Independent News

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It’s time to check the Community’s zeitgeist again now that we are nine months into the Biden-Harris administration with a signature infrastructure bill to be signed on Monday. A year ago, we were seesawing through election results, hoping nothing (else) dire happened before the inauguration. Then the insurrection gave one last flare of horror before the government was “free” of Trump and we could move on.

Right after the inauguration, I asked if Community members had recovered from our four-year-long resistance. Of the 718 responses, 39% felt like they’d just escaped a hostage situation, 29% were still burning off the accumulated stress biochemicals, and 20% were ready to move forward.

I’ve moved past burnout, cleared out my stress biochemicals, and found reasons to be encouraged—such as reversals of Trump’s environmental rollbacks and the enthusiasm of new, women candidates. Have your views changed in the nine months since the inauguration? Let us know in the poll below.

Based on what I’ve read in Community stories and comments, we’ve dialed down reactive outrage and increased thoughtful examination. While plenty that stirs up anger remains, it’s easier for me to keep the outrage in perspective and appreciate the progress. I’m grateful that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will rescind the Trump era decision that eliminated the need to designate critical habitat for endangered species, for example. Other encouraging events include the 29 Emily’s List-sponsored women candidates who won their 2021 elections and Dr. Annie Andrews, the new 2022 Democratic candidate running in South Carolina against a legislators whose town halls I track for Indivisible.

After the inauguration, I asked readers, “The fight sustained us during the last 4 years. What’s next?” Stayingsilent said, “We fight like hell to ever prevent such a horror from rising again.” Ahumbleopinion offered, “Our messaging must be strong and the teamwork flawless to defeat the propaganda machine of white supremacy.”

Looking over the list of rescued stories from the past months, I see Community writers have delivered on those topics. You’ve written about problems and helped readers discover what battles to fight and actions to guide our responses.

Spotlighted stories this week address racism, and a transgender prophet in late 1770 America. Five stories arise from the writers’ personal experiences: canvassing for the Virginia election, a QAnon-like mass hysteria event in Iceland 30 years ago, visiting the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, vaccinating an 8-year-old son, and coexisting with coyotes.

The Rescued to Recommended story this week—a detailed look into the Republican propaganda about critical race theory—is from a sociologist focusing “on systemic aspects of racism in social structures” who issues a powerful warning to readers and what steps to take.

Check out the blurbs for these stories, answer the poll, and in the comments tell us how your views have changed since the inauguration.

Seven stories rescued from 1 PM Friday, Nov. 5 to 1 PM friday, nov. 12, 2021

Community Spotlight’s mission is to ensure that the best stories from the Daily Kos Community receive the attention they deserve. We encourage members who write excellent stories with original views to keep writing by promoting their work.

Good news: You don’t have to search to find our rescued stories! The nightly News Roundup, an Open Thread published six days a week at 7:30 PM PDT, includes links to each day’s rescued stories.

Reminder: The numbers in parentheses after each author’s name indicate the year they joined Daily Kos, how many stories they’ve published, and how many we’ve rescued.

My baby boy gets his first dose of the Covid vaccine today by Annoyedfrog (2018-10-1) 

A relieved mother describes her partially vaccinated family’s experiences over the past few weeks, including the older kids moving to their father’s home temporarily when they returned to in-person classes. The availability of a vaccine for children 5 to 11 means “we will be able to have family visit for the holidays … He will start second grade in-person next semester. For a lot of people, life went back to normal months ago, but for our family, life will finally go back to something close to normal.”

Post-mortem on Virginia general election 2021 – canvasser’s edition by patriotic (2015-3-2)

Patriotic gives us a boots-on-the-ground (up to 18,000 steps a day!) assessment of canvassing in Virginia, even while dealing with radiation and (thankfully) getting a good prognosis. She did literature drops and eventually was up to having face to face conversations again.”I am proud to share that we have turned one of the reddest districts in our entire Commonwealth purple. We have shown the rest of Virginia that the 56th district is not to be overlooked any longer.”

LGBTQ literature: A transgender prophet in revolutionary-era America by Clio2 (2006-198-?)

Part biography, part book review, part social evaluation, Clio2 unwinds the story told in the book The Public Universal Friend: Jemima Wilkinson and Religious Enthusiasm in Revolutionary America. After falling ill and recovering from a deadly fever and coma, the young woman announced that Wilkinson had died and was “reanimated by God” as neither male nor female to be God’s messenger. Dressed in male clothing, the Public Universal Friend “traveled and addressed crowds across five states. His gender nonconformity, together with a more conventional apocalyptic message of repentance, created a stir.”

