WHITE SUPREMACY IN RURAL ALBERTA

Accused in killing of 2 Métis hunters admits destroying evidence, lying to RCMP

A  man accused of fatally shooting two Métis hunters in Alberta in 2020 spent the night following the killings destroying evidence, including cutting up the rifle used in the attack, an Edmonton trial heard Thursday.


© Jim Stokes

Anthony Bilodeau, 33, spent two days testifying in his own defence at an Edmonton Court of Queen's Bench second-degree murder trial. His father Roger Bilodeau is co-accused.

Janice Johnston - Yesterday
cbc.ca

Anthony Bilodeau also admitted lying to RCMP three days later and denied causing their deaths.

Bilodeau, 33, and his father, 58-year-old Roger Bilodeau, are on trial in Edmonton Court of Queen's Bench. Both are charged with two counts of second-degree murder in the March 27, 2020 killings of Jacob Sansom, 39, and Sansom's uncle, Maurice Cardinal, 57.

Sansom and Cardinal died at a remote intersection outside the village of Glendon, 215 kilometres northeast of Edmonton.

Anthony Bilodeau was on the witness stand all day Wednesday and again on Thursday morning, testifying in his own defence.

Court has previously heard that Sansom and Cardinal had spent March 27, 2020 moose hunting, then socializing with friends.

Two of Roger Bilodeau's younger children have testified that they were worried and suspicious when a blue pickup turned into their driveway that night, just outside Glendon.

Court has also heard that Roger Bilodeau and his then-16-year-old son Joseph decided to chase the vehicle. While driving at speeds that reached 152 km/h, Roger called Anthony and asked him to bring a gun.

Under questioning from his defence lawyer, Anthony Bilodeau portrayed himself, his father and brother as victims who acted in self-defence.

He told the jury his father called him at 9:46 p.m. to say, "We caught the thieves. They came back. You've got to get over here."

Bilodeau told defence lawyer Brian Beresh that his father told him to bring a gun, "just in case." He said he was alarmed, so he rushed out of the house, grabbed a rifle and ammunition and tried to catch up

On Thursday, Crown prosecutor Jordan Kerr challenged Bilodeau about joining the pursuit.

"You could have told him, 'Dad, this is ridiculous. Pull over and call the police,'" Kerr said. "There were any number of places along that range road where they could have just pulled over and stopped."

Bilodeau agreed, but said he felt he needed to protect his family.

"Against what?" Kerr asked. "A vehicle that was driving away from them?"
Shots fired

Bilodeau told Beresh Wednesday that his fear grew as he raced toward the location. He said he was still on the phone with his father and brother when he heard a window being smashed and his brother screaming.

"It was at the top of his lungs," he testified. "It made the hair on your neck stand up. Then I heard a man's voice say, 'Go get a knife so I can kill these f--kers.'"

He said he was worried he wasn't going to get to the scene in time after he heard his little brother begging someone not to kill his dad.

"I was devastated," Bilodeau said. "I was wiping tears on the way there."

He said that when he arrived, he saw a man standing outside his father's open truck door. The man had both hands around his father's neck, he said.

The prosecutor challenged that claim, based on distance and darkness.

"You didn't see anyone choking your dad," Kerr said. "That's another lie you told, right?"

"Absolutely not," Bilodeau replied.

"But you're putting bullets in your gun," Kerr said. "You've already made the decision you're going to get out with a loaded gun."

Bilodeau admitted that he loaded the rifle in five seconds, then got out of his truck and loudly racked his weapon in what he agreed was a show of force.

"Did you consider that getting out of that truck with a loaded gun might really escalate the situation?" Kerr asked.

"I thought it might de-escalate the situation," Bilodeau responded. "These men were already threatening to kill my family."

Bilodeau told the jury that Jacob Sansom approached him unarmed, with his fists clenched.

During direct examination, he said he backed up when he thought Sansom was trying to grab his gun.

But during cross-examination, he admitted Sansom never touched his gun or laid a hand on him.

"And you shot him in the chest about 20 seconds after you got out of your truck," Kerr said.

"He said he was going to kill me," Bilodeau responded.

"I'm going to suggest to you that's a lie," the prosecutor shot back.

"Absolutely not," said Bilodeau.

"The reality is you were angry when you shot him in the chest, right?" Kerr said.

"Absolutely not," Bilodeau repeated.
No shots fired at accused

Bilodeau testified that immediately after he shot Sansom, he racked his gun to get the next shot ready, but his gun jammed.

He said Maurice Cardinal was approaching him, holding a gun and threatening to kill him, so he ran toward a ditch.

"I turned around and he still had his gun pointed at me," Bilodeau told his lawyer, adding that he asked the other man to please put his gun down.

"I managed to un-jam my gun and then I yelled again, 'We just want to talk,'" he testified.

Bilodeau fired his weapon, then reloaded and ran up to the other men's truck.

"Then I shot twice. Quickly. One after the other," he said.

During cross-examination, Bilodeau admitted that Cardinal fell to the ground after he fired a second shot. He said he didn't see the other man holding a gun when he took the final two shots.

RCMP found the gun in the back seat of the truck. There was no clip in the weapon.

"You knew [Cardinal] was a witness, right?" Kerr challenged. "You knew he had seen you shoot Mr. Sansom, right?

"You went back and shot him a third time to make sure he was dead, right?"

"Absolutely not," Bilodeau responded. He said that even after he'd been shot three times, Cardinal was still threatening to kill him.

"You're lying," Kerr said. "He was physically incapable of saying that.

"He was dying."
'Deliberate, calculated lies'

Bilodeau admitted in court that when he got home he began destroying evidence. He removed distinctive lights from the front of his truck to change the vehicle's appearance.

He cut his .30-30 rifle into four or five pieces, put them in a box and wrapped the box in a garbage bag, then drove to a dumpster 20 minutes away to get rid of the bag. He dumped the lights in a different location.

When he was questioned by RCMP on March 31, 2020, he lied about the truck lights and didn't mention owning a .30-30 rifle.

Bilodeau also said he was in bed on that Friday night and had nothing to do with Sansom and Cardinal's deaths.

"You were telling all these deliberate, calculated lies because in your own mind, you knew what you were doing wasn't lawful," Kerr said. "You knew you weren't acting in self-defence."

Again, Bilodeau answered, "Absolutely not."

He had the same response to the Crown's final question during cross-examination.

"The reality is you and your father decided to take the law into your own hands and chase these men, right?"

"Absolutely not," Bilodeau testified.

The trial continues.

PUSHED OR JUMPED

French financier commits suicide while touring $2.3m New York apartment

The French businessman also had properties in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side

Johanna Chisholm

Charles-Henry Kurzen reportedly fell from the 32nd floor of 100 United Nations Plaza in the Turtle Bay neighborhood of New York City on Thursday afternoon, according to a police spokesperson.
(Youtube/video screengrab)

A French financier reportedly asked a real estate agent if he could view the balcony of a luxury New York apartment he was viewing before he died by apparent suicide.

