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anonymous

Suez Canal: A Long Shutdown Might Roil The Global Economy : NPR - 0 views

  • Before the grounding of the massive Ever Given container ship in the Suez Canal, some 50 vessels a day, or about 10% of global trade, sailed through the waterway each day — everything from consumer electronics to food, chemicals, ore and petroleum.
  • Now, with the ship lodged sideways in the canal, closing off the main oceangoing highway between Europe and Asia, much of that cargo is sitting idle. It's either waiting to transit the canal or stuck in port while owners and shippers decide what to do.
  • Ultimately, they may be forced to place a bet on whether the canal will be reopened soon or gamble on expensive and time-consuming alternate routes. Lloyd's List estimates that the waiting game is costing $9.6 billion per day.
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  • Ship owners and operators have some options, but none of them are particularly good ones. The adage that time is money couldn't be more true in the shipping business. For the vessels already backed up in the canal, if the waterway isn't clear for transit soon, a decision will need to be made about whether to continue waiting or go to Plan B.
  • To get an idea just what a shortcut could be lost, commodity analysts Kpler said that for a vessel averaging 12 knots (14 mph), Suez to Amsterdam, takes 13 days via the canal. Around the Cape of Good Hope, it takes 41 days.
  • The situation could become clearer in the next week, Karatzas said, but if the Ever Given looks likely to require a massive operation to break free, shippers will have to make some tough and potentially costly decisions. The same goes for vessels that haven't yet left port, although the cost in time and money for them wouldn't be as great.
  • Another possible option is to go through the Panama Canal by way of the Pacific. But many of the largest commercial vessels today, such as the 1,300-foot Ever Given, are too big to fit through the Panama Canal.
  • Jonathan Roach, a container market analyst for Braemar ACM Shipbroking, said in a recent letter to clients that the route via the Cape of Good Hope was the most likely detour, even for vessels that can fit through the Panama Canal.Last year, due to a combination of excess capacity and falling fuel prices, some shippers did just that — opting to go the Africa route to avoid the Suez Canal transit fees.
  • There is one more possibility, but it too has severe limitations. A shorter route through the Arctic known alternately as the Northeast Passage, or the Northern Sea Route, or NSR, is being touted by Russia.
  • The number of vessels using the NSR has increased to several hundred each year, thanks in part to global warming that has reduced polar ice. However, traffic there still amounts to a mere fraction of what passes through the Suez.
  • The Northern Sea Route is still not considered practical by most shipping companies. For example, in 2018, Maersk, the world's largest container line, sent one of its ships via the NSR, but the company emphasized it doesn't see the route "as an alternative to our usual routes" and that the voyage was merely "a trial to explore an unknown route for container shipping and to collect scientific data."
  • Lastly, it's worth noting that a prolonged shutdown of the Suez Canal is not unprecedented. The waterway was closed for eight years, beginning in 1967, after war broke out between Egypt and Israel. As a result, ships were forced to divert around the tip of Africa.
  • Global supply chains, already significantly disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, could be further stressed by a prolonged shutdown of the Suez Canal, said Jonathan Gold, vice president for supply chain and customs policy with the National Retail Federation.
  • The greatest impact would be felt in the European market, which relies most on transfers through the canal, but given the interconnected nature of global manufacturing and commerce, there's likely also to be a knock-on effect for the United States.
  • Bisceglie said it's time for companies to consider "having more disparate [supply hubs] instead of having all our eggs on one cargo ship." Maersk told NPR on Friday that it was too early to commit to rerouting any of its massive global container fleet. The Copenhagen, Denmark-based company said in a statement, that while "out of our control, we apologize for the inconvenience this incident may cause to your business and for critical shipments."
  • Like much else about the situation, it depends on how long it goes on. A weeklong delay for a few hundred ships at the Suez might have only a negligible impact for consumers, but a prolonged delay could increase the cost of shipping, complicate manufacturing and ultimately drive up prices.
  • That's $80,000 a day in fuel and an extra 10 days travel time — both to and from Asia. "So, you're looking at the best part of a million dollars with your operating costs. So it's a million dollars out and a million dollars back," he said.
  • In his letter to clients, Roach also noted problems at the Suez Canal could disrupt the flow of containers. A trade imbalance between Europe and Asia means that filled containers going west return mostly empty to ports in the east to be refilled. "If empty stocks dwindle in Asia, there is the short-term possibility of an increase" in prices, Roach wrote.
  • Overall, though, Joanna Konings, a senior economist at ING, told Bloomberg that she's "relatively sanguine" about the impact on trade. But she doesn't rule out "an inflationary shock that could come right to the consumer."
  • Shipping rates for petroleum products have nearly doubled since the Ever Given's grounding on Tuesday, according to Reuters. Although oil prices may also be feeling some upward pressure in the wake of the Ever Given incident, their increase so far has been blunted by news of further COVID-19 lockdowns in Europe that are likely to continue to depress demand.
anonymous

Georgia's election law: How the Supreme Court laid the path - CNNPolitics - 0 views