For progressives to win we must learn enough about racism to stop using Republican talking points by arawls (2018-1-1) Rescued to Recommended

“My message for the Daily Kos community is that unless we address this (systemic racism) issue head on, racism and fascism will win … We need to stop denying the racism in our lives and go on the offensive to explain and defend CRT and the impressive results of CRT researchers,” asserts the author, a “White female scholar who has studied systemic racism” for 50 years. Arawls explains the origins and purpose of critical race theory, and ramifications of the reality that systemic racism “makes racists of us all – no matter how committed to diversity and equity we are – not the other way around … It is the White American bias toward treating systemic racism as if it were individual prejudice that fuels the Republican talking points and makes them persuasive to so many.”

QAnon in Dallas and space aliens in Iceland by Curious therapist (2019-17-1)

The recent QAnon fantasy of JFK Jr. springing back to life on the grassy knoll in Dallas reminds the author of a 1993 mass hysteria event they witnessed in Iceland that “underscores how people can succumb to true belief to the point that they will deny what their own senses are telling them.” An Englishman began to have visions and “came to believe that he was being contacted by benevolent aliens who wanted to come to Earth and bring lasting world peace.” A loud party with 500 dancing, singing people gathered to welcome the aliens, who—you guessed this, right?—failed to show up. The Englishman told a reporter the “aliens must have been deterred by the loud party.”

Celebrating 100 years of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier by Snowbored (2005-90-?)

Snowbored writes a tribute to this special monument at Arlington National Cemetery, interspersing his own experiences with history of the Tomb. For two days this year, the public was allowed to visit the monument. “No doubt, everyone there had their own reason, their own connection, to this place. But in this day and age, it’s hard to find hundreds of Americans who suddenly go silent, no phones, no conversation, just reverence.”

Top Comments: Coyote edition by gizmo59 (2006-518-?)

Gizmo59 and his husband are adapting to their new coyote neighbors after moving from rural Pennsylvania to a SoCal small town bordering “a vast area of undeveloped land … One early morning, to our great surprise, a coyote was standing on our back deck and looking at us through the glass door, just 10 feet from where we were standing. A couple weeks ago, as we were having lunch on the deck with guests, a coyote strolled through the back yard in broad daylight. Around here, they’re cheeky.”

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Back in the summer of 2017, 101-year-old Julia “Hurricane” Hawkins set a couple of world records when she competed in the USA Track and Field Outdoors Masters Championships. The sprinter became the oldest female athlete to ever compete in the events, and at the time she crushed the existing world record for the 100 metes, at that age bracket, with a 40.12 second time. At the time Hawkins joked that she “missed my nap for this.”

On Saturday, Nov. 6, 2021, Hurricane Hawkins set a new record. Two actually: As she became the “first female track and field athlete and first American to set a world record in the 100-meter dash for her age group” completed it in 1:02:95. In running the event, Hawkins also created the first 105+ age bracket in the sport. “The older you get, the more passions you ought to have,” she told news outlets. I made hash browns in a toaster oven this morning—so I’ve got that going for me.

Hawkins was born in Wisconsin in 1916. She has four children, three grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. Hawkins spent her years as an octogenarian doing cycling time trials and pulling in a few gold medals. She told the Guardian that her cycling career ended because “there wasn’t anyone left my age to compete with.” So at the age of 100, Hawkins registered to become a 100-meter sprinter. I don’t believe I’ve put on socks yet.

After Hurricane’s 100-meter record in the 100-104 age bracket was broken by 100-year-old Cleveland, Ohio, woman Diane Friedman in August, Hawkins dusted off her running shoes. After the race, she told reporters “It was wonderful to see so many family members and friends. But I wanted to do it in less than a minute.” 

As the Guardian points out, while Hawkins and Friedman are blowing minds at the centenarian level, there has been a lot of action in the field of senior sports lately:

In August, Hiroo Tanaka of Japan blazed home in 16.69 to set the male record in the 90 and over category. In women’s competition Australia’s Julie Brims broke the 55+ record in a time of 12:24, while American Kathy Bergen crossed the line in 16.26 in the 80 and over category. Bergen has also broken age records in the high jump, 60m and 200m.

I hurt my neck sleeping last night.

Hawkins knows she’s an inspiration and has these words of advice: “I want to keep running as long as I can. My message to others is that you have to stay active if you want to be healthy and happy as you age.”

Here’s Julia “Hurricane” Hawkins earning her nickname and creating the first world record for 105+ track and field.

Here’s Diane “Flash” Friedman setting the 100M record for the 100-104 age brackett.