A police spokesperson confirmed to the New York Post that Charles-Henry Kurzen, 43, was viewing a unit at 100 United Nations Plaza on the 32nd floor in Midtown at around 1:15pm on Thursday afternoon and was later found on the third-floor patio below.

The French businessman, who had moved to Brooklyn from Paris over two decades ago, had reportedly asked the real estate agent if he could view the balcony of the $2.9m unit before he reportedly jumped from the balcony and fell to his death, source told the New York Post.

The Independent reached out to the New York Police Department for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

The 43-year-old had properties in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn and a separate apartment on the Lower East Side, both valued at around $1m, according to public records.

The 52-floor luxury complex at 100 United Nations Plaza has apartments listed that can fetch for anywhere between $1m to $3.5m.

Mr Kurzen, a graduate of the Ecole Superieure de Commerce de Paris (ESCP) Business School, was a partner at Saltbox Partners LLC, a New York-based finance firm, and had several years experience working in the banking sector before moving to the US, according to the company website.

A New Yorker article from 2004 about French businessmen, who created a bi-weekly gathering in an effort to maintain good relations with their American counterparts following the US invasion of Iraq (France vetoed a United Nations resolution in favour of war against Iraq, a move that splintered relations between the two nations in the years following), quoted then-25-year-old Mr Kurzen, who attended these “French Tuesdays”.

The French financier was apparently attempting to garner the attention of New Zealand supermodel Rachel Hunter, who rebuffed his attempts, according to the article.

When asked by the magazine why he was so determined to meet the supermodel, who at the time was still married to Rod Stewart, now her ex-husband, the young Frenchman said the then-34-year-old Hunter was a “beautiful, mature woman; a woman of character, a woman of history, a woman who has lived!”

 Klaatu Barada Nikto

 

"Klaatu barada nikto" is a phrase originating in the 1951 science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still. The humanoid alien protagonist of the film, Klaatu (Michael Rennie), commanded Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) that, were anything to happen to him she must say the phrase to the robot Gort (Lockard Martin). In response Gort relented from destroying the Earth and resurrected Klaatu from death.

Scientists are studying whether Cold War-era photos of the night sky contain clues of alien life

A series of telescope photographs from the 1950s reveal unusually regular patterns of flickering lights in the sky

By MATTHEW ROZSA
PUBLISHED MAY 26, 2022 4:26PM (EDT

UFO flying toward Earth (Getty Images)

On a single photographic plate from April 12, 1950, nine dots of light appear in a row in the night sky. To an uninformed eye, they appear unremarkable, perhaps nothing more than technical errors. Yet this particular photographic plate was produced as part of a larger project to photograph the night sky from California's Palomar Observatory Sky Survey. When lights appear and then disappear without explanation, they are known as transients, and astronomers seek explanations.

This is especially true as UFO sightings have become both more frequent and more effectively documented. Indeed, a group of scientists is arguing that the nine lights of these plates — which were taken seven years before the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite into space — could be evidence of extraterrestrial life. (Emphasis on could: there is nothing definitive that says these are alien craft.)

RELATED: Why Tucker Carlson loves UFOs: Jason Colavito on the hidden links between conspiracy theories  \ 

FOR THE SAME REASON RT/SPUTNIK/SIBERIAN NEWS LOVES UFO'S

"Their presence supports searches for other, clearer signatures of potential debris and satellites in orbits around Earth," a research team led by Stockholm University's Beatriz Villarroel wrote in a recent paper for the scientific journal Acta Astronautica. "The best way to search them, is obviously by looking at images taken before human-made objects were sent to orbit the GEOs." (GEOs is a shorthand term for geosynchronous Earth orbit, meaning satellites that orbit in the ring around Earth above the equator and move at the same rate that Earth rotates such that they appear at fixed points in the sky to an Earth-bound observer.)

The number of transients in these photographic plates, the authors write, is "far higher than expected" from known natural phenomena that exhibit similar behavior.

This is not the only paper on the subject written by Villarroel and her team. They note that the objects in the old photos could not be asteroids or meteors, as they would either be too dark to show up or appear like streaks. After some research, they confirmed that the lights could not have been caused by airplanes or other astrophysical explanations. Since man-made satellites didn't exist at that point, another explanation could have been nuclear testing. But, to the best of our knowledge, that was not happening at the time and place where the plates were taken.

This is why, in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports last year, Villarroel and her team explain precisely why the lights in this particular plate are so intriguing to them.

The number of transients in these photographic plates, the authors write, is "far higher than expected" from known natural phenomena that exhibit similar behavior in photographs, such as "flaring dwarf stars, Fast Radio Bursts, Gamma Ray Bursts or microlensing events."

They concede that the lights could have been caused by contamination in the plates themselves, and would therefore be technical artifacts rather than anything otherworldly. Yet "if contamination as an explanation can be fully excluded, another possibility is fast solar reflections from objects near geosynchronous orbits," the authors add. They also suggest comparing images from another sky survey done in the 1950s to see if that one also shows multiple transient objects appearing all in a line.

In a paper published last month to the pre-print server arXiv.org, Villarroel and her team explained that the transients are scientifically significant even if they do not have an extraterrestrial origin. As the scientists explained in the conclusion of that paper, "there are still uncertainties that preclude a definite answer even if the authenticity of the transients eventually is confirmed, and one of these is to fully understand the phenomenology behind simultaneously appearing and disappearing point sources, that may originate in a entirely different process." In other words, these old images of flickering objects are definitely still weird by today's standards, and could yield new astronomy discoveries regardless.

These papers follow a recent trend in which serious politicians and scientists have become more openly curious about the question as to whether extraterrestrial intelligence may have ever visited Earth. Earlier this month, a congressional hearing on UFOs revealed that UFO sightings have become increasingly common among military personnel. As Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray explained, "Since the early 2000s, we have seen an increasing number of unauthorized and or identified aircraft or objects in military-controlled training areas and training ranges, and other designated airspace reports of sightings are frequent and continuing." There are a number of possible mundane explanations for these UFO sightings, from natural atmospheric phenomena and atmospheric clutter to secret government technology programs.

Meanwhile, declassified Pentagon documents that were revealed to the public in April showed that the U.S. Department of Defense had conducted a program monitoring reports of human encounters from 2007 to 2012. These documents revealed, among other things, that people who alleged UFO encounters frequently displayed similar symptoms: Heart ailments, sleep disturbances, and symptoms consistent with exposure to electromagnetic radiation (such as burns). Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has also been outspoken about the fact that companies which comprise the military-industrial complex have UFO fragments.