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Georgia's voter restrictions were dashed into law Thursday by Republicans shaken over recent election losses and lies about fraud from former President Donald Trump, yet the measures also developed against a backdrop of US Supreme Court decisions hollowing out federal voting rights protection.
  • In another world, before the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, Georgia would have had to obtain federal approval for new election practices to ensure they did not harm Blacks and other minority voters.
  • And at another time, before the Roberts Court enhanced state latitude in a series of rulings, legislators might have hedged before enacting policies from new voter identification requirements, to a prohibition on third-party collection of ballots to a rule against non-poll workers providing food or water to voters waiting in lines. But the conservative court has increasingly granted states leeway over how they run elections.
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  • As the justices have turned away challenges to state policies, they have expressed sympathy for local officials who face potentially intrusive federal regulation and protracted litigation. Led by Roberts, the court has also dismissed concerns about the consequences for minority voters as it has curtailed the reach of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
  • That case from Shelby County, Alabama, centered on a provision of the 1965 act that required states with a history of discrimination to seek approval from the Department of Justice or a federal court before changing electoral policy. By a 5-4 vote, the court invalidated the provision that still covered nine states, including Georgia.
  • The justices are now considering, in a recently argued Arizona case, the strength of a separate Voting Rights Act provision that prohibits any measure that denies someone the right to vote because of race. Unlike the "pre-clearance" provision previously in dispute, this section of the law comes into play after legislation has taken effect and puts the burden on those protesting the law to initiate a lawsuit.
  • Resolution of that Arizona case, known as Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, will have repercussions for controversy over laws like Georgia's, which were immediately challenged Thursday night by advocates who say they will disproportionately hurt Blacks.
  • Across the country, Republican legislators have proposed voting changes that would reverse the pandemic-era steps that made it easier for people to vote last November, especially by mail, and led to record numbers of votes cast.
  • Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act soon after the Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Alabama. The law reflected the reality of the time that although the Fifteenth Amendment barred racial bias in voting, Blacks were still deterred from casting ballots through poll taxes, literacy tests and other rules.
  • Roberts has also made clear that he abhors remedies tied to race, saying in a 2006 voting-rights case: "It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race." Yet in the aftermath of the polarizing 2020 election, the country and the high court may be headed for a new chapter of voting-rights cases of a deeper partisan character, intensifying concerns about the future of the Voting Rights Act, as well as First Amendment guarantees of free speech and association.
  • Georgia's law, signed by Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday, emerges from Republican efforts nationwide, particularly in battleground states that experienced record turnout and Democratic victories last November. Among its myriad provisions, the Georgia law imposes new voter identification requirements for absentee ballots and empowers state officials to take over local election boards.
  • The three voting rights groups that sued - the New Georgia Project, the Black Voters Matter Fund and Rise Inc. -- grounded their complaint in the Voting Rights Act and in the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
  • The challengers emphasized Georgia's history of racial discrimination. "(V)oting in Georgia is highly polarized, and the shameful legacy of racial discrimination is visible today in Georgia's housing, economic, and health disparities," they wrote, adding that the new law "interacts with these vestiges of discrimination" to deny equal opportunity in the political process. Lower federal court judges have struggled over the standard for assessing the denial of voting rights, and that dilemma is at the heart of the Supreme Court's new Arizona controversy.
  • In dispute are laws require ballots cast by people at the wrong precinct to be discarded and bar most third parties -- beyond a relative or mail carrier -- from collecting absentee ballots, for example, at a nursing home.
  • During oral arguments, Roberts and fellow conservatives focused on potential voter fraud and highlighted state authority for overseeing elections. Arizona officials argued that the measures would help prevent voter coercion and other irregularities, as the challengers contended that the new requirements would especially disenfranchise Native Americans and other minorities.
  • The high court's resolution of the Arizona controversy could have a dramatic impact on the raft of new legislation and ultimately how easy it is for minorities to register and vote. Resolution is expected by the end of June.
mattrenz16

Biden Backs Labor Movement as Amazon Workers Weigh Unionization: Live Updates - The New York Times - 0 views

  • President Biden expressed solidarity with workers attempting to unionize an Amazon facility in Alabama in a video released Sunday that emphasized his broad support of the labor movement — without explicitly backing their cause or naming the company itself.
  • Around 6,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, a former steel town outside of Birmingham, are voting over the next week on whether they want to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
  • If successful, they would be the first of Amazon’s 400,000 American workers to join a union — a landmark undertaking and early test of Mr. Biden’s campaign claim that he will be the “most pro-union president” ever.
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  • “Let me be really clear: It’s not up to me to decide whether anyone should join a union,” he said. “But let me be even more clear: It’s not up to an employer to decide that either.”
  • More than 2,000 of the warehouse’s workers signed cards indicating interest in joining the union, meeting the threshold to hold a vote under National Labor Relations Board rules.
  • The site of the unionization drive is not insignificant. Alabama was a key battleground for the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, and many of the workers at the Bessemer facility are Black, a fact that Mr. Biden noted on Sunday. But Alabama is now a right-to-work state, making it harder for unions to organize or negotiate with employers — which has made it a draw for big companies, especially auto manufacturers.
  • The unionization drive takes place at a time of “reckoning on race,” Mr. Biden said, adding, “It reveals the deep disparities that still exist in our country.”
ethanshilling

Where Have All the Houses Gone? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Much of the housing market has gone missing. On suburban streets and in many urban neighborhoods, across large and midsize metro areas, many homes that would have typically come up for sale over the past year never did.
  • Today, if you’re looking for one, you’re likely to see only about half as many homes for sale as were available last winter, according to data from Altos Research, a firm that tracks the market nationwide
  • “The supply side is really tricky,” said Benjamin Keys, an economist at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. “Who wants to sell a house in the middle of a pandemic?
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  • A majority of homeowners in America are baby boomers — a group at heightened risk from the coronavirus. If many of them have been reluctant to move out and downsize over the past year, that makes it hard for other families behind them to move in and upgrade.
  • “Every additional home that gets pulled off the market incentivizes someone else to not sell their house,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “That’s a self-reinforcing cycle.”
  • Add all of this up, and for every tale of someone who ran off and bought in the suburbs or paid all-cash sight unseen in some far-flung town, the larger story of the pandemic is this: Americans have been staying put.
  • The last decade has also been a period of relatively low interest rates. That incentivized many homeowners to stay in their homes longer than they would have in the past, clinging to cheap mortgages.
  • “We’re all looking for a unified field theory for what’s going on,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “We have all these disparate pieces of information.
  • Right now, in a number of metro areas, home prices and rents aren’t just drifting apart; they’re moving in opposite directions. Prices are rising while rents are falling.
  • “I don’t think we’ve seen a housing market quite like this one,” said Jenny Schuetz, a researcher at the Brookings Institution. “And other recessions looked a little bit different, so that makes it hard to know what’s going on.”
  • Recent research by Arpit Gupta at N.Y.U. and colleagues suggests that rents have fallen the most in close-in urban neighborhoods.
  • The ratio of home prices to rents in many metros is now as high as it has been since the housing bubble — but it has spiked during the pandemic in part because rents have fallen, not solely because prices have soared.
  • The pandemic will also eventually subside, and people will gain more certainty about remote work, and more confidence about having strangers in their homes. But for anyone waiting for the typical spring surge in inventory, these reasons for optimism may not materialize in time.
mattrenz16

