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RoJo the Clown is at it again. Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, who surfed into office on the derp wave of 2010, has been temporarily bounced from YouTube because he can’t distinguish reality from nonsense. 

Make no mistake. He is a stupid, stupid man. If you somehow linked Johnson’s, Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s, and Rep. Louie Gohmert’s brains together, you might attain the computing power of a Pong console. Or maybe an Etch-a-Sketch. In other words, they’re not exactly deep—or even shallow, for that matter—thinkers, and the latest news from Johnsonville confirms that.

The Hill:

Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-Wis.) YouTube account was suspended for one week starting Friday for uploading content violating the platform’s policy against COVID-19 misinformation.

The video that triggered the suspension was a roundtable discussion in which the lawmaker falsely claimed that coronavirus vaccines are unsafe.

“The updated figures today are 17,619,” he said. “That is 225 times the number of deaths in just a 10-month period versus an annual figure for the flu vaccine. These vaccine injuries are real.”

What Johnson is referring to here is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System database (VAERS). Like Bazooka Joe comics or model airplane glue warning labels, Johnson has trouble reading this data correctly. 

Here’s the CDC’s own warning about interpreting the raw data in VAERS—a warning that Johnson seems determined to ignore at all costs.

VAERS accepts and analyzes reports of possible health problems—also called “adverse events”—after vaccination. As an early warning system, VAERS cannot prove that a vaccine caused a problem. Specifically, a report to VAERS does not mean that a vaccine caused an adverse event. But VAERS can give CDC and FDA important information. If it looks as though a vaccine might be causing a problem, FDA and CDC will investigate further and take action if needed.

Anyone can submit a report to VAERS — healthcare professionals, vaccine manufacturers, and the general public. VAERS welcomes all reports, regardless of seriousness, and regardless of how likely the vaccine may have been to have caused the adverse event.

See that part the CDC went out of its way to highlight? “[A] report to VAERS does not mean that a vaccine caused an adverse event.”

Anyone—and I mean anyone—can report an adverse reaction on the VAERS database. I could say the first shot gave me stigmata and the second one made me grow gills, and it would be on the database for any fool to interpret as they saw fit.

More importantly, just because someone died after getting a shot doesn’t mean they died because of the shot. To date, more than 225 million Americans have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Some of them were bound to die. Indeed, the vast majority would have no doubt passed anyway. Because, you know, people fucking die. What would have truly been troubling is if there had been no fatalities in the wake of these vaccinations, because then we’d be looking at a drug that causes vampirism, and who wants that?

Ron Johnson, apparently.

The COVID-19 vaccines have not “caused” 17,619 deaths any more than Ron Johnson’s election “caused” me to move as far away from Wisconsin as I possibly could. (Scott Walker was the true inspiration for that.)

In response to his temporary ouster, Johnson predictably threw a fit. In a statement, he wrote, “Once again Big Tech is censoring the truth. Why won’t they let the vaccine injured tell their stories and medical experts give a second opinion? Why can’t we discuss the harmful effects of mandates? Apparently, the Biden administration and federal health agencies must not be questioned. How many more lives will be needlessly destroyed?”

That last one’s actually a very relevant question—only RoJo doesn’t understand why. How many more lives will be needlessly destroyed by Johnson’s, and others’, glitchy brains? A whole hell of a lot, it seems.

This is not the first time that Johnson has been suspended from YouTube. He lost his uploading privileges for a week back in June, after posting a video touting hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. At the time, he also claimed that YouTube was engaged in “censorship,” even though its policies are posted for anyone to see.

“YouTube’s ongoing Covid censorship proves they have accumulated too much unaccountable power,” Johnson wrote in a statement at the time. “Big Tech and mainstream media believe they are smarter than medical doctors who have devoted their lives to science and use their skills to save lives. They have decided there is only one medical viewpoint allowed and it is the viewpoint dictated by government agencies.”

Hmm, is there an implicit threat in there from a powerful member of Congress? That doesn’t make me feel good.

Of course, this latest rebuke of Johnson is pretty sad, especially coming from a platform that’s kept this thing up for 13 years:

At least they’re not singing about injecting disinfectant or eating horse paste. Maybe if RoJo pitched his quackery through karaoke it would fly right under YouTube’s radar.

Or maybe it’s way past time that he leaves the Senate, and makes room for someone without his serious reading comprehension problem. 

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

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This month (Nov. 13 to be exact) Chef Crystal Wahpepah will finally see her dream come to fruition when Wahpepah’s Kitchen has its grand opening in East Oakland, California. Born and raised in Oakland, but a registered member of the Kickapoo Tribe in Oklahoma, Wahpepah says as a little girl she wondered why among all the different restaurants in the city, none offered her food—Indigenous food. 

“I knew at a young age what was wrong,” she tells Nosh. “They took away our food.”  

Since the time she was a little girl, Wahpepah has been in the kitchen. Spending summers in Oklahoma with her grandmother or sharing meals with the multi-tribal urban Native community at Oakland’s Intertribal Friendship House—a place established in 1955 to serve the needs of those who’d been relocated from reservations to the San Francisco Bay area. 

“I’ve seen so many different beautiful tribes and different foods,” Wahpepah says to KQED. “So all these foods that I cook, it’s something that I grew up with and something that means a lot to me.”

After studying at Le Cordon Bleu in San Francisco and honing her skills at La Cocina, a professional development program for marginalized individuals, Wahpepah, who identifies as Indigenous Black American, threw herself into finding her niche, cooking the food she grew up on, and sharing it with others. She did her research on the dishes from different Nations, joined Food Sovereignty Alliance, and attended food summits where Native chefs and farmers came together. 