"I was told for decades that Lockheed had some of these retrieved materials," Reid told The New Yorker last year. "And I tried to get, as I recall, a classified approval by the Pentagon to have me go look at the stuff. They would not approve that. I don't know what all the numbers were, what kind of classification it was, but they would not give that to me."

For more Salon articles on UFOs:Former Sen. Harry Reid: I was told Lockheed Martin had UFO crash fragments

Scientists discovered a radio signal from the nearest star and want to know if it's from aliens

Why do smart people lie about alien encounters?

MATTHEW ROZSA is a staff writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and is ABD in his PhD program in History at Lehigh University. His work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (4/5) Movie CLIP - Klaatu's Speech (1951) HD

There are billions of galaxies and planets but only one world

28 May 2022 01:18 am - 

---

With Sri Lanka’s worst ever ‘Aragalaya’ or public revolt continuing for its 50th day with large crowds gathering at the GotaGoGama or Galle Face Green to demand the resignation of the Rajapaksa Government and the abolition of the executive presidential system, Sri Lanka is not able to give top priority to a key issue that could destroy the world. The battle against climate change—which former United States’ President Donald Trump described as a Chinese hoax—the world gave less attention to this vital issue but the new US President Joe Biden is making every effort to get democratic countries involved in this battles of battles.  

On June 5, the United Nations marks World Environment Day and in a statement the world body says, “Only One world: In the universe are billions of galaxies, in our galaxy are billions of planets, but there is only one earth, let’s take care of it.”  

In Sri Lanka, families or individuals may tend to think there is little we could do to get involved effectively in the battle against climate change. There is much we could do. For instance, with power cuts disrupting our lives, we could switch off unnecessary bulbs and reduce the use of other electrical equipment such as television and FM radio stations. Independent world political analysts say that though the then US President George Bush launched a massive “shock and awe” war against Iraq after the terrorists attack on the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon, the bigger aim was to gain control of oil resources in Iraq and Syria. Now US companies control some of the biggest oil companies and that is why prices have soared to their highest levels in history—more than three times what we paid last year.  

Regarding clean drinking water, world analysts say that in next three decades the big powers including the US, Russia and China may go to war to get control of the world’s drinking water resources. Sri Lanka possibly would be a target because we have more than 100 rivers including 12 major rivers. Therefore we need to save water even in small ways. As the saying goes, little drops of water make the mighty ocean. For instance, when washing our hands, we need to open the taps only half way or less. When washing rice, vegetables or fruits, we need to collect the excess water in pans or buckets and use it to water the plants. As far as possible, we need to stop using fresh drinking water to wash our vehicles. We could also plant a few trees in our home garden. Some civic minded citizens have also cut down their daily shower times from five to 10 minutes. Some enterprising citizens have also installed rain water harvesting equipment on their roofs. This is collected in big tubs and the second rain is so pure that garages are known to use it as battery water.  

In a statement the UN says the earth faces a triple planetary emergency: The climate is heating up too quickly for people and nature to adapt, habitat loss and other pressures mean an estimated 1 million species are threatened with extinction, pollution continues to poison our air, land 
and water.   

The way out of this dilemma is to transform our economies and societies to make them inclusive, fair and more connected with nature. We must shift from harming the planet to healing it.The good news is the solutions and the technology exist and are increasingly affordable. #OnlyOneEarth is the campaign for World Environment Day this year. It calls for collective, transformative action on a global scale to celebrate, protect and restore our planet. 

 
Led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and held annually on June 5 since 1974, World Environment Day is the largest global platform for environmental public outreach and is celebrated by millions of people across the world. This year it is hosted by Sweden. “Only One Earth” was the slogan for the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972. This put sustainable development on the global agenda and led to the establishment of World Environment Day. Fifty years later, Sweden is hosting Stockholm+50 from 2nd to 3rd June.   

Leonardo DiCaprio, the main actor in the box office film “Titanic” has said raising awareness on the most pressing environmental issues of our time is more important than ever. One of the world’s greatest statesmen Mahatma Gandhi has warned the earth provides enough to satisfy every person’s needs, but not some person’s greed.”  

FREE SPEECH
Obscenity (Including as to Minors) and "the Work Taken as a Whole"

An isolated sexually themed passage, even a graphic one, doesn't make a work obscene.


EUGENE VOLOKH | 5.27.2022 

REASON MAGAZINE

The Court of Mist and Fury / Gender Queer controversy is a good opportunity to note an important legal principle: Under modern American law, a work can only be "obscene" and therefore constitutionally unprotected—or "obscene as to minors," and therefore constitutionally unprotected when distributed to minors—if it's basically pornographic taken as a whole.

"A quotation from Voltaire in the flyleaf of a book will not constitutionally redeem an otherwise obscene publication." The rule once seemed to be that, "to be smut, it must be utterly without redeeming social importance," but that is no longer so.

But, conversely, a few sexual scenes in a work likewise don't make a publication obscene. The question is whether its dominant theme appeals to the "prurient interest," which is to say a "shameful or morbid" interest in sex. (The government must also show that the work is patently offensive under contemporary community standards, and that, taken as a whole, it lacks serious value.) Even Justice Scalia, who was open to pretty substantial restrictions on pornographic material, acknowledged this:

[In our obscenity precedents], we rejected the approach previously adopted by some courts, which would permit the banning of an entire literary work on the basis of one or several passages that in isolation could be considered obscene. Instead, we said, "the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole" must appeal to prurient interest.

(He in turn was quoting Roth v. United States (1957), which was modified in some measure by Miller v. California (1973); but, as Justice Scalia noted, Miller only added extra elements the government must show beyond this "dominant theme" constitutional requirement.) And the same applies to obscene-as-to-minors material.

Now this isn't so for all First Amendment exceptions. Someone can be prosecuted for possessing child pornography even if that's an isolated picture within a broader work. Likewise, someone can be sued (or prosecuted) for libel based on a libelous statement in a mostly nonlibelous work.

But when it comes to the obscenity exception, the law is settled: Isolated pornographic passages don't make a work punishable.

EUGENE VOLOKH is the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA. Naturally, his posts here (like the opinions of the other bloggers) are his own, and not endorsed by any educational institution.

Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent

About The The Volokh Conspiracy

Lesbian Jamie McLeod-Skinner Wins Congressional Primary in Oregon

McLeod-Skinner, who beat a seven-term incumbent in the Democratic primary, would be the first out member of Oregon's congressional delegation.

BY TRUDY RING

THE ADVOCATE 

MAY 27 2022 

Oregon could have its first member of Congress from the LGBTQ+ community with lesbian Jamie McLeod-Skinner’s victory over incumbent Kurt Schrader in the state’s Fifth Congressional District.

The Associated Press and the state’s largest newspaper, The Oregonian, both called the race for McLeod-Skinner Friday. Problems with counting ballots had delayed the call in the May 17 primary.

