'We just unionized Amazon': How two best friends beat the retail giant's union-busting campaign

Amy Goodman,

 Democracy Now!
April 04, 2022


We speak with the two best friends who led a drive to organize workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Staten Island, New York, and made history Friday after a majority voted to form the first Amazon union in the U.S. We speak with Christian Smalls, interim president of the new union and former Amazon supervisor, about how he led the effort after Amazon fired him at the height of the pandemic for demanding better worker protections. “I think we proved that it’s possible, no matter what industry you work in, what corporation you work for,” says Smalls. “We just unionized Amazon. If we can do that, we can unionize anywhere.” We also speak with Derrick Palmer, who works at the Amazon JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island and is the vice president of the Amazon Labor Union, about intimidation tactics the company used. Reporter Josefa Velásquez covered the union drive for The City and discusses what the victory means for the broader labor movement.

 

'Win for Workers Across America': Amazon Union Victory Inspires Progressives

"For everyone in the labor movement, it's time to dramatically rethink what we imagine is possible," said one organizer.

Amazon Labor Union organizer and president Chris Smalls celebrates following the successful unionization vote by workers at Amazon's JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York on April 1, 2022. (Photo: Andrea Renault/AFP via Getty Images)

BRETT WILKINS

April 1, 2022

Progressives hailed Friday's unionization vote by employees at an Amazon warehouse in New York City as a historic victory for workers across the United States and an inspiring call to action for others seeking to organize.

"This is the catalyst for the revolution."

In what's being described as a "tremendous upset" of "David versus Goliath" proportions, employees at Amazon's JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island—led by fired worker Chris Smalls—defeated a multimillion-dollar union-busting effort by one of the world's largest and most powerful corporations and voted to form the Amazon Labor Union (ALU).

"It's official," ALU tweeted after the vote. "Amazon Labor Union is the first Amazon union in U.S. history. Power to the people!"

"This is the catalyst for the revolution," Smalls, the ALU organizer and president, said while celebrating the vote.

Erica Smiley, executive director of the labor advocacy group Jobs With Justice, said in a statement that "this triumphant union victory over Amazon represents a watershed moment in the labor movement."

"Amazon finally got what it deserved today after the trillion-dollar company ignored the demands for safer working conditions in 2020 from its workers exposed to Covid and retaliated against Christian Smalls and others who led a walkout," she said.

Smiley added that "the closeness of the election in Bessemer, Alabama"—where Amazon employees are also fighting to form a union—"is a further indication of the genuine sea-change for all Amazon workers and workers everywhere."

Varshini Prakash, executive director of the youth-led climate group Sunrise Movement, cheered Friday's "win for workers across America," while hailing "worker victories at giant corporations like Amazon and Starbucks" as "part of a growing wave of activism that is paving the way for a more just economy."

Our Revolution, the progressive political action group spun out of Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) 2016 presidential campaign, called the results of the vote "a massive victory" and "an inspiration for working-class people across the U.S."


Dennis Hogan, who rose to prominence organizing a graduate students' union at Brown University, tweeted: "Doubtless there will be many takes on the Amazon Labor Union's historic and little-anticipated victory in the election today. But I think a lot of it boils down to this: for everyone in the labor movement, it's time to dramatically rethink what we imagine is possible."

"There's probably never been a better time to take big risks and win," he added. "Who knows how long this window of militancy and possibility will last. Months? Years? Impossible to say. But if you're not making big moves now you risk missing it."


Eric Blanc, an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University and author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers' Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics, tweeted that "the iron is hot—unions urgently need to seize the moment for new organizing."

Some labor advocates reported increased interest from workers seeing to form their own unions.


Others, including numerous Democratic U.S. lawmakers, called on Congress to pass the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, legislation whose provisions include penalties for employers who engage in union-busting activity.

"Fantastic news," Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) tweeted about the ALU vote. "Now let's get the PRO Act to [President Joe Biden's] desk to protect the right of all workers to organize."

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‘Post-work’ visions for 2030

The future could realise the dream of Marx and Keynes for a society beyond work—or a populist nightmare of worklessness.