“When I’m presenting these foods, it’s almost like taking these foods back. You’re presenting what is meant to be cooked for your people and also for your community,” she tells Cultural Survival. 

Wahpepah is becoming accustomed to being one of the firsts in her field. In 2016, she was the​ ​first​ ​Native​ ​American​ ​chef​ ​to​ ​be​ ​featured​ ​on​ Food​ ​Network’s​ ​Chopped. 

She’s also received the Indigenous Artist and Activist Award.

Since the time she began catering, before her brick-and-mortar restaurant, Wahpepah has had a booming business feeding companies in Silicon Valley—Facebook, Twitter, WeWork, Google, and others. But, she’s held fast to her three tenets: 

(1) to acknowledge that we live on stolen land; and (2) how that acknowledgment connects to the reclamation of Native foodways (food sovereignty); as well as (3) to educate communities and organizations on the health benefits of Native foodways using the knowledge passed onto her.  

“At the end of the day, that’s what I want: to make people fully aware, to realize whose land they’re on,” she tells NPR. 

She exclusively uses ingredients from Indigenous farmers across the country to make her staple blue corn waffles, blueberry bison meatballs, and a wide array of Native stews, salads, and nut bars. 

“Crystal has always been as much about this place, the Bay Area, as she is Native and Indigenous foods,” Caleb Zigas, the departing executive director of the La Cocina kitchen incubator tells KQED, remember Wahpepah’s time in the program ten years ago.  “That kind of relationship to place is so special to me, and I think you can really taste it in her food.”

Wahpepah says her decolonized dishes have solid health benefits. She tells Cultural Survival:

“I believe our ancestors are actually asking us to make these foods. So once you feed your community with it, you can taste the healthiness; you can taste the benefits of it, especially mental, physical, and emotional. [People] want to enjoy all these different foods, especially how we grew up with traditional foods. But some don’t really know what to do with them or how to make them. In this time and age, I think we’re very fortunate to have so many people keeping the tradition alive. That’s where I source my foods from—other Indigenous people that are making these.”

Despite the dearth of Indigenous chefs on the scene today, she’s determined to inspire Native chefs to bring their food to follow their passions. 

“I feel that Native American communities, Native American people are so forgotten … and so that’s my job is to actually make everyone aware how good our foods are. Everybody has their job. My job is to cook beautiful native ingredients on the plate,” she tells NPR. 

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I woke up in a cold sweat this morning, fitful with worry that the Donald Trump Thanksgiving card I signed this year might be a crude forgery … instead of the OFFICIAL TRUMP THANKSGIVING CARD!

Not since the WKRP turkey drop have we seen a Thanksgiving Day disaster akin to this one. Imagine millions of unsuspecting MAGAs signing fugazi Thanksgiving cards that Trump might not even read! Oh, the humanity!

HuffPost’s S.V. Dáte has the grisly details:

For the nontweeters:

Friend,

Make sure President Trump sees YOUR name.

Thanksgiving is coming up and we’re giving you the exclusive chance to sign the only Official TRUMP THANKSGIVING CARD.

This is the ONLY official TRUMP THANKSGIVING CARD where you can leave your name and a personal note for President Trump to read. You’ll see a lot of FAKE Thanksgiving Cards out there, but this is the ONLY one he’ll read.

I didn’t know there was such a lucrative opportunity in mailing unofficial Thanksgiving cards to known traitors, but I guess that’s just my congenital myopia talking. 

Of course, if you really think Donald Trump is going to read your name and personal note, I’ve got an official Trump Kwanzaa card to sell you.

First of all, he doesn’t care about you, and secondly, if he reads more than half a Denny’s kids’ placemat they have to put him down for a nap for the rest of the afternoon. Reading just isn’t his bag, man. The best thing the government could do right now is publish an official coup-launching instruction manual chock-full of three-syllable words you can’t find in Marmaduke. Honestly, it could very well save the republic. They should really think about it.

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

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Just when you think the state of Florida can’t possibly do more harm to their own residents, we find that new rules instituted for this school year—rules that took all of six minutes to pass—are wrecking the lives and opportunities of students with severe disabilities.

Gov. Ron DeSantis took up a considerable amount of time this summer demanding changes to educational tools to stop teaching about racism. The governor contended that legislators know better, and therefore, stopping critical race theory—a subject educators aren’t teaching at these levels, though they do teach history—was of high priority. What wasn’t a priority in the state board of education meeting was special need students. After a lengthy debate on critical race theory, it took only six minutes, with only one public speaker, to permanently change the way disability education works in Florida, an act that disability advocates believe was as harmful as stripping people of access to their wheelchairs.

The policy Florida enacted can only be summarized in one word: cruel. Florida faced a problem where just over 1% of their students fell into the category of special education, which is a cap that the federal government has set under the Every Student Succeeds Act. So how do you fix this problem? 

DeSantis and Florida’s board of education had an idea: Kick the students out of special education, make them get IQ tests, and then see if after two grading periods they can succeed in mainstream education. 

Matthew Cooley was a student with most of the common problems that come with autism. Like most parents of autistic children (myself included), we know how beautiful and thoughtful our own children can be, and that they can accomplish great things if given a chance. What is needed will be a different kind of opportunity for what comes next after education. Instead of being offered that chance to start sooner, Cooley found that under the new Florida policy, he would have to be mainstreamed for two grading periods before he could go back into special education.