McLeod-Skinner will face Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer in November’s general election. The Fifth District leans Democratic and extends from Oregon’s central coast through the southern suburbs of Portland and then farther inland. McLeod-Skinner had run unsuccessfully for the U.S. House from the Second District in 2018; Oregon’s congressional districts have since been redrawn.

She challenged Schrader from the left, portraying him as too moderate and too close to big-money interests such as pharmaceutical companies. He was endorsed by President Joe Biden, even though he had opposed some aspects of Biden’s legislative program. McLeod-Skinner was endorsed by some other high-profile Democrats, such as U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Schrader, a farmer and veterinarian, is in his seventh term in the House. McLeod-Skinner is a lawyer, small-business owner, and emergency response coordinator. She has worked in refugee resettlement and helped repair schools and hospitals in Bosnia and Kosovo, has served on several local boards, and was interim city manager of the Oregon town of Talent.

“This is a David and Goliath moment,” Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, of which McLeod-Skinner is a member, told The Washington Post. “This win proves that voters are hungry for leaders who will fight for working families, not billionaires and Big Pharma.”

McLeod tweeted that her victory is for all Oregonians.

The LGBTQ Victory Fund had endorsed McLeod-Skinner and hailed her win. “For years, Jamie has been committed to addressing the climate crisis and its impacts, helping working families, safeguarding abortion and access to reproductive health care and defending our democracy,” Victory Fund President and CEO Annise Parker said in a press release. “Her success is a direct result of her steadfast commitment to community organizing and grassroots advocacy. Oregonians are clearly enthusiastic about her vision for our future. For far too long, Oregon’s LGBTQ community has not had a voice in Congress. By shattering this lavender ceiling, Jamie is one step closer to changing that. With anti-LGBTQ attacks spreading like wildfire and lawmakers in Congress bent on outlawing abortion and reproductive health care, her election could not come at a more critical moment in our nation’s history.”

LPAC, which is dedicated to electing women from the LGBTQ+ community to office, also had endorsed McLeod-Skinner and issued a statement upon her victory. “LPAC supports good candidates who run good campaigns. Jamie ran a competitive race challenging a longtime member of Congress,” said LPAC Executive Director Lisa Turner. “After spending time talking to Jamie McLeod-Skinner and her team we saw that she was the right candidate for Central Oregon, and that institutional support and investments could help her win this race. We are proud to be the first LGBTQ organization to endorse and contribute to her campaign. We look forward to continuing to work with Jamie as she takes the fight to the general election in November.”

She is not the only lesbian poised to make history in Oregon. Tina Kotek won the Democratic primary for governor, and if she wins in November, she would be the state’s first lesbian chief executive.

Progressive challenger topples Kurt Schrader in Oregon

Biden-backed ‘Blue Dog’ loses primary to attorney Jamie McLeod-Skinner

"Blue Dog" Rep. Kurt Schrader lost his bid for an eighth term after

 a tough Democratic primary in Oregon's 5th District. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call file photo)

By Kate Ackley

ROLL CALL

Posted May 27, 2022 

Rep. Kurt Schrader, a seven-term Democrat from Oregon’s 5th District, lost his renomination bid to attorney and emergency response coordinator Jamie McLeod-Skinner, who had the backing of local party officials and progressive groups.

McLeod-Skinner had 57 percent of the vote to Schrader's 43 percent when The Associated Press called the race at 11:55 a.m. Eastern time Friday. The primary, held May 17, took more than a week to call because of vote-counting delays attributed to ballot-printing problems in Schrader's home county of Clackamas.

President Joe Biden and House Democrats’ campaign arm tried to come to Schrader’s defense, and the incumbent held a strong campaign cash advantage. But it wasn’t enough to overcome the dual headwinds of redistricting and a Democratic primary electorate that has become more liberal.

Republicans were already targeting the district, which Biden won in 2020 by 9 points, for November. GOP operatives now view it as a better pickup opportunity because no one will have the benefit of incumbency and because McLeod-Skinner leans more liberal than Schrader. Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales moved the rating for the race this week from Likey to Lean Democratic.

In the general election, she will face Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a former Happy Valley mayor who held $135,000 cash on hand as of April 27.

Schrader had $1.3 million in the bank to McLeod-Skinner’s $110,000 as of April 27. He also benefited from more outside spending, with $1.3 million spent supporting him and another $845,000 spent against McLeod-Skinner. Conversely, just $235,000 in outside spending was spent supporting her and only $35,000 spent against Schrader.

McLeod-Skinner portrayed Schrader as distant from his constituents, and progressive activists said that, as a fiscally conservative Democrat, he was out of step with the party and had sided too often with business interests. During his career in the House, Schrader voted with his party, on votes that split Republicans and Democrats, 85.6 percent of the time, according to CQ Vote Watch.

Schrader is the fourth incumbent to lose a primary this year. The others are Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux of Georgia and Republicans Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina and David B. McKinley of West Virginia.
Endangered species?

Schrader is a member of the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of fiscally conservative Democrats who have been dwindling in number.

Schrader, who was first sworn into the House on the cusp of the Obama presidency, once told Portland-based newspaper The Oregonian that the Blue Dog group is “a balance to the Elizabeth Warrens of the world,” a reference to the progressive Massachusetts senator. Warren endorsed McLeod-Skinner in the primary.

“She will fight for prescription drug coverage for seniors, tackle the climate crisis, and stand shoulder to shoulder with working families,” Warren said in her endorsement of the challenger.

Local liberal activists were “furious” with Schrader for voting against some key components of the Democrats’ agenda, including a vote he took in a House committee to thwart a bill that would have allowed Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, according to Leah Greenberg, a co-founder of the progressive group Indivisible. They also blame him, in part, for being part of a small group of House members who successfully pushed to de-link a bipartisan infrastructure measure from the broader tax and climate policy package known as the “Build Back Better” bill, Greenberg added.

“We don’t always agree, but when it has mattered most, Kurt has been there for me,” Biden said in a statement about the endorsement.

Redistricting also muted the incumbent’s advantages, with about half the voters from the district he won in 2020 now part of the new 6th District that the state received through reapportionment.
Congressional career

On Capitol Hill, Schrader served on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. A licensed veterinarian and co-chairman of the Veterinary Medicine Caucus, he pushed through several bills related to animals, including one to expand regulations designed to combat horse soring — using chemicals, pressure or devices to cause pain to horses’ front feet so they pick them up higher and faster than they naturally would.

“Horse soring still runs rampant even though laws have been on the books for decades banning this cruel practice,” he said after the House voted to pass the bill in July 2019.

Schrader is also part of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus.

He has, at times, challenged his party’s leadership in the House. He was one of 63 Democrats who voted for Rep. Tim Ryan, an Ohio Democrat who is running for Senate this year, in a November 2016 challenge to then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s leadership. He again opposed Pelosi’s leadership bid in the 116th Congress as Democrats took control of the chamber in January 2019. Schrader was one of 15 Democrats who didn’t vote for her election as House speaker.