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by Frances Nguyen

This story was originally published at Prism.

Throughout the pandemic, news outlets have covered the restaurant industry’s struggle with labor shortages and rising costs. But reports of restaurant workers quitting in droves, customer complaints about slow service and limited menus, and hand-wringing over “a lack of work ethic” consistently overlook a fundamental detail: Restaurant workers, especially back-of-house (BOH) workers, are dying in outrageous numbers from this pandemic. Laboring in jobs that pay less than a living wage, they’re forced to choose between taking their chances elsewhere or remaining in jobs where the risk to their lives can’t be understated.

Restaurant workers experience poverty at nearly three times the rate of workers in other industries, and workers of color experience poverty at nearly double the rate of their white peers. And now, in an industry notorious for its Jim Crow-legacy wages, BOH food preparation and kitchen staff such as bussers, dishwashers, line cooks, and chefs are being forced to accept considerable health risks to continue working. Restaurants remain one of the most dangerous environments in this pandemic, especially for those working BOH. A recent study by the University of California, San Francisco found that line cooks have had the highest risk of dying during the pandemic, surpassing even health care workers.

Using death records from the California Department of Public Health, researchers found that for Californians aged 18 to 65 who died between March and October 2020, mortality increased by 39% among food or agriculture workers during the pandemic, relative to pre-pandemic times—the highest increase of any occupational sector. Line cooks had a 60% increase in mortality during the pandemic, leading every other occupation in mortality risk. Chefs and head cooks, as well as bartenders, also made the list among the 25 occupations with the highest risk. It’s an inescapable fact that restaurant workers, especially those in BOH positions, are risking their lives to fulfill the demands of American restaurant-goers.

‘If it’s too hot, get out of the kitchen’

More often than not, BOH positions are staffed by people of color and immigrants whose work behind the scenes fulfills the demands of the business. And the space in which they’re confined—just beyond the curated atmosphere of more spacious dining areas—hosts the perfect conditions for the coronavirus to ravage the workforce.

Kitchens were never designed to be particularly comfortable or sanitary, with “terrible” ventilation and few opportunities to socially distance, said Ben Reynolds, an organizer with Restaurant Workers United, a national, volunteer-run network of service workers and labor organizers that emerged from the pandemic to advocate for the security needs of those in the industry. It’s a physical reflection of how restaurants prioritize diners’ comfort and satisfaction, not the safety or well-being of kitchen staff.

“Kitchen space is going to be as small as possible to maximize seating in a restaurant,” Reynolds said.

What’s more, kitchens are unbearably hot—regularly up to 110 degrees. BOH staff often work 14-hour shifts, six to seven days a week in that sweltering environment, performing grueling physical labor in a tight, enclosed space. Maggie Tenbroeck, a sous chef in Memphis who is currently unemployed, said that job interviews regularly included questions about physical labor:

“[I was asked] ‘Can you stand for at least eight hours straight? Can you lift 50 pounds? Can you do repetitive movements? Can you move 25 pounds out of a 400-degree oven and move it 300 feet to another position without spilling on yourself or someone else?’” Tenbroeck said. “You are just destroying your body.”

That kind of physical labor in close quarters can also take a toll on a person’s immune system, but working through sickness is a routine obligation in this industry, where health insurance and paid sick leave are considered luxuries. Emilio Enriquez, a line cook in Chicago who helped open the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialist Labor Commission’s Restaurant Organizing Project, stressed how low wages and lack of health care puts everyone at risk because workers can’t afford to take time off to get medical treatment.

“I’m willing to put money on that as a major factor to why the deaths in this industry have skyrocketed [during the pandemic],” he said.

Essential work without protection

While personal protective equipment (PPE) shortages early on in the pandemic may have facilitated the virus’ swift spread through restaurants, BOH workers are still given few accommodations for their protection. Mask-wearing is rarely enforced by managers, so staff are often at the mercy of their colleagues’ preferences. Workers like Tenbroeck support mask-wearing but sympathize with how frustrating it can be wearing one for hours in close quarters with hot stoves and ovens running at 400 degrees.

In Oakland, California, a line cook and shift lead who asked to remain anonymous detailed how their management’s limited communication and lack of support—such as providing PPE to staff—left workers to figure out on their own how to mitigate infection in the workplace. In addition to working in an overcrowded and tightly confined space, staff were still being pressured to work even if they were sick. Eventually, there was a COVID-19 outbreak at the restaurant.

“Workers should not have to be forced into being essential workers during a pandemic,” the worker from Oakland said. “There should be a choice, but the choice shouldn’t be between risking your life or paying your bills.”

