End Racial Profiling in Immigration Enforcement

It's virtually the only area of law enforcement where racial discrimination is officially permitted by policy. And it's both wrong and illegal.

ILYA SOMIN | 8.6.2022 

Reece Jones of the Texas Observer has a helpful article urging the Biden Administration to end racial profiling in immigration enforcement. Racial profiling is a serious problem in many aspects of law enforcement, state, local, and federal. But, as Jones explains, this virtually the only one where such discrimination is actually endorsed by policy, so long as the profiling occurs in a "border" area:

Despite a broad public consensus that law enforcement officers should not use racial profiling, efforts in Congress to ban the practice have failed for decades. The situation is even worse in the border zone, where racial profiling is explicitly allowed for the Border Patrol and other federal immigration police based on Supreme Court decisions and the Obama administration's 2014 guidelines on race and policing, which are still in effect. The Biden administration should revise those guidelines to ban racial profiling for all federal police, including the Border Patrol, and should state explicitly that racial profiling is a violation of the Civil Rights Act [of 1964]….

In 2014, former Attorney General Eric Holder directed the Department of Justice to review federal guidelines for the use of race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity in policing. The review resulted in new guidance that banned racial profiling for most federal officers, but it does not apply to the Border Patrol. Buried in a footnote, it said "this guidance does not apply to interdiction activities in the vicinity of the border, or to protective, inspection, or screening activities." At the time, a DHS official told the New York Times, "We can't do our job without taking ethnicity into account. We are very dependent on that."

The Trump and Biden administrations kept these guidelines on racial profiling in place.

The "border area" exception to rules against racial profiling is so broad that it effectively swallows the rule. As Reece notes, "the official border zone is defined as within 100 miles of borders and coastlines—a vast area that includes the homes of almost two-thirds of the United States population and many of the largest cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C."

You may not think that you live in a border area, but - as far as the Department of Homeland Security is concerned - you probably do. And if you belong to the same racial or ethnic group as suspected undocumented immigrants (or just look like you do), you are subject to racial profiling by law enforcement agencies seeking to catch and deport them.

The practical consequences of such profiling can be dire. Because of weak due process protections in the immigration detention and deportation system, the federal government routinely detains and deports large numbers of US citizens, before discovering its mistake. For obvious reasons, racial profiling increases the incidence of such errors. Victims of racial profiling are also sometimes physically abused by law enforcement. Even when (as in the vast majority of cases) racial profiling incidents end without anyone being detained or hurt, they still inflict needless suffering, and poison relations between law enforcement and minority communities.

In previous posts, I have explained why racial profiling in immigration enforcement is harmful and unjust, and also why racial profiling is a great evil more generally, and unconstitutional, too boot. Progressives, conservatives, and libertarians all have good reason to condemn the practice.

If you're a conservative  - or anyone else - committed to color-blindness in government policy (a commitment I share), you cannot make an exception for law enforcement:

If you truly believe that it is wrong for government to discriminate on the basis of race, you cannot ignore that principle when it comes to those government officials who carry badges and guns and have the power to kill and injure people. Otherwise, your position is blatantly inconsistent. Cynics will understandably suspect that your supposed opposition to discrimination only arise when whites are the victims, as in the case of affirmative action preferences in education.

I don't think I need to explain in detail why libertarians should be opposed to racial profiling in immigration enforcement, or law enforcement more generally. All our usual concerns about law enforcement abuses become even more pressing when racial discrimination enters the mix - especially if that discrimination is openly condoned by policy. And, of course, libertarians are no fans of immigration restrictions generally.

Finally, if you're a progressive, and you believe ending racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is an important priority, you cannot make an exception for immigration enforcement in so-called "border" areas that actually encompass areas where the vast majority of Americans live. You especially should not do so, given the long history of racial and ethnic bias in immigration policy.

Both major political parties and all three branches of government deserve a share of the blame here. As Reece describes, the current immigration enforcement guidelines permitting racial profiling were developed by the Obama Administration, and then continued by Trump and Biden, even as Congress sat back and did little or nothing to curb them.

Reece also explains how a series of misguided Supreme Court rulings from the 1970s sanctioned at least some racial profiling in immigration enforcement, even as the Court barred state-sponsored racial discrimination almost everywhere else. This is just one of many areas where the Court has endorsed pernicious double standards under which immigrant restrictions are often exempted from constitutional constraints that bind every other area of government policy.

Reece describes ways in which all three branches of government can begin to make up for their awful record in this field:

All three branches of government could act to end racial profiling in the United States. Congress should finally pass long-stalled bills to ban racial profiling. The Department of Justice should revise its guidance and remove the exception to the ban on racial profiling for the Border Patrol and immigration officers and should make clear that racial profiling violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Finally, the Supreme Court should revisit the racial aspects of the Brignoni-Ponce and Martinez-Fuerte decisions.

In the past, the court has corrected erroneous rulings, often in cases about race. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) reversed Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which had approved "separate but equal" public facilities for different races. Despite its current conservative composition, in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), the court condemned its previous decision in Korematsu v. United States (1944), which had allowed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, "Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and to be clear 'has no place in law under the Constitution.'" Among those symbols of America's racist past, Brignoni-Ponce and Martinez-Fuerte stand alone because they are still put into practice by the Border Patrol every day. It is time to correct those gravely wrong decisions and end racial profiling for the Texas DPS, the Border Patrol, and all police in the United States.

Sadly, though it repudiated the racial discrimination endorsed by Korematsu, the Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii perpetuated some other pernicious aspects of that infamous decision, at least in the context of immigration restrictions. Nonetheless, there is much all three branches of government can do to end the unjust practice of racial profiling in immigration enforcement. At the very least, the Biden Administration could easily withdraw the Obama-era guidelines permitting this practice in "border" areas, and Congress could easily ban it.

Ilya Somin is Professor of Law at George Mason University, and author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom and Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter.

Princess Reema impressed by tour of Aramco Research Center in Detroit

August 06, 2022





Saudi Gazette report

DETROIT — Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to the United States Princess Reema Bint Bandar expressed her immense pride over all the extraordinary work that is being done at the Aramco Research Center in Detroit.

Princess Reema made the remarks on Friday during her tour of the Aramco Research Center in Detroit, Michigan, where she met with a number of officials who are in charge of the center.

Princess Reema was briefed on the developments in the carbon capture technology field, as well as on the new innovations that the center is working on to protect the environment and reduce emissions.

“It was a pleasure to tour the Aramco Research Center in Detroit, Michigan,” Princess Reema said on her official Twitter account, adding that "Very proud of all the extraordinary work being done here."

It is noteworthy that the Aramco Research Center in Detroit focuses on competitive transportation solutions, improving the efficiency of current and future engines, and reducing the overall environmental impact, cost, and complexity of engine systems.

Hundreds of California Farmworkers Are Marching for Union Voting Rights

The marchers are demanding better protections against voter suppression by employers in union elections.

UNITED FARM WORKERS / @UFWUPDATES

BY Sara Herschander, 

Waging Nonviolence

August 6, 2022

On Wednesday, around 250 farmworkers and their supporters took their first steps of a 24-day Delano-to-Sacramento march to demand more voting options for farmworkers when casting a ballot on unionization.

The march, organized by United Farm Workers, or UFW, has been billed as the “March for the Governor’s Signature,” a reference to demands that California Gov. Gavin Newsom sign a new bill meant to protect farmworkers from voter suppression by employers.

“California is a very wealthy state and agriculture contributes to that wealth, but farmworkers continue to be poor and their families suffer — that’s what we need to change,” Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the UFW, told a crowd of marchers gathered at Forty Acres, the site of UFW’s original headquarters in Delano.

“We want everything that you’re doing here to reach the hearts of the growers and the heart of the governor,” said Huerta, before shouting “Si se puede,” a phrase she originated in 1972, while campaigning against legislation that denied workers’ right to organize during harvest seasons.

Over the next several weeks, participants are expected to march roughly 15 miles per day, before reaching the state capital in Sacramento on Aug. 26, which Gov. Gavin Newsom declared “California Farmworker Day” last October. They’ll be marching in the scorching summer heat, behind the same Lady of Guadalupe banner that UFW has been using since the 1960s.

According to Elizabeth Strater, director of strategic campaigns at UFW, that history was palpable during the march’s launch, which she called a kind of “family reunion” for farmworkers, organizers, clergy and other union workers who attended in solidarity with the farmworker movement.

The new bill — the Agricultural Labor Relations Voting Choice Act, AB 2183 — would allow farmworkers to cast a vote on unionization through mail-in ballots or at a drop-off location. Current regulations dictate that workers must cast ballots at in-person-only polling places, typically located at their place of employment, where they may face intimidation from supervisors.

“The vast majority of those elections are on the growers’ property, under the watchful and often retaliatory eye of their bosses,” said Strater, who explained that such a system has “an incredibly chilling effect” on a largely undocumented workforce.

Even as policymakers have lauded farmworkers as essential workers at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, they’ve largely sided with the agricultural industry in curtailing or neglecting workers’ right to organize over the past several years. As of 2021, fewer than three percent of farmworkers belong to a union, and farmworkers still lack the right to collectively bargain and unionize in most states.

On Cesar Chavez Day this April, farmworkers and advocates organized marches in 13 California cities criticizing the governor’s continued refusal to meet with farmworkers to discuss the most recent bill. Newsom also vetoed a similar bill in September 2021, which would have allowed for mail-in unionization ballots.

Farmworker organizers faced another blow in June 2021, when the Supreme Court ruled in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid that labor organizations could no longer go on grower’s property to meet with workers.

Still, longtime organizers like Roberto “El Capitan” Bustos, who led UFW’s famed 400-mile march to Sacramento in 1966, were in attendance on Wednesday to encourage marchers to persevere despite political setbacks.

“I’m here again — I’m still marching,” Bustos told those gathered on Wednesday. “You can’t get lost. Follow our footprints. You’re going to see our footprints along the way.”

Labor board rejects Starbucks' accusations against union workers, this week in the war on workers


Laura Clawson for Daily Kos Labor
Daily Kos Staff
Saturday August 06, 2022 ·


Howard Schultz

Laura Clawson
Daily Kos Labor


Amid Starbucks’ vicious union-busting campaign, which has involved the firing of at least 70 pro-union workers—more than 50 of them since April, in what’s clearly an escalating effort—the company tried to convince the National Labor Relations Board that union activists in Phoenix, Arizona, violated labor law by “threatening and coercing employees and the public.” Starbucks claimed workers surrounded a store and pounded on the windows during an action. The NLRB investigated and found that no such thing happened. (And since there were news cameras there for the protest, there’s an actual video of the peaceful picket.)

Meanwhile, Starbucks continues announcing pay raises and new benefits only to workers at stores that have not unionized—a practice that NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo told Steven Greenhouse was (in principle, without naming Starbucks) is an unfair labor practice, “unlawful, absent compelling business justification.”

Starbucks management is absolutely committed to fighting its workers, often in direct violation of the law. But so far, at least, its lawlessness and cruelty has not stopped the momentum of its workers coming together to form unions.

● Workers at a veterinary hospital in Orchard Park, New York, voted to unionize.

● OSHA fines Family Dollar $1.2 million for safety violations at two Ohio stores.

● A PetSmart dog groomer quit her job. They billed her thousands of dollars for training, Dave Jamieson reports. Thousands of dollars in training for a job that paid $15 an hour? In California? Something is out of whack there, and the cause of that something is corporate greed and abuse of power.

● Amy's Kitchen closes San Jose facility after workers seek to form a union, Prism’s Alexandra Martinez reports.

 

Demand for Charitable Food Remains Unnaturally High

JUNE 21, 2022

Food banks agree that demand for food assistance has remained unusually high, even as the pandemic has eased. Now Feeding America has put a number on that demand. 

In a report released last week, it found that an estimated 53 million people received charitable food assistance in 2021. That’s down from 60 million in 2020 when the pandemic was raging, but still well above the 40 million who received charitable food in 2019. Put another way, 33% more people were still getting charitable food in 2021 versus before the pandemic. 

Rising prices, combined with the pullback of many pandemic-related government food assistance programs, mean that high demand for charitable food is continuing into 2022. Eighty percent of the 200 food banks in the Feeding America network say demand for food assistance has increased or stayed the same from March 2022 to April 2022. 

“Local food banks, food pantries, food shelves and other community food programs have become an essential piece of a household’s food budget,” noted Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, CEO of Feeding America, in a press release.

Feeding America’s findings are borne out in other, more local reports. The Greater Boston Food Bank, for example, found in a survey released in June that 46% of food-insecure adults in Massachusetts used a food pantry in 2021, up significantly from 32% in 2020, and 27% in 2019.

Kyle Waide, CEO of Atlanta Community Food Bank, urged funding for TEFAP at a House Agriculture Committee hearing last week.

Similarly, Kyle Waide, President and CEO of Atlanta Community Food Bank, testifying last week at a House Agriculture Committee hearing on nutrition assistance, said his food bank distributed the same volume of food during April and May of 2022 as it did during those same two months in 2020, which was nearly 35% higher than pre-pandemic levels.

Food banks are recommending a broad array of interventions to reduce the need for food assistance. Capital Area Food Bank, in its own report released in June laid some responsibility for fixing the hunger problem on the private sector. 

The food bank urged companies to pay living wages, offer paid leave, and ensure upward mobility for workers, echoing similar thoughts expressed by Stacy Dykstra, CEO of Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma, in this article. “Companies have incredible influence over the problem of food insecurity … through their employment strategies,” Capital Area Food Bank said in its report.

At the government level, Capital Area Food Bank recommends permanently expanding the earned income tax credit and child tax credit, and finding ways to drive greater enrollment in SNAP (only one in five food-insecure households in the D.C. area use it) and to make more people eligible for social safety net programs, such as easing qualifications for college students and military families. The food bank also thinks that partnerships between social service organizations, such as food banks and healthcare clinics, can go a long way toward addressing hunger.

Greater Boston Food Bank centered many of its recommendations around improving the food pantry experience. It urged pantries to focus on best practices, such as paying extra attention to Black, Latino and LGBTQ communities; providing food in convenient, dignified and equitable ways; exploring alternative methods of delivery like grocery cards and home delivery, and partnering with other community-based organizations. It also highlighted the need for adequate funding of government programs like SNAP and WIC. 

In his testimony, Waide focused mostly on TEFAP, urging mandatory funding of $450 million for the program in the next Farm Bill, as well as $200 million for TEFAP storage and distribution. He noted that Atlanta Community Food Bank next year expects to purchase nearly 25% more food (17.5 million pounds) than it will get through TEFAP (14 million pounds). The purchases will cost it nearly $15 million, and presage a pattern the food bank believes is unsustainable, he said. 

The 14 million pounds of food the food bank will get through TEFAP in fiscal 2023 represents about one-third of the government food it received during 2021, Waide said. In addition, the amount is about one million pounds less than what the food bank received from the government pre-pandemic. A further complication is that about 13% of TEFAP shipments the food bank ordered this year have been canceled due to supply chain issues, he said. 

In closing, Waide urged the committee to “flood the zone” with access to food. “Doing so will help our families, communities and our country recover faster.” – Chris Costanzo

This article was made possible by the readers who support Food Bank News, a small, editorially independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit media organization. Food Bank News is not funded by any government agencies, nor is it part of a larger association or corporation. Your support helps ensure the continuation of our solutions-oriented coverage of best practices in hunger relief. Thank you!

 

Alex Jones may only pay fraction of $49m defamation damages thanks to Texas law

06/08/2022

CHARLIE HERBERT

The conspiracy theorist has been ordered to pay millions in damages to the parents of one of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting

A jury has ordered Alex Jones to pay more than $49m in damages to the parents of a Sandy Hook victims for his claims that the shooting was a "hoax", but thanks to state law he may end up only having to pay a fraction of this.

The parents of Jesse Lewis, a six-year-old boy who was one of 26 pupils and staff killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, sued the Infowars host for defamation over his baseless claims that the shooting was a "hoax."

The parents, Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, said they experienced harassment and emotional distress because of Jones' fake news.

On Thursday, the jury in the trial  ordered Jones to pay the parents $4.1m in compensatory damages, marking the first time he has been ordered to pay any financial amount for his claims around Sandy Hook.

The next day, they then ordered the far-right conspiracy theorist to pay more than $45m in punitive damages to the parents.

But the fake news peddler may end up paying only a fraction of the punitive damages. The trial took place in Austin, Texas, and state law sets a limit on how high punitive damages can be.

In Texas, this limit stands at $750,000.

Jones would still have to pay this amount to each plaintiff, meaning that in this case he would end up paying $1.5m in punitive damages.

https://www.facebook.com/www.JOE.co.uk/videos/580876640377939/

But this would be just 3 percent of what the jury determined was a just punishment for his lies.

Jones' lawyer did bring up the state cap on punitive damages in court, claiming that the jury's verdict was too high.

Addressing his objection, Judge Maya Guerra Gamble said: "We do have laws in Texas where we claim to trust our juries and then we don't trust our juries, and that's true. And I'm sure the judgment will properly reflect that laws of Texas in that regard, so don't need to worry about that."

Mark Bankston, the lawyer for the parents, told Bloomberg Law that they would push back against the court if it moves to reduced the punitive damages to the state cap.

"We do not believe punitive damage caps are constitutional as applied to our case and will certainly litigate that issue if necessary," he said.

The Volokh Conspiracy

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

About The Volokh Conspiracy 

IMMIGRATION

The Rise of Private Refugee Sponsorship

The Uniting for Ukraine program and other new initiatives may open the door to a broader role for private citizens in sponsoring refugees.

ILYA SOMIN | 8.6.2022 

After an initial period when the United States accepted very few Ukrainians fleeing Russia's brutal invasion, admissions have ramped up in recent weeks, thanks in part to the Biden Administration's new Uniting for Ukraine program, which allows private citizens and organizations to sponsor Ukrainian migrants. These and other developments have led some to hope that the new policies herald a much broader shift to private refugee sponsorship. There is some basis for this optimism. But current policies have significant limitations that will need to be overcome in order to realize their full promise.

CBS recently summarized the growth of Ukrainian refugee admissions:

The U.S. received more than 100,000 Ukrainians in roughly five months following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, fulfilling President Biden's pledge of providing a temporary safe haven to those displaced as part of the largest refugee exodus since World War II, government statistics obtained by CBS News show….

Approximately 47,000 Ukrainians have come to the U.S. on temporary or immigrant visas; nearly 30,000 Ukrainians arrived under a private sponsorship program; more than 22,000 Ukrainians were admitted along the U.S.-Mexico border; and 500 Ukrainians entered the country through the traditional refugee system, the data show….

Only Ukrainians who entered the U.S. with immigrant visas or through the refugee admissions program have a direct path to permanent residency and ultimately, U.S. citizenship. These immigration pathways, however, typically take years to complete due to interviews, vetting and other steps.

Those who have arrived through the Uniting for Ukraine program, which was launched in late April to allow U.S.-based individuals to financially sponsor Ukrainians, were granted parole, a temporary humanitarian immigration classification that allows them to live and work in the U.S. for two years….

To fulfill Mr. Biden's pledge, DHS in late April set up the Uniting for Ukraine program, a free initiative that has drawn tens of thousands of applications from U.S. citizens and others hoping to sponsor the resettlement of Ukrainians, including their family members.

Since April 25, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has received 92,000 applications from U.S. individuals seeking to sponsor Ukrainians, DHS figures show. More than 62,000 Ukrainians have been granted permission to travel to the U.S. as of July 29, including the nearly 30,000 individuals who have arrived so far, according to the DHS data.

In early May, the Biden Administration issued a call for proposals for a pilot private refugee sponsorship program, that might eventually be expanded into a broader policy that goes far beyond Ukrainian refugees.

The Administration's recent moves are obviously an improvement over the anemic official refugee system, which admitted a record low of only 11,411 refugees in fiscal year 2021, despite Biden Administration promises to improve it, after the damage done under Trump.

In a July 27 Foreign Affairs article [unfortunately paywalled, but you can get around it for free], migration policy specialist Gregory Maniatis argues that these and other moves herald a "refugee revolution" under which private refugee sponsorship will increasingly augment and overshadow traditional government-controlled refugee admissions, enabling the United States to take in more refugees at less cost, and with less opportunity for reversal by a hostile administration:

The State Department is the main gatekeeper for the resettlement system, but other federal, state, and local agencies also play critical yet complicating roles. A resettlement agency has to sign a cooperative agreement that is more than 100 pages long and regulates such finicky details as how many forks must be in a refugee's kitchen…. Refugees endure an average of two years of security, health, and other types of vetting, languishing overseas in often distressing or dangerous settings. The system's complexity has grown to the point that even sophisticated national service and faith organizations feel frozen out….

The consequences of the United States' narrow, professionalized approach to resettlement can be seen by comparing it with Canada's program. During the Vietnamese boat lift in the late 1970s, Ottawa opened up resettlement to the public through private sponsorship rather than insisting on a system run exclusively by the government. Today, Canada welcomes about 40,000 refugees a year—which in relation to the overall population would be equivalent to some 350,000 refugees in the United States—the majority through sponsorship….

Nearly a third of Canadians say they have been a member of a sponsorship group or have supported one. As a result, public backing for refugees in Canada makes resettlement untouchable—unlike in the United States, where the Trump administration nearly destroyed the system with surprisingly little resistance. It is one thing for a legislator to be lobbied by refugee professionals. It is quite another if the advocates are the lawmaker's neighbors who are volunteering their time to integrate newcomers—and who themselves are benefiting from the experience. Entire communities have been revived after deciding to systematically welcome refugees…..

The United States should make the Canadian sponsorship model the national resettlement standard—and improve on it. That process is already underway. This past year has upended the outdated American resettlement system as a rush of communities of care—veterans seeking to support their displaced Afghan interpreters and allies, members of the Ukrainian diaspora, service organizations, faith groups, local governments, colleges and universities, and ordinary Americans throughout the country moved by the plight of Afghans and Ukrainians—have demanded to be part of the response to the crises. The Biden administration has improvised in creative ways to address the surge of interest and need. These innovations point the way to a more powerful, community-led system of welcoming refugees in the United States.

I agree with many of Maniatis' points. In a July 18 Washington Post op ed, co-authored with Canadian refugee policy expert Sabine El-Chidiac, I myself argued that the United States should adopt a system modeled on Canada's, with various improvements. We too believe such an approach would be a massive improvement on the current US refugee admissions policy, and we too think the Uniting for Ukraine program was a valuable step in the right direction. The same can be said for the potential pilot program for private refugee admissions reaching beyond Ukraine. And I too believe that policies helping Ukrainian refugees should be extended to those fleeing war and oppression elsewhere. Doing so is both the right thing to do on moral and strategic grounds, and likely to benefit America's economy and society.

But Sabine and I also emphasized that recent initiatives have serious limitations - most notably that they give participating migrants only temporary residency and work rights (two years in the case of participants in the Uniting for Ukraine program). In addition, unilateral executive policies can often easily be reversed by a future, more hostile, administration - much like the anti-immigration Trump Administration undermined traditional refugee admissions.

George Dawes Green: Why the past-and storytelling-isnever dead

Maniatis may well be right that community support will make private refugee sponsorship  harder to attack than the traditional government-controlled system. But an administration whose base primarily consists of the more xenophobic and restrictionist portions of the population might be inclined to ignore the opposition of these communities.

Ultimately, a truly firm basis for private refugee sponsorship will require legislative, as well as executive authorization. It will also necessitate giving those admitted permanent residency and work rights, as opposed to merely temporary ones. In the long run, we should go further, and allow many more people - especially those fleeing awful conditions - to migrate without having any kind of advance sponsorship at all. Doing so would create vast benefits for  current US citizens, as well as the migrants themselves.

In the meantime, recent administration initiatives are still useful steps in the right direction. The best should not be the enemy of the good! If nothing else, they have given the lie to claims that the US is incapable of absorbing far larger numbers of refugees.

Ilya Somin is Professor of Law at George Mason University, and author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom and Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter.

M&A IS MONOPOLY CAPITALI$M

Pfizer in talks on $5 billion acquisition

Pharmaceutical company is negotiating with Global Blood Therapeutics

By AFP
August 06, 2022


NEW YORK: American drugmaker Pfizer is close to a deal to purchase Global Blood Therapeutics, which manufactures a recently approved drug against sickle-cell anemia, for $5 billion, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

Pfizer, one of the top makers of Covid-19 vaccines, hopes to conclude talks with GBT within days, the newspaper said Friday, citing people close to the negotiations.

But it said other takeover candidates remain in the running.

GBT's sickle-cell treatment, marketed as Oxbryta, was authorized for those over 12 years old in 2019 but gained federal approval in December for children aged four to 11. The blood disorder affects millions.

Sales of Oxbryta helped the laboratory generate first-quarter turnover of $55 million (up 41 per cent), while the company registered a net loss of $81.4 million.

GBT, which is based in San Francisco, California, is to publish its second-quarter numbers on Monday.

Pfizer, for its part, saw its second-quarter turnover jump by 47 percent — to a record $27.74 billion — boosted by sales of its Covid vaccine and pills.

Its net profit soared by 78 percent, to $9.9 billion.

GBT shares on the New York Stock Exchange were up 33.03 per cent at the close on Friday, at $63.84, for a market capitalization of more than $4 billion.

Pfizer shares slipped by 1.18 per cent, to $49.27.

Related Stories

• US secures 105 million doses of Pfizer vaccine for fall
• US approves Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for youngest children
• Pfizer offers to sell medicines at cost to poorest countries

Can Dungeons & Dragons banish its racism problem?


Ed Power
Fri, 5 August 2022 

‘Stranger Things’ has introduced a younger generation to the popular tabletop roleplaying game (Courtesy of Netflix)

It is full of monsters, mayhem and magic. But could it be that the true villain in Dungeons & Dragons is institutional racism? That is the accusation directed at the popular tabletop role-playing game, with many in the gaming community expressing unease over its historical portrayal of fantasy races such as orcs and “dark elves” as inherently stupid, brutish and evil.

D&D is in the spotlight as never before thanks to Stranger Things, which has introduced the game to a new generation. And its profile will rise further next year with the release of a Dungeons & Dragons film, Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, starring Chris Pine and Hugh Grant. With a D&D television series and further movies planned, the ultimate goal of the game’s publisher, Wizards of the Coast, is a multi-headed fantasy franchise – a sort of Marvel Expanded Universe with swords and fireball spells.

But to achieve this, Wizards of the Coast must first confront what many see as its problematic legacy around race and representation. The issue first reared its head in earnest in the summer of 2020 as Black Lives Matters protests took place across the world. That June, Wizards of the Coast acknowledged that depicting orcs and drow – subterranean elves with dusky skin – as intrinsically wicked was problematic.

“Throughout the 50-year history of D&D, some of the peoples in the game – orcs and drow being two of the prime examples – have been characterised as monstrous and evil, using descriptions that are painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated,” Wizards of the Coast said in a message posted to its website. “That’s just not right, and it’s not something we believe in.”

The statement was welcomed by those players who have long felt perturbed with a fantasy universe where certain individuals are innately good and others bad. The issue has rumbled on, however. Wizards of the Coast hopes to go some way towards addressing it with its latest collection of D&D source material, Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, a compilation of adventures that draw on non-Western cultural traditions, published in the UK on Tuesday 9 August.

But some D&D fans say it isn’t enough to hold the publisher to account. Players must also do their bit. “Don’t just hand-wave racism away, as if it’s ‘just a game,’” says Paul Sturtevant, a D&D fan and co-author of The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past. “We gamers are always looking for others to take our hobby seriously so we should treat it seriously too.”

Yet to others, Wizards of the Coast is sucking all the fun out of fantasy roleplaying. Orcs in D&D fulfil the same function as Stormtroopers in Star Wars, goes the argument. They are cannon fodder for the players, who gain experience points and level up by overcoming adversaries. Change that and you’ve changed the game. “It’s short-sighted and counter-productive,” says Christian Twiste, a science fiction and fantasy author who runs the blog Confessions of a Conservative Atheist. “A game like D&D requires an adversary for the players to face off against and ultimately defeat, especially when much of the gameplay is devoted to fighting and killing monsters.”

Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel creates history as the first D&D manual written entirely by authors from minority backgrounds. In so doing, it rejects a Eurocentric vision that has defined fantasy back to Tolkien (who described the inhabits of the far south and east of Middle Earth as swarthy and warlike). Within its pages are adventures inspired by Mexico’s Day of the Dead and Middle Eastern bazaars. The chapter “Written In Blood” is meanwhile set in Godsbreath, a fantasy kingdom steeped in the Black experience of the American South. “Much of my family tree is rooted in the South of the United States so I immediately knew that I wanted to draw from that aspect of the African diaspora,” said “Written In Blood” author Erin Roberts in an interview on the official D&D website. “I wanted to create a big region to explore… in the Southern Gothic tradition.”

‘Dungeons & Dragons’ was a critical flop when it was released in cinemas in 2000,

 but the future of the franchise could be bright (Rex Features)

Radiant Citadel is a welcome first step, say those who feel that the game needs to change. “It’s a wonderful thing that Wizards has been hiring more people of colour to write for D&D’s official books,” says Sturtevant. “It’s especially encouraging that it seems that Wizards has hired these creators and given them a platform to write from their own experiences and create fantasy worlds that reflect their cultures with honesty and specificity.” The problem, he continues, is that ultimate control still rests with Wizards of the Coast and its corporate parent, boardgame and toy giant Hasbro. “Writers are brought on as freelance writers for one-off adventures, which means they aren’t the ones making editorial decisions about their work, or in a position to change some of the structural problems in the game, like character types, that perpetuate racism.”

The conversation around race and the appropriation of non-Western cultural traditions are ones around which D&D and the tabletop hobby have been able to skirt until recently. D&D was stupendously niche for most of its history; its fanbase predominantly (though, certainly not entirely) male and white. But the championing of role-playing games in Netflix’s Stranger Things and the rise of D&D podcasts such as Critical Role have introduced a new audience to this world – many of whom were struck by the promotion of racial archetypes and the presentation of orcs and drow as naturally deviant. The controversy is likely to continue with next year’s release of the aforementioned D&D movie, starring Chris Pine, Hugh Grant, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page and Sophia Lillis.

Two years ago, in the wake of Black Lives Matter, Wizards of the Coast hoped to head off questions about race by tweaking those problematic rules around orcs and dark elves, so that they were no longer innately evil and/or stupid. For instance, gamers choosing to play as a half-orc character no long suffer an automatic penalty to intelligence. It also rewrote racially insensitive material from past gamebooks, including a segment in the Curse of Strahd adventure in which a Roma-like culture, the Vistani, was characterised as lazy and untrustworthy.

Batiri Goblins attend the Wizards of the Coast introduction to the new Dungeons & Dragons storyline, ‘Tomb of Annihilation’, during a live streaming event in 2017 (Getty)

But if many players have cheered these changes, others have accused Wizards of the Coast of pandering to a subset of players. Christian Twiste argues that D&D simply is not the appropriate forum to discuss racial and class injustices. D&D is about adventure and escapism, he says. What is to be gained from turning it into something else? “You can hack and slash your way through a dungeon without worrying whether you might have slain an innocent orc. If the monsters are no longer evil, however, the players are no longer good. It doesn’t increase the moral complexity of the game. It compromises the morality of the characters, making them something less than heroes vanquishing evil.”

He is concerned that D&D may become unplayable. “I can’t see how the game will be much fun if your morally compromised, human-centric dwarf has to question every monster to determine their cultural history and potential culpability for raiding the neighbouring village before engaging in battle,” says Twiste. “When the local innkeeper informs the party the town was beset by kobolds [goblin-like monsters] from the nearby hills, are the players supposed to do a police lineup or something? Is this really the kobold that killed your daughter, or perhaps it was just a misunderstanding? It seems like these questions are far more suited to a college dorm room or faculty lounge than a game where most people are aspiring to be heroes.”

Without more inclusion in the creative space, ideas get stale, the same plots get recycled, and the hobby slowly dies

Gwendolyn Marshall, author of ‘Ancestry and Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5E'

That argument is, however, disputed by others in the gaming world. “Taking representation seriously makes for a more inclusive hobby, to be sure,” says Gwendolyn Marshall. Associate professor of philosophy at Florida International University and author of Ancestry and Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5E (that is, for the “fifth edition” of Dungeons & Dragons). “It also makes for better stories. Without more inclusion in the creative space, ideas get stale, the same plots get recycled, and the hobby slowly dies… A lot of the folks complaining about [Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel] simply don’t want to do the work of thinking new thoughts and trying out new forms of fantasy; they would rather fall back lazily on the same few tired, and problematic, tropes.”

What the conversation ultimately tells us is that D&D is no longer an under-the-radar affair. In the Eighties and Nineties, when it languished in nerdish obscurity, nobody cared whether or not D&D was politically correct. Most people had barely heard of it – apart from when it was briefly, erroneously, hilariously linked to devil worship in the US during the short-lived “Satanic Panic”. But now the hobby has grown up. In so doing, it has been forced to wrestle with some very adult questions concerning privilege and historic injustice. With Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, Wizards of the Coast has demonstrated that this is a debate it is prepared to have. As is always the case in D&D, what happens next is up to the players.

‘Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel’ is published in the UK on 8 August