Children with autism who are mainstreamed often suffer bullying and an erosion of confidence in their own ability to succeed. They don’t move forward—they regress instead. 

Six minutes was all it took to change the lives of families across Florida. Six minutes to demand IQ tests and the humiliation of putting a child through a test designed to prove to them that they are “less than.” Six minutes to think about subjecting students to bullying. Six minutes to deprive classrooms of students of fair and free access to a public education—unless the goal is to mainstream students to drive more wealthy families to go to private schools. Six minutes to take away months of learning you can’t get back.

Students ask for our love, our care, and our compassion. Six minutes was all the time they were afforded. Don’t worry: Fighting back against masks or teaching the history of racism? I’m sure days and days were spent on those matters.

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Nine days after at least eight people were killed during rapper Travis Scott’s set at the Astroworld festival at NRG Park, journalists are asking all the right questions. What could have been done to prevent the tragedy? Who should the onus fall on to ensure crowd safety? Knowing what we know, what we have known for decades, why are these tragedies still happening? I would add another essential question to the list: How do we avoid one set of rules for Black musicians and another for white?

It’s a question that would be too late to ask in other entertainment businesses, namely nightclubs at which it’s common practice for venues to drive up the cost of entry or staff added security on their one hip-hop night a month. Black nightclub owners marched through Chicago’s Near North Side last June to protest discrimination and racial targeting driving them out of the area. Asa “Duce” Powell, a nightclub owner and long-time promoter, told the Chicago Sun-Times that the city police department’s Near North Side District has been running Black people out of downtown “simply because of the color of their skin for at least 20 years.”

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by Frances Nguyen

This story was originally published at Prism.

While restaurant owners, pro-business lobbyists, and the New York Post were convinced that taking away restaurant workers’ option to “rake in cash from unemployment checks” would force them to return to work en masse, many workers had no intention of going back to a notoriously exploitative and abusive industry after COVID-19 forced them out. The truth is that it will take far more than a loss of unemployment benefits to get restaurant workers to return without substantial, lasting change, and that’s especially true for back-of-house (BOH) staff—positions that are heavily filled by BIPOC and undocumented people and had the highest risk of death during the pandemic due to the demands of their workplace environment

“For an industry that already is operating in survival mode at all times, to throw a pandemic in it, everything becomes so much more horrifyingly apparent,” said Lily Nicholson, a restaurant worker who’s also an organizer with Memphis Restaurant Workers United. “We were left with this feeling of, ‘Well, what else do we have to lose?’ This [the pandemic] was what it took us to get here after decades of exploitation.”

Many workers see the current crisis as an opportunity to demand remedies for long-standing ills, including wage theft, the lack of a livable wage, unsafe and unforgiving workplaces, and abusive management. But they face an uphill battle. Claims placing the blame on a purportedly lazy workforce and its reliance on “big government” for the stalled restaurant recovery persist, despite having been debunked by multiple studies. Still, more workers are refusing to accept a “return to normal”—instead, they’re making demands for better pay and safer working conditions, and they’re looking to collective bargaining, labor organizing, and federal policy changes to remake the industry into one worth returning to.

Divided by design

After the Memphis restaurant where 16-year veteran cook Peter DeQuattro worked closed at the start of the pandemic, he managed to secure unemployment benefits, hoping to wait for the restaurant to reopen. However, he had to return to work after applicants were required to provide proof of an active job search in September 2020. Since then, he’s navigated jobs paying less than a living wage while working through chronic back pain, making too much to qualify for Medicare but unable to afford health insurance, and “butting heads” with employers over working conditions and wages. After talking with Nicholson, a longtime colleague and friend, about organizing restaurant employees to improve their industry, he started to initiate dialogues with his colleagues about their pay rates and what they need from their employers.

DeQuattro isn’t alone in his frustrations. Ben Reynolds, an organizer with the national, volunteer-run Restaurant Workers United, said that people are exhausted—not just by the pandemic, but also by the industry’s insistence on maintaining a status quo that’s always been detrimental to restaurant workers, especially those in BOH positions.

“They need the ability to assert themselves collectively and actually have a say in their workplace, whether that’s over basic safety issues, their hours, or harassment or abuse from their managers,” he said.

However, workers face significant obstacles to organizing. The restaurant industry is decentralized, making it difficult to work cohesively, and a revolving door of staff complicates building any worker solidarity. In 2019, the industry had a 78% turnover rate, and that was before a pandemic motivated 33% of its workforce to leave, potentially for good. Further, while front-of-house (FOH) and BOH staff are typically drawn from the same workforce in casual dining establishments, the division between FOH and BOH staff in fine dining establishments often falls along racial lines, with white people primarily in customer-facing positions like servers, hosts, and bartenders, and BIPOC relegated behind kitchen doors.

“Management has kept that line pretty clear,” Nicholson said. “It has been a big factor in why we haven’t been able to organize. There’s not that feeling of solidarity, and [with] such a disparity between wages, there’s an animosity kind of built into the structure.”

According to a report by NPR, in fine dining restaurants, white employees typically occupy positions with higher-earning salaries, while Latinx, Black, and other workers of color tend to occupy positions with pay closer to the poverty level. The division, some say, is intentionally sustained.

“It’s amazing how many ongoing legacies of plantation slavery exist in the restaurant industry today, both in the subminimum wage and the notion white people work in the front and people of color in the back,” said Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage and director of the Food Labor Research Center at University of California-Berkeley.