MARIA MEXI 

SOCIALEUROPE

31st March 2022

Jacob_09/shutterstock.com

The year is 2030—an important milestone in prevailing policy narratives and futurist imaginaries. We live in a different world of work. Artificial intelligence is becoming pervasive, complementing and augmenting human capabilities. Due to increased connectivity, the line between work, home and leisure is becoming increasingly blurred, making new forms of ‘work-leisure’ more hybrid and virtual, more globalised and placeless. Large numbers of employees in the still-analogue economy or ‘crowdworkers’ in the digital-platform economy now sit in Bangalore, Lima or Johannesburg, work for companies in London, San Francisco or Beijing and service customers in still other locales.

By 2030, the emergence of ‘labour-linking’ technologies enabled by digital platforms, together with the advance of ‘labour-saving’ technologies in robotics, will have fundamentally reshaped the global jobs landscape. Labour-linking technologies are reinforcing a global mobility of virtual labour, by enabling (crowd)workers from low- and middle-income countries to enter new labour markets, often in wealthier economies, previously out of reach due to migration barriers and, in principle, achieve a higher material standard of living.

But new forms of digitally-enabled work and labour-saving technologies will continue to generate inequities across developed and developing countries, industries and workforce groups, resulting in a global yet fragmented world. And while remote employment is not limited by geography, it tends to reproduce the spatial inequities of traditional labour markets. The most profitable jobs will be drawn to the thriving technology-wise metropolis, with rural communities lagging behind.

Populist parties

The evolving landscape of jobs and employment opportunities will give rise to new problems—while history will repeat itself if we do not learn from it. Global-inequality scholars have demonstrated that the biggest losers of recent waves of globalisation have been working people in rich countries, while the biggest winners have been the ‘global plutocrats’ (the top 1 per cent in rich countries) and the emerging ‘global middle class’ of much less wealth, primarily in China. Between the mid-2000s and early 2010s, falling earnings of low-income workers in the United States and western Europe escalated political grievances into conflict and political discontent, leading in several cases to the rapid rise to power of populist parties. The changes we are currently seeing, as well as those that lie ahead, have the potential to unsettle liberal democracies once more.

Albert Hirschman uses the analogy of a traffic jam in a two-lane tunnel to explain how people respond to inequality: those stuck in the left lane feel better once they see a car in the right lane start to move. This initial gratification is known as the ‘tunnel effect’. Yet it fades rapidly if only the cars in the right lane are moving. According to Hirschman, those left out in the process of economic growth may better tolerate increasing inequality if they expect that their lot is likely to improve soon. Otherwise, their frustration may breed social unrest.

If inequalities are not addressed in our digital economies, once the tunnel effect is over populists are likely to benefit from the frustration generated by the unequal future of work. A new brand, ‘Populism 4.0’, may thrive on the persistent failure to address the vulnerabilities created by the fourth industrial revolution and exacerbated by the Covid-19 crisis.

Profound change

Only a fairer future for work can make our societies less fragmented and democracies more resilient. And by 2030 we could see a ‘post-work’ world in which work is profoundly changed—or even vanishes as such.

The promise of a society devoid of work has often been highlighted in emancipatory visions. In the 1840s, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels envisaged a communist society, in which individuals would ‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, grow cattle in the evening and critique after supper’, rather than being bound by the monotony of a single exhausting job. By the early 21st century, John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930, technological advances would usher in an ‘age of leisure and wealth’, in which his grandchildren would work just 15 hours per week.

And change is already taking shape. In western countries, the average working week declined from over 80 to around 60 hours between 1800 and 1900. Between 1900 and the 1970s, it shrank even further, reaching roughly 40 hours. In countries such as Spain, Japan and New Zealand, there have been recent experiments with a four-day working week.

Lines blurred

By 2030, reduction of working time will be in full gear, blurring the lines between the traditional employment contract and self-employment. Working-time patterns will have been redefined, fluctuating through technological innovation (with project-oriented freelance work), trade union pressure and shifts in mindsets towards a healthy work-life balance—a transformation younger generations will demand. Work values will have changed, transforming human experience.

Generations Y (millennials) and Z will make up by far the largest part of the working population, about 40 per cent. They see meaningful work as more associated with individual, societal and environmental and planetary wellbeing, with the boundaries between remunerated work, voluntary activity and leisure increasingly fuzzy. They will advocate a new way of working and living, working fewer hours and being more mobile and autonomous.