Schrader’s political career began in the Oregon House of Representatives in 1996. He was first elected to Congress in 2008 after a 30-plus year career as a veterinarian and farmer, replacing six-term Democratic Rep. Darlene Hooley, who retired.

PRISON NATION USA

Rikers Island Has Made Us All Prisoners

New York City’s infamous jail on Rikers Island is one of the most brutal institutions of incarceration in America. Its conditions are the product not just of “tough-on-crime” policies but also of the best intentions of liberal criminal-justice reformers.

Prisoners sit handcuffed on the ground along the hallway after riots at Rikers Island on November 25, 1975. (Leonard Jackson / NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)

LONG READ


BY SCOTT W. STERN

JACOBIN
05.27.2022

Review of Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage by Jarrod Shanahan (Verso, 2022)

In 2014, a young man named Jarrod Shanahan arrived at Rikers Island, the infamous spit of land that houses New York’s primary jail complex. Shanahan had been arrested during a violent state crackdown on anti-police uprisings that characterized the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement. For the next several weeks, he “beheld and experienced the degrading treatment to which tens of thousands of New Yorkers are subjected each year by guards who answer to nobody,” he later reflected.

The guards harassed, intimidated, and outright assaulted prisoners and visitors alike; they ignored prisoners’ medical emergencies and sought to bait them into fights; boredom characterized the hours that were free of violence. It was frightening, demoralizing. Yet Shanahan also began to hear talk of a campaign to close down the penal complex, an organizing effort that a year later would expand greatly following the suicide of Kalief Browder, who had spent three wretched years at Rikers (half that time in solitary confinement) despite not having been convicted of a crime.

Over the course of his forty-five-day sentence, Shanahan decided to learn more about the institution in which he was caged. Five years later, his research had become a doctoral dissertation at the CUNY Graduate Center; three years after that, it has become his first book, Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage. It is a vivid, vital, and terrifying volume.

Jails and prisons have long been popular case studies for academics, but in recent years, several historians have seized on new archives and original oral histories to reframe these accounts along expressly abolitionist lines. Last year, Jessica Ordaz told the remarkable, decades-long story of an immigration detention center at El Centro, California. Last month, Hugh Ryan published his brilliant “queer history” of the Women’s House of Detention, which stood for half a century in Greenwich Village. Shanahan’s book joins these efforts, unearthing the history of one of the most famous — and notorious — jails in the world (its notoriety due in part to its location in New York City, but probably in larger part because of the unending series of stomach-turning scandals in which the penal island has been embroiled).

For generations, “Rikers” has been a byword for official impunity, state-sanctioned violence, racialized mass incarceration, and the criminalization of the poor. In 2019, the New York City Council finally voted to close Rikers by 2026, a plan Eric Adams claimed to support while running to be the city’s mayor last year. For now, though, the facility remains open — and an absolute nightmare. With more than a third of the guards playing hooky every day, with routine deprivations of food, water, and medicine, and with stabbings, assaults, and even murders a routine affair, the federal government has recently threatened to take over the jail complex entirely.

According to Shanahan, the history of Rikers contains “the story of the postwar struggle for who would run New York City” — and by extension, cities across the United States. Shanahan frames New York’s governance as defined by two increasingly polarized camps: reformist liberals on the one side, and the “forces of brute repression,” of “law and order,” on the other.

But “make no mistake,” he writes: “both camps swore allegiance to the capitalist order and believed in the ultimate legitimacy of whatever means were necessary to protect it.” Captives tells a story about the inherent limitations of liberal reform: about how every effort to make human caging more humane only served to expand incarceration, to make it more profitable for a small elite, and to render it more necessary to the administration of American cities.

It has always been a vile place. “Rikers Island is a patch of reeking landfill plopped into the East River between LaGuardia Airport in Queens and Hunts Point in the Bronx,” Shanahan writes, with evident disgust. The name traces back to a seventeenth-century Dutch landowner, Abraham Rycken, although the most famous of his descendants, Richard Riker, was a key player in the nineteenth-century Kidnapping Club, in which corrupt, wealthy New Yorkers would kidnap free and fugitive black people and sell them south into slavery.

Two decades after the end of the Civil War, New York officials purchased Rikers Island “to build a bigger jail” (as the New York Times approvingly wrote) and set to work shoring up its unstable soil. At first, Rikers was just a miserable daytime worksite for inmates of the overcrowded jail on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island), with the disproportionately poor and black prisoners literally laying the groundwork for the future penal colony. In the early 1930s, a new jail opened on the island, and progressive penologists rejoiced. It had a large library, a state-of-the-art hospital, and offered an array of “rehabilitative programming.”

The fantasy was not to last for long. Insufficient budgets and overzealous policing soon led to a corrupt, overcrowded jail system. By the time Anna Moscowitz Kross took over as New York’s commissioner of correction in 1954, Rikers was cluttered with beds, running short on clothing, disproportionately packed with poor people and New Yorkers of color, and individual guards were responsible for more than two hundred prisoners at a time.

Kross, though, had a vision for Rikers, as well as the city’s other jails and prisons. It is because of that vision — and her decades at the head of the Department of Corrections (DOC) — that she emerges as perhaps Shanahan’s main character, a well-meaning, deeply harmful protagonist. (She is also profiled at length in Ryan’s aforementioned The Women’s House of Detention; at long last, Kross is having a moment.)

The working-class daughter of Russian Jewish refugees, Kross sped through public schools, Columbia’s Teachers College, and New York University’s law school all before the age of nineteen. As a teenage law student, she had become interested in the plight of poor women (many of them accused sex workers) appearing in New York’s “night court.” In the years that followed, as she rose through the ranks of Tammany Hall, eventually becoming a judge, Kross never lost her determination to reform the city’s penal system. She believed that, with compassion and expert guidance, the courts and the prisons could become “a site of potential social good.” In seeking to realize this vision, Shanahan argues, she “significantly expanded the role of the courts in the lives of working people.”

Kross was appointed DOC commissioner amid a brutal police crackdown on black and brown New Yorkers. Just a month after she took office, the number of incarcerated people in the city reached a fifteen-year high. In response, Kross sought to increase the DOC’s reliance on civilian experts, well-credentialed social scientists with a particular focus on supposedly reformable women and children. She created educational programs and introduced classificatory schemes, seeking to “make carceral facilities more easily governable.” She also brought in private charities and nonprofit and religious organizations to offer benevolent services to incarcerated individuals.

Such policies no doubt improved the lives of some prisoners, but they also served to enmesh liberal actors in the prison-industrial complex, leading the nonprofits and the charities to defend the prison system and their own roles within it.

“As interested citizens and volunteers, we have worked thousands of hours yearly in every corner of this institution,” read one letter to every city newspaper, signed by a who’s who of New York’s nonprofit establishment. “We have been appalled by the exaggerated and distorted descriptions [of jails] given by news media. . . . We are qualified to set the record straight!”