Rebuilding the industry, advocates say, requires challenging how the industry views its workforce and values their labor—like where they belong and what they deserve. jeanie chunn, the national director for RAISE, looked to the example of how Latinx workers seem only ever to be visible as bussers, dishwashers, and cooks in the restaurant environment—behind kitchen doors, out of sight of customers, and given few opportunities for upward mobility.

“We knew who was back there, and sure enough, it was immigrants,” Nolasco said. “They were the ones bearing this burden of minimum wage jobs and untipped positions, while the rest of our peers were building careers for themselves on the backs of undocumented labor.”

Jayaraman told NPR she has interviewed Latinx bussers who said they helped train newly hired white employees who inevitably went on to earn five times what their Latinx mentors were making within weeks or months.

“We shouldn’t be hiding people of color in the back of the house,” chunn said. “You should be able to start as a dishwasher and become a server or a bartender or the general manager. There should be a pathway to access the most amount of money possible.”

Undocumented and unable to rely on benefits

Despite the rhetoric blaming unemployment benefits for making workers lazy, many BOH workers had very little to no access to state or government assistance throughout the pandemic. However, they still had to manage health risks, threats of eviction, and expenses like child care, school fees, car payments, utilities, and food. Without an income or a safety net, entire households became vulnerable to destitution overnight. Unable to access unemployment benefits or any other targeted government aid, undocumented workers and others who can’t obtain benefits have had to rely on mutual aid and support from community organizations, some of which sprang up in direct response to the overwhelming need.

In Los Angeles, industry veterans Othón Nolasco and Damián Diaz founded the nonprofit No Us Without You to help feed the city’s undocumented BOH workers, whom the duo counted as longtime friends and colleagues. In the first weekend of the shutdown, they took care of 30 families. Now they provide for more than 1,600 families a week. Many are working at some capacity now, but what they make still isn’t enough to sustain their families while catching up on missed payments and other debt accrued during the shutdown.

“These families have never taken aid before, not that aid was ever offered to them,” Nolasco said. “They’re used to working for anything they need, whether it was a death in the family back home in Central America or Mexico, or their kids needing new school clothes. All they’ve wanted to do is go back to work.”

The Oakland Workers Fund, a queer-, trans-, and BIPOC-run mutual aid fund to support out-of-work food service workers unable to receive government aid, has raised more than $180,000 for members of the community. However, fund organizer Samantha Espinoza said this is the bare minimum of what those workers should have received and pointed to the absence of government initiatives to even acknowledge this workforce, much less help them. But this level of mutual aid is difficult to sustain. Nolasco said that donations to No Us Without You have dwindled, and organizers with the Oakland Workers Fund, many of whom were themselves food service workers laid off during the pandemic, are struggling to maintain their own survival outside of their involvement with the fund.

Still, they’re stepping in and asking those in positions of power to step up. In late August, the fund launched a phone and email zap urging supporters to contact state governors, senators, the president’s office, and the chair of committee to reinstate and extend pandemic unemployment benefits in California and across the country.

“We are committed to this fight because it is essential to so many people’s survival, including many of our own,” the fund’s organizers said via email.

Other groups are hoping to create change by directly engaging with restaurants. High Road Kitchens, a project of Restaurants Advancing Industry Standards of Employment (RAISE): High Road Restaurants and One Fair Wage, is a feeding program that also launched at the start of the pandemic and works with the restaurants to prioritize race and gender equity within their establishments, which includes taking its race and gender equity training. And in states that don’t require employees to be paid the full minimum wage, restaurants are required to transition to the full minimum wage by the end of five years.

“I think it’s important that we prioritize [restaurants] that actually show commitment to their workers,” chunn said. “And we think that, by building a commitment to race and gender equity, they are really investing in the survival of our industry.”

Reshaping the restaurant industry

Restaurant workers’ refusal to return to the pre-pandemic status quo is perhaps best illustrated by their response to the removal of government support systems. At the beginning of summer, 25 states—all led by Republican governors—ended participation in the federal program for pandemic unemployment benefits to force people back to work, but a report by One Fair Wage and the Food Labor Research Center found that in five of those states (Arizona, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Florida, and Texas), workers did not return to their jobs en masse as governors had expected, despite the loss of benefits. Additionally, 54% of workers surveyed—who had received unemployment benefits and then lost them prematurely due to these policies—stated that the experience of receiving benefits increased their desire for a livable wage at their next job.

“Without this permanent wage change, workers will not return, and the restaurant industry will never fully reopen and recover,” the report read.

Workers aren’t waiting for restaurants to change on their own, despite justifiable fears about backlash or being blacklisted from large restaurant groups. Those groups do exist to protect the interests of business owners and exploit workers, and members share information with each other. However, more workers are also seeing the benefits of working together to protect their own collective interests. Those who have been able to unionize have managed to obtain critical protections like health insurance and safety procedures.

After being called back to work in May of last year, Porfirio Oden, a chef de partie at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach, fell in the kitchen and nearly broke his leg. He was only able to receive care because he has health insurance as a union member of Unite Here Local 355.

“The union got us health insurance,” Oden said. “Otherwise, we’d have to pay for it with the little money that they give us. Without the union, we’re nothing.”

When cook Affron Herring and his colleagues were called back to work at the Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki Beach Resort in Honolulu after being laid off at the start of the pandemic, Herring’s union, Unite Here Local 5—the largest hospitality union in the state—negotiated with management for personal protective equipment, temperature scans for employees, and the formation of a safety committee made up of workers from different hotel departments that conducts weekly inspections and ensures a safe environment for employees to return to work.