The journey toward a new foundation for work will reach a point of acknowledging the invisible domestic labour of caregivers—mostly women—and recognising these efforts. Post-work visions will thus give feminist ideas a new vigour.
Hopes shattered

Yet survival will continue to be at issue for the vast majority across the world. The pandemic has brought more than 250 million to the brink of hunger, shattering hopes of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and leaving populations in the global south worse off. In the north, there will be more zero-hours or ‘gig’ contracts, more self-employed with unpredictable incomes and more precarity, especially among young people—yet no effective offsetting public programmes, due to declining social resources and shifting demographics which favour age-related worklessness. In 2030, coping with intergenerational and distributional conflicts will become a pressing concern.

Work is indeed a basic human need, not only because it ensures our economic existence but also because it contributes greatly to the meaning ofa dignified life. We thus need to address more than just the economic and technological challenges the digital transition will bring. We need a robust public dialogue about the normative foundations of work—about the right ways to embed ‘post-work’ visions, distilling what principles we want to protect rather than allow to perish.

Such an effort would necessitate policies to strengthen workplace democracy and organisational performance, as well as fundamentally reimagining the relationship between labour, work and business, along more dignified, socially-meaningful and environmentally-sustainable lines. It would also require suitable structures and institutions for inclusive workplaces and labour markets, to make our democracies more resilient to the emerging divides between ‘digital losers’ and ‘digitally enabled value creators’, with their potential to reinforce populist threats.

An Oxford University survey found 53 per cent of young Europeans (aged 16-29) doubted democracy’s capacity to deliver on climate change, placing greater trust in authoritarian states—an alarming finding. Other research not only finds a link from youth dissatisfaction to the rise of populism but also reveals that, throughout the world, younger generations are becoming increasingly unhappy with democracy in absolute numbers, as well as compared with prior cohorts at comparable stages of life. With youth exclusion from jobs—because of automation—on the riseand amid chronic precarity, the complex dynamics of demography, technology and populism unfolding in the post-pandemic era will prove critical for the future of our democracies.

Rather than allowing the future of work to become part of the 2030s populist playbook and its emerging versions, we need reforms—now.



MARIA MEXI
Dr Maria Mexi serves as a special adviser to the president of Greece, a consultant at the International Labour Organization and a senior researcher and fellow at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development and the Albert Hirschman Center of Democracy of the Graduate Institute Geneva.

A European basic income?

An EU-wide scheme could address progressives’ concerns about proposals for universal basic income.

HollyHarry/shutterstock.com

DOMINIC AFSCHARIAN, VIKTORIIA MULIAVKA, MARIUS OSTROWSKI and 1 MORE 

25th March 2022

As the Conference on the Future of Europe progresses, its interim reports indicate that the proposal for a more social Europe most frequently suggested by citizens is a European universal basic income (UBI). This poses a dilemma for progressives who promised to seriously consider the proposals from the conference but have valid concerns about such a scheme.

They could flatly reject UBI but this would risk alienating citizens and feeding into scepticism about how seriously the European Union takes civic participation. Irrespective of whether progressives are in favour of UBI, by offering constructive visions they can stay on top of the debate.

Striking patterns

For the Foundation for European Progressive Studies, we conducted an analysis of UBI debates and reflected on the arguments for and against from a progressive political standpoint. We found some striking patterns.

First, support for and opposition to UBI can be found within various political movements, irrespective of ideological background. Secondly, the arguments are much more complex than often assumed, given UBI is typically framed as a simple solution. Thirdly, the (limited) evidence suggests many likely positive effects of UBI, although it is by no means a silver bullet. Fourthly, some important arguments against UBI are predominantly concerns about policy design—careless implementation could have significant detrimental social effects.

As UBI remains salient, it is all the more important then to develop a differentiated view of where and how it bears potential for progressive goals:
it must be supplementary, complementing rather than replacing the welfare state;
it must be redistributive, so that it acts as a net benefit for the less wealthy;
it must render individuals independent of market forces, and
it must foster European solidarity by giving the EU a tangible social dimension.

If European progressives choose to embrace UBI, it should be at EU level, administered by the union and paid directly to every adult EU denizen each month. Minors’ caregivers should receive a reduced payout, with the remaining amount accruing to a European sovereign-wealth fund. Part of this accumulated residue would be paid out to individuals as a lump sum of starting capital once they reached maturity, with part retained in the sovereign-wealth fund to help fund the scheme over the long run.