A Year Later, Who Is Back to Work and Who Is Not? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • As a proportion of their employment levels before the pandemic, significantly fewer Black and Hispanic women are working now than any other demographic, according to the latest government data — and women are lagging behind men across race and ethnicity.
  • Hispanic women fell into the deepest hole at the peak of the job losses, going from 12.4 million workers in February 2020, the last month of job gains before the pandemic, to 9.4 million in April — a 24 percent drop.
  • No demographic has returned to prepandemic employment levels, but significant differences remain. There are nearly 10 percent fewer employed Black women than a year ago, but only 5 percent fewer employed white men.
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  • One way to see disparities in employment that existed well before the pandemic is to look at the share who are employed among the working age population in each demographic over time. This measure, known as the employment-population ratio, has long been lower for women and Black men.
  • Workers on the older and younger ends of the spectrum also experienced outsize losses. Younger people, who also tend to be overrepresented in some of the most affected industries like food service, were much more likely to lose work early in the outbreak and are still among the farthest from their prepandemic employment levels. However, they have regained jobs more rapidly than older people, who may be more wary of returning to work and increasing their exposure to the coronavirus.
  • One common feature is that many people who lost jobs earned low wages. According to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research group, workers in the lowest quartile of earners lost almost eight million jobs from 2019 to 2020, while the highest wage earners gained jobs.
lmunch

Opinion: The one issue that could bring Democrats and Republicans together - CNN - 0 views

  • Political commentators continue to wonder whether President Joe Biden can deliver on his promise of national unity and healing.While his prospects for doing so seem increasingly limited, there is one area that offers some hope: criminal justice reform.
  • In 2010, Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, a bipartisan bill that reduced the racist disparities in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine. Over the course of his administration, he granted clemency to 1,715 people behind bars -- more than any president in US history, according to his administration. And to give people a fair shot at getting their lives back on, he signed an executive order banning federal agencies from asking about criminal records during the hiring process -- a reform known as "ban the box."
  • The result was the First Step Act -- a bill that addresses many aspects of the criminal justice system: curbing mandatory minimum sentencing, increasing compassionate and elderly release, reducing sentences for people who complete rehabilitative programs, and more. The bill, which passed in a bipartisan landslide during the Trump presidency, has already led to more than 16,000 people coming home early from federal prisons.
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  • Biden needs a way to begin bringing the country together. The past two administrations -- in different ways and for different reasons -- have left a door open for him to do so.
Javier E

Opinion | New study shows how the GOP scam is getting worse for Republican voters - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • For decades throughout the 20th century, it notes, the industrial economy — combined with large federal expenditures, particularly in the South — drove a “great economic convergence,” in which poorer states steadily caught up with better-off ones.
  • more recently, the development of the knowledge economy, whose benefits are largely concentrated in cosmopolitan hubs, has reversed this trend
  • Meanwhile, in many red states — mostly in the South — the model of weak unions and low wages, which made them competitive for business inside the national market, is faltering in the face of globalized production.
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  • “Blue America is increasingly buoyed by the knowledge economy,” the analysis concludes, while “red America is struggling to find a viable growth model for the twenty-first century.”
  • A big part of the problem, the authors argue, is conservative governance.
  • The analysis looks at the political economy of 26 states that voted Republican in presidential elections three times since 2000. Of those, 21 are what the authors call “low road states.
  • Mostly Southern, they largely maintain that model centered on weak unions and low wages, and tend to have smaller governments and far fewer urban centers.
  • those states have aggregate wage averages that rank below those in the states that voted blue three times since 2000
  • Another group — “left behind states” — are the ones in the industrial Midwest. They, too, are struggling in the knowledge economy. But they have legacies of progressive policies strengthening unions and public spending
  • To address resulting regional disparities, the analysis argues, these states should want expanded federal cash transfers and bigger federal spending on health care, social insurance and infrastructure
  • Instead, red state politicians have increasingly embraced a national agenda that is focused on tax cuts and aggressive deregulation and hostile to federal transfers.
  • Why? Because GOP policy at the federal and state levels is largely set by “national business groups and organized wealthy backers.
  • Meanwhile, the rescue package’s child allowance is the sort of policy that “conservative populist” Republicans who want to wean the GOP off its addiction to plutocratic policies should support.
  • GOP political elites are able to continue insulating themselves from accountability for this disconnect, not just “through identity appeals rooted in racial and cultural backlash,” but also because of the bias “of the American electoral system toward nonurban areas.”
  • “The tragic irony is that this huge rural bias also helps Republicans get away with ignoring the economic needs of their own constituents.”
Javier E