​What’s more, protocols and policies around informing staff of potential coronavirus-related issues weren’t always clearly or consistently communicated. Porfirio Oden, a chef de partie at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach, said he relied on his coworkers for information more than management.  

“One guy was gone for a couple days and he came back with a mask on, and I heard from other employees that he had COVID,” Oden said. “[Management] didn’t tell me that.”

Fountainebleu didn’t respond to a request for comment.

With unforgiving working conditions before the pandemic and limited communication from management to keep them safe, it’s no wonder that workers have left the industry—many for good.

Slipping through the cracks in the system

For many, unemployment has been a preferable alternative to risking their health in jobs that rarely offer health insurance or paid sick leave, even to get vaccinated. For workers like Tenbroeck, it’s allowed them to take a desperately needed pause to reevaluate their options and desire to remain in the industry.

“As someone with genetic disorders, I needed to be able to take time away to make sure that [going back as a sous chef] wasn’t going to kill me,” Tenbroeck said.

However, accessing unemployment was a struggle for many, especially during the early days of the pandemic. Contrary to inaccurate claims that restaurant workers were taking advantage of unemployment insurance instead of working, many were struggling with how the pandemic overloaded the unequal and racialized benefits system. Oden was among thousands of Floridians frustrated by site glitches, system crashes, inundated phone lines, and unanswered emails in the state’s historically flawed unemployment system. He spent three months waiting hours in line at food distribution centers to feed his family while listening to Gov. Ron DeSantis blame people like him for their own distress. Overall, according to a One Fair Wage survey, more than half of unemployed restaurant workers were denied unemployment insurance during the pandemic. For many, it was because they earned too little to qualify. Those who managed to receive benefits would immediately lose them if they turned down work.

A significant portion of BOH workers didn’t even have the option to use unemployment benefits. In 2014, 12% of food preparation workers were undocumented, as were 16% of cooks and 19% of dishwashers, according to data from the Pew Research Center. Undocumented workers may account for up to 40% of the restaurant industry in urban areas, according to One Fair Wage. Enriquez, who is a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient, said the added stress of having undocumented status forces workers to remain in situations where they’re exploited.

“Your livelihood is always at the hands of someone else,” he said. “It’s certainly kept me submissive to poor treatment in the past because of it.”

According to Catalina Xavlena, founder of the Oakland Workers Fund, which supports out-of-work food service workers—specifically those unable to receive government aid—many applicants have been stuck in a cycle of employment, downsizing, and layoffs. Some struggle with drastically reduced work hours that are a far cry from a livable income, especially for workers with dependents, but enough to disqualify them from unemployment benefits since they were technically employed.

“​​It’s been tragic and infuriating to often be the only source of income and support that so many of our applicants have had for the entirety of the pandemic,” Xavlena said.

Returning to work—just not at restaurants

Despite earlier hints at recovery, the delta variant has already begun softening the industry’s growth, and more closures and reinstated restrictions loom for many restaurants across the country. McDonald’s and other fast-food chains are now closing their dining areas and limiting hours of operation. And the encroaching cold of fall and winter will remove outdoor dining options in many areas. Given the volatility of the industry, many workers simply funneled into other service jobs requiring less risk, less physical and mental strain, and greater or comparable—and more stable—pay.

“The pay isn’t going to be that great, but they’re probably not going to be risking their life in the same way just to make somebody’s burger,” Reynolds said.

Restaurants and casual dining chains are now offering hefty sign-on bonuses and boosted minimum hourly wages, hoping to convince their former workforce to return. Chipotle Mexican Grill even debuted a debt-free degree program in agriculture science, culinary arts, and hospitality to workers after 120 days of employment. However, advocates and workers find these efforts hollow and too little, too late.

“These incentives aren’t being provided for the right reasons because, as a whole, we don’t view people working in food service as people but as employees meant to rake in money for their bosses,” said Samantha Espinoza, a core organizer with the Oakland Workers Fund.

Some economists are hoping that the recent end of the federal pandemic unemployment benefits program will leave workers little choice but to return and alleviate labor shortages. But a July report from One Fair Wage and the Food Labor Research Center at University of California at Berkeley suggests that’s not the case. Twenty-five states had already ended participation in the federal program prematurely to force people back to work, but the report found that “cutting unemployment insurance has not changed workers’ desire to leave the industry unless wages go up.”

Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage and director of the Food Labor Research Center at University of California at Berkeley pointed out the hypocrisy of blaming restaurant workers for the industry’s current struggle while at the same time doing little to care for their health.