To discourage the wealthy from actually claiming UBI if they do not need it, starting at the national median income automatic payouts would be tapered at a linear rate with increasing income. In principle, everyone could still claim their UBI regardless, but unclaimed funds would be channelled into the sovereign-wealth fund. Such a universal right to income would be more in line with progressive ideals than a universal income paid out automatically without exceptions.

Universal entitlement however sets this scheme apart from traditional means-tested approaches. It is key to overcoming issues such as discriminatory practices while avoiding problematic incentives due to cut-off points.
Protection against poverty

In the long run, a progressive UBI would need to protect citizens against poverty at 60 per cent of the respective national median income or 50 per cent of the mean income—whichever were higher. To keep the scheme feasible while incentivising upwards convergence and ensuring sufficiency, no national UBI should fall below 20 per cent of EU-wide median income or exceed 60 per cent of it. Responding to persisting concerns, progressives might embrace further differentiation at the local level.

While the existing empirical research indicates that phenomena such as moral hazard associated with a UBI are smaller in magnitude than is often suspected, there are valid concerns about what one can extrapolate from it. One way of engaging with citizens’ proposals while taking the risks seriously would be to introduce the scheme at very low levels, raised slowly as increasing funds became available.

This would also allow policy-makers to react swiftly with complementary schemes and regulations if employers were to abuse the scheme by wage-dumping. As such risks exist in any event and are being addressed through policy measures, it seems unlikely that a UBI could work without such policies or that the latter would stop working if a UBI were implemented.

By implication, a progressive UBI would only be part of an encompassing mix of social policies and regulations, avoiding the overall system being reductively focused on monetary tools. Established welfare systems must remain in place from a progressive perspective, as UBI can never be a panacea but bears potential as a complement to means-tested schemes which closes otherwise unavoidable gaps.

Even initially low levels of UBI would be a non-stigmatising social improvement, especially for low-income individuals. The only social policies which could be voluntarily replaced as a result would be monetary transfers whose value was by then fully covered by the EU UBI.

Revenue sources

For funding, we propose stepwise utilisation of various revenue sources. These would include designated EU resources, such as a financial-transactions tax, a carbon-dioxide tax, a green border tax, extended emissions trading, a sovereign-wealth fund, a digital-services tax, an EU-level value-added tax and a ‘robot tax’, as well as taxes on luxury goods, high incomes, inheritances, wealth and land value. In addition, national corporate-tax contributions could be partly hypothecated.

Could such funds not be used otherwise more effectively? Means-tested schemes are ostensibly more targeted than UBI but they suffer from stigmatisation and low uptake, as well as mistreatment and discrimination by case workers of the most vulnerable. And a UBI might be conceptually more appealing for progressives at EU level, since it would visibly strengthen the social acquis without directly competing with national welfare policies.

Further issues, such as legal limitations in the EU treaties and political scepticism towards a UBI, must be taken seriously. In light of the Conference on the Future of Europe, however, progressives should engage with the debate in an appropriately nuanced way, by discussing more openly the conditions a European UBI would need to fulfil to be considered desirable.




DOMINIC AFSCHARIAN
Dominic Afscharian holds degrees in political science and economics from Heidelberg University and has worked with think tanks, consultancies and academic institutions. He is currently a research officer at the University of Tübingen.




VIKTORIIA MULIAVKA
Viktoriia Muliavka is a researcher in the Polish Academy of Sciences and SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities.




MARIUS OSTROWSKI
Marius S Ostrowski is a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute. His publications include Left Unity (2020) and the edited series of Eduard Bernstein’s Collected Works (2018-). He is deputy editor of the Journal of Political Ideologies,.




LUKÁŠ SIEGEL
Lukáš Siegel recently completed a PhD in philosophy, focusing on discrimination against people with disabilities, with a special interest in different models of disability.



Home ・ Politics ・ A European basic income?

‘Lie from hell’: Franklin Graham calls for ‘regime change’ in US

David Badash,

 The New Civil Rights Movement
April 04, 2022

Franklin Graham speaks to CNN (screen grab)

Right-wing evangelical Franklin Graham spent the weekend promoting anti-LGBTQ extremist hate to his nearly 10 million Facebook followers, including by attacking The Walt Disney Company, criticizing the Biden administration's support of medically-necessary treatment for transgender children, posting a video of his home state's Lt. Governor preaching jaw-droppingly vulgar attacks on transgender people, and even calling for "regime change" in the United States because he opposes science that support LGBTQ children and teens.