Opinion | We Did Not Suffer Equally - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The past year was devastating. Weddings, holidays and celebrations were put on hold as social life was suspended. Anxiety, distress and loneliness soared, careers stalled, and jobs disappeared. Over 500,000 people in the United States lost their lives.
  • Latino and Black communities were hit hardest. Even as the economy slowly recovers, unemployment rates among these groups remain disproportionately high.
  • At the same time, average house prices rose, as well average rents in smaller cities, widening the gap between those who own their homes and those who don’t.
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  • The pandemic worsened disparities across society — in unemployment, education, housing, health and even survival. The discrepancies in vaccination rates, which are twice as high for white Americans as for their Black counterparts and 2.6 times as high as for Latinos, show such inequities are going nowhere. Whatever it felt like last March, Americans are clearly not in this together. Until the country’s deep inequalities are eliminated, we will not be.
  • The pandemic has been a story of two lines — haves and have-nots — moving in different directions.
tsainten

Covid-19 Global News: Live Updates on Johnson & Johnson Vaccine, Variants and US Re-Opening - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In the past month alone, the rate of vaccinations has ramped up about 40 percent, to an average of 2.3 million shots a day as of Friday, up from an average of about 1.7 million shots a day on Feb. 12, according to a New York Times database.
  • But now that the vaccine supply is getting closer to meeting the demand of the eligible, the country faces the challenge of getting all those shots into arms, an operation that requires not only enough doses, but also improving access to communities of color, as well as space, manpower and messaging to convince Americans wary for a variety of reasons that getting vaccinated is safe and effective.
  • Mr. Biden said there should be enough vaccine supply available to any adult in the country by the end of July. By early March, he said that timeline moved up to the end of May. Mr. Biden also recently announced that his administration would secure an additional 100 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson single-shot vaccine by the end of this year, a boost that could eventually make the vaccines available to children.
Javier E

Opinion | Democrats Repent for Bill Clinton - The New York Times - 0 views

  • I view the crime bill as disastrous. It flooded the streets with police officers and contributed to the rise of mass incarceration, which disproportionately impacts Black men and their families. It helped to drain Black communities of fathers, uncles, husbands, partners and sons.
  • A 2015 New York Times Upshot analysis of 2010 census data found that there were 1.5 million “missing” Black men between the ages of 25 and 54, comparing the totals of Black men and women who were not incarcerated. According to the report: “Using census data, we estimated that about 625,000 prime-age Black men were imprisoned, compared with 45,000 Black women. This gap — of 580,000 — accounts for more than one-third of the overall gap.”
  • It continued: “It is the result of sharply different incarceration rates for Black men and any other group. The rate for prime-age Black men is 8.2 percent, compared with 1.6 percent for nonblack men, 0.5 percent for Black women and 0.2 percent for nonblack women.”
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  • But in the last decade, the party and Clinton himself have been forced to admit the failures of the bill and to work to rectify it. As Clinton told the N.A.A.C.P. in 2015, “I signed a bill that made the problem worse, and I want to admit it.”
  • Part of the goal of the bill was to blunt Republican criticisms that Democrats were soft on crime, so the bill gave permission for Democrats across the country to engage in a sort of criminal justice policy and punishment arms race with Republicans, each group attempting to be more draconian than the other.
  • Then there was the welfare reform bill, which Clinton promised would “end welfare as we know it.” One of its central provisions was block-grant assistance to the states.
  • As Clinton said when the bill was passed:“Today the Congress will vote on legislation that gives us a chance to live up to that promise, to transform a broken system that traps too many people in a cycle of dependence to one that emphasizes work and independence, to give people on welfare a chance to draw a paycheck, not a welfare check.”
  • On the day Clinton signed the bill, Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund and Hillary Clinton’s longtime mentor, released a statement that read, “President Clinton’s signature on this pernicious bill makes a mockery of his pledge not to hurt children.”
  • As the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out in 2020, the block grant to states “has been set at $16.5 billion each year since 1996; as a result, its real value has fallen by almost 40 percent due to inflation.”
  • Furthermore, only a fraction of the money goes to income assistance, and state-set benefit levels are low and “do not enable families to meet their basic needs,” the report outlines. It continues:
  • “The wide variation in benefit levels across states exacerbates national racial disparities because many of the states with the lowest benefits have larger Black populations. Fifty-five percent of Black children live in states with benefits below 20 percent of the poverty line, compared to 40 percent of white children.”
Javier E