“We’re the resident experts; we know our spaces better than managers do, and we know what we need to keep ourselves safe,” said Herring, who is part of the hotel safety committee. “All we ask is to be respected as workers.”

Advocates argue further that restaurant workers shouldn’t bear the weight of improving their working conditions and wages without government support. Many insist that federal policy changes, such as raising the minimum wage, are critical to reshaping the industry. The Raise the Wage Act, which was introduced to Congress in late January, would end the subminimum wage for tipped workers and establish a fair federal minimum wage at $15 an hour over a five-year period. The practice of tipping itself (in lieu of full wages from the employer) is a legacy of slavery, popularized after emancipation when formerly enslaved Black people were hired in the hospitality sector to cater to white patrons and relied primarily on tips to survive. The American cultural practice of tipping today, chunn says, is why “customers think that we are their servants because we are their servers.”

“I guarantee you that if you pay your people, they’ll work for you,” Nicholson said.

While the act failed to pass with the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill back in March, it’s far from off the table. Similar legislation is moving on the state level, from Illinois to Michigan to Washington, D.C. Advocates say that raising the subminimum wage and allowing for tip-sharing among BOH and FOH workers will raise overall wages for BOH and put protections in place for FOH. Ideally, these changes would also encourage more equity and solidarity among restaurant workers, increasing their ability to collectively bargain with owners.

“I think there’s finally been a realization in many states that there are only two choices at this point,” Jayaraman said. “Either you raise the wage or shrink the industry, because there just aren’t enough workers willing to work for these wages anymore.”

Only seven states—California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Minnesota, Montana, and Alaska—have adopted the model of paying workers a full livable wage, with tip sharing between front and back of house. In those states, chunn said, there is more restaurant growth, higher sales, and more employees.

“If we make [a standard minimum wage] into law, everybody has to raise their menu prices to cover their increased labor costs, and the playing field is equal,” chunn said. “You’re not going to be penalized for trying to compensate your employees.”

If customers started taking notice of inequities in the industry and applying pressure to businesses, advocates say this could also have a considerable effect on reluctant owners. RAISE: High Road Restaurants has action items for consumers to apply pressure for policy change, including signing petitions, patronizing participating restaurants, and speaking to the manager. Its #AskTheManager campaign encourages consumers to inquire about wage and race equity in their favorite establishments, like why there aren’t people of color working FOH or whether they pay a full minimum wage with tips on top.

“We all know that consumers love mission-driven businesses that are doing the right thing, that are supporting their employees and providing safe work environments,” chunn said. “Really putting some pressure on businesses would be the best thing people can do right now.”

Frances Nguyen is a freelance writer, editor of the Women Under Siege section (which reports on gender-based and sexualized violence in conflict and other settings) at the Women’s Media Center, and a member of the editorial team for Interruptr, an online space for women experts to disrupt discourse in traditionally male-dominated focus areas.

Prism is a BIPOC-led non-profit news outlet that centers the people, places, and issues currently underreported by national media. We’re committed to producing the kind of journalism that treats Black, Indigenous, and people of color, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and other invisibilized groups as the experts on our own lived experiences, our resilience, and our fights for justice. Sign up for our email list to get our stories in your inbox, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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The Virginia Supreme Court, which recently took over the redistricting process after the state’s new redistricting commission failed to produce any maps, has ordered Republicans to submit a new slate of proposed experts to assist the court in drawing new districts, disqualifying one pick due to a conflict of interest and casting doubt on the other two.

Under Virginia law, the court must appoint two such experts, known in legal parlance as special masters. However, the justices specifically rejected the nomination of Thomas Bryan, who the Virginia Senate GOP caucus had paid $20,000 in consulting fees in September—a fact Republicans failed to disclose in putting forth Bryan’s name and was only highlighted publicly in a letter that Democratic Sen. Dick Saslaw sent to the court just days ago. The justices further said they have unspecified “concerns” about the GOP’s two other candidates, both of whom are also partisan Republican operatives, and told Republicans to provide a new set of proposals by Monday.

Democrats, by contrast, suggested three nonpartisan professors who are well-known in the field and have served as court-appointed experts in past redistricting cases. The court did, however, order Democrats to come up with one substitution, saying that one unnamed person on their list “has asserted a condition or reservation” indicating he might not be willing to work in tandem with whomever the justices choose as the second special master.

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It’s autumn. I love watching the glorious display of colors that deck the hills that surround my home in the Hudson Valley of New York. While not everyone lives in regions where autumn is marked by an explosion of vivid new colors on the leaves of trees around us, the colorful season has been the subject of musicians for years. For today’s Black Music Sunday, let’s take a listen to a palette of fall colors painted with sound.

For those who have fall chores like raking and leaf blowing to do, here’s some great music about those autumn leaves to keep you company. For those who don’t, well, just listen and enjoy.

It seems appropriate to open with the song “Autumn Leaves.” When I started listening to the wealth of different versions of it, I wound up deciding to try an experiment: My first Black Music Sunday with variations of just one song. (I’ll have other fall songs in the comments section.)

My first choice is the late, great Nat King Cole, seen here performing live in an October 1957 episode of The Nat King Cole Show. The King introduces his performance as a tribute to songwriter Johnny Mercer, who wrote the English lyrics.

I mention Mercer’s English lyrics because the song was originally a hit in France, taken from the poem Les Feuilles Mortes (Dead Leaves), by Jacques Prevert. Roger Crane details that history for The International Review of Music.