Graham kicked off his attacks on Thursday, the Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV), calling the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services' guidance, titled "Gender-Affirming Care and Young People," "one of the most wicked initiatives that we've seen come out of Washington."

He labeled HHS's factual statement that "Research demonstrates that gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents," a "lie from hell."

"All of their manipulated research saying that it improves mental health or increases happiness is just a lie from hell. What it really does is destroy the lives and futures of these children," declared Graham, who has no medical, scientific, or child development degrees.

"Churches and followers of Jesus Christ must stand against this evil agenda," Graham preached. "Politicians who support this shouldn’t be in leadership, and we need to work to get them out of office in the next election—whether they're Republican or Democrat."

"Speaking of regime changes—we need one in this country," he concluded.

On Saturday Graham jumped on the right wing bandwagon of attacking The Walt Disney Company after the entertainment giant denounced Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law.

"Disney is indoctrinating children with the LGBTQ agenda—and they don’t even try to hide it," Graham declared, linking to a Fox News article titled, "Woke Disney: 10 families who are swearing off Disney due to its left-leaning politics."

"I certainly hope parents wake up to what Disney is trying to do and protect their children and grandchildren from the lies this once-great company is now so willing to promote," he added.

Graham followed that attack on Sunday by posting the vile 2021 video of North Carolina's Republican Christian nationalist Lt. Governor Mark Robinson that made him infamous.

In it Robinson calls the transgender movement "demonic," and "full of the spirit of Antichrist."

"They’re dragging our kids down into the pit of Hell," Robinson adds.

Graham did not weigh in on the video, other than posting it and writing, "This preacher is our NC Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson," but last year he rushed to defend Robinson after that video – in which he calls LGBTQ people "filth" – was widely denounced.

French fruit, vineyards endure coldest April day in 75 years

Agence France-Presse
April 04, 2022

Wine growers burned candles to protect vineyards from the coldest April day in 75 years

 JEFF PACHOUD AFP

French wine and fruit growers were hit by the coldest April day since 1947 overnight Sunday and early Monday, the second straight year they have suffered freak spring weather.

Growers burned candles, sprayed water and used wind turbines in efforts to protect their crops as temperatures fell below the freezing point, with a record minus 9.3C in Mourmelon in the Marne department east of Paris.

Experts say freak weather events are increasingly common due to climate change.

Temperatures rose on Monday, according to Meteo France forecaster Patrick Galois, but he warned that freezing weather would still occur between the southwest and central France.

Growers fear the worst.

"It's very bad. It hit hard overnight. A lot of fruit growers are affected," Christiane Lambert, president of the FNSEA farmers' union, told AFP.

The agriculture ministry said it was "too early" to draw conclusions about the damage.

"The damage is only visible after a few days," it said.

Fruit trees are more vulnerable than vineyards this year, the ministry said.

In the Tarn-et-Garonne department in the southwest, Damien Garrigues sprayed his apple trees to cover buds in ice in a bid to protect them from even lower temperatures.

"For now it's not as bad as last year," he said, noting he lost 20 percent of production in 2021.

In Agen in the neighboring Lot-et-Garonne department, "big losses" are expected for plum growers but not as bad as last year, when "100 percent" were ruined by the cold snap, said Remy Muller, an adviser at the department's chamber of agriculture.

A wind turbine was used in Eric Chadourne's vineyard in Bergerac, also in the southwest, in a bit to limit the damage.

But elsewhere, "all early buds, merlot, white grapes and malbec are frozen," Chadourne said.

A cold snap in April last year cut the harvest of apricots, cherries and pears by half compared to previous years, according to official statistics.

Wine production also fell to a historically low level, down 19 percent on an annual basis.

Prime Minister Jean Castex said money from an emergency fund may be released if necessary to help producers.


© 2022 AFP

HERE KITTY, KITTY

How the first cat-like sabre-tooth predator was discovered – and why it differs from modern cats

Diegoalerus was probably around the size of a bobcat. 

