Yashin is an April YouTube stream, in which the politician spoke about the “murder of civilians” in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, where the Russian army has been accused of war crimes. He called it a “massacre”.
While in detention, Yashin has not minced his words about Russia’s tactics in Ukraine.
In a speech in court this month, he accused Russia’s judges of acting as “political servants of the Kremlin”.
Another Moscow councillor, Alexey Gorinov, was sentenced in July to seven years in prison for denouncing the Ukraine offensive.
The 61-year-old had questioned plans for an art competition for children in his constituency while “every day children are dying” in Ukraine.
Nearly all of Putin’s well-known political opponents have either fled the country or are in jail.
Navalny, 46, is currently serving a nine-year jail term on embezzlement charges widely seen as politically motivated.
Moscow has stepped up efforts to stamp out dissent since Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
READ MORE
While different lifestyles allow for different rhythms, experts recommended more frequent, smaller grocery runs rather than a few big ones. (photo: SolStock/Getty Images)
About 30 to 40% of the food in the US goes uneaten each year – and individual solutions such as making a grocery list can address the problem
From a climate perspective, Naik’s approach makes sense. While food waste is difficult to measure, one estimate by the UN Environment Program found that if food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gasses after China and the US.
“About 30 to 40% of the food in the US goes uneaten each year. And about 40% of that waste occurs in our homes,” said sustainable food systems specialist at the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC) Andrea Spacht Collins.
While it’s important to address the systemic factors and corporate actors that contribute to a wasteful food system, Collins noted that this is one arena where individual solutions really can add up. “Preventing food from becoming waste across the globe is the most impactful solution we have to addressing climate change now,” she said, pointing to research by Project Drawdown.
Here are expert tips on four ways to reduce food waste at home.
Plan ahead, shop mindfully
Avoiding food waste can start before you even get to the grocery store or farmer’s market. Collins noted that making a grocery list and sticking to it can help ensure you don’t get home and find that you’re missing a key ingredient that will derail your meal plans and keep you from using the other ingredients you bought.
Naik added that the American tendency to buy in bulk or try to knock out a month’s worth of shopping in one go can also lead to excessive purchasing that results in food spoiling because it wasn’t used up in time. While she noted that different lifestyles allow for different rhythms, she recommended more frequent, smaller grocery runs rather than a few big ones; she usually tries to shop every Saturday or Sunday to prep for the week ahead.
Her other recommendation: “Do not go to the grocery store hungry,” she said, unless you want to get home and realize you’ve somehow bought five bags of tomatoes you don’t need. “The state of mind that you’re in when you’re shopping greatly affects the outcome.”
Store food properly
“We all know that if you leave milk on the counter, it’s going to spoil faster. But there are similar tricks that you can use around how you put away your vegetables and your fruit in order to keep them good longer,” said Collins.
She pointed to the NRDC site savethefood.com as a source for practical tips, and highlighted some of her favorites: stowing apples separately from other fruit, since apples release a hormone called ethylene that can make other produce spoil faster; placing fresh herbs stem-side down in a water-filled cup in the refrigerator almost like they’re a bouquet of flowers; keeping mushrooms in paper bags rather than plastic so they don’t get slimy; putting a paper towel inside the bag you keep your greens in to absorb excess moisture; and storing bread in the freezer for freshness.
Dr Hannah Birgé, a senior agricultural scientist at the Nature Conservancy, noted that creative approaches to storage cannot just prolong food’s lifespan, but also make you more likely to use what you have. Switching to smaller, clear containers for food storage has helped her family more easily see what they have at a glance so it’s less likely to be forgotten in the back of the fridge.
Scrap cooking
One of the ways people throw away food without even realizing it is by not recognizing that what they think of as inedible might in fact be both delicious and nutrient-dense. According to Naik, this is particularly true with produce.
“Many times the peel or the leaves of the vegetable can be denser in nutrients than the actual ‘meaty’ part of the vegetable,” she said. Carrot tops, for example, can be repurposed into a delicious pesto, and pumpkin skin is just as edible as the flesh – sauteed with oil, the peel softens right up.
Besides finding uses for every part of the food you have while cooking, Naik also points out that there are endless ways to repurpose leftovers so you don’t get too bored of the flavors to finish them off. Candied yams left over from the holidays can become sweet potato biscuits, cranberry sauce could be used to whip up seasonal cocktails or be enclosed in puff pastry to become tasty hand pies, and (for carnivores, unlike Naik) a turkey frame and uneaten stuffing could be transformed into a turkey dumpling soup.
Disposal and composting
You don’t necessarily need to throw something out just because the expiration date on the package has passed, said Collins. “Contrary to popular belief, the ‘best by’ date on food is not federally regulated, which leads to a lot of food that’s perfectly good being tossed,” she said. “Your nose and your tongue are going to tell you whether it’s gone bad far better than the date is going to.”
Even so, there will always be some things – think eggshells or banana peels – that you’ll want to throw out. That’s where composting comes in. Whether you have a backyard space you can devote to your own compost heap, or a drop off-site or pick up service in your city, composting can be a “gamechanger”, said Dr Birgé, for reducing the amount of food going to landfills.
In the end, said Collins, there’s no one approach that will work for every person or household. “It’s important for each person to look critically at why food is tossed in our homes, and then to find a solution that matches that,” she said. “There’s a way for each of us to change small behaviors that then leads to a big solution.”
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.