At every turn, however, Kross ran into resistance from the New York Police Department — especially from the legions of guards that patrolled the city’s jails and prisons. She strove valiantly to keep the guards on her side, offering higher wages, greater benefits, and more jobs, but this did little to control the guards’ violence. When she sought to institute a policy with which they disagreed, many guards simply ignored her.

And conditions only grew worse. At the Women’s House of Detention, the incarcerated were subjected to violent medical searches, filthy blankets and mattresses, rats and roaches everywhere, toothpaste and soap nowhere, rampant sexual abuse, and consistent racist treatment. Facilities like this one (located in the heart of Manhattan) were “a great shame” for New York; pissed-off prisoners were within shouting distance of the streets below. Kross and her colleagues at DOC decided that it would be better to relocate incarcerated people away from the city proper, from the old jails and workhouses of Brooklyn and the Bronx and onto far-off islands.

Throughout the 1960s, therefore, Kross led a massive infrastructure expansion on Rikers Island, unveiling new, “modern” penal facilities. The “final piece of the puzzle,” Shanahan writes, was replacing the ferry to the island with a bridge, so greater quantities of supplies and humans could be shipped to Rikers more easily. “With the best of intentions, Anna M. Kross had paved the road, quite literally, to the Rikers Island of today.”

Kross served as DOC commissioner for well over a decade, but her tenure did not last long enough for her to oversee the modern monstrosity that Rikers became. By the time Mayor John Lindsay — another liberal reformer — officially opened the bridge to Rikers in 1966, he had replaced Kross with a new commissioner, albeit one whom Kross praised as “rehabilitation minded.”

In 1967, DOC broke ground on a new facility for women at Rikers. By 1968, all adolescent prisoners were housed there as well. In large part, these expansions were motivated by a continued surge in arrests across New York City during these years. Throughout the 1960s, the DOC population had shifted from majority-white to majority-nonwhite. This shift reflected a widening economic gap between the white and nonwhite segments of the labor force, itself reflective of postwar municipal policies that favored white workers.

Rikers Island, New York, New York. 

(Theodore Parisienne / New York Daily News / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

The shift was also attributable to a violent backlash to the civil rights movement and urban uprisings, which led the NYPD to step up arrests of black and brown people across the city. As working-class white New Yorkers moved to the right and as a significant number of working-class people of color embraced revolutionary movements, the police became more and more violent. Explicitly embracing white supremacy and Klan-like tactics, the cops relentlessly (and often illegally) targeted the Black Panthers and Young Lords. Rikers was needed to house all of the people that the cops were hauling off the streets.

Kross’s successor strove to maintain her reform-minded policies, continuing the partnerships with private nonprofits like the Ford Foundation, busing in social science graduate students, and even constructing the new penal facilities according to modern design principles. The DOC began working closely with the newly founded Vera Institute of Justice, another organization that sincerely sought to improve prisoners’ lives but ended up providing the city with detailed plans for how penal facilities could be used as essentially a counterinsurgent mechanism to quell black and brown revolt.The guards never stopped pushing for their own interests. And they enjoyed considerably greater success than the prisoners.

And Rikers remained a horrendous place, overcrowded, violent, rife with suicides. “It was as if Kross had never come along at all,” Shanahan comments dryly, “except for the bridge, the new jails, and plans for still more jail expansion.” An increasing proportion of the prisoners were black and brown, an increasing share of these having been arrested not for “crimes” but for activism.

In response to the rash of arrests, the rising rates of incarceration, the police violence, and the atrocious conditions within, rebellions flared inside the city’s jails and prisons. In 1970, a hunger strike erupted at one of Rikers’s facilities for male inmates, followed by a work stoppage at the Tombs in solidarity. Other uprisings soon followed at the Brooklyn House of Detention, multiple houses of detention in Queens, the Adolescent Reformatory at Rikers, and the Tombs (again). Almost invariably, these rebellions led to vicious reactions from the guards and NYPD, wielding clubs, blasting music, setting fires, indiscriminately spraying teargas, and beating prisoners almost to death.

In the aftermath of the unrest, the guards embraced a newfound “militancy,” Shanahan notes. The Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association (COBA), the guards’ main union, demanded more power to “clean up our institutions” — that is, virtually unchecked impunity to assault and torture inmates — and won greater pay, benefits, and new riot gear for its members by threatening to quit en masse. The guards imposed twenty-four-hour lockdowns, blocked prisoner communication with the outside world, and denied access to medical care. Prisoners returned to find their cells “completely wrecked and all their belongings destroyed by guards.”

Never again would New York City prisoner resistance reach the widespread levels that it did in 1970, but struggle continued at a smaller scale, violently contested by guards yet ultimately ineradicable. Prisoners smuggled in revolutionary literature, organized for better conditions, escaped in droves, and occasionally set up barricades. They and their allies won some reforms, including the abolition of the “bread and water” disciplinary diet and the introduction of methadone; and the rise of litigation challenging unconstitutionally dire conditions within prisons also led to some changes, including the closure of the Tombs.

Yet the guards never stopped pushing for their own interests, either. And they enjoyed considerably greater success.

Indeed, the second half of Captives is a demoralizing, twinned narrative about brutal economic austerity on the part of the city and militant labor organizing on the part of the guards. The two forces functioned in tandem. Economic troubles in New York led to overcrowding behind bars, which led to conditions that the guards used to demand greater authority and control, which led to more prisoner maltreatment; austerity governance cut programs that benefited the poor, which led to more crime, more arrests, and more people in jail, which led to still greater construction at Rikers; tightening city budgets led to greater reliance on private organizations, which led incarceration to become even less accountable to the public; layoffs in the wake of the financial crisis led the guards to protest, which led those in power to classify the guards as “essential” and “special,” effectively immunizing them from future layoffs.

Over time, COBA became more and more confrontational. Aware of its increasing centrality to New York’s new order, it staged repeated wildcat actions, belligerently marched on city hall, and conspicuously displayed guns and knives. It violently resisted each concession or reform that the prisoners won. COBA opposed the searches of its members for contraband, despite evidence that guards were smuggling drugs into Rikers, promoting more invasive searches of prisoners instead.

“In short, COBA members’ carte blanche remained the organization’s bottom line,” Shanahan notes, “for which it was willing to trade away not only the dignity and well-being of the city’s prisoners, but also the safety of its own members.”

In the 1980s, the municipal government (led first by Mayor Ed Koch and then by Mayor David Dinkins) turned away from liberalism and toward tough-on-crime policies and the “war on drugs.” (Ironically, and fittingly, Koch’s deputy mayor was the founder of the Vera Institute.) Rikers expanded and then expanded again; one new facility on the island was named after Anna Kross. To those in power, enhanced policing and imprisoning also suited the imperatives of austerity (even as the DOC’s budget increased 3,000 percent).