Erick Toussaint, San Diego Natural History Museum (licensed under CC by 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

THE CONVERSATION

Published: March 30, 2022 

Although they are currently the greatest predators on land, it’s likely that modern-day cats wouldn’t have been a match for the newly discovered Diegoaelurus vanvalkenburghae. At around 42 million years old, it’s thought to be one of the first sabre-tooth cat-like predators to have roamed the planet – and a formidable hunter capable of killing prey much larger than itself.

None of our existing top predators possess a sabre-tooth. But throughout much of the history of wild cats, there have been sabre-toothed forms.

Indeed, from 2.5 million years ago, until as recently as 10,000 years ago, the iconic Smilodon fatalis – commonly known as the sabre-tooth tiger – was on the prowl in California and other parts of North and South America. Although its main focus were the large, thick-skinned mammoths and woolly rhinos, early humans might well have been at risk, too.

Though this newly described animal was smaller than Smilodon, the sabre-tooth adaptation means it was probably one of the first ever mammalian hypercarnivores, surviving almost exclusively on a diet of meat – a lifestyle followed by modern cats today.

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The sabre-tooth discovery

In the new PeerJ study scientists from the University of Arizona and San Diego Natural History Museum describe the new predator, which they named Diegoaelurus vanvalkenburghae after San Diego county, in southern California, where the fossil was found, and Professor Van Valkenburgh, the doyenne of carnivore evolution.

The beautiful piece of lower jaw had sat unappreciated in the drawers of the San Diego museum since 1988 – until Curator Ashley Poust found it and recognised what it was. And although it doesn’t sound like much to go on, we can actually learn a huge amount about this ancient creature from the fossilised jaw and teeth alone.

When compared with a skull cast of a Smilodon, the Diegoaelurus fossil is much smaller with a more pronounced chin bone (lower-right edge). 

CC by 4.0. Cypress Hansen, San Diego Natural History Museum, CC BY

At the back of the newly discovered jaw there are slicing scissor teeth, called carnassials – the equivalent of molars and premolars – shaped like flesh-cutting blades with multiple points. Going forward in the jaw, there is a long gap, and then the key tooth, the canine sabre-tooth, elongated and curved. Below that, is an expanded and deepened portion at the front of the jawbone that partly accommodates the deeply rooted canine tooth, and also provides added strength for the jawbone when it bites with force.

The unpreserved upper jawbone would have featured an equivalent canine sabre tooth, which would have cut down outside the jaw as the animal seized its prey.

We can learn so much about the size and diet of Diegoaelurus from this 42-million-year-old jawbone fossil. 

CC BY 4.0. Cypress Hansen, San Diego Natural History Museum, CC BY

The fossil also allowed the study authors to identify that Diegoaelurus is a machaeroidine, a sub-family of extinct mammals from North America and Asia. But our new knowledge doesn’t end there. From long-term studies of the rocks and fossils of California, scientists can form a picture of the newly discovered animal’s habitat and lifestyle.

California in the middle Eocene – the time 42 million years ago when Diegoaelurus lived – was a land of rich tropical forests through which the bobcat-sized Diegoaelurus slipped silently in search of prey. The forests teemed with rodents and early primates in the trees, as well as larger herbivorous mammals, such as even-toed oreodonts (most closely related to camels and pigs), early hoofed tapiroids, multi-toed horses, and the small rhinocerous Menoceras, on the ground.

Perhaps this first sabre-tooth concentrated on hunting these thick-skinned ungulates, leaping from the trees onto their backs and biting suddenly and deeply.
Could the sabre-tooth return?

Although Diegoaelurus looked similar to cats, they are, in fact, unrelated. But the sabre-toothed adaptation to hypercarnivory arose independently several times among cats in other extinct sub-families, such as the nimravids, the “sabre-tooth false cats” in North America and Eurasia – and even in the marsupial thylacosmilids of South America.

Read more: When two ecosystems collided, ichthyosaurs re-evolved the ability to consume large prey

But when Smilodon – the last known survivor of the most recent sub-family, Machairodontinae – became extinct, probably due to loss of prey or hunting by early humans, the sabre-tooth disappeared.

Tigers are fearsome predators but struggle to bring down prey much bigger than themselves. Photo by Pixabay, CC BY-NC-SA

Most cats today operate as solitary hunters, and so generally tackle prey that is of a similar size to themselves, or smaller, in contrast to the sabre-tooths who were able to take on much larger prey.