“It’s going to take some guarantee that things are actually going to change permanently and not temporarily,” Jayaraman said. “Nothing can give them that faith or trust, except policy change.”

Paying the cost to meet customer demands

While Americans are fatigued by the pandemic, their desire to be waited on at the expense of those serving them reflects how, in America’s dehumanizing and exploitative consumer culture, sacrificing workers’ lives at the altar of customers’ dining experience is merely business as usual. Impatient to “return to normal,” many Americans equate dining out with exercising their freedom from pandemic-related restrictions, while the cost in human lives is conveniently out of sight at the BOH, and many restaurants are only too happy to indulge in their fantasies.

“If we as a country are going to call these people ‘essential,’ then we have to treat them as essential—not disposable—which is how we’ve treated them over the last year,” Jayaraman said.

Policy changes to safeguard BOH restaurant workers’ wages and workplaces are critical, but even moreso is for Americans to confront how their sense of entitlement shapes service culture and the toll their demands take on restaurant workers’ livelihoods, health, and safety. With restaurants determined to remain open even as the delta variant rages across the country, people of color and immigrants, who are overrepresented in the service industry, continue to suffer disproportionately so that the more fortunate among us can indulge in dining out.

“Because our faces [aren’t seen], it’s hard for people to humanize [us] sometimes, but [BOH workers are] famously one of the most disenfranchised groups of people,” Enriquez said. “I would love for people to try to remove that veil. When that happens, it won’t just be organizers who are fighting for things to change; it will be everybody.”

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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Below you’ll find Daily Kos Elections’ calendar of major-party filing deadlines, primaries, and runoffs for the 2022 elections. For a chronological version of this calendar, click here. Beneath the table, you’ll find detailed notes on requirements for runoffs, exceptions to filing deadlines, and important conventions.

RUNOFFS

• Primary runoffs between the top two vote-getters may take place in some states if no candidate receives over a certain threshold of the vote in the primary:
  • 30% in North Carolina (only if requested by the runner-up)
  • 35% in South Dakota
  • 50% in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas.
• Georgia conducts a general election runoff between the top two vote-getters on Dec. 6 if no candidate receives a majority on Nov. 8.
• Louisiana conducts a general election runoff between the top two vote-getters on Dec. 10 if no candidate receives a majority on Nov. 8.

FILING DEADLINES

• All filing deadlines on the calendar above are for major-party candidates and only apply to congressional and statewide races unless noted below. Independent and third-party candidates, or contests for other races, may be subject to different deadlines.
• California’s filing deadline is extended to Mar. 16 in races where no incumbents file for re-election.
• Kansas’ filing deadline for congressional candidates is extended to Jun. 10 if new congressional maps are not approved by May 10.
• Massachusetts requires candidates to file with local election officials by May 10; then, they must file again with the commonwealth secretary by Jun. 7. Therefore, the first step is necessary but not sufficient for candidates to appear on the primary ballot.
• Nebraska’s filing deadline for incumbents, regardless of whether they seek re-election or another office, is Feb. 15.
• Utah requires candidates to file a declaration of candidacy with the lieutenant governor’s office by Mar. 17, then either submit sufficient signatures 14 days before the candidate’s party’s convention or win sufficient support at that party convention. The first step is therefore necessary but not sufficient for candidates to appear on the primary ballot.

CONVENTIONS

• Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, and Utah parties typically conduct conventions prior to their primaries that can impact primary ballot access.
• Indiana, Michigan, and South Dakota parties select nominees for downballot statewide office (such as attorney general and secretary of state) at conventions.
• Iowa parties conduct conventions to select nominees if no candidate receives over 35% of the vote in the primary.
• Minnesota parties conduct conventions after which candidates who fail to win their party’s endorsement often (but by no means always) drop out.
• Virginia parties, at their discretion, may select nominees at conventions rather than via primaries.

We’ll have more details regarding the dates of these conventions as they’re announced. 

Sources: Green Papers; FEC; NCSL; state elections sites and statutes

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You may have heard about school bus driver shortages this year. Maggie Koerth’s fabulous in-depth look at the job shows why that would be. The headline might give you all you need to know: “Would you manage 70 children and a 15-ton vehicle for $18 an hour?” But the headline leaves out a very important piece: It’s a part-time job, so that $18 an hour might only be for four hours a day, timed so that it’s difficult to have another job.

The whole piece is very much worth a read, putting this year’s shortages in context—in fact, there have been shortages for years, with the pandemic creating a tipping point for several reasons. And beyond that, it shows how school bus driver shortages have a domino effect, with some parents having to give up on paying jobs themselves because their kids no longer get to and from school on the bus. 

