Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalHow the Founding Fathers' concept of 'Minority Rule' is alive and well today
It's a fundamental tension in a democracy: How do you have majority rule in a way that also protects minority rights? Journalist Ari Berman says the Founding Fathers struggled with that question back in 1787 — except, for them, white male landowners were the minority in need of protection.
"Most of the founders were skeptical of the public's ability to elect the president directly," Berman says. "So they created this very complicated situation in which electors would elect the president instead of the people electing the president directly."
In his new book, Minority Rule, Berman connects the debates and compromises of the country's founders to contemporary politics. He says the founding fathers created a system that concentrated power in the hands of the elite and that today, institutions like the Electoral College and the Senate — designed as a check against the power of the majority — are having much the same effect.
Berman notes that in the country's first presidential election, in 1789, only a small fraction of the population was eligible to vote — and in certain states, voters were only allowed to vote for electors, not the candidates themselves.
Though the right to vote has since been expanded, Berman says the democratic process remains deeply flawed. He points out that in 2000 and again in 2016, the presidential candidate who won the popular vote did not win the electoral vote. Additionally, he says, because the Constitution stipulates that each state gets two senators, regardless of its population, "smaller, whiter, more conservative states have far more power and representation in the Senate then larger, more diverse, more urban states."
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/22/1246297603/ari-berman-minority-rule-electoral-college
A huge step toward this would, of course, be the elimination of the Electoral College. Another would be to admit DC and Puerto Rico as states.
Tipping Is Out of Control. It's Also a Serious Labor Issue
To tip or not to tip? It’s a simple question with a deeply complicated answer, at least in the U.S. Here, the practice of tossing a few bucks to a service worker when you pay your total bill is not only common, but expected in many industries, from grocery delivery to coffee shops. And while European tourists may famously struggle to decipher the rules, Americans are all too aware of how it works. And it’s more than likely they have a very strong—probably negative—opinion about it. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who likes the American tipping system, from the customers who resent paying more to the workers who are often paid too little in the first place.
However, tipping culture and all of its attendant discourse is really just a means of obscuring the real issue: The continuing existence of the sub-minimum wage, and the ensuing expectation that consumers (and their tips) will make up the lost wages that employers avoid paying.
For many workers, tips often make up a significant portion of their take-home pay. While some—like servers and bartenders at high-end restaurants, for example—do manage to make good money off tips, someone else always suffers; deprived of that same opportunity, back-of-house kitchen workers like dishwashers and cooks, who are already at a financial disadvantage, fall even further behind. Other workers who rely on tips may find their own earning opportunities restricted by vindictive employers; for example, after dancers at North Hollywood’s Star Garden strip club unionized, their angry boss instituted new rules that made it nearly impossible for them to earn more than a few dollars a night.
The only people who truly benefit from this custom are those at the top: the people who own the restaurants, hotels, delivery apps, and other businesses, and take home the lion’s share of the profits. Under federal labor law, employers are able to get away with paying tipped workers only $2.13 per hour; if the tips workers receive don’t add up to the hourly federal minimum wage of $7.25, their bosses are required to make up the difference. Unfortunately, this does not always happen. In 2017, the Economic Policy Institute found that workers in the 10most populous states were robbed of more than $8 billion annually thanks to minimum wage violations, and the issue’s only getting worse. In 2023 alone, the Department of Labor’s Wages and Hours Division recovered over $29 million in back wages and damages for restaurant workers.
https://time.com/6962665/tipping-labor-issue-kim-kelly/
As one who once worked for minimum + tips, I could hardly agree more!
The Fantasy of a Lily-White America
BY EDDIE S. GLAUDE JR.In 1970, two years and a couple days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Time magazine published a special issue on Black America. The cover was a Jacob Lawrence portrait of Jesse Jackson, against the backdrop of bright yellows and reds, seemingly poised to speak. His eyes sad, skeptical, and cautious. The special issue included an extended essay on Jackson and the shifting terrain of Black politics. Another addressed the militant and hopeful attitudes among African Americans as they recognized the unwillingness of white America “to bend or change to accommodate black equality.” In April of 1970, with grief still palpable, the editors of Time sought to examine the complexities of Black lives and politics in the face of the white backlash during the Nixon years. Race held center stage.
But it was an essay, “What Would America Be Like Without Blacks,” written by Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man, and, later, published in his 1986 collection of essays, Going to the Territory, that struck a chord with me. I have been struggling with how to characterize our current national malaise, especially given the recent reporting about Donald Trump’s plan to use civil rights laws to protect white people. It’s easy to describe MAGA Republicans as racists or to talk about the white backlash and to decry the assault on American history and the manufactured panic around immigration. But something more fundamental about who we are as a nation (or who we refuse to be) is being revealed in this moment. Ellison maintained that “whenever the nation grows weary of the struggle toward the ideal of American democratic equality,” we reach for the illusion of secession—the fantasy of a lily-white America.