The modern family Felidae – which includes all modern cats – has 41 species, including the pantherines, such as lions, tigers and leopards, and the felines, such as cheetahs, pumas and caracal. Some of the larger cats – tigers and lions, for example – are hypercarnivores who live only on the flesh of other large animals. Smaller cats are carnivores, of course, but with broader diets which can include rodents, birds, lizards and even invertebrates such as bugs and beetles.

It could be suggested that sabre teeth are an adaptation that is urgently required by many modern large cats. Lions and tigers do have large canine teeth that are used to pierce and kill – but they could certainly benefit from canines that are longer and stronger.

When a lion tries to bring down a Cape buffalo or a juvenile elephant, it struggles to make a killing bite. Even Chilean pumas struggle to bite through the hide of a guanaco (a native of South America and close relative of the llama) and only succeed in killing their prey in one hunt out of ten. And with their thicker skin, pachyderms like buffalo, hippos, rhinos and elephants are more or less immune from attack.

Indeed, sabre-teeth could save the lives of many modern large hunting cats by making the hunt safer. So will one of the modern cat species evolve them? Well, it seems like leopards might already be moving in that direction, so only time will tell.

Author

Michael J. Benton
Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology, University of Bristol

USA
The bizarre politics of radical anti-abortion activists

Jon Skolnik, Salon
April 03, 2022

An anti-abortion protester (Shutterstock)

On Thursday, Lauren Handy, a 28-year old anti-abortion activist currently under a federal indictment for blockading an abortion clinic two years ago, was found to be in possession of five fetuses in her Washington home after her residence was raided by the D.C. police. The grisly development, which comes amid a national Republican-led assault on abortion access, provides a startling glimpse into the depths of anti-abortion extremism. As reporting reveals, Handy's affiliations — although ostensibly left-wing — appear to be in associated with more traditional right-wing anti-abortion organizations.

This article first appeared in Salon.

A self-described "leftist," Handy served as Director of Activism at the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU), a group of self-professed "grassroots activists dismantling the abortion industrial complex & standing in solidarity with the unborn victims killed by abortion violence." Handy also apparently founded Mercy Missions, an anti-abortion group that uses "non-carceral solutions in the struggle towards our collective liberation which is the freedom to thrive in safe & sustainable communities from conception to natural death."

Interestingly, these groups appear to use the language of the left, employing a variety of progressive buzzwords – like "non-carceral", "industrial complex", and "collective liberation" – not typically used in anti-abortion rhetoric. And yet, on seemingly religious grounds, these groups adamantly oppose the practice of abortion, a practice that has been shown to reduce poverty, reduce crime, and improve the socioeconomic status of women.

RELATED: The next phase of anti-abortion cruelty: Jail for ending your own pregnancy

While this bizarre spin on anti-abortion organizing might appear to be somewhat novel, anti-abortion activists have long tried to dress their cause in the verbiage and discourse of feminism, co-opting the notion of "women's liberation" to fit their political agenda.

In 2010, for instance, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin told a group of anti-abortion activists that they stood for an "emerging, conservative, feminist identity." And during the 2016 presidential election, as Jezebel's Kyle Cheung noted, candidate Carly Fiorina repeatedly sold herself as being a feminist in her sensationalized crusade against Planned Parenthood.

But "for all the anti-abortion movement tries to sell its commitment to the well-being of women," as The Intelligencer's Sarah Jones wrote last year, "its beliefs, when reduced to their most basic elements, are undeniably misogynistic."

In Handy's case, anti-abortion activists are alleging that the fetal remains found in her house are part of a "direct action" effort against apparent human rights abuses. As PAAU wrote in a press release, the fetuses' "gestational ages as well as their apparent sustained injuries potentially show violations of the Partial Birth Abortion Act as well as the Born Alive Infants Protection Act which are federal crimes." Even by her own account, Handy at one point said she was inspired to "liberate the bodies of aborted babies from med waste companies and give them a proper burial."

RELATED: Even if the U.S. did support mothers — and it doesn't — there will always be a need for abortion

Though shocking, it isn't the first time Handy's demonstrations have gone beyond the pale.