“In the end, policing and jails were a less expensive, and thoroughly disempowering, alternative to welfare state spending,” Shanahan writes, echoing Ruth Wilson Gilmore and other abolitionist scholars. “Human costs notwithstanding, jails were politically expedient, and a good investment to boot.”

Shanahan largely concludes his story in the summer of 1990, with a massive protest in which hundreds of guards blocked access to the bridge to Rikers. Armed and drunk, the guards picketed for hours (at one point assaulting EMTs who were trying to get to Rikers to assist a prisoner having a seizure). COBA made more than thirty demands, including greater hiring, harsher penalties for prisoners that assaulted guards, and — most significantly — “an end to stringent oversight of how and when they chose to inflict violence.” The action ended with a nonbinding agreement, although COBA’s president told the rank-and-file via bullhorn that the oversight protocol had been eliminated.The book’s titular captives are not just the individuals incarcerated in Rikers. This book is about how Rikers — and the politics of surveillance, policing, and carceral punishment — made captives of us all.

Meanwhile, a meltdown in humanitarian conditions within Rikers as a result of the blockade led the prisoners to rise up, which the guards brutally repressed. In the end, no guards faced any criminal charges. The city would not hold them accountable at all. They had proved a bloody point.

In one sense, Captives is mistitled. It tells the story of the captors, not the captives. It is not a people’s history; it the guards’ history. Their struggles, their budgets, their internecine disputes, even the racially disparate violence meted out by a majority-black workforce — this is the focus of Shanahan’s book. Such an approach is highly revelatory, although it stands in contrast with the approach of, say, Hugh Ryan or Heather Ann Thompson (acclaimed historian of the Attica prison uprising), who largely looked past the guards in their penal histories, instead lavishing attention on the prisoners, both the famous and the unknown.

This is not a criticism of Shanahan, however. In a review published more than twenty years ago, the historian Nell Irvin Painter critiqued Diane McWhorter for failing to sustain a “clear-eyed focus on white supremacy’s power structure” across her epic, 700-page account of the struggle over civil rights in mid-century Birmingham. McWhorter began her book by carefully tracing the connections among the white supremacist “country clubbers,” the Klansmen, and all levels of law enforcement. But in her quest to also track black resistance and give her book a “happy ending,” Painter writes, McWhorter lost sight of her most significant intervention.

The same cannot be said of Shanahan. He never loses track of the racist and capitalist power structure that is his book’s primary focus. He never lets the guards out of his sight.

In another sense, Captives is perfectly titled. Looking to its subtitle, it’s clear that its titular captives are not just the individuals incarcerated in Rikers. Rather, this book is about how Rikers — and the politics of surveillance, policing, and carceral punishment—made captives of us all. We are all at the mercy of the system it emblematizes — not equally at risk, to be sure, but captives to its inexorable logic, nonetheless.

In the aftermath of the 1990 uprising, Shanahan argues, the modern status quo prevailed. “Built by jail reformers to be a world-renowned hub of penal welfarism,” he writes, “Rikers Island was now the domain of a violent custodial force that demanded — and won — almost-untrammeled city recognition of their freedom to dispose of the city’s prisoners however they saw fit.” Rikers overflowed with prisoners structurally consigned to poverty, “the vast majority of whom had not been convicted of any crime.

Indeed, the authorities warehoused so many people at Rikers that it became famous for its ad hoc structure (tents, modules) meant to facilitate ever more rapid expansion; so many prisoners filed civil rights suits that DOC constructed its own courthouse on the island. The number of captives has grown over the last thirty years, but the violence of their captors has not relented.

Shanahan closes the book, however, with one last look at liberal reformers (a different set of captors). Nonprofit organizations, he writes, have remained “highly specialized partners to the administration of punishment and surveillance.” In the aftermath of Kalief Browder’s death, a powerful abolitionist movement rose up, wielding a simple demand: “Shut Down Rikers” and replace it with nothing. “To this demand, however, emissaries of the city’s nonprofit sector” — including the Ford Foundation, the Vera Institute, and others, Shanahan notes — “would add another. The city should shut down Rikers, they argued, and replace it with new, state-of-the-art penal welfarist jails. . . . This time around, they assured the public, the city would get it right.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Scott W. Stern is a lawyer and the author of The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison "Promiscuous" Women.

USA

Pay transparency laws raise women’s salaries — and slightly lower men’s

Posted May 27, 2022

Elaine S. Povich

Stateline

The bestselling 2016 book “Hidden Figures,” later adapted into a popular film, told the story of Black female mathematicians who played an essential role in the U.S. space program in the 1950s and 1960s, but who faced racial discrimination and were paid less than their male counterparts.

The gender pay gap existed before the era portrayed in the book and film, and it persists today, though it has narrowed in recent years. In 2019, the national median salary for women working full time was $43,394, compared with $53,544 for men, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

The sponsor of a West Virginia bill that aimed to close that gap there named it for two of the mathematicians featured in the book and film, Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan, both of whom were born in the state. The bill, which has been introduced for several sessions but has failed to pass, would require employers to publish salaries when advertising jobs and would prohibit companies from retaliating against workers who discuss their pay with colleagues.

Studies show that salary transparency—coupled with laws prohibiting companies from asking an applicant about their current or previous pay—can narrow the gender pay gap. If companies must advertise salaries for open positions, and current employees can freely discuss pay, applicants are less likely to receive or accept lowball offers. Studies show that women and minority candidates are most likely to receive such offers.

But research also shows that salary transparency tends to lower men’s salaries even as it raises those of women—and might lower salaries overall. Multistate companies have found ways to circumvent the laws by refusing to accept applications from job seekers who live in states that require transparency. And critics say salary transparency laws might persuade companies to hire fewer employees, and could foment conflict in the workplace.

State Rep. Barbara Evans Fleischauer, the Democratic sponsor of the West Virginia bill, said it has foundered against opposition from Republicans and business interests. “One member said: ‘I don’t want my secretary talking to others about what they make,’” she recalled.

But 17 states already have similar pay transparency laws. In March, Washington Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee signed legislation requiring employers with 15 or more workers to post salary ranges beginning in 2023. A similar Rhode Island law is scheduled to take effect next year.

There are no readily available studies on whether state transparency laws have helped close the pay gap, since the first of the laws took effect just a few years ago, in 2018.

But a 2019 study of Canadian universities, which have similar requirements, found the laws “reduced the gender pay gap between men and women by approximately 20-40 percent.”

“It’s very hard to lowball some new potential employee if the new potential employee is capable of looking at a range of salaries,” said Cornell economics assistant professor Thomas Jungbauer. “This can have a positive effect on wage gaps because of gender or color. Employers might offer lower wages to certain types of applicants. This makes it harder.”