That fantasy, of course, involves not only the desire to rid the nation of Black and brown people, but aims to banish us and the issue of race from the nation’s moral conscience. The likes of Jacob Lawrence or Ralph Ellison, for example, or even Dr. King and Jesse Jackson are reduced, by some today, to a mere footnote in the struggle for democracy. These political forces cast aside the creative tensions around race that have made the country what it is. In their hands, America’s original sin is settled by the wishful effort to wash the nation clean.
And we have seen this throughout the history of the country: from schemes during the antebellum period to send free Black people to Liberia to President Lincoln’s insistence that free Blacks accept the colonization scheme because white people “suffer from your presence” to the lies of the Lost Cause and Redemption to American immigration law like the Immigration Act of 1924 that insisted that ours must remain a white nation to the clamoring around the border today and the bitter fights about what to teach our children in schools.
https://time.com/6966768/fantasy-white-america-eddie-glaude/
America wasn't "lily white" when Columbus, or the Vikings, or the Pilgrims got here either.
'I want to erase my own footprint': The women looking after an island paradise
Kih'Nyiah McKay may be just 11 years old, but she is keenly aware of the climate crisis.
She knows the loss of trees reduces oxygen and that dumped garbage kills the sea turtles that keep the ocean around her healthy.
"Young people need to save the Earth," she says with a solemnity that belies her age.
It is only March, but the sun outside is already blisteringly hot, posing a challenge for the electric fans battling valiantly to keep Kih'Nyiah's classroom cool.
In Antigua, like the rest of the Caribbean, the impacts of climate change are a daily reality, evidenced in receding beaches, worsening hurricanes, debilitating droughts and increasingly suffocating summers.
Some islanders, however, are fighting back.
Kih'Nyiah is one of more than 60 girls and young women who have been trained as coastal stewards, tasked with planting indigenous trees to slow coastal erosion, protecting the nesting sites of critically endangered turtles, and making and managing beach bins.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-68683693
What a difference between this and places like Florida!
Man speaks out after police release K-9 on him during traffic stop: 'Traumatized'
A Black Ohio man said he is "traumatized" after police released a K-9 on him during a traffic stop during an investigation of a vehicle that was mistakenly believed to have been stolen, body camera footage shows.
The Toledo branch of the NAACP this week called the release of the police dog "unwarranted" and "inhumane."
Brandon Upchurch, 38, of Toledo, told ABC News he was bitten seven times on his forearm and elbow by the K-9 after being pulled over on April 11 and has been unable to work since.
"My elbow was already messed up," he told ABC News correspondent Ike Ejiochi. "I can't do anything."
Upchurch said he was driving his cousin home from work when officers pulled him over.
"They instantly came out with the guns drawn," he said. "They did not come to my car and ask me for license, insurance, etc., anything."
https://abcnews.go.com/US/man-speaks-after-police-release-9-traffic-stop/story?id=109463145
More cop overreach on a Black person
Giving baby squirrels and other injured wildlife a second chance
In a nondescript warehouse in Washington, D.C., wedged between a community garden and the Metro train tracks, more than a dozen baby squirrels fill cages in an uncomfortably warm room. A noise machine pumps out forest sounds under the fluorescent lights.
Some squirrels nap in hammocks, cuddled up in furry piles. Others cling to the cages' wire, peering out.
Right now, it's baby squirrel season in much of the country. Spring is when many wild animals start having their offspring, which means it's a busy time for the people charged with rehabilitating animals that are injured or orphaned.
Animal care staffers here at the nonprofit City Wildlife spend much of their time these days hand-feeding baby squirrels.
"We could tell them apart because we paint their ears different colors," says Alessandra Flores, one of the staffers here. She reaches into a cage to grab a squirrel with ears painted pink. Then she holds the animal with one hand while offering it a tiny syringe with a soft nipple on the end, filled with specially formulated squirrel formula.
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/21/1244845371/giving-baby-squirrels-and-other-injured-wildlife-a-second-chance
Heaven bless these people. We need all our wild critters to maintain our home. I had a friend, now deceased, who was a wildlife rehabber. She was amazing.
Looking for role models among the spiritual leaders of history? Look to the women in their lives
Sometimes I think the entire point of religion is to help men behave more like women.