Anarchists and an increase in violent crime hijack Portland's social justice movement - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • when you look over the longer history of what’s been going on in Portland — there’s something else happening. It’s not just the protests. It is not just covid-19. There is something else going on in Portland.”
  • Henning and others say crime was rising in the city before the pandemic shut it down and before Floyd died in Minneapolis with a White police officer’s knee on his neck. From 2019 to 2020, the number of homicides nearly doubled, something Henning called “unheard of” in Portland. This followed years with some of the nation’s lowest crime rates for a city its size.
  • “So these perpetrators, my guess, were coming of age, were in elementary and middle school right around the Great Recession,” said Brian Renauer, director of the Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute at Portland State. “Now they’re in their early to mid-20s. So what we’re seeing is the outgrowth of a breakdown in the family, in the economy, in those neighborhoods they came out of, if this is very much a homegrown phenomenon.”
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  • The rising gun violence, and for a time the downtown demonstrations, have stressed the police department and put it largely on its back foot, as a response unit rather than a force with resources to prevent crime. As one measure, police response time to emergency calls has more than doubled over the past eight years, to more than 40 minutes of wait-time before a call is even fielded by emergency dispatchers.
  • “Police are bailing,” Henning said. “We are losing our best, most experienced officers left and right, and calls for service are increasing every year.”
  • The Portland Police Bureau is authorized to have 1,001 sworn officers. At the moment it has about 900, a shortage that city officials blame on a lack of urgency in hiring and police leaders attribute to a lack of support and funding.
  • The City Council last year cut about $27 million from the roughly $200 million police budget — about $11 million because of a pandemic-caused budget crisis, and $15 million as part of the “defund” effort to shift some police resources to other agencies that may be able to handle nonviolent calls more effectively.
  • But Schmidt, who was elected with 77 percent of the vote, said the “message I was sending got twisted,” and the public began to think that no cases associated with protests would be prosecuted. Vandalism and property crimes spiked — and at a time of rising violence against young men of color, Schmidt was making the rounds to explain that people who broke windows and burned buildings would be prosecuted.
  • What I know is that being chief, and being a Black chief in particular, this movement to really exclude police from some facets of enforcement or community interaction, it really bears the brunt on the African American community,” Lovell said. “These shootings have an outsized impact on people of color.”
  • The chief’s goal to reestablish a larger uniformed presence on Portland’s streets and in its most dangerous neighborhoods appears to be supported by many residents, who just a year ago were very much opposed to the city’s police practices
  • A poll conducted by the Oregonian newspaper this month found that three-quarters of Portland-area residents did not want police officer levels to decline more than they have. Just more than half said they favored an increase in the number of officers.
  • “They are trying to run a Cadillac with a Volkswagen engine,” said Daryl Turner, who retired after nearly 30 years as a Portland police officer to lead its largest union, the Portland Police Association. “You cannot defund the police and expect the changes they are seeking. Our public officials are not reading the data.”
  • I was faced with a bunch of competing priorities,” he continued. “Do I use the power of this office to essentially criminalize people who are showing up to criticize the criminal justice system and the inherent conflict in making that decision? If I had to do that, from a public safety standpoint, is there a good public safety case to be made for people being prosecuted for this conduct?”
  • But the police bureau also disbanded a unit last July that focused specifically on gun violence, a high-profile initiative that had been designed to make the agency less reactive and more attuned in advance to rising gang- and gun-related crime as the protests began slowly fading.
  • So would police officers, a pledge he ran on. Within months, Schmidt will bring two cases involving shootings by officers to grand juries for possible indictments. He will hire outside counsel to present the cases, a change in policy designed to strengthen the public’s sense of independent accountability for police action.
  • Wheeler, the mayor, said he believes that the city has begun to recover, at least from the demonstrations that have left downtown largely empty on most days. Over the past year, he said, the city has recorded an 85 percent decline in downtown foot traffic. The result has been economic despair and more crime.
  • “Portland has always had this great tradition of protest,” Wheeler said. “But the anarchists that joined into the demonstration really co-opted what had been a nonviolent message in favor of change. And now that group has gotten much smaller, but also much more blatant in the damage they are causing and the targets they are picking.”
  • Over the spring, the group of self-described anarchists, usually masked and dressed in black, has shattered windows at the Oregon Historical Society, at a Boys & Girls Club, at a public library, and at many small businesses, including some owned by Black merchants. Wheeler made a public plea for Portlanders to “take the city back.”
  • At City Hall, Wheeler and the rest of the council are debating ways to increase police resources, a shift for a symbol of the defund movement.
  • he mayor plans to triple the number of unarmed officers in the police bureau, from 11 to 33, to help manage reports related to mental illness and mounting homelessness while freeing up armed police for more serious calls.
  • “I think other people are just understanding that this is a really challenging time to be a police officer,” Wheeler said. “And we are finally putting racial disparity and institutional racism front and center in our society. This is an opportunity for us to be honest about its existence, to call it out for what it is and to change it.”
mattrenz16

As Israelis Await Netanyahu's Fate, Palestinians Seize a Moment of Unity - The New York Times - 0 views

  • JERUSALEM — When Israelis opened their newspapers and news websites on Tuesday, they encountered a barrage of reports and commentary about the possible downfall of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s longest-serving leader.
  • Mr. Netanyahu’s political future hung in the balance on Tuesday night, as opposition leaders struggled to agree on a fragile coalition government that would finally remove him from office for the first time in 12 years. The deadlock set the stage for a dramatic last day of negotiations, which the opposition must conclude by Wednesday at midnight or risk sending the country to another round of early elections.
  • During his current 12-year term, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process fizzled, as both Israeli and Palestinian leaderships accused each other of obstructing the process, and Mr. Netanyahu expressed increasing ambivalence about the possibility of a sovereign Palestinian state.
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  • But to many Palestinians, his likely replacement as prime minister, Naftali Bennett, would be no improvement. Mr. Bennett is Mr. Netanyahu’s former chief of staff, and a former settler leader who outright rejects Palestinian statehood.
  • Yet alongside last month’s deadly 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and the worst bout of intercommunal Arab-Jewish violence to have convulsed Israel in decades, these disparate parts suddenly came together in a seemingly leaderless eruption of shared identity and purpose.
  • Among the Arab minority in Israel, many of whom define themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel, the prospect of a new government has divided opinion. While the government would be led by Mr. Bennett, and packed with lawmakers who oppose a Palestinian state, some hoped the presence of three centrist and leftist parties in the coalition, coupled with the likely tacit support of Raam, an Arab Islamist party, might moderate Mr. Bennett’s approach.
  • The cabinet is expected to include at least one Arab, Esawi Frej, of the left-wing Meretz party. Raam’s leader, Mansour Abbas, has said he will support the new government only if it grants more resources and attention to the Arab minority. And the likely appointment of a center-left minister to oversee the police force might encourage officers to take a more restrained approach to Palestinians in East Jerusalem, where clashes between the police and protesters played a major role in the buildup to the recent war in Gaza.
  • Mr. Trump’s administration helped broker a series of historic normalization agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, which bypassed the Palestinians and ruptured decades of professed Arab unity around the Palestinian cause.
  • The Palestinians have been aided by the international awakening and momentum of movements like Black Lives Matter, speaking the language of rights and historical justice, according to experts.
  • In a measure of the popular excitement about what would have been the first ballot in the occupied territories since 2006, more than 93 percent of eligible Palestinians had registered to vote, and 36 parties with about 1,400 candidates planned to compete for 132 seats in the Palestinian assembly. Nearly 40 percent of the candidates were 40 or younger, according to the Palestinian Central Elections Commission.
  • Some analysts say they doubt that this recent flash of Palestinian unity will have any immediate, profound impact on the Palestinian reality. But others argue that after years of stagnation, the Palestinian cause is back with a new sense of energy, connectivity, solidarity and activism.
  • The events of the last few weeks were “like an earthquake,” said Hanan Ashrawi, a seasoned Palestinian leader and former senior official. “We are part of the global conversation on rights, justice, freedom, and Israel cannot close it down or censor it.”
ethanshilling