As Koerth writes, “Caregiving is interconnected. Roberta Steele doesn’t just drive a bus. She drove a bus to pick up and drop off Naima Kaidi’s children. Without Steele’s services, Kaidi still had to get the kids to school. But the task became harder and required her to make more sacrifices.” It’s kind of a microcosm of so many things wrong with the U.S. economy: A job that is both important and difficult is treated as junk, and the problems that result from that are put onto the shoulders of parents—overwhelmingly mothers.

Read the whole thing.

● U.S. workers have been striking in startling numbers. Will that continue? Analysis by Jasmine Kerrissey of the University of Massachusetts sociology and labor studies department and Judy Stepan-Norris of the University of California, Irvine, sociology department.

● Pregnant workers’ jobs and health at risk as bosses refuse accommodations.

● This is horrific, and racist: Contract lawyers face a growing invasion of surveillance programs that monitor their work

We could be looking at a historic health care industry strike, Maximillian Alvarez writes. Stay tuned.

● Dean Baker: The trucker shortage: Why don’t we just let the market work?

Suppose that truckers got $150,000 a year and worked something like regular 40-hour weeks, and weren’t force to drive unsafe trucks in unsafe conditions? Does anyone think the industry would have a hard time finding enough people to work as truckers? (Actually, if truckers pay had kept pace with productivity growth over the last four decades it would be somewhere around $150k a year today.)

The point here is that the trucker shortage is overwhelmingly a problem of inadequate pay. This is what the market is telling us. But rather than listen to the market, we get a grand tour of other possible solutions. Why does the NYT have such a such a hard time listening to the market?

● The Build Back Better Act will support 2.3 million jobs per year in its first five years, writes the Economic Policy Institute’s Adam Hersh.

Why one IATSE member is voting no on the tentative contract.

● John Deere is back at the bargaining table, but in the meantime …

● 

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We already know, just from the company’s behavior in the United States, that Facebook seems content to continue to permit the spread of extremist disinformation and organizing on its social media platform, while paying lip service to its responsibilities and taking hollow half-measures to correct the problem—largely because its revenue stream is so powerfully dependent on the features fueling the phenomenon. Facebook’s profits, as whistleblower-provided evidence has established, are fundamentally built on creating social division and real-world strife.

The apotheosis of Facebook-fueled violence is genocide; its undeniable role in helping facilitate the bloody eliminationist campaign by Myanmar’s military against its Rohingya minority population is already well-established. Now, a fresh report from Nick Robins-Early of Vice details how it is replicating those results in Ethiopia, where military leaders and their authoritarian supporters are unleashing genocidal violence in the midst of an ongoing civil war.

The Facebook model for engendering social chaos for profit with which we have all become familiar is on full display in Ethiopia, as the report shows us: Just as occurred in Myanmar, the nation’s military leaders have leveraged the spread of disinformation on Facebook to encourage ethnic violence against a regional minority population and to organize lethal violence against them. And just as it has everywhere, the social media giant is claiming to take steps to correct the abuse of its platform, but with ineffective sops to public relations that have done next to nothing to slow the looming genocide.

Ethiopia has been embroiled in a civil war since mid-2020, after the federal administration of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed refused to recognize the region’s newly elected government, leading Tigrayan forces to attack a government military base, to which Abiy responded by launching an all-out military offensive on the region last November. Abiy’s forces, which represent the larger Amhara region, have continued to wreak havoc in the Tigray region, whose ethnic population represents about 7% of Ethiopia’s total. When Eritrean soldiers aligned with Abiy invaded Tigray, a flood of reports of mass killings of soldiers and gang rapes followed, telling of shallow graves surrounding villages and mutilated bodies floating down rivers. Eritrea withdrew its forces in June.

The tide in the war shifted this past month when a Tigrayan counteroffensive comprised of an alliance of forces allied with Ethiopia’s other ethnic minorities neared Addis Ababa. Abiy declared a state of emergency on Nov. 2, calling on citizens to take up arms.

“There are sacrifices to be made, but those sacrifices will salvage Ethiopia,” Abiy said on Twitter on Saturday. On Facebook, he urged Ethiopians to “bury” the rebels; that post was removed. In Addis Ababa, the city administration called on citizens to use their weapons to defend their neighborhoods. House-to-house searches were conducted in search of Tigrayan sympathizers.