Members of a religious community are supposed to get along with each other, even if they don’t like each other. But women don’t need religious rules to teach them social graces. From birth, we are socialised to prioritise the needs of the collective above our own.
Most of the world’s major religions recognise men as their founders. For example, Christianity was founded by Jesus, Buddhism by Siddhartha Gautama and Islam by Muhammad. They were men who did not have to find time for their spirituality between cooking dinners and attending work meetings. But I want a spiritual role model who would have understood how to avert a meltdown at school pickup every day. So who are the women spiritual leaders?
Because of my Christian upbringing, my natural starting point is Mary, the mother of Jesus. Christians believe that Jesus was god incarnate. To retain her son’s deity status, early Church theologians described Mary as a virtuous virgin who conceived Jesus “immaculately,” no body fluids required.
Rather than fall at the feet of a woman with a magical womb, I am drawn to her lesser-known cousin Elizabeth. A pregnant and unmarried Mary travelled into the hill country to seek Elizabeth’s advice. Elizabeth was an older woman who had believed herself unable to conceive, but was six months pregnant when Mary arrived at her door. I imagine Elizabeth hearing Mary’s news, and shouting poetry at her cousin, helping her to believe that Mary’s baby, no matter how legitimate, was a miracle.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/22/looking-for-role-models-among-the-spiritual-leaders-of-history-look-to-the-women-in-their-lives
And it continues. Fascinating perspective. I like it.
New FAA rest rules to address 'fatigue' issues with air traffic controllers
The Federal Aviation Administration is instituting new rest rules for U.S. air traffic controllers to address fatigue issues that may be degrading air safety.
Controllers will now be required to take 10 hours off between shifts and 12 hours off before a midnight shift. The mandate will take effect in 90 days, FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker said in a statement Friday.
"In my first few months at the helm of the FAA, I toured air traffic control facilities around the country — and heard concerns about schedules that do not always allow controllers to get enough rest," he said. "With the safety of our controllers and national airspace always top of mind for FAA, I took this very seriously — and we’re taking action."
In a statement following the release of the new mandate, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association said that while it appreciated the FAA's attempt to address the fatigue issue, it was alarmed that the agency did not coordinate the new rules with them. It also warned said the new rules could backfire given current staffing shortage issues.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-faa-rest-rules-address-fatigue-issues-air-traffic-controllers-rcna148572
We would not have all the staffing shortage issues if Reagan hadn't fired all the air traffic controllers to begin with.
Women run 80% of US elections - but are targets of misogyny-laced threats
Carly Koppes kept her pregnancy hidden from the public as long as she possibly could, fearing the potential harassment that could come from those who frequently attack the Republican elections clerk.
When Koppes, who runs elections in Weld county, Colorado, did media interviews, she asked the people behind the camera to position her so her growing belly wasn’t visible, fearing her harassers would see the images or videos and make comments about her future child. She “never in a million years” anticipated that she’d have to hide her pregnancy, she said.
Sure enough, once it was public, she received messages like, “I’m going to pray for your child because his mother’s a demon,” she said.
“I’m happy to report, he did not come out with horns, he came out looking more like a cherub angel,” she joked. “So thank you for the prayers, they clearly worked.”
Koppes is part of the 80% – the percentage of women who run elections in the US, one area of government that is consistently female-dominated. It’s also an area of government that, since 2020, has seen a persistent level of threats and harassment, largely from those who believe Donald Trump won the election that year. Women in elected positions, in general, report higher levels of threats and harassment than their male counterparts, and people of color experience higher levels than their white counterparts.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/20/women-elections-misogyny-harassment
And it gets worse. Read on.
'We created this problem:' a pediatric surgeon on how gun violence affects children
Treating gunshot wounds on children was not what Mikael Petrosyan expected when he entered pediatrics.
Petrosyan has been working as a pediatric surgeon at the Children's National Hospital for more than a decade, and he has treated many children injured by guns.
He hasn't been able to save them all and has had to tell parents that their children have died from gunshot wounds.
"It's a devastating thing to do, to lose a child for something that has been caused by guns," Petrosyan said. "It's not an accident. It was totally preventable in many ways."
Last year, 106 juveniles were registered as gun shot wound victims in Washington D.C., and 16 of those incidents were fatal, according to the Metropolitan Police Department. Law enforcement in D.C. also recovered more than 3,000 firearms in both 2022 and 2023.
Petrosyan says having to tell a parent their child has died from gunshot wounds is one of the most difficult parts of his job.
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/19/1245079832/gun-violence-children-pediatric-surgeon-washington-dc
This problem does not exist elsewhere in the world outside of war zones. Think on that.
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