How Many Americans Support the Death Penalty? Depends How You Ask. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The use of capital punishment has fallen to historically low levels in recent years. This year, Virginia became the first Southern state to outlaw the practice.
  • Still, a solid majority of Americans continue to favor keeping the death penalty, driven by the conviction that it’s morally justified in cases of murder — even though most of the country recognizes that there are racial disparities in how it’s doled out, and an overwhelming majority admits that it sometimes results in the death of an innocent person.
  • We can say all this with relative certainty thanks to a Pew Research Center poll released today. Sixty percent considered the death penalty acceptable for people convicted of murder, according to the survey of Pew’s online American Trends Panel.
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  • Polls on the death penalty presented one of the most glaring examples. More than other issues — and far more than on questions about candidate choice, which generally aren’t as deeply impacted by survey mode — capital punishment drew meaningfully different responses.
  • Last year, participants of Pew’s online panel were 13 points more likely than those surveyed by phone to say they approved of the death penalty. Among Democrats, there was a particularly strong aversion to expressing support via phone
  • There are a number of issues that make phone polls different from online surveys, including the fact that they tend to yield a slightly different sample of respondents.
  • “It’s a bit of a touchy subject, it’s kind of sensitive, and admitting that you hold an opinion that has such profound implications for somebody else — not everybody wants to engage with that with a stranger,” Kennedy said, referring to questions about the death penalty.
  • Among Republicans and independents who lean toward the G.O.P., 77 percent said in the new poll that they supported the death penalty.
  • Even among Republicans, however, there was broad acknowledgment that it’s impossible to ensure innocent people won’t be executed. Just 31 percent of Republicans and leaners said there were “adequate safeguards” to that effect. Only 12 percent of Democrats and their leaners said so.
  • And most Americans — 63 percent — doubted that the death penalty successfully discouraged crime. Even among those who favored its use, just 50 percent said it was a deterrent to serious crimes.
  • Fully 85 percent of Black people said that whites were less likely to be put to death for similar crimes, but white respondents were evenly divided on the question.
rerobinson03

Opinion | A Post-George Floyd 'Racial Reckoning' Missed Other Inequalities - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The fatal shooting of Mr. Wright was a personal reminder of how my own traffic stop by the police might have gone much differently, but for those seconds when my friends’ whiteness and then my own class privilege were revealed; how unfairness is both arbitrary and tiered.
  • Consider how the thousands of large multiracial protests led to relatively modest changes compared to the lofty, paradigm shifting possibilities originally floated. Support for Black Lives Matter waxed only to wane months later. Confederate monuments were removed, but a new racialized Lost Cause took hold: the attempts to subvert the 2020 presidential election, which countless prominent Republicans falsely claim was stolen by a “woke mob” cabal, their elected allies and a diverse electorate.
  • rotest leaders didn’t march last summer to widen the trend of Black Lives Matter signs in tree-lined progressive neighborhoods, where Black neighbors are often conspicuously absent because of classist zoning laws. While many cultural shifts have been welcome, it’s not clear that people were protesting for things like greater demographic variety in the ads, magazine covers or entertainment that we consume.
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  • n 2019, a Human Rights Watch report found strong evidence of racial bias in policing. Yet it also revealed that a significant share of the disparities are explained by “concentrated policing in high poverty neighborhoods, which are more frequently communities of color.” Its authors gently ask if policing is “a proper response” as opposed to “addressing the problems” in those places with greater resources.
  • Many powerful companies that view themselves as progressive continue to actively lobby against the sort of federal tax increases that are needed, under current budgetary norms, if greater physical and social infrastructure investments are going to be made in underserved communities of color.
  • When asked why social justice discourse in America has drifted into a scattered set of culture wars and inclusion debates, Ms. Hatch told me that in addition to such outgrowths (positive or negative) being natural, “diversity is often an easy place to start for people,” as it’s less likely to induce political backlash. For many executive managers, it feels more directly within their power.
  • After George Floyd’s death, Robin DiAngelo’s antiracism training book, “White Fragility,” published in 2018, became Amazon’s No. 1 selling book. She was called upon to give lectures and lead workshops at powerful universities, public agencies and corporations such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Nike, Under Armour, Goldman Sachs, Facebook, CVS, American Express and Netflix.
hannahcarter11

Tulsa marks race massacre centennial as US grapples with racial injustice | TheHill - 0 views