Many of them have taken to Facebook to organize the ethnic attacks, as well as to threaten and intimidate minorities. The shape of this online behavior is already familiar: Robins-Early describes how journalist Lucy Kassa was targeted by a deluge of online harassment after she reported on the burn injuries suffered by a teenage girl in an apparent incendiary-weapons attack. A pro-government account posted her photo and address, calling for her arrest. Death threats and sexual harassment followed; yet the Facebook post remains up.

The Facebook-organized ethnic cleansing campaign has spread widely and readily, with the company’s litany of inaction speaking for itself:

Last month a video went viral on Facebook showing a man telling a large crowd of people that anyone who associates with certain ethnic minorities is “the enemy.” It was reposted multiple times before the platform removed it. The same account that called for Kassa’s arrest also appeared to celebrate the Fano, a notorious Amhara militia, for carrying out an extrajudicial killing. That post that remains online. Another account with over 28,000 followers posted an instructional video on how to use an AK47 with a caption that suggested every Amhara should watch it. The post has been up since April and has nearly 300,000 views. In September, a local media outlet published unproven allegations on Facebook that members of the ethnic Qimant minority were responsible for a shooting. That same day a government-aligned militia and mob attacked a Qimant village, looting and burning down homes. The post remains on Facebook.

Facebook continues to insist that it’s taking serious steps to clamp down on the posts that violate its terms of service in Ethiopia, saying it has heavily hired moderation staff there directed at removing the threatening material. “Over the past two years, we have actively focused and invested in Ethiopia, adding more staff with local expertise, operational resources, and additional review capacity to expand the number of local languages we support to include Amharic, Oromo, Somali, and Tigrinya,” the company told Vice. “We have worked to improve our proactive detection so that we can remove more harmful content at scale.”

But researchers told Vice that Facebook’s big talk is hollow: Moderation and fact-checking in Ethiopia, they say, in fact is operated by “group of volunteers who send Facebook spreadsheets of posts to investigate and frequently have to explain to staffers why content on their platform is dangerous.”

“They completely lack context,” researcher Berhan Taye told Vice. “Every time we talk to them, they’re asking for context. That’s been a big issue—they don’t understand what’s happening in the country.”

The company also routinely ignores researchers when they point out violent or hateful content, telling them that the posts don’t violate Facebook policies.

“The reporting system is not working. The proactive technology, which is AI, doesn’t work,” Taye said.

If this sounds familiar, it should. When the Myanmar military used fake Facebook accounts to organize ethnic-cleansing violence against the Rohingya, it allowed the posts to remain online until The New York Times published an account of the platform’s culpability in the genocidal violence. An independent fact-finding commission by the United Nations Human Rights Council found that both the specific violence and the ethos that fostered it were spread readily on Facebook: “The Myanmar authorities have emboldened those who preach hatred and silenced those who stand for tolerance and human rights,” the report notes. “By creating an environment where extremists’ discourse can thrive, human rights violations are legitimized, and incitement to discrimination and violence facilitated.”

Facebook responded by taking down the accounts of multiple Myanmar military leaders, including Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the Myanmar military. It also shut down numerous group pages and other networks focused on inciting anti-Rohingya violence, removing 484 pages, 157 accounts, and 17 groups in 2018 alone. However, these takedowns were not for their hateful content, but rather for “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

This rationale is already familiar to Facebook users in the United States: When the company announced in 2020 that it was taking down large numbers of conspiracist QAnon pages and groups, it likewise did so because of “inauthentic behavior,” rather than because of its extremist content and disinformation. As a result, its pushback on the far-right cult—whose sin, in Facebook’s eyes, was not promoting hate and false information, but gaming Facebook—was a mere drop in the bucket.

Similarly, Facebook claimed that it was eager to fix what it could in Myanmar, but when the government of Gambia filed a suit in international court against Myanmar over the Rohingya genocide and demanded access to the data Facebook retained in its own investigation of the matter, the social-media giant balked, claiming that the request is “extraordinarily broad,” as well as “unduly intrusive or burdensome.”

A federal judge in Washington last month ruled that Facebook must release the data. In response, the company complained that the judge’s order “creates grave human rights concerns of its own, leaving internet users’ private content unprotected and thereby susceptible to disclosure—at a provider’s whim—to private litigants, foreign governments, law enforcement, or anyone else.”

But this is bogus rationale. As Matthew Smith of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy observed at Time:

Facebook might say it’s concerned about setting a dangerous precedent, but sharing information of genocidal intent through a U.S. federal court would seem to be precisely the “precedent” the company should want to set, i.e. to deter State actors from using its platform for criminal purposes. Not to mention that voluntarily complying with The Gambia’s request wouldn’t create any legal precedent, only an internal one at the company.