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, median earnings for women in the 2016-2020 period, the most recent period for which samples were taken, showed women making 81% of what men earn as a median salary. That’s better than the 59 cents on the dollar earned by women during the “Hidden Figures” era, but still well short of equal.

The 2019 census data also shows that the gender pay gap varies significantly from state to state. The District of Columbia, Utah and Wyoming all had gaps that exceeded $15,000, while the gap was less than $10,000 in states including Arizona, California, Florida, New York and North Carolina.

New York debate

New York City’s pay transparency law was scheduled to take effect this month, but the City Council in April voted to postpone implementation until November because of business concerns about a lack of flexibility and worries that the law had been approved too quickly, according to Beverly Neufeld, president and founder of PowHer NY, a network of gender and racial justice organizations.

The new law will require that employers get a warning and 30 days to fix their first violation before facing fines. It also eliminated the right to sue an employer for not posting salary ranges unless you are employed there.

The Staten Island Chamber of Commerce was one organization that argued against the law, saying that it would disadvantage New York companies. Forcing them to publicize salaries for open jobs, the chamber argued, would push prospective employees to look elsewhere for higher compensation.

“The city’s [minority- and women-owned business] firms are generally at a disadvantage in competing for scarce talent and are likely to be outbid if a majority competitor has access to their salary offering,” the chamber said in a statement.

New York state is considering a similar bill. State Rep. Latoya Joyner, a Democrat and primary sponsor of the bill, said in an email to Stateline that while the state has taken a significant step toward closing the salary gap by prohibiting companies from asking interviewees about their salary history, it will go even further with this legislation.

Overall, the pay gap between men and women in New York state in 2019 was $8,821, with women making 85.5% of what men make, but that gap differed by race and ethnicity. For White workers the gap was $12,000 (83%), while it was $3,500 for Hispanic workers (92%) and $2,900 for Black workers (94%). There was no gender pay gap for Asian workers.

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“Workers—especially women—still face a very daunting work environment when it comes to compensation, and we need to do more to create a level playing field in the workplace when it comes to salaries,” Joyner said.

The bill is awaiting action in both the Senate and the Assembly, and Joyner said she was hopeful it would pass in June.

Limited effectiveness?

Colorado’s transparency law went into effect last year, but an investigation by television station 9News in Denver found at least 10 companies in May 2021―including Nike, Johnson & Johnson and Lincoln Financial―saying in their ads that no Coloradans need apply for their openings. A subsequent Colorado Department of Labor ruling underscored the regulation and said that no company is exempt, even if the jobs are for remote work.

Meanwhile, a study in 2021 by Harvard Business School assistant professor Zoe Cullen showed that making pay scales public reduces “the individual bargaining power of workers, leading to lower average wages.” The study found the wages went down by 2%, mostly by lowering men’s pay. The study used salary data from the American Community Survey and compared overall salaries in states where pay transparency exists to those where it doesn’t. It modeled future effects based on those statistics.

“Both the empirical work and that model showed that when employers catch wind of the fact that there’s greater transparency and have time to adjust pay setting practices, they do so by bargaining more aggressively,” she said in a phone interview. “They know that by raising your wage, it weakens their negotiations. The upshot is that average wages are overall lower.”


Stateline is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news service of the Pew Charitable Trusts that provides daily reporting and analysis on trends in state policy.

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Could the U.S. Be Doing More to Free Brittney Griner?
By A. Sherrod Blakely
| May 27, 2022

Image: Mike Mattina/Getty Images.
Brittney Griner, a two-time Olympian and WNBA star has been detained near Moscow for allegedly having hashish oil in her luggage. Would she still be detained if she were an NBA star versus being a WNBA star?

You could feel the pain in Cherelle Griner’s voice as she spoke publicly for the first time about her spouse, WNBA star Brittney Griner, who has been detained in Russia on Feb. 17.

As EBONY previously reported, Griner was detained at Sheremetyevo International Airport near Moscow for allegedly having vape cartridges in her luggage that contained hashish oil, an illegal substance in Russia.

If convicted, the Phoenix Mercury center could be facing up to 10 years in prison.

Cherelle Griner responded eloquently to all the questions thrown her way, doing her best to mask the hurt and pain that she and so many of us are feeling right now.

And like so many of us, Cherelle is anxious to see Brittney back home in the United States which is complicated for far too many reasons to fully address in one column.

But as the days continue to pass with little to no signs of Brittney being released, lots of questions continue to be raised about whether the United States Government is operating with a heightened sense of urgency to bring the two-time Olympian home.

And if not, folks have publicly wondered how different would all this play out if it were LeBron James or maybe another less-renowned, Olympic-caliber talent like Paul George of the Los Angeles Clippers or Khris Middleton of the Milwaukee Bucks, stuck in a Russian detention center.

If any of the aforementioned players were being detained overseas, the questions we would be asking now wouldn’t be focused on when they were coming home, but more about what their next move will be now that they are back in the United States.

Sadly, Griner isn’t the first American arrested in a foreign country deemed by the United States government as being “wrongfully detained.”

The cost of her freedom will surely be high.

But if the government plans to stick to its word, it’s a price they should be vigorous in their willingness to pay.

“You (U.S. Government) say she’s top priority, but I wanna see it, and I feel like to see it would be me seeing BG on U.S. soil,” Cherelle Griner told Robin Roberts during an episode of Good Morning America this week.

We have seen several Americans in recent years detained overseas, with many being imprisoned for years before being released.

So the idea of it taking longer than most would prefer, should come as no surprise.

But never has there been an American athlete arrested and detained with the kind of big-name notoriety and stature of the 6-foot-9 Griner.

In addition to being a two-time Olympic gold-medal winner, Griner won an NBA championship with the Phoenix Mercury in 2014.

She’s also a seven-time WNBA All-Star in addition to being a two-time scoring champion.

Griner has also been among the most dominant players overseas, a three-time National Russian League champion with UMMC Ekaterinburg; a four-time Euroleague champion; not to mention all the accolades acquired at Baylor where Griner won a national championship and was named the AP College Player of the Year (2012) and then the No. 1 overall pick in 2013 by the Phoenix Mercury.

The Russian rules of law have always been tricky for non-Russians, with a judicial system that is no stranger to using American citizens as a political pawn to bargain for the release of Russian citizens jailed in the United States.

When the U.S. Government determined Brittney was “wrongfully detained” by Russia, that’s often the catalyst for the United States to engage in discussion about a potential swap.

But actual movement on that front has been slow; certainly slower than Cherelle or Brittney’s legion of fans and fellow WNBAers would want to see.

Yes, the often-chilly relationship between the United States and Russia doesn’t help matters.

Ditto for Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine which occurred about a week after Griner’s detainment.

How much has that played into Griner’s detainment? No one knows for sure.

But the idea that this process might be fast-tracked if it were an NBA player rather than a WNBA player, isn’t that far-fetched.