  • On the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre — in which a thriving Black neighborhood was burned to the ground and hundreds of residents were killed by an angry white mob — local and national leaders find themselves grappling with the lasting effects of racial injustice and violence.
  • The centennial comes just a week after the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, an event that sparked nationwide Black Lives Matter protests calling for an end to police brutality and systemic racism.
  • In 1921, Greenwood was a bastion of Black wealth at a time when Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan hamstrung and terrorized Black Americans in the South.
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  • Dubbed “Black Wall Street,” the northern section of Tulsa was home to dozens of Black-owned businesses, including hotels, restaurants, law firms and medical practices.
  • Despite its prominence, the massacre was little known, if at all, in most parts of the country, until the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 was created in 1997
  • he seeds of violence were planted on the morning of May 31, when the Tulsa Tribune reported that 19-year-old Black shoeshine Dick Rowland had attempted to assault Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white elevator operator in the Drexel Building in the white part of town.
  • The Tribune’s overdramatized account of what happened — the story headline read “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator” — sparked the forming of a lynch mob outside the Tulsa County Courthouse, where Rowland was in custody.
  • A group of roughly 25 Black men from Greenwood went to the courthouse armed to stop the mob from taking Rowland, only to be turned away by authorities.
  • Later, after the white mob continued to grow and a larger group from Greenwood returned, a scuffle broke out, followed by gunfire
  • Tulsa police appointed hundreds of white men and boys “special deputies,” even supplying some of them with guns.
  • It’s a “striking example of how our institutions, particularly policing but not only policing, have played a role over our history in enforcing systemic racism and brutality against Black Americans,” Rep. Steven HorsfordSteven Alexander HorsfordTulsa marks race massacre centennial as US grapples with racial injustice Gun violence: Save the thoughts and prayers, it's time for Senate action Democrats offer bill to encourage hiring of groups hard-hit by pandemic MORE (D-Nev.), second vice chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, told The Hill.
  • The white mob had razed more than 1,200 houses across 35 city blocks, looting hundreds more. The prosperous business district of Greenwood was destroyed.
  • As many as 300 people died, historians say, though the exact number is unknown due to mass gravesites. The destruction displaced about 10,000 Greenwood residents.
  • In total, more than $1.8 million of Black property was destroyed, more than $27 million by today’s dollar.
  • The staggering economic loss was never recovered by Black Tulsans and is seen as a key factor in the stark racial wealth disparity in the city 100 years later.
  • Restorative justice, also known as reparative justice or reparations, was one of the recommendations of the Oklahoma commission’s 2001 report.
  • Steps toward justice, the commission said, could take the form of direct payments to the survivors and their descendants, a scholarship for descendants, economic development in Greenwood and a memorial for the massacre victims.
  • The 100-year anniversary includes events hosted by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, which spearheaded the building of Greenwood Rising, a $30 million history museum and center that will fully open in July.
  • Many advocates have argued that the centennial commission hasn’t done enough to raise up the voices of the survivors and their descendants, but Horsford said he doesn’t want that to detract from the importance of the weekend.The focus should be on “what caused the massacre and those who contributed to it and the systemic reasons for it,” Horsford said.
yehbru

Why Asian-American Health Gets So Little Research Attention : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

  • Chang and her family, like many other Asian Americans, can see themselves in the thousands of reported hate incidents against Asians over the past year, and it's adding a new layer of stress to their lives.
  • "For many Asian Americans, these acts of harassment and violence are activating old wounds, memories of racial traumas. For others, they may now worry about going out alone to the grocery store, worrying about loved ones," she says.
  • But research into the health effects on Asian Americans of living with such violence is sparse. Health scientists like Chang say that's been damaging to the Asian community, and the research gap needs to close as soon as possible.
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  • Past research on other communities of color finds that repeated exposure to racism and racial violence can grind one's physical and mental health down. Race-related stress has been linked to higher infant mortality rates and cardiovascular disease in African American communities, and researchers continue to find more insidious ways racism harms health.
  • Without the research specific to Asian Americans' experience, it means any problems currently facing the Asian American community will likely continue to fester, unnoticed and unaddressed.
  • One is the model minority myth, which can suggest that Asians don't suffer economic or health disparities compared to whites.
  • From 1992 to 2018, only 0.17% of the National Institutes of Health's budget went to studying Asian, native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Americans.
  • "Aside from the language barrier, immigrants may not understand the justice system and that may be another reason that prevents them from reporting."
  • "If you look at all those cases, you will find that many people had the same or similar experiences before they reported,"
  • From March 19, 2020 to Feb 28, 2021, a period encompassing the ballooning of the country's coronavirus pandemic and some politicians' insistence on linking the virus to China, the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center recorded nearly 3,800 separate incidents of hate against Asians in the United States.
  • "White toxicity and racism have put an inordinate amount of pressure on Asians living in diaspora communities to cope with the trauma of being in an environment that does not see them and does not protect them."
saberal

'It's easy to dismiss Black women's lives': Texas drags feet on maternal mortality crisis | Texas | The Guardian - 0 views

  • When medical staff prepped Shawn Thierry for an emergency C-section, she knew something was very wrong. After an epidural, excruciating pain ran through her legs. Soon, she could barely breathe.
  • The US has the highest maternal death rate among similarly developed countries and is the only industrialized nation where such deaths are rising. But according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Texas the maternal mortality rate is above the US average, at 18.5 deaths per 100,000 live births.
  • They did not advance in 2019, or in the current legislative session which ends this weekend. Focused on restricting abortion rights, the male- and Republican-dominated state legislature has dragged its feet on maternal mortality.
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  • “It was really striking,” said Dr Amy Raines-Milenkov, a University of North Texas Health Science Center professor and member of the review committee. “We found that most of these deaths could have been prevented but the system is just not set up to prevent them. And we found a large racial disparity, which is a reflection of how we in society value women, especially African American women.”
  • the ultra-conservative Texas Senate – which ushered through extremist anti-abortion bills in March – did not pass the bill until the final minutes of its session. Even then, the legislation was not what was proposed. Without explanation, Republican Lois Kolkhorst of Brenham reduced the year of coverage to six months.
  • “Black women are dying at an alarming rate for reasons that could be prevented and our state leaders cut down the main proposal that a state-appointed committee recommended to help them – why would that even happen?” said Jones. “I think it’s because it’s so easy to dismiss Black women’s lives.”
  • In an ideological quest to punish abortion affiliates, Republicans have decimated the Texas reproductive health safety net by blocking low-income Medicaid patients from receiving life-saving preventative care at Planned Parenthood, a move resulting in reduced access to contraception and increased rates of Medicaid births, according to the Texas Policy Evaluation Project.
yehbru