Prevert’s poem was set to music by composer Joseph Kosma and introduced in a 1946 French film titled Les Portes de la Nuit by actor Yves Montand, who briefly sings (and hums) it in a nightclub scene. Thereafter, the beautiful and haunting song became popular in France.

Four years later a batch of records were sent from Paris to Johnny Mercer’s Capitol Records to see if the staff thought any of the songs or recordings were worthy of release to the US audience. Fortunately the Capitol folks realized that this song was exceptional. Mercer was given the record and a copy of the French lyrics and reportedly, while on a short train trip, wrote the poetic English lyric. Although retaining the original concept, his lyric is not a translation from the French but a new story of its own. Kosma’s melody has 68 notes and Mercer used just 58 words to match the melody […]

In 1956 Hollywood released a movie titled Autumn Leaves starring Joan Crawford and the theme is used throughout the film. This movie also has Nat Cole singing the song over the film’s credits. (By the way, the movie’s title was changed to Autumn Leaves due to the popularity of the song. It’s original title was The Way We Are.)

For horn aficionados, it doesn’t get much better than alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley’s 1958 rendition. With Miles Davis on trumpet, Sam Jones on double bass, and Art Blakey on drums, it’s both lyrical and mellow.

Shifting to a vocal version, for sheer scat jazz virtuosity, no one can beat Betty Carter, also known as “Betty Bebop.” Carter didn’t sing “Autumn Leaves” with lyrics; instead, she used her voice as an instrument. In her New York Times obituary, written after her death in September 1998 at the age of 69, Peter Watrous wrote:

Her improvisations were explosive, tumbling out in great leaps at a velocity that expressed unfettered artistic freedom.

But it was artifice. Ms. Carter was one of jazz’s most articulate small-group arrangers, and few musicians have ever controlled tempo the way she had; woe to the young musicians in the band who could not navigate the shockingly abrupt tempo changes or keep up with Ms. Carter’s fastest or slowest tempos. Her snapping fingers, marking off the time, sent generations of musicians back to the practice room, chagrined.

In her hands a standard or her own compositions often contrasted some of jazz’s slowest tempos with some of its fastest. She wasn’t afraid to pare down the instrumentation of a group for a while, singing against piano or bass, orchestrating the arrival of other instruments. And the constant tempo-changing gave the impression of emotional extremity and careful control of the artistic environment. She sculptured sound, and it made her concerts some of the most moving experiences in jazz, a mixture of the emotional power of the songs’ texts and the sheer joy of her imagination.

Listen to this performance at the Munich Philharmonie in 1992 with Cyrus A. Chestnut on piano, Curtis Lundy on bass, and Clarence Penn on drums, and you will see what Watrous meant.

Still with us at age 91 is the great jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal. According to his website biography, he was a musical prodigy and started playing piano at age three.

By age 10 Jamal was composing, orchestrating and performing works by Franz Liszt, exploring the music of Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, Nat Cole, Erroll Garner and a host of music notables. Jamal immersed himself fully in learning the American Song Book. He was proficient at amassing a huge repertoire and caught the attention of his senior Pittsburgh masters. Quickly hired on, he joined the AFof M (American Federation of Musicians) at 14, when the minimum age requirement was 16.

…

He formed his own group in 1951 and with the help of John Hammond started his recording career with Okeh Records. That career has continued for over six decades and has resulted in one of the most successful recordings in the history of Instrumental music, “The Ahmad Jamal Trio, at The Pershing”.

In this concert at the Palais des Congrès in 2017, with James Cammack on bass, Herlin Riley on drums, and Manolo Badrena on percussion, “Autumn Leaves” takes on a decidedly Latin rhythm. It had me up out of my chair and doing a rumba.

I’ll close today with an homage to autumn leaves that is in no way related to those above, beyond the song’s title. It’s performed by Damian Marley, son of reggae legend Bob Marley.

Damian Robert Nesta Marley, also known around the world as “Junior Gong” and more recently as “Gongzilla” was born in 1978 to parents Bob Marley and Cindy Breakspeare, Miss World 1976. As a young adult, he developed a passion and a gift to speak for those who cannot always speak for themselves. A self-proclaimed ‘Spiritual Revolutionary’, Damian has worked assiduously to carve his own niche in music history and to add a new perspective to the Marley legacy for the 21st century.
 

Marley’s  2018 “Autumn Leaves” video, from his 2017 Grammy Award-winning Stony Hill album, is a stunningly photographed mini-movie directed by Mark Pellington.

Oh Autumn seems to never end
Leaves are always brown
Summer seems to never tend
To ever come around
Spring times are for beginnings
When true love is found
Winters are for finishings
True love stands its grounds
Now I hear no happy songs
Birds have all gone south
Bright green pastures drying up
And plenty turn to drought

Life is full of ups and downs
The carousels of love
Good times, bad times, smiles, and frowns
Don’t give up on me
Don’t give up on me

Time flies by while having fun
It’s all gone in a wink
And now the days feel more like months
Don’t know what to think

Life is full of ups and downs
The carousels of love
Good times, bad times, smiles, and frowns
Don’t give up on me
Don’t give up on me

By now it should be clear that I’m in no rush to see autumn end, since the bitter cold of winter follows. Join me in the comments for more autumnal tunes, and be sure to share your own fall favorites.

This post was originally published on this site

Let’s dig right in!