The Facebook model of engendering social chaos for profit has already had its effect in the United States, which particularly came home to roost at the Capitol on Jan. 6; the company’s own internal reports acknowledge that much of the extremism (particularly disinformation about the 2020 election) and violence, including the siege on Congress, that day was spread and organized on Facebook.

Now, as the insurrection’s defenders longstanding talk of civil war and targeted violence against liberals (“When do we get to use the guns?”) ratchets higher on social media and in real life, it’s becoming clear that what happened in Myanmar can happen anywhere. Ethiopia is only the latest nation to suffer from Facebook’s lethal revenue-generation model.

This post was originally published on this site

You can say this at least about Donald Trump: He sure knows how to pick ‘em. Republican Sean Parnell is the Trump-backed candidate for the 2022 U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania. Parnell, already dogged by accusations that he allegedly attempted to strangle his former wife, seemed like a fitting endorsement from Trump, no stranger to assault claims himself, even (allegedly) dabbling in rape as well.

While Republican voters were willing to overlook Trump’s blatant misogyny, Parnell has neither the name recognition nor the media-spun notoriety of Trump. More significantly, from a practical standpoint, Parnell’s potential future as a U.S. senator would largely be decided by the prevailing sentiment of those suburban counties surrounding Philadelphia, an increasingly liberal bellwether for any Pennsylvania candidate aspiring to statewide office. In particular, the women’s vote in those counties now tends to have an outsized impact on any statewide election.

Parnell would face a Republican primary in May of next year. However, it now appears that he may not make it that far, Trump’s wholehearted endorsement notwithstanding. As reported by Nick Kepler and Michael Scherer, writing for the Washington Post, Parnell gave an interview to Fox Nation in 2019, providing some startling misogynist viewpoints, the contents of which are now receiving closer attention.

His comments came up in a discussion about a study that attributed low marriage rates in the U.S. to the lack of “economically attractive men.” Parnell gave what he now describes as a “tongue-in-cheek” response to the interviewer:

“I am going to say something very, very un-PC. I reject this study wholesale,” Parnell said. “I feel like the whole happy wife, happy life nonsense has done nothing but raise one generation of women tyrants after the next.”

“The idea that a woman doesn’t need a man to be successful, the idea that a woman doesn’t need a man to have a baby, the idea that a woman can live a happy and fulfilling life without a man, I think it’s all nonsense,” he said.

Blaming “high maintenance, narcissistic women” for their inability to find suitable mates, Parnell also pined for an earlier time: “It used to be, you know, women were attracted to your strength because you could defend them from dinosaurs.” He also claimed to have been repulsed by the “duck-billed selfies” taken by women and posted on Instagram.

It’s certainly possible that Parnell thought he was being funny, although he does not appear to be laughing in these clips:

The entire Fox Nation video interview is available here. Parnell is currently locked in a bitter divorce and custody battle with his former wife, in which his ex has accused him both of physically assaulting her and physically abusing their children.

Parnell’s estranged wife, Laurie Snell, with whom he shares three children, has accused him of multiple forms of abuse, including strangling her and hitting one of their children so hard he left a fingerprint-shaped welt on the child’s back. She said Parnell has called her a “piece of s—” and said he once told her to get an abortion.

Further reporting from CNN suggests that the overall tenor of Parnell’s statements about women on Fox Nation mesh well with someone whom his ex-wife has portrayed as a classic abuser:

He would hold me down — he would barricade himself in front of our door so I couldn’t leave the house. He would take my keys and my phone so I couldn’t leave,” Snell said in 2018. “These were, you know, pretty typical for Sean. This had happened at least a dozen times during our relationship.”

According to the CNN report, shortly after Trump endorsed Parnell, Jeff Bartos, another GOP Senate hopeful, published documents on his campaign website indicating that Parnell’s ex-wife had sought and obtained two protection-from-abuse orders against Parnell. Both of those orders were later expunged from the public record.

The divorce and custody case, which has lasted four years, will likely be decided this week. Some of Parnell’s backers contend that if the court decides to award joint custody, Parnell could trumpet that fact in arguing that his candidacy is still viable. As Kepler and Scherer report, others have taken a decidedly dimmer view of his prospects, blaming Trump for not vetting Parnell before he endorsed him.

Several relatively lesser-known PA Republicans have indicated they would join the race if Parnell implodes any further. One of them, a hedge fund operator named David McCormick, recently traveled to Mar-a-Lago for a “private” dinner with Trump. On the Democratic side, the race appears to be crystallizing between current Rep. Conor Lamb, who President Biden has praised, and current Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman.