Jailed Kremlin critic: Government has ‘failed to shut me up’

  

 

Russian opposition activist and municipal deputy of the Krasnoselsky district Ilya Yashin, top, steps down from a police truck to attend a hearing on his detention, at the Basmanny district court in Moscow, Russia, Friday, Sept. 9, 2022. Yashin, 39, is one of the few prominent opposition figures that refused to leave Russia despite the unprecedented pressure the authorities have mounted on dissent in recent years. (AP Photo/Dmitry Serebryakov)More

DASHA LITVINOVA
Fri, September 9, 2022

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin may be in jail, but he refuses to be silenced.

His social media accounts are regularly updated with anecdotes about his life in detention or video commentary criticizing President Vladimir Putin’s rule. He gives interviews to media outlets by providing written answers to questions through his lawyers from behind bars.

He uses court appearances as an opportunity to speak out against the Kremlin’s devastating war in Ukraine — which is exactly what he is being prosecuted for.

“So far the authorities have failed to shut me up,” Yashin told The Associated Press in a lengthy handwritten letter from a pre-trial detention center in Moscow, passed on via his lawyers and associates last week.


“The opposition should speak the truth and stimulate a peaceful anti-war resistance … It is very important to help people overcome their fear. But one can only truly motivate people with their own personal example,” the politician added.

Yashin, 39, is one of the few prominent opposition figures who has refused to leave Russia despite the unprecedented pressure the authorities have mounted on dissent in recent years. He says leaving Russia would have affected his authority and value as a politician.

A sharp critic of the Kremlin, a vocal ally of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny and an uncompromising member of a Moscow municipal council, Yashin was arrested in June. The authorities charged him with spreading false information about the Russian military — a new criminal offense for which he faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

The charges against Yashin reportedly relate to a YouTube livestream video in which he talked about Ukrainians being killed in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. He rejects the charges as politically motivated.

On Friday, a court in Moscow extended Yashin's detention for two more months, until Nov. 12. "Don’t worry, everything’s fine. Russia will be free,” the politician said as he was being escorted out of the courtroom by police.

Yashin wrote answers to the AP’s questions in his small cell in Moscow’s notorious Butyrskaya prison that he shares with several other people.

His day there starts at 6 a.m. and ends at 10 p.m., he wrote, and consists of a walk, three meals, a couple of inspections and lots of free time. So he writes and reads a lot to make use of it.

Last week, his parents visited him in detention. His mother, Tatyana, told the AP in a phone interview that he was “holding up well and not regretting anything.”

She said the risk of her son getting arrested has been there for years — since 2012, when arrests followed mass protests in Moscow over reports of widespread rigging at a parliamentary election. “But you know how it is: You always hope for the best,” Tatyana Yashina said. “Nevertheless, we were, of course, prepared.”

Yashin said he, too, was ready for the arrest.

After the authorities adopted a law that criminalized the spread of false information about the military, effectively outlawing all criticism of what the Kremlin calls “a special military operation" in Ukraine, “it became obvious: The security forces will come after all public opponents of Putin who refuse to emigrate,” Yashin said.

“So yes, I tried to prepare for prison as much as it was possible. I got my health in order, completed my dental treatments. Explained the situation, explained the risks to my family and loved ones. Prepared my home for a raid, gathered a team of lawyers in advance. And most importantly — I mentally prepared to take the heat.”

What did surprise him, Yashin said, was how much respect law enforcement officers treated him with —

In detention, both the inmates and the guards are genuinely puzzled to hear that the politician is facing 10 years in prison “for a few words against the war,” Yashin wrote: “In Russia, courts hand down shorter sentences for theft, assaults, rapes and sometimes even murders.”

With all protests suppressed by a brutal crackdown and most opposition leaders leaving the country, spreading the word has become the main effort for many.

Even though Navalny is in jail, his team continues to post video exposes of corruption and regular livestreams on the politician’s YouTube channels. The three most popular channels combined currently have more than 10 million subscribers.

Yashin’s own YouTube channel, regularly updated even after his arrest with news analysis and political commentary, has nearly 1.4 million subscribers. Most of his videos over the past six months have been dedicated to the war and criticizing the Kremlin for it.

“Demand for an alternative point of view has appeared in society,” Yashin told the AP.

Denis Volkov, director of Russia's top independent pollster Levada center, told the AP that the influence of independent sources of information in Russia has grown in recent years thanks to popular video blogs on YouTube as an alternative to state television.

“People read little, but watch a lot,” Volkov said.

Yashin urged ordinary Russians to help spread the word.

“Show your grandmother, who is used to watching TV, a couple of interesting channels on YouTube. Teach your relative from a small town to use VPN so that he can read the news on a blocked independent news site. Create a chat with friends and neighbors, share links, anti-corruption investigations and opinions there.”

Yashin said that both before his arrest and in detention, he has seen very little support for the war in Ukraine, despite the authorities' vast effort to control the narrative and weed out any criticisms or dissenting voices.

The Kremlin has insisted for months that there is overwhelming support for the invasion. Just this week, President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov reiterated once again that “the absolute majority” of Russians were behind the decision to send troops into Ukraine.

Behind bars, the war is widely and actively discussed, Yashin said, but there is either an understanding among those discussing it that Russia has been drawn into a major crisis, or disappointment at Moscow’s modest successes on the battlefield.

“I’m convinced that by getting involved in the war, Putin has started the countdown of his time in power. He went all in, but miscalculated…”

The final lines of his letter from prison offer his hope for the future. “I am convinced that my country, after all, will become part of a free and civilized world,” he says. “But no one will win this battle for us. It is only our responsibility.”

 

Eric Trump comes under fire for claiming his father has done more for Christianity than anyone

Sarah K. Burris
September 11, 2022

Eric Trump on Facebook.

Eric Trump, the middle son of a former president, Donald Trump, made a curious claim that is sending some Christians to turn their heads.

“There’s no one who’s done more for Christianity than Donald Trump. No one," said the younger Trump.

Former Trump lawyer, Jenna Ellis, noted that the video left out that Eric Trump was talking about "religious freedom" when he said that no one had done more for Christianity. Those viewed as the biggest fighters for religious freedom tend to be the founding fathers, who wrote into the Constitution that Americans could think and believe what they want. The right seems to believe that religious freedom means that churches can do whatever they want and that right-wing Christianity is more powerful than the government and "religious freedom" only applies to Christianity to the right-wing.

It's a claim that many dispute, as Jesus Christ is generally considered to have done the most for Christianity since it's named after him.

"No one has done more for Christian nationalism, not for Christianity. That Eric Trump doesn’t know the difference is the problem," tweeted Baptist Pastor George Mason.

Brian Tyler Cohen's podcast account noted that he could think of at least "one or two people" who did more than Trump.

Actor Ken Olin also found the claim absurd, noting that even Eric Trump's "ignorance is ignorant."

Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger (IL) is a frequent foe of the Trump family. He also suggested Jesus might be a better choice, if not him, Billy Graham was his other suggestion.

"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves," Jesus said in his Sermon on the Mount, some of those commenting on Trump recalled.

Others were quick to suggest people like Mother Teresa, who was declared a saint by the Catholic Church in 2003. Another mentioned Pope Francis, who leads the Catholic church, and is said to have "divine institution, supreme, full, immediate, and universal power in the care of souls," according to the Catechism.

There were many other options from those online and they all appeared to be people who dedicated their lives to charity, service and God.

See the clip from Eric Trump's speech in the video below or at the link here:

 

YOU WOULD HAVE THOUGHT ERIC WOULD HAVE BEEN AWARE OF THIS

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
Nikola Founder Milton Faces New York Jury in His Toughest Sales Job

Trevor Milton sold investors on the idea his company was building the truck of the future. Now, he’ll have to persuade a jury his alleged lies weren’t material.


Bloomberg News
Chris Dolmetsch
Publishing date:Sep 12, 2022 

A Nikola Tre battery-electric heavy duty truck at the Nikola Corp.-Iveco SpA joint venture electric truck plant in Ulm, Germany, on Wednesday, Sept. 15, 2021. Nikola Iveco Europe GmbH hosted an event where its partner Iveco -- the commercial-vehicle unit of CNH Industrial NV -- is preparing to start series production of Nikola Tre heavy-duty trucks by year-end.

 PHOTO BY ANDREAS GEBERT /Bloomberg


(Bloomberg) — Trevor Milton sold investors on the idea his company was building the truck of the future. Now, he’ll have to persuade a jury his alleged lies weren’t material.

Two years after he abruptly resigned from the board of Nikola Corp. — the company he started — Milton is set to go on trial in New York on securities fraud and wire fraud charges, facing a maximum prison term of 25 years if convicted of the most serious charge.

Milton, who founded Nikola in 2014, built the startup into a company that in June of 2020 was valued at $34 billion, more than Ford Motor Co. at one point. The meteoric rise — despite having no revenue at the time — was buoyed by investors in the height of the SPAC craze seeking the next Tesla Inc.

US prosecutors plan to argue that the Utah man induced retail investors to buy Nikola shares by making false statements about the company’s products and capabilities. Milton’s lawyers will likely make one focus of his defense the advice he relied on from the company’s lawyers and executives, saying that’s what determined what he told shareholders and he had no intent to defraud anyone.

“They shared responsibility with Mr. Milton for the accuracy of the investor communications,” Kenneth Caruso, a lawyer for Milton, said at a pretrial conference last week.

US District Judge Edgardo Ramos last week denied Milton’s request to use in the trial advice that Nikola General Counsel Britton Worthen gave other employees, which was intended to bolster his defense. But he will be able to use communications between himself and Worthen to rebut prosecutors’ claims that he made public statements he knew were false.

Milton’s attorneys have pointed to evidence to support that argument, including a series of emails between Nikola executives and the founder about a podcast in which he allegedly misled investors — which they say show his statements were approved by the company’s legal team.

The Phoenix-based Nikola kickstarted the SPAC trend among electric-vehicle makers in June 2020, three months before Milton stepped down as chairman, by combining with the blank-check acquisition vehicle VectoIQ.

Milton’s resignation followed a report from short seller Hindenburg Research that claimed Nikola deceived investors by making non-working products appear fully functional and staging misleading videos. Nikola shares plummeted on the report, which also spurred probes by the US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Nikola shares closed at $5.42 Friday, valuing the company at $2.3 billion.

Milton called the report a “hit job,” and Nikola pushed back on Hindenburg’s allegations that it had overstated the capabilities of some of its earliest test trucks, saying the report underestimated its ability to produce hydrogen for its fuel-cell-powered trucks. Milton resigned saying the “focus should be on the company.”

Even if prosecutors can convince jurors that Milton lied to shareholders, to show he committed securities fraud they will also have to prove that the alleged misrepresentations were material to a reasonable investor, or central to their decision to invest.

Nikola sees itself as a leader in clean-energy heavy vehicles in a high-potential field for zero emissions trucks that includes other aspirants such as Tesla Inc. and legacy players like Volvo AB. The company built 50 battery-electric semis in the second quarter, delivering 48 to dealers and missing its own forecast.

The trial before Ramos is scheduled to begin with jury selection Monday and opening arguments likely as early as Tuesday. The trial is expected to last four to five weeks and is to feature testimony from experts from both sides as well as Nikola employees, including engineers who worked on prototypes, and company shareholders.

Milton’s relationship with the company he founded has been strained since he stepped down. They have fought over whether documents are privileged and Milton — Nikola’s largest shareholder, with more than 12% of the stock — opposed a company measure this year to issue new shares. The measure was approved by shareholders.

Nikola started making payments on a $125 million civil settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in February. The company has said it will seek reimbursement from Milton for those costs, even though it continues to cover his legal fees.

The case is US v Milton, 21-cr-478, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan.)

Germany faces a looming threat of deindustrialisation

Sun, September 11, 2022 

08 September 2022, Lower Saxony, Hanover: A bakery saleswoman stands in the early morning in the Fahrenhorst bakery, which is deliberately lit sparingly. The North German guild bakeries draw attention to increased energy costs, which threaten the existence of many businesses, with the campaign "We're running out of light - today the light and tomorrow the oven?" on September 8. Photo: Julian Stratenschulte/dpa

In a book from 1945 entitled “Germany Is Our Problem”, Henry Morgenthau, America’s treasury secretary, presented a proposal to strip post-war Germany of its industry and turn it into an agricultural economy. Though his radical proposal had some influence on Allied plans for the occupation of Germany after Hitler’s defeat, it was never implemented.

Almost 80 years later Vladimir Putin might achieve some of what Morgenthau, whose parents were both born in Germany, had in mind. By weaponising the natural gas on which Germany’s mighty industrial base relies, the Russian president is eating away at the world’s fourth-biggest economy and its third-biggest exporter of goods. It doesn’t help that at the same time, Germany’s largest trading partner, China, which bought €100bn of Germany goods last year, including cars, medical equipment and chemicals, is in the midst of a severe slowdown, too. A national business model built in part on cheap energy from one autocracy and abundant demand from another faces a severe test.

The consequences could be dire for Deutschland ag: German blue chips have suffered more amid this year’s market turmoil than counterparts elsewhere, dropping 27% year to date in dollar terms, almost twice the fall in Britain’s ftse 100 or America’s s&p 500 index. “The substance of our industry is under threat,” warned Siegfried Russwurm, boss of the bdi, the association of German industry, last month. The situation was looking “toxic” for many businesses, he said. And through globalised supply chains the poison could spread to the rest of the industrialised world, which relies heavily on German manufacturers.

German industry’s biggest problem is the spiralling cost of energy. The electricity price for next year has already increased 15-fold, and the price of gas ten-fold, says the bdi. In July industry consumed 21% less gas than in the same month last year. That is not because companies used energy more efficiently. Rather, the fall was due to a “dramatic” reduction in output. Since June the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a think-tank, has revised down its forecast of gdp growth in 2022 by 0.7 percentage points, to 1.4%. It now expects the economy to contract in 2023 and inflation to exceed this year’s with 8.7%.

Smaller firms are hardest hit. According to a survey in July fti Andersch, a consultancy, of 100 medium-sized “pocket multinationals” of Germany’s Mittelstand, smaller companies are struggling more than bigger ones. Almost a quarter of firms with fewer than 1,000 employees have cancelled or declined orders or are planning to do so, compared with 11% of those with more than 1,000 staff. In the land of more than 3,000 types of bread, around 10,000 bread producers are struggling as never before in post-war Germany. They need electricity and gas to heat ovens and run kneading machines, even as they contend with the higher costs of flour, butter and sugar, as well as of bakers. A shop assistant at the 127-year-old Wiedemann chain of bakeries in Berlin reports that the firm is desperately short-staffed and trying to save energy by, for instance, keeping outlet ovens cool and baking all the loaves at headquarters.

Another recent survey, by the bdi, of 600 medium-sized companies found that almost one in ten interrupted or reduced output because of high input costs. More than nine in ten said that rocketing prices of energy and raw materials is a big or existential challenge. One in five is thinking about transferring part or all of their production to another country. Two-fifths said investments in greener production methods will have to wait.

Bigger energy-intensive business such as chemicals or steel face a similar predicament, exacerbated by the need to compete with rivals in other countries where the cost of energy is lower. basf, a chemicals giant which uses natural gas for both energy and as an input, has already cut production and may need to slash it further. Thyssenkrupp, another big steelmaker, has lost half its market value since January.

Big multinational companies often have factories in other countries where energy is cheaper. But many, including basf, with its vast city-sized complex in Ludwigshafen, nevertheless continue to produce a lot at home. Even if costs of raw materials moderate, as some have begun to, and the government comes to the rescue with energy-related support, as it has vowed, cost pressures will not disappear. In particular, companies are bracing for a brutal round of annual wage negotiations with Germany’s powerful unions. Those between ig Metall, Germany’s biggest union, and employers in the mighty car industry, are about to kick off. “The ig Metall will not accept anything below an 8% increase,” predicts Ferdinand Dudenhöffer of the Centre Automotive Research, a think-tank.

The higher costs are becoming harder to pass on to consumers. Hakle, a big maker of loo paper, has filed for insolvency after being unable to pass onto clients the huge increase of production costs. After several fat years, carmakers’ order books are thinning as inflation burns a hole in car buyers’ wallets. The next two or three years will be very lean, predicts Mr Dudenhöffer. Car companies cannot easily modify production processes. Instead, they will cut costs by slashing spending on administration, and research and development. As with the Mittelstand, the car industry’s belated efforts to reimagine itself for an era of electric and self-driving cars are likely to suffer a setback as a result. Some will probably relocate production to lower-cost countries.

Holger Schmieding, chief economist of Berenberg, a private bank, predicts that, with energy prices likely to remain high for a while, 2-3% of Germany’s industrial companies that use energy-intensive production processes will relocate aboard. A higher share of industrial firms will reduce their production this winter and next. ArcelorMittal, another steel behemoth, has announced plans to close down two mills in northern Germany and put employees on furlough. Stickstoffwerke Piesteritz, Germany’s largest producer of ammonia and urea, two important chemical inputs, shut down its ammonia factories in Saxony-Anhalt.

In a demonstration of how such moves ripple through supply chains, the shutdown has triggered an shortage of AdBlue, a basf product that is crucial for cleaning the engines of the diesel trucks that help connect Germany to markets abroad. Stefan Kooths of the Kiel institute forewarns of “an economic avalanche is rolling towards Germany”. Before long the reverberations will be felt by German companies’ global customers.

© 2022 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

Quiet quitting has a polar opposite:

The FatFIRE movement of people

 working hard to retire early on a

 ‘massive stash’

Sophie Mellor 

Sun, September 11, 2022 

Getty Images

Joshua decided to take stock of his life around a year ago. He had just turned 33 and, after almost a decade of working six days a week at a startup that had reached a nine-figure valuation, he had squirreled away $2 million in liquid capital, $10 million in illiquid stock options, and a couple of real estate investments.

The bulk of his saving came from a recent equity sale of his startup, but Joshua has lived what he calls a "fairly modest life." He didn't buy new clothes, he put money into long-term investments whenever he could, and as he was working all the time, he took very few holidays and didn't have many hobbies.

To build up the level of capital required to retire, Joshua had sacrificed a lot.

"I guess I am 33 and unmarried," he jokingly told Fortune. "But the biggest sacrifice is free time. There is no work-life balance. That's gone."

Once he realized he had made enough to never have to work again, Joshua decided it was time to retire. He had always dreamed of building a house in the country and living off his passive investments as he traveled the world. Who doesn't?

While retiring at 33 is uncommon in any part of the world, stopping young was always Joshua's ultimate goal. “Life is short, and allowing myself to live life to its fullest, to go with the flow and give space for it, to be free from the system, that has been my focus,” Joshua told Fortune.

Joshua, who did not wish to use his last name, is a believer in FatFIRE, which stands for Fat Financial Independence and Retirement Early.

While "quiet quitting" has dominated headlines and young workers flock to social media to vent their frustrations over the downsides of employment and capitalism, people like Joshua have instead turned to FatFIRING.

If quiet quitting is simply doing the minimum a job requires in a quest for a more equal work/life balance, FatFIRING advocates the opposite. It tells people to lean into work rather than lean out, and hustle as much as they can to achieve the same thing most workers want: freedom.

How does FatFIRE work?

The online forum subreddit r/fatFIRE is filled with people discussing investments, sharing tips, and telling stories of getting FatFIRED—the day when they retire in their 30s or 40s after having stockpiled millions of dollars in liquid and illiquid investments.

Described with the tagline “retire with a fat stash,” FatFIRErs try to retire with a budget that allows them to spend around $100,000 a year.

They often work at large tech companies, corporate law firms, or their own startups, earning millions over their career. They then invest their money in small businesses and properties that make good, reliable margins, in order to get to the point where working for money is never something to think about again.

The concept of FIRE is not new, and first emerged in the United States in a 1990s newsletter called The Tightwad Gazette. Since then, the movement has grown online and has expanded its definition to include LeanFIRING—where one looks to live frugally in order to escape the 9 to 5 via early retirement—and FatFIRE.

FatFIRE split from the FIRE movement in 2016, motivated by people who were interested in FIRE but wanted a much higher standard of living. It was launched by a Reddit user who said he had grown tired of all the “noise of ‘just cut your expenses down to the bone and buy vanguard index funds’ parroted endlessly” and wanted to make a smaller community of richer FIRErs.

The subreddit r/fatFIRE ended up overtaking both the FIRE and leanFIRE versions and now has over 325,000 members who are ambitious, career-oriented, and value time and freedom above all else.

Generational divide

As different as they seem, both quiet-quitters and FIRERS want the same thing, according to Alex Bryson, a professor of quantitative social science at the University College of London.

To understand what that is, he points to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—the five-tier model often depicted in a pyramid shape.

At the bottom of the pyramid there are physiological needs like food and shelter; one higher there is safety—which often comes in the form of financial security; above that is love and belonging; then esteem; and finally self-actualization, or the highest level of physiological development.

Bryson argues that the new generation of workers are "questioning the link between paid work and reaching the top of that pyramid,” which causes trends such as quiet quitting and FatFIRING to emerge.

Age often determines which group people join. While young people early on in their careers may look towards quiet quitting and disengaging as a means to a more fulfilling life, millennials and older generations who have worked for years might be more inclined to subscribe to FatFIRING.

Job satisfaction across all generations is the lowest it’s been in 20 years, according to a report from insurance and benefits company MetLife. A recent survey from Gallup also found that around 50% of 15,000 U.S. workers above the age of 18, were “not engaged" at work, meaning they felt detached from work and were doing the bare minimum.

As disengagement from work reaches an all-time high and employers are hanging onto their employees by a thread, it may pave the way for a generation of new FIRERs.

Be careful what you wish for

FatFIRING is not open to everyone, of course—and may be unrealistic (and unhealthy) for many.

According to Bryson, those who can FatFIRE are a subset of people who “are fortunate enough to be in the position, who have valuable skills or opportunities that allow them to max out on income early on.

"Most people are never in that position.”

Dana J. Menard, founder and financial planner at Twin Cities Wealth Strategies, puts a number on it: He says that only around 10% of the population have what it takes to achieve FatFIRE status. And for those who do, there are dangers.

Menard argues the major risk of following a FatFIRE way of life is what happens after FIRING is achieved: “One of the biggest downsides that I see…is that once they attain that ultimate goal of 'retirement', they’re miserable. The idea of retirement is much better than the reality of retirement.”

Taking away the social construct that traditional work gives people can have a negative impact on mental health, he says, and leaves some people finding themselves “just plain bored.”

Bryson from Oxford University agrees, arguing that “maxing out and then stopping is fraught with problems.” There is an inherent risk of burnout with trying to work as much as you can to retire early, he says, and even when successful, FatFIRERs “have no real idea of how you're going to feel if you go from one to zero.”

Indeed, on the r/fatFIRE community board there are many warnings from people who have suddenly decided to quit all work and go travel, only to find themselves racked with mental health issues caused by loneliness.

But for many others, the goal of FatFIRING is still a dream worth pursuing. For these, one of the highest ranking posts ever made on r/fatFIRE subreddit, from user Snoo68013, could act as the rallying cry of the movement: "Have good food. Enjoy the relations. Workout and enjoy sex. Sleep well. Call your parents. That’s all there is to life. Greed has no end.

"Repeat after me. Time is the currency of life. Money is not."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

How Justice Antonin Scalia created this chaos
Paul Rosenberg, Salon
September 11, 2022

Justice Antonin Scalia (Flickr/Stephen Masker)

LONG READ

A string of recent election results — including the Kansas abortion amendment and special elections for House seats in New York and Alaska — make it clear that the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade has enormous political consequences, and could even end up preserving the Democrats' hold on Congress this year. But the court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization wasn't the only earth-shaking break with precedent in the last two weeks of its term. Even if Democrats do hold onto Congress and somehow codify Roe into law (an unlikely set of outcomes) that would only affect one aspect of the vast sweep of policy change the court's rulings portend.

The new book by UC Berkeley Law School dean Erwin Chemerinsky, "Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism," shows how fundamental those changes could be and focuses on the bogus legal reasoning known as "originalism," which plays such a crucial role in justifying this sudden and sweeping assertion of judicial power.

Originalists claim to be guided by the original meaning of the Constitution and argue that everyone else is swayed by their own subjective values in groping for other kinds of reasoning. Chemerinsky, as it happens, has first-hand experience in drafting a constitution of sorts. He chaired the Los Angeles Charter Commission, an elected body that rewrote the charter for the second-largest city in the U.S. (in collaboration with a parallel appointed body) just over 20 years ago. So his argument that originalists' key claims about constitutional meaning are simply false carries significant weight. Even while writing the L.A. charter, Chemerinsky says, there often wasn't one unanimously agreed-upon meaning for its specific language, and that was even less true after the fact. Over the course of the last 20 years, he reports, questions have arisen that weren't even considered in the drafting process.

There's considerable evidence that the same was true of the Constitution written in Philadelphia 235 years ago as well, but none of the framers are still around to confirm that. Chemerinsky doesn't use his personal experience as the central argument of his book, but it clearly underscores the gap between the sweeping claims made by originalists and the granular, often difficult-to-discern nature of constitutional reality. That should make all of us willing and eager to seek understanding from a variety of different approaches and points of view. which is what the vast majority of judges have done throughout most of our constitutional history.

Much of Chemerinsky's book is devoted to explaining the five biggest problems that originalists face, any one of which is arguably fatal to their dogmatic claims. The argument mentioned above is part of the epistemological problem, meaning the impossibility of finding a single fixed meaning that simply does not exist. What's just as bad is the abhorrence problem, meaning that sometimes the original meaning of the Constitution is clear enough, but the results of an "originalist" interpretation would be morally abhorrent to most Americans today. Then there's the incoherence problem: If originalism is the correct approach, then originalism itself must be written into the Constitution. But it isn't, and Chemerinsky concludes that the only true originalist position, paradoxically or otherwise, is to reject strict originalism.

Chemerinsky explores these and two other problems in five central chapters of his book, while also providing a historical introduction and a discussion of why originalism is attractive to so many conservatives. Ultimately, he argues forcefully for an alternative view, a more pluralistic approach that seeks understanding from different sources, as judges have been doing for hundreds if not thousands of years. He concludes with a reflection on the dangers that originalism poses to the rights and freedoms that Americans today have come to cherish or, perhaps foolishly, have taken for granted.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

The title of your book, "Worse Than Nothing," is a direct response to Justice Antonin Scalia's claim that whatever the faults of originalism's faults may be, he had a theory, while the critics of originalism had nothing. Before digging into the details, what's your bottom-line response to this claim?


As the title suggests, I think originalism is a very dangerous approach to constitutional law, and in this instance I think it really is worse than nothing.

The core of your book lays out five key problems with originalism, but you begin by describing its rise in the first chapter and its allure in the second. What drove that rise and how did it proceed?

In large part it was the conservative political movement that drove originalism. The Federalist Society embraced originalism, and nurtured a belief in it. Also, I think it was simply about who has won elections. If Hillary Clinton had won the presidency in 2016 and if she had replaced Justices Scalia, Kennedy and Ginsburg, we wouldn't be talking about originalism today. It would be a fringe theory on the Supreme Court that a group of conservative law professors kept alive. But Trump appointed three conservatives, joining conservatives who were already there, and that is causing originalism to be in the ascendancy.


Why is originalism worrying, and how does this echo the 19th-century dominance of the legal doctrine known as "formalism"?

I think it's a simplistic theory. It says, "We don't want judges to impose their own values. We want judges to discover the law and mechanically apply it." That's formalism, which has always had an intuitive appeal, because it seems to take out of decision-making individual biases, preferences and ideology. So originalists say, "We're going to discover the original meaning of the constitutional provision and apply it. These other people are all making it up, imposing their own values."

The first of the key problems you tackle is the epistemological problem. You begin by talking about your experience as chair of the elected L.A. Charter Commission. How did that experience illuminate the problem of determining meaning in the Constitution?


Some scholars have persuasively argued that the framers of the Constitution didn't believe in originalism, and therefore if one is to follow the framers' intent or the original understanding, one has to abandon originalism.

A charter for a city in California is much like its Constitution. It creates the institutions of government, it allocates power and it even provides more protection of rights than exist under federal or state law. I went through the two-year experience of chairing a commission to draft the charter and inevitably, issues of interpretation arose. They came up soon after the charter was adopted, and they continue to arise now. Just yesterday I got a memo concerning certain issues in the Los Angeles charter that are much in the news. What I have discovered was that, almost always, the issues that are arising now are ones that we didn't consider then, even though the "then" was very recent. And when we did consider them, there was a difference of opinion about what we intended and what we meant.

The reason this informs me is that, if we couldn't decide the original meaning of the charter right after it was adopted, when all the commissioners were then still alive, how can we do so for a constitution that was written in 1787?


One of the key problems in establishing "original meaning" is the level of abstraction. How does shifting the level of abstraction change the meaning?

If the original meaning of the constitutional provision is stated at a very abstract level, then any result can be justified. At the most abstract level, the Constitution is about liberty and equality, separation of powers. But the constraint that originalists purport to get is gone when the original meaning is stated in a very abstract way. On the other hand, if we focus on the original meaning at a very concrete and specific level, then the Constitution becomes unacceptable. Then Brown v. Board of Education [on school desegregation] was wrongly decided, Loving v. Virginia [on interracial marriage] was wrongly decided.

In Chapter 4, "The Incoherence Problem," you argue that there's no indication the Constitution meant to create judicial review, much less originalist judicial review, and in fact that there's evidence to the contrary. So an originalist reading actually requires abandoning originalism. Can you elaborate on that?


An originalist would say that all aspects of the Constitution are to be determined by its original meaning. That would have to include the question of whether there should be the power of judicial review at all. In fact, the text of the Constitution says nothing about the power of judicial review, and it wasn't explicitly discussed at the Constitutional Convention. It would seem, then, that from an originalist perspective there shouldn't even be judicial review. But if there is judicial review, then how, from an originalist's perspective, should courts go about interpreting the Constitution? Scholars such as Jeff Powell at Duke have, I think, persuasively argued that the framers of the Constitution didn't believe in originalism, and therefore if one is to follow the framers' intent or the original understanding of the Constitution, one has to abandon originalism.

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In Chapter 5, "The Abhorrence Problem," you focus on three repugnant results of originalism: If we go by clear and original intention, then segregation and racial discrimination generally are permissible, for example, and the First Amendment allows government to prohibit blasphemy and seditious libel. I'd like to focus on the first example. because it involves the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education. You quote from Chief Justice Earl Warren's opinion, which explicitly rejected originalism. Talk about the originalists' problem with the Brown decision — how they try to deal with it and how they fail.


The central problem with Brown, from an originalist perspective, is that the result can't be justified under originalism. The same Congress that voted to ratify the 14th Amendment also voted to segregate the District of Columbia public schools. There's no indication whatsoever that Congress, in proposing the 14th Amendment — or the states, in ratifying it — saw it as outlawing segregation. Brown v. Board of Education was first argued to the Supreme Court in the October term of 1952. The justices couldn't come to a decision and asked for re-argument, focusing on the intent of the framers with regard to segregation. Those briefs were filed, the case was re-argued and then Chief Justice Warren, writing for the unanimous court, said, "We can't focus on originalism, we can't turn the clock back. Education plays a far different role in society today than it did in 1868."

From an originalist perspective, the result of Brown v. Board of Education can't be justified. There's no indication whatsoever that Congress saw the 14th Amendment as outlawing segregation.

Originalists try to get around this embarrassment in some ways. They try to state the goal of equal protection at an abstract enough level that Brown becomes permissible — but then originalism becomes indistinguishable from non-originalism. There's another attempt at this: The most famous one is by Stanford Law professor Michael McConnell in the Virginia Law Review, where he points especially to a statute adopted in 1875 that outlawed segregation. There are many problems with McConnell's approach. As he himself concedes in the article, there's no evidence that when Congress ratified the 14th Amendment, it meant to outlaw segregation. Also, 1875 is not 1868, when the 14th Amendment was adopted. There's no reason to believe that what they did in adopting a statute in 1875 is the same as what they meant to accomplish with a constitutional provision.


In chapter 6, "The Modernity Problem," you highlight three issues. Two of those deal with specific kinds of technological development — surveillance and communication — and one is much broader, the question of how the country's growth in size and complexity changes how it must be governed. Can you address both of those? Pick one of the technological developments to talk about and then take up the broader problem of growth, and explain how originalism fails to deal with these developments.

When the Constitution was ratified and the Fourth Amendment was adopted, it was thought that a search required a physical intrusion by the police. When the Supreme Court first defined a search, it wasn't until 1928, in Olmstead v. U.S., when the court said that wiretapping was not a "search" if it's done without going on somebody's premises. That makes no sense in terms of the current methods of police gathering information.

One of the most important recent Fourth Amendment cases was Carpenter v. U.S. in 2018, where the police obtained 127 days of cellular location information about a person and used it as key evidence in a prosecution that led to a sentence of 100 years. There was no physical trespass on a property, but it was an enormous invasion of privacy. When we look at other technology that exists now for police to accomplish searches — drones, surveillance airplanes, cameras on utility poles that monitor was going on 24 hours a day, seven days a week — it makes no sense to think of the Fourth Amendment solely as about physical trespass. The Supreme Court found in Carpenter that obtaining that cellular location information was a search, but Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, who are originalists, said it should take an invasion of property rights to count as a search. That just doesn't make sense when the government now can gather so much information without a physical trespass.


In terms of the growth in the size of the country, the United States in 1787 was 13 states. There was nothing like the methods of transportation or communication that exists today, so there could be a very small federal government. But in our modern technological world, the country spans the continent and includes territory as far away as Guam and Saipan. We need a government that has the tools to be able to deal with this. So the Thomas approach, which would radically limit federal government power, makes no sense in the current world.

Expansion the federal government dates back to the 1870s, at least. How has that balance changed over time and how has the reasoning about it shifted?

The size of the federal government has dramatically expanded as the country has expanded, as technology has developed, as the problems become more complex. In 1787, the framers wouldn't have thought of the need to have an Environmental Protection Agency to deal with the problem of pollution or greenhouse gas emissions. Today, climate change and greenhouse emissions, imperil human life on the planet. So we need a government that is has the tools to deal with the problems that we face. Unfortunately, the conservatives on the court, following originalism, have a very narrow view of congressional power. Justice Thomas, especially, would greatly limit the federal government's authority to deal with key social problems.

You write about the court striking down regulation during the New Deal, and then doing very little of that for generations, until just recently. What can we learn from that history?

the Supreme Court declared some key New Deal legislation unconstitutional for delegating too much power to the executive branch. The last time the Supreme Court invalidated a federal law as an improper delegation of power was in 1935. Now I think we have a majority on the court that wants to revive the non-delegation doctrine. They've also created something new called the "major questions" doctrine, saying that an agency can't rule on a major question of economic or political significance unless Congress gives clear direction. This is a sibling to the non-delegation doctrine. In fact, on June 30, 2022, in West Virginia v. EPA, the Supreme Court limited the EPA's power to regulate emissions from coal-fired power plants, using the major questions doctrine.

In Chapter 7 you deal with the hypocrisy problem, meaning that conservatives abandon originalism when it doesn't suit their purposes. Because of its central importance, I'd like to focus on the invalidation of the Voting Rights Act, which was not grounded in original intent or meaning. How do you explain what happened?

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was one of the most important laws adopted in my lifetime. It dealt with pervasive, long-standing disenfranchisement of voters of color, especially Black voters. In section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, it prohibits state and local governments from election practices or systems that discriminate based on race. But Congress knew that authorizing lawsuits to challenge race discrimination wouldn't be sufficient. Congress was aware that Southern states kept changing the voting practices to disenfranchise minority voters, and decided to create a preventative mechanism. Section 5 of the act said that jurisdictions with a history of race discrimination in voting had to get pre-approval or "pre-clearance" from the attorney general or a three-judge federal court before changing their election system.

Chief Justice Roberts said the Voting Rights Act violated the principle of "equal state sovereignty." But where is this found in the Constitution? Nowhere.

This provision was tremendously effective. There were hundreds of instances where pre-clearance was denied and there were thousands where state or level governments didn't even try because they knew they wouldn't get pre-clearance. This was enacted and upheld as constitutional, and when it was scheduled to expire it was re-enacted in 1982 for another 25 years. Then, when it was scheduled to expire in 2007, Congress held over 15 hearings and compiled a legislative history of over 10,000 pages documenting a continued need for pre-clearance. Congress then extended pre-clearance for another 25 years. It passed the Senate 98-0. There were only 33 "no" votes in the House. George W. Bush signed it into law.

But in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, the Court declared the pre-clearance law unconstitutional. What constitutional principle or provision did the Voting Rights Act violate? Chief Justice Roberts said it violated the principle of "equal state sovereignty," which holds that Congress must treat all states alike. But where is this found in the Constitution? Nowhere. It doesn't say that. In terms of original meaning, the same Congress that ratified the 14th Amendment also voted to segregate the District of Columbia public schools. In fact, the same Congress that ratified the 14th Amendment imposed military rule on Southern states, showing it didn't believe in equal state sovereignty.

After laying out all those arguments, you move into a threefold affirmative defense of non-originalism. I'd like to ask you to elaborate a bit on each of those arguments. The first one being that a pluralist epistemology is desirable.

My argument is that throughout American history, the Supreme Court has looked at many sources. Of course it looks at the text of the Constitution, it always was looking at the original meaning. It should look at history, look at precedents, look at modern social needs. I think to ignore any of those is undesirable. Why believe that all wisdom stopped in 1787, when the Constitution was adopted? Or when the Bill of Rights was adopted? Why not believe that there is wisdom to be gained from all of these different sources? That's my argument: It's desirable for the court not to be limited just to historical original meaning.

Your second argument is that a living Constitution that evolves by interpretation as well as amendment is desirable.

I think a preeminent purpose of the Constitution is to safeguard minorities of all sorts. Yet I think it is very difficult for the Constitution to do that unless there is evolution by interpretation. We shouldn't require a supermajority to protect the rights of minorities. Let me give you an example. We've already talked about Brown v. Board of Education, which would not have been decided in the same way under originalism. Loving v. Virginia, where the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional state laws prohibiting interracial marriage, wouldn't have been decided the same way under originalism. Using the Constitution to combat sex discrimination wouldn't work under originalism. Using the Constitution to combat sexual-orientation discrimination — the right to marriage equality for gays and lesbians — wouldn't work that way under originalism. It makes no sense to me to say that those changes can happen only through the amendment process. Then you're saying a minority can be constitutionally protected only if it has a supermajority behind it.

Finally, you argue that candor and transparency in constitutional decisions are desirable.

I think what originalists do is to impose their conservative values and then hide behind the originalist rhetoric to claim that they're just following the original meaning. I think that conservatives, as much as liberals, are imposing their values on constitutional decisions. Consider the cases in June of 2022. The book was finished in the summer of 2021, so it doesn't cover these. But the conservatives on the court found that there's no constitutional right to abortion, that there's very broad protection of gun rights, that there is a right of teachers to pray at high school football games and that the state is obligated to support parochial school education in certain circumstances. All of that is consistent with current Republican conservative ideology. It's not that the framers of 1787 to 1791 thought the same way as the current Republican Party. Conservatives are just imposing their values.

So what I say is: Let's all be transparent. Let's acknowledge that the court is making value judgments. No one should hide behind the guise of originalism.

It strikes me that all these arguments are important, because without honest argument, everything else is suspect. You frame it as "candor and transparency," but at bottom isn't it simply about honesty?

Yes. I think there is a dishonesty, a disingenuousness, in conservatives pretending that they're just following the original meaning and not making value choices. They're making value choices just as much as any liberal justice would.

Chapter 9 is titled "Why We Should Be Afraid." You focus on three areas where dramatic changes should be expected from originalist judges. Say a little bit about each of those. The first area is about rights of privacy and autonomy.

Originalists are imposing conservative values and hiding behind their originalist rhetoric. ... What I say is: Let's all be transparent. Let's acknowledge that the court is making value judgments.

As I mentioned, I finished the book in the summer of 2021. What I predict in the book that given the originalist views of the court in the conservative justices, that the court would overrule Roe v. Wade. It did that on June 24 in the Dobbs decision, where Justice Alito said that a right should be protected under the Constitution only within the text, part of the original meaning or to safeguard a long unbroken tradition. Justice Thomas wrote a concurring opinion in which he said the court should now overrule Griswold v. Connecticut, which allowed purchase of contraceptives; Lawrence v. Texas, which established the right of consenting adults to engage in private same-sex sexual activity; and Obergefell v. Hodges, where the court found a right to marriage equality for gays and lesbians. I think if one follows an originalist view, that is the conclusion. All of these rights protecting privacy and autonomy are endangered.

The second area concerns the scope of congressional power.

Originalists like Justice Thomas believe the federal government has very limited authority, but that doesn't work in the world of 2022. We need the federal government to be able to deal with things like air pollution and climate change, or technology. I worry that what we're going to see from the conservative justices is significant constraints on federal power to deal with urgent social problems.

Finally, the third area is about the Constitution's religion clauses.

Again, I finished the book in the summer of 2021, but I predicted you'd see aggressive protection of free exercise of religion. And we saw it at the end of June 2022 in Carson vs Makin, where the Supreme Court said that whenever the government gives aid for private secular education, the government is constitutionally required, even mandated, to provide that aid for religious education. The court said in Kennedy v. Bremerton Schools that a high school football coach had the First Amendment right to go onto the field after games and engage in prayer, even when joined by teammates and members of other teams. I think we're going to see in the next term rulings on the ability to violate anti-discrimination laws, based on free speech and religion.

Given all of the above, what conclusions do you draw about how the public should respond? What do we do?

I think it's important to see, when it comes to the Supreme Court, that it's an emperor with no clothes. It's a conservative court, it's conservative justices imposing their conservative values. It's not about originalism at all. They write opinions in terms of originalism, but we should see that as the fig leaf to cover what's really going on — conservative justices imposing conservative values.

It seems that you have a pluralistic approach to law, and to epistemology as well. You argue that there's no one right way to do things, no determinate outcome, but that a tradition can evolve out of diverse views coming into conflict with with some kind of self-regulation. That pluralism seems inherent in a liberal as opposed to conservative view of the nature of human knowledge and law. Do you have any broader thoughts about that?

Let me take an example. The Second Amendment says, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Do gun control laws violate that? If the government says that people need a concealed weapons permit, or if the government prohibits handguns, does it violate that? It depends on how you want to read the Second Amendment. If you read it as primarily about militia service, then those government regulations are allowed. If you read it as being about the right of individuals to keep and bear arms, those regulations aren't allowed. There's not an inherently right or wrong answer to the question. It's a choice.

It shouldn't surprise us the conservatives who embrace gun rights strike down gun control laws and liberals who favor gun control would uphold those laws. It's not about neutral methodology, but value choices by who's on the court. Virtually all constitutional provisions get litigated. There are arguments on both sides, and it's a mistake to think there's a right answer out there, waiting to be discovered.

I always like to end by asking: What's the most important question that I didn't ask? And what's the answer?

I think the most important question to ask is: What should we expect in the future? It's likely we're going to have a Supreme Court that is highly originalist for a long time to come. You look at the conservative justices: Clarence Thomas is 74, Samuel Alito is 72, John Roberts is 67, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are all in their 50s. So the rise of originalism that we've seen on the Supreme Court is likely to be followed for many years to come.

Doesn't this argue for the need to think about court expansion and other possible reforms, such as term limits? Elie Mystal of the Nation has suggested expanding the Supreme Court to the size of a district court, so you have a panel system that would decentralize its power.

I favor expanding the size of the Supreme Court. I think the current court is a result of Republican court packing — blocking Merrick Garland and rushing through Amy Coney Barrett. I think we're not going to see an expansion in the size of the Supreme Court, because we know Republicans would filibuster that in the Senate and there aren't the votes among Democrats to remove the filibuster.

I favor 18-year nonrenewable terms for justices. Too much depends on the accident of history and when vacancies occur, and life expectancy is a lot longer now than it was in 1787. Clarence Thomas was appointed to the court in 1991 when he was 43 years old. If he stays on the court until he's 90, he'll be a justice for 47 years. Amy Coney Barrett was 48 when she was confirmed. if she stays on the court until she's 87, the age that Justice Ginsburg was, she will be a justice until 2059. It's just too much power in too few people's hands for too long a period of time. But I don't think we're going to get 18-year term limits. I believe it would take a constitutional amendment and I don't see a constituency that cares enough to do the work.

I would oppose having a court with panels deciding cases. We have too much of a need for consistency and resolution, and I think when you have panels inevitably they disagree with one another. It would cause chaos.

'The work of a dilettante': Foreign policy expert dismantles Jared Kushner book claims

Tom Boggioni
September 11, 2022

Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner (Photo by Mandel Ngan for AFP)

In a column for Foreign Policy, international affairs analyst Steven Cook called out Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner for attempting to pass himself off as an innovative diplomat for his Middle East efforts, with Cook saying he broke no new ground and inflated his resume in his new book "Breaking History."

Admitting that Kushner "was a real player in a presidential administration of consequence," Cook explained that, in the former White House advisor's book, he offers neither a thoughtful reflection on the Trump team’s encounter with the Middle East or an explication of the intellectual underpinnings of the 'disruption' it claimed to bring to bear on the region’s thorniest problems."

Writing that the Kushner book is instead a "tedious" recounting of his days working on the Middle East for Trump, Fisher noted that what Trump's son-in-law boasted was his greatest achievement was just a rehash of previous efforts.

"The Trump administration’s efforts in the Middle East bore a striking resemblance to the bipartisan U.S. approach to the region that existed on Sept. 10, 2001: support for Israel and Washington’s Arab partners—regardless of the character of their regimes—and sustained pressure on Iran using mostly, but not exclusively, economic sanctions," he wrote before adding, "The gap between what Kushner imagined he was doing and what he was actually doing is not the only weakness of Breaking History."


RELATED: Jared Kushner's 'soulless' White House memoir torn to pieces in New York Times review

The Middle East expert added, "Kushner does not even pause to offer any insight into Mohammed bin Salman or the contradictions between the brutality of the crown prince’s approach and the positive changes he has wrought in the kingdom. And although Kushner wants to break from history, he accepts the parameters of the U.S.-Saudi relationship as they are and have long been: oil and security. He never considers the possibility that there might be risks for Washington by being so tightly bound to the crown prince."

"Still, when it comes to his and the Trump administration’s signature accomplishment in the Middle East, Kushner demonstrates a lack of self-awareness and depth," he wrote. "Looking back, Kushner cannot provide a single insight about how the Abraham Accords could or should affect the U.S. approach to the region."

Summing up the book, he concluded, "Breaking History is just words on 512 pages with no lessons, no meaning, and no new way of looking at old problems. If a book can be white noise, Kushner has produced it. If it was meant to set the record straight, it failed," before ending with a brutal: " It is the work of a dilettante.

You can read the whole piece here.

PRISON NATION U$A

Advocates seek to make prison work voluntary
2022/09/11

Florida inmates take a lunch break during their work shift.

 - Carl Juste/Miami Herald/TNS

Prisoners making license plates is a popular stereotype, but most of the nation’s 800,000 incarcerated workers hold jobs more similar to those on the outside: They cook and serve food, mop floors, mow lawns and cut hair.

Unlike other workers, though, the incarcerated have little say, if any, in what jobs they do. They face punishment if they refuse to work and are paid pennies per hour — if that.

The nation’s racial reckoning of the past few years has prompted a reevaluation of penal labor as a legacy of slavery, spurring people to question whether incarcerated people should be required to work in 2022. Activists are pressing for an end to work requirements or, if they continue, for higher wages.

Among the proponents of fully voluntary work in prison are the American Civil Liberties Union and the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago’s School of Law. The groups released a report in June calling, among other recommendations, for the elimination of any laws and policies that punish incarcerated people who are unwilling to work.

Other groups and lawmakers insist it’s appropriate to require prisoners to work to maintain prison facilities.

“We still have to run our prisons,” California state Sen. Steve Glazer, a Democrat, said in an interview. “We need hygiene, kitchen service and groundskeeping to keep our prisons going. Those are all appropriate work elements to being in prison.”

Glazer favors different legislative solutions to inequities in the criminal justice system. The California Senate recently asked the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for a plan to raise inmate pay.

“That is exactly the way we should be approaching this issue,” Glazer said.

Other states also are considering whether and how to improve prison work and pay.

In March, Colorado enacted a law that will pay the state minimum wage of $12.56 an hour to inmates who are within a year of their release date and work for private companies through the state-run Take TWO (for Transitional Work Opportunity) program.

“This is actually a very conservative approach,” Colorado state Rep. Matt Soper, the Republican sponsor of the bipartisan measure, said in an interview. “We need workers, and they need to gain skills before release.”

To pass the bill, though, Soper first had to explain why paying prisoners the minimum wage was a good idea.

“Some victims and victims’ advocacy groups opposed the idea at first, and then they wanted every dollar to come back in restitution,” he said. “But that’s not a good system, because we want (the former offenders) to have savings as seed money to restart their lives. My goal is to disrupt the current model of recidivism.”

But no Colorado inmates are participating right now. Take TWO, which began in 2019 and reportedly had about 100 participants in March, is “on a pause while we review and update logistics and criteria and address some of our immediate staffing shortages,” the Colorado Department of Corrections said in an email.

Prison minimum wage bills are pending in New York and Illinois. Since 2019, bills have failed in Arizona, Maryland, Mississippi, Nevada, Texas and Virginia, according to the ACLU.

Former inmate Samual Nathaniel Brown seeks more sweeping change. When COVID-19 struck, Brown had served more than 20 years of a life sentence in California state prisons for attempted murder and had a parole hearing coming up.

A janitor in a health care facility at the prison in Los Angeles County known as Lancaster, he was ordered to clean rooms that had blood, feces and other bodily fluids on the floors and walls.

“I was terrified for my life. I didn’t want to die this close to going home,” Brown, who suffers from asthma and has had a collapsed lung, said in an interview.

He was told if he did not work, he would be written up with a 115 disciplinary report, which Brown calls “the modern-day equivalent of the whip on your back.” A 115 signifies a serious violation of prison rules and can result in loss of “good time” credits for good conduct, delaying an inmate’s release date. Brown went to work despite, he said, a lack of social distancing and inadequate personal protective equipment.

Then, encouraged by his wife, he wrote a proposed amendment to the state constitution prohibiting involuntary servitude. Brown earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from California State University, Los Angeles while he was in prison. He was granted parole last December.

Brown’s amendment, introduced by California state Sen. Sydney Kamlager, failed in the legislature in June after the state Department of Finance estimated it would cost $1.5 billion in 2022 to pay the state’s $15 minimum wage to the 65,000 incarcerated Californians.

A similar push in Illinois also has stalled.

“Yes, it’s expensive,” Illinois state Sen. Robert Peters, a Democrat who twice has introduced a prison minimum wage bill in his state, told Stateline. “But we always find the money to build other things. Why are we not able to find the money for this? The challenge is: Why are there so many people in prison doing work that you can’t afford to pay them?”

State prisoners in Illinois did receive a pay increase last year — their first in 11 years. It was about 14 cents a day, on wages that average 85 cents to $2.50 a day. Peters wants the state to pay prisoners the state minimum wage of $12 an hour.

“There’s a disproportionate impact on Black and Hispanic people. It hits at class and race and gender,” he said.

A study last year by The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit that works on criminal justice issues, found that Black people are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of White people, and Hispanic people are incarcerated at a rate 1.3 times than White people.

But even though Illinois has a Democratic governor and Democrats control both chambers of the legislature, Peters’ bill, the End Prison Slavery Act, has gone nowhere.

“It’s very complicated,” Peters said. “We do have some legislators who want to do it, but they think the electorate is against it.”

Three Republican Illinois state legislators who are typically involved in criminal justice matters did not respond to requests for comment on the prison minimum wage bill.

Peters argues that incarcerated workers deserve wages sufficient to purchase essentials at the prison commissary, the only market to which they have access. He is also looking for ways to reduce commissary prices.

Proponents of making prison work more remunerative and meaningful also argue it’s not productive for society to keep incarcerated workers in dead-end jobs that fail to prepare them for employment outside the prison walls or allow them to accumulate some savings for when they are released. Studies show poverty and unemployment lead to recidivism.

Some crime victims groups also support raising prison wages, said Lenore Anderson, founder and president of the Alliance for Safety and Justice, an Oakland, California-based group that works to end mass incarceration, reduce crime and support survivors of violent crime.

The public assumes that people hurt by crime and violence would want the worst possible prison experience for those who committed the crimes, Anderson said.

“But that’s not what we find. People want them to succeed,” she said. “How do we know after someone has served time they’re prepared for living in society? That’s what rehabilitation, work and education programs do. Wages are part of that. It would be very consistent with smart rehabilitation to align prison wages with wages on the outside.”

The average wage nationwide for incarcerated workers who maintain prison facilities ranges from 13 cents to 52 cents an hour, according to the ACLU and Global Human Rights Clinic. In seven Southern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas — almost all work by prisoners goes unpaid.

“It’s not hard to imagine that’s a vestige of slavery,” said Jennifer Turner, the ACLU’s principal human rights researcher and primary author of the report, “Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers.”

An inmate survey by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, cited in “Captive Labor,” found 80% of state and federal prison workers have jobs that maintain the prison facilities. Only about 6.5% work in “correctional industries,” state-run programs that provide goods for state and local agencies, and less than 1% in private company work programs.

Cheap prison labor is profitable for states. The value of goods and services produced by correctional industries programs totaled $2 billion in 2021, according to the “Captive Labor” report, citing the National Correctional Industries Association. The value of labor to maintain prisons is unknown, although it was estimated in 2004 at $9 billion, according to the report.

New York Democratic state Sen. Zellnor Myrie introduced a bill last year that would increase prison wages to $3 an hour.

“In the depths of the pandemic, incarcerated New Yorkers, making 16 cents an hour, produced 11 million bottles of hand sanitizer for the rest of us while COVID raged inside our prisons and jails, killing dozens and sickening thousands,” Myrie said in an email. “We shouldn’t need a once-in-a-century virus to awaken us to the moral indignity of paying slave wages to those doing essential work.”

Myrie’s wage bill though, was eclipsed by other legislative efforts to change the criminal justice system in New York.

Advocates of prison changes put energy into mobilizing against a proposal floated by New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul in February to bring back contract labor to New York state prisons, after it had been banned for 100 years. Hochul’s proposal went nowhere, leaving the state’s incarcerated labor situation unchanged.

Worth Rises, a group based in New York City that works to end exploitation of incarcerated people and their loved ones, also found more enthusiasm to push the U.S. Congress to repeal the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which allows slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime, and for making phone calls for incarcerated people in state prisons free.

“We had to go with what resonates with the public — and it wasn’t the minimum wage” for incarcerated workers, said Bianca Tylek, founder and executive director of Worth Rises.

———

In Louisiana, the first US climate refugees find new safe haven

Agence France-Presse
September 02, 2022

An aerial view of the Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, which is rapidly falling victim to climate change

Joann Bourg stands in front of her new home, about an hour's drive from the low-lying Louisiana island where she grew up -- an area gradually sinking into the Gulf of Mexico.

"I'm very excited. I can't wait to just move on in," Bourg told AFP. "I've been waiting for this day forever."

Bourg is one of about a dozen Native Americans from the Isle de Jean Charles who have been relocated to Schriever, less than 40 miles (60 kilometers) to the northwest -- the maiden beneficiaries of a federal resettlement grant awarded in 2016.

They are the first so-called "climate refugees" in the United States, forced from their homes due to the consequences of climate change.

"The house we had back there on the island -- well, that has been home forever. Me and my siblings all grew up there, went to school down there," Bourg recalls. "It was peaceful."

But the family home -- as with many others on the island -- was destroyed.

There is only one road connecting Isle de Jean Charles to the mainland, and it is sometimes impassable due to high winds or tides.

Residents are mainly of Native American descent -- several tribes sought shelter on the island from rampant government persecution in the 1800s.

But climate change has transformed the island into a symbol of the scourge that plagues much of hurricane-prone Louisiana -- coastal erosion.

90 percent under water

Eventually, 37 new homes will be built in Schriever to accommodate about 100 current or former residents of Isle de Jean Charles, thanks to a $48 million federal grant initially allocated in 2016.

"This is the first project of its kind in our nation's history," state Governor John Bel Edwards, who was on site to see the residents close on their new properties, told AFP.

"We've had people over the years that we would buy their homes out and move them. But we've not done whole communities like this and moved them to one place before because of climate change."


Since the 1930s, Isle de Jean Charles has lost "about 90 percent" of its surface area to the encroaching bayou waters, explains Alex Kolker, an associate professor at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.

The island was already fragile, but climate change heightens the risks, he says -- sea levels are rising, the ground is sinking and erosion is rampant. More frequent and fiercer storms intensify the problem.

"This community is one of the most vulnerable communities in Louisiana, and Louisiana is one of the most vulnerable places in the US," Kolker says.

Dead trees

The road to Isle de Jean Charles is lined with dozens of homes, many of which are stripped down to the pilings.

A year ago, Hurricane Ida slammed into Louisiana as a dangerous category 4 storm; it was the second most damaging hurricane on record in the state, after the devastation of Katrina in 2005.

The storm ripped part of Chris Brunet's roof off his home.

The 57-year-old placed a sign in front of his home: "Climate change sucks."

Seemingly indifferent to the voracious and omnipresent mosquitos, and occasionally speaking the old Acadian French associated with the area, Brunet says hurricanes are nothing compared to so-called "saltwater intrusion" destroying canals and other waterways.

A few years ago, he finally agreed to relocation, adopting the view of the leader of his Choctaw tribe that it was the only way to preserve the island's dwindling community.

But those whose homes remain upright do not want to completely abandon their ancestral land.

Bert Naquin, who is moving into one of the new federally funded houses in Schriever, hopes to repaint her family dwelling in Isle de Jean Charles, despite her joy at being a first-time full homeowner.


"I plan on being down there a lot, because it's still my home," the 64-year-old Naquin said.

"This house up here is my house. But the island is always going to be my home in my heart."

© Agence France-Presse