Supreme Court ruling in Arizona case will be another front in the voting rights wars - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Now, within the next few weeks, the Supreme Court will enter the melee and weigh in on the scope of the Voting Rights Act in a way that could bolster efforts by Republicans in states like Georgia and Texas to limit access to the polls.
  • The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated both provisions, stressing the state's "long history of race-based discrimination against its American Indian, Hispanic, and African American citizens" and highlighting a "pattern of discrimination."
  • Since the decision in Shelby County v. Holder, states have moved forward with new laws, an effort further fueled by former President Donald Trump's unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
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  • "The wave of restrictive laws being introduced and passed in state legislatures across the country highlights once again how important it is to have a strong Voting Rights Act to protect voters."
  • It's the first time the justices have considered the scope of the Voting Rights Act as it applies to the denial of the vote since Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a 5-4 opinion in 2013 effectively invalidating Section 5 of the law
  • Unlike fights against voting restrictions in Georgia and Texas, however, Democrats are divided on whether the two Arizona laws should be allowed to stand. The Democratic National Committee argues the rules should fall, but the Biden administration told the court that the laws passed legal muster.
  • "If the Supreme Court weakens the Voting Rights Act as they are being asked to do, it will make it much harder to stop the kind of legislation we saw Texan lawmakers try to ram through over the weekend," Morales-Doyle said.
  • Ho and others are worried that the court could issue a ruling, for instance, that required evidence that there is a significant racially disparate impact on voter turnout. Such a standard would be hard for challengers to satisfy because it is difficult to always make a direct connection between fluctuations in voter turnout based on a single law.
anonymous

Biden Visits Tulsa For Anniversary Of 1921 Race Massacre On Black Wall Street : NPR - 0 views

  • President Biden traveled to Oklahoma on Tuesday to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre amid a renewed reckoning over a long-overlooked attack that left as many as 300 people dead in a community once known as Black Wall Street.
  • On May 31 and June 1, 1921, an armed white mob attacked the all-Black district of Greenwood. The racist mob destroyed the area, leaving 40 square blocks in ruins and nearly 10,000 people homeless. A century later, it remains one of the worst episodes of racial violence in U.S. history.
  • "But just because history is silent, it doesn't mean that it did not take place. And while darkness can hide much, it erases nothing. It erases nothing. Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they can't be buried, no matter how hard people try."
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  • "Untold bodies dumped into mass graves," Biden said. "Families, who at the time, waited for hours and days to know the fate of their loved ones, are now descendants who have gone 100 years without closure.
  • In his inaugural address, Biden said he would help to deliver "racial justice" and promised that "the dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer."
  • But while Biden has talked about tackling "systemic racism," his administration has faced challenges. Racial disparities have continued throughout the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine, with Black Americans getting vaccinated at a lower rate than whites.
  • When it comes to police reform, Biden called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act by the first anniversary of Floyd's death. While negotiations continue in the Senate, Congress failed to meet that deadline.
  • Survivors of the Tulsa massacre are still seeking justice and reparations a century later. Three survivors testified before Congress in May about what they saw and the devastating and ongoing impact of the attack.
tsainten

Death penalty: Biden vowed to end capital punishment. Activists are demanding action as he nears the 100-day mark - CNNPolitics - 0 views

shared by tsainten on 27 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • While there haven't been any federal or state executions since Biden took office, about 2,500 men and women sit on death row in federal and state prisons across the country -- and advocates say that, in the absence of an executive order from the White House, a state can at any moment schedule executions or the Justice Department can decide to calendar a federal inmate's death date.
  • a promise to pass legislation eliminating the death penalty on the federal level and to "incentivize states to follow the federal government's example. These individuals should instead serve life sentences without probation or parole."
  • The President has not directly addressed the death penalty since taking office -- though White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in March that Biden continues to have "grave concerns" about the practice.
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  • Abolishing the death penalty statute through Congress would prevent a future administration from restarting federal executions -- as former President Donald Trump did -- but members of Congress, former and current law enforcement as well as civil and human rights groups are urging Biden to use his executive pen to pause the federal death penalty.
  • Former Attorney General William Barr lifted a moratorium on the federal death penalty in July 2019, setting off a cascade of lethal injection executions -- 13 in total -- at the Terre Haute, Indiana, federal prison.
  • The President only has the power to pause the federal death penalty, according to Daniel S. Medwed, a University Distinguished Professor of Law and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University.
  • Biden's Attorney General Merrick Garland reaffirmed at his confirmation hearings in February that the new administration is committed to reversing Trump's approach. "The data is clear that it has been enormously disparate impact on Black Americans and members of communities of color, and exonerations also that something like half of the exonerations had to do with Black men. So all of this has given me pause," Garland said.
  • "I don't think citizens want the death penalty anymore or a moratorium. Now, it's a matter of dismantling the system so it cannot come back and function in a knee jerk reaction where 13 people can get executed like under Trump,"
  • "would come with great resistance." The CJLF is a nonprofit organization that advocates for equal justice for victims of crimes including pursuing the death penalty.
  • I don't want someone killed in my name," Mikey Bogart, a Boston Marathon bombing survivor, wrote in a statement after the Supreme Court decided in March to review whether to reinstate Tsarnaev's death sentence. "I hope the Biden Administration will reconsider pursuing a death sentence. Mr. Tsarnaev will spend the rest of his life in prison no matter what."
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