Maeve Reston of CNN writes about Friday’s indictment of former Trump staffer Steve Bannon and the possible implications for others who refuse to comply with the Jan. 6 committee’s subpoenas.

It remained unlikely that Friday’s indictment would lead to Bannon testifying before the committee — even as he faces at least 30 days of jail time for his defiance of their requests — since he has so effectively used his past legal battles with Democrats to burnish his image as a victim of political persecution while being elevated to folk hero status among Trump’s core voters.

Still, the indictment marked the first real flash of power by a committee that has sometimes struggled to gain its footing while facing a wall of obstruction from Trump loyalists. For months, the former President and some key figures from his inner circle have treated the January 6 panel as an ineffectual nuisance, making it clear that they see no need to cooperate with subpoenas or turn over documents for an investigation they view as a politically motivated charade.

Bannon’s indictment may mark a turning point in that dynamic as Trump allies who have received subpoenas consider whether they can endure protracted legal battles and the possibility of jail time.

Interestingly, Hayes Brown of MSNBC thinks that it’s the “smaller fish” in the Trump orbit who we should pay more attention to, rather than the “big names” like Bannon, Stephen Miller, or Kayleigh McEnany.

Miller and McEnany are being called to appear before the committee because the seniority of their respective roles demands it, not necessarily because they seem likely to cooperate. Given the lack of cooperation we’ve seen from some of the others the committee has served, like former White House adviser Steve Bannon, don’t be surprised if Miller and McEnany risk being held in contempt of Congress, too.

That’s why their eventual responses (or non-responses) are actually less interesting than what we could hear from some of the others called to testify. They include Keith Kellogg, who served as former Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser. In “I Alone Can Fix It,” a book by Washington Post journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, Kellogg appears as a voice of reason on Jan. 6. 

[…]

Joining him on the list of people subpoenaed Tuesday are several of Trump’s aides: Nicholas Luna, a personal assistant; Molly Michael, the Oval Office operations coordinator; and Cassidy Hutchinson, a special assistant for legislative affairs. Luna, the committee explained in its press release, was reportedly with Trump the morning of the riot. Michael ferried alleged election fraud information to various recipients at Trump’s request, and Hutchinson was reportedly with Trump during and after the Jan. 6 rally.

[…]

The fact that nobody reading this has likely heard any of these names before is what makes them so fascinating. None of them has the star power of Miller or McEnany. They’ll likely struggle to raise the kind of legal defense fund money that’s being raised in support of other Trumpworld denizens. And, crucially, all of them had access to the exact same information as their bosses.

Kimberly Atkins Stohr writes for The Boston Globe that, more than anything, we need to get at the truth of the Jan. 6 insurrection in order for there to ever be accountability.

At this point, the only real accountability is in truth.

“The biggest thing that Congress can do is get to the truth and put it out there effectively to the public,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of the nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

That may feel anticlimactic and unsatisfying. But factual information is powerful. That is why disinformation has become the stock-in-trade of insurrectionists and their defenders. The Big Lie about nonexistent election fraud costing Trump the election didn’t end when he left office. It only expanded, fueling distrust of election results, spurring continued attacks on democratic systems, and causing an upsurge in threats against election officials, judges, and members of Congress. And much of this dangerous counternarrative about the insurrection at the Capitol is coming from the Republican members inside the House.

These events are the raw material for another coup attempt. The truth is needed more than ever, and quickly — before next fall’s elections.

Nicholas Rostow, writing for Roll Call, says that Congress should pass an ethics code for the United States Supreme Court.

The answer to this polarization is not court-packing or confirming more pro-life judges. Instead, Congress should pass an ethics code for the Supreme Court.

A code of conduct for the justices would be fair, practical, and effective. Such a nonpartisan reform would not change the fundamental structure of the court. But it would constrain the justices from conducting partisan or unethical activities that undermine public faith in the court and the law. A code of conduct could have held Chief Justice John Roberts accountable when he did not recuse himself from a 2016 case involving a company in which he owned stock. And ethical guidelines could have penalized Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg after she told The New York Times in 2016, “I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president.”

The reality is that the American people are losing faith in the Supreme Court as a neutral arbiter. In October, the court’s approval rating sunk to 40 percent, the lowest since Gallup began tracking this statistic in 2000. Over half of Americans disapprove of the court’s job performance. But an ethics code could rebuild public faith in the judiciary at this critical time.

My problem with Rostow’s column is that he did not mention two of the most egregious ways in which SCOTUS conservatives have not been held accountable: the political activities of Clarence Thomas’s wife, Virginia Thomas, and some of the statements by Antonin Scalia—which were far more egregious than any comment by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

I don’t think that a SCOTUS code of conduct is a bad idea, though.

Joe Davidson of The Washington Post points to a study by the Brookings Institution; it estimates that the continued maintenance of systemic racial inequities costs the U.S. economy tens of trillions of dollars.

The report’s opening line asks the central question: “How much larger would the U.S. economic pie be if opportunities and outcomes were more equally distributed by race and ethnicity?” Buried deep in the 35-page study is the distressing answer: $22.9 trillion over 30 years — that’s trillion with a “T.”

But that’s not the full answer.

When other factors are considered, including the value of capital items like machinery, factories and computers that the labor force needs to do its work, the figure jumps to a staggering $51 trillion…

Looking just at “the economic cost of Black inequality” last year, a report by Citi, a global bank, reached a similar conclusion: “if four key racial gaps for Blacks — wages, education, housing, and investment — were closed 20 years ago, $16 trillion could have been added to the U.S. economy. And if the gaps are closed today, $5 trillion can be added to U.S. GDP over the next five years.”

Gary Shapiro of STATnews writes that remedying inequities in broadband access is critical for accessibility to health care.

With the rise of digital health care, the U.S. faces a new health challenge: unequal access to broadband technology. Some 43% of adults in households making less than $30,000 a year — that’s more than 25 million American adults — lack a high-speed internet connection. Those with limited or no internet access can’t communicate online with their physicians, obtain electronic medical records, or access online health resources, all of which can improve health outcomes.

Many digital health products and applications offered today work most effectively with a broadband connection. Tools like smartphones, health monitoring devices, and cloud-based software applications can support health equity by closing communication gaps between patients and providers, enhancing consumer access to health care services and increasing consumers’ knowledge about their own health.

Technology and health care firms are already doing their part working to advance health equity and reach underserved communities. Here are just a few examples: During the pandemic, Doctor On Demand (now Included Health) provided on-demand virtual care to nearly 100 million people across the U.S. Microsoft developed and deployed Covid-19 screening and triage bots, mobile apps for field workers, and analytics for public health agencies. A collaborative effort through the Alliance for Better Health distributed Kinsa Health thermometers during the pandemic to community-based organizations and their members. And Fitbit is awarding up to $500,000 in products and services to early-career researchers improving health care access for underserved populations.

In a few APR comment sections over the past couple of weeks, there have been some discussion of sit-ins currently taking place at Howard University over the unhealthy conditions of the dormitories. On more than one occasion, I have seen the question, “What if this had taken place at Harvard instead of Howard?”

In that light, I do find it interesting that the Editorial Board of the Harvard Crimson solidly supports the student sit-ins at Howard.

Earlier this year, undergraduates at Howard University discovered mushrooms, mildew, and black mold within their dorms. Some students say these glaringly unhygienic housing conditions have led to severe health consequences, including respiratory issues and “coughing blood.” Beyond concerns of subhuman housing, this semester Howard students have dealt with a weeklong WiFi outage, spurts with no running water and air conditioning in muggy dorms, and classroom eyewash stations that spit out putrid, yellow water.

Faced with seemingly unfazed administrators, students took to occupying the Armour J. Blackburn University Center in tents on Oct. 12 to demand the university address their housing concerns. They have not left the building since. Some protesters say they prefer the tents to sordid dorms.

[…]

Indeed, any of us would be outraged if a landlord failed to address black mold in our apartment; suing would certainly be reasonable. Attempting to guilt-trip demonstrators into conceding their demands through a false oppositional narrative, and by painting basic hygiene expectations as unreasonable, is dishonest and coercive.

Michael S. Roth writes for POLITICO that the University of Austin is not necessarily a bad idea but the premise of the proposed new university—attacking existing colleges and universities in the higher education “ecosystem”—is wrong-headed.

New schools can still have great value, even if they’re plowing existing ground. One of the great things about the system of American higher education is that it is not a system at all. Students who want to specialize in engineering may choose a large university — or the more experimental Olin College of Engineering, a young Massachusetts school that has smartly rethought what young people really need out of a college. Someone who wants an intensive studio experience of designing new spaces and objects might choose a multi-disciplinary art school like the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, or prefer a small liberal arts school with a strong studio program. This diversity can be confusing, but it is also immensely enriching to the landscape of American education, and to students who are exploring what they might love to do, get better at it and then learn how to find work in relation to their skills after graduation. UATX can add to this diversity.

The University of Austin makes space for itself in this ecosystem, however, not with a bold new idea but by attacking the other species already out there. Its own justification for launching is that other institutions suffer from not being adequately devoted to truth, from a lack of civility, from a failure to protect free speech and from being too tied to the elite liberal consensus that has been branded lately as “wokeness.” We’ve heard such complaints again and again from moderate and conservative critics at odds with students and faculty devoted to such things as rooting out racism, treating less conventional people with respect and eradicating gender-based violence and discrimination. Most of the critics are themselves in favor of these things in principle, but they fear that through a combination of self-righteousness, hypocrisy and group think, campus cultures have gone too far.

Finally today, Moisés Naím writes for El País (in English) that the future of U.S./China relations must include collaboration, as well as competition.

In Washington, it is now a given that a second cold war has already begun. American planners realize that a prolonged conflict with China is imminent, even in the absence of direct military confrontation. Instead, conflicts will be settled in the economic, political, communications and cyber arenas, as well as in the world of espionage and sabotage. It will also likely play out in limited armed confrontations between countries allied with one or the other of the superpowers.

There are dozens of bills under consideration in the US Congress intended to limit, counter or sanction China. A survey conducted in early 2021 by the Pew Center found that 89% of Americans viewed China as a competitor or enemy. Sophisticated observers wring their hands over the Thucydides Trap, which posits that when a rising power threatens the dominant role of an established power, conflict is almost inevitable.

Surely, the United States and China are destined to compete. But what should be equally obvious is that they must also collaborate. Worldwide threats and problems threaten the national interest of both superpowers and cannot be mitigated or eliminated by either of them acting alone. The most obvious example is the fight against global warming. The very nature of the problem, as well as the policies to deal with it, require close collaboration between Beijing and Washington. And this coordination is not going to happen out of altruism, international solidarity or because it is simply the most reasonable solution. No, it will happen because it suits the powerful. It is in the national interest of these two giants to slow temperature rises, because the disasters that will follow will have no regard for oceans or borders.

Everyone have a great day!