In 2017, Rewire News reported, the activist led a throng of anti-abortion demonstrators, called the "Red Rose Rescuers," into an abortion clinic in Alexandria, Virginia, where they "tried hand roses to patients in the waiting room, as clinic staff ushered patients to another room, trying to avoid the protesters."

"The activists prayed out loud, begging women to cancel their appointments, and refused to leave," the outlet further reported. "When police arrived to arrest them for trespassing, they went limp, forcing officers to carry them out in wheelchairs or on stretchers."

RELATED: When human life begins is a question of politics — not biology

This tactic, in which demonstrators physically blockade doors to prevent staff from operating, stretches as far back as the 1980s, when incidentally, stealing fetal material was a much more common practice. At the time, anti-abortion were known to scare-monger over the notion of fetal remains being discarded in dumpsters, Robin Marty, Communications Director for the West Alabama Women's Center, wrote over Twitter.

"We need to pay a lot of attention to how anti-abortion actions and prosecution/defense can be used against abortion seeking people in the long run," Marty wrote. "Because abortion opponents are ALWAYS playing the long game, and this is no doubt part of it.

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2022/04/fetus-fetishist-five-fetuses-were-found.html

UN to release handbook of climate change solutions
Agence France-Presse
April 04, 2022

The report's main focus is on weaning the global economy off fossil fuels and moving to alternative energy sources William EDWARDS AFP/File

UN climate experts are set to release what is expected to be the definitive guide to halting global warming on Monday, in a report that lays out how societies and economies must transform to ensure a "livable" future.

With war in Ukraine spurring an urgent energy rethink in the West, analysts say the latest report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will also be an important resource for nations seeking a rapid transition away from Russian oil and gas.

In recent months the IPCC has published the first two installments in a trilogy of mammoth scientific assessments covering how greenhouse gas pollution is heating the planet and what that means for life on Earth.

This third report will outline what to do about it.

But that answer has sweeping political ramifications as climate solutions touch on virtually all aspects of modern life -- and require significant investment.

Two weeks of grueling negotiations have seen nearly 200 nations struggling to thrash out line-by-line a high-level "summary for policymakers" that distills the hundreds of pages of underlying assessment.

That meeting was supposed to wrap up on Friday, but dragged on through the weekend. The IPCC assessment was originally due to be published publicly on Monday at 0900 GMT, but that is now likely to be delayed until later in the day.

"Everybody has something to lose and everybody has something to gain," said one person close to the process.

Easy answers are unlikely, with the IPCC expected to detail the need for transformational changes to energy generation and industry, as well as to cities, transportation and food systems.

To save the world from the worst ravages of climate change, the report is also expected to warn that slashing carbon dioxide pollution is no longer enough.

And technologies that are not yet operating to scale will need to be ramped up enormously to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.

A 1.5C cap on global warming -- the aspirational goal of the 2015 Paris climate accord -- has been embraced as a target by most of the world's nations.

Barely 1.1C of warming so far has ushered in a devastating surge of deadly extreme weather across the globe.
Fossil fuels

UN chief Antonio Guterres warned last month that major economies are allowing carbon pollution to increase when drastic cuts are needed.

"We are sleepwalking to climate catastrophe," he said.

In February, the IPCC report on past, present and future climate change impacts and vulnerabilities detailed what Guterres called an "atlas of human suffering".

The report concluded that further delays in cutting carbon pollution and preparing for impacts already in the pipeline "will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all".

Current national carbon-cutting commitments still put the world on a catastrophic path toward 2.7C of warming by 2100.

"How much more destruction must we witness, and how many more scientific reports will it take, before governments finally acknowledge fossil fuels as the real culprits behind the human suffering being felt across the globe?", said Namrata Chowdhary of 350.org.

The main focus of the report is on weaning the global economy off fossil fuels and moving to low- or zero-carbon sources of energy, from solar and wind to nuclear, hydro and hydrogen.

Helping that transition is the fact that renewable energy is now cheaper than energy generated by fossil fuels in most markets.

The IPCC also details ways to reduce demand for oil, gas and coal, whether by making buildings more energy-efficient or encouraging shifts in lifestyle, such as eating less beef and not flying half-way around the world for a holiday or business meeting.

With intense political wrangling over the high level policy summary, some fear the message will have been watered down.

"The climate crisis is accelerating and fossil fuels are the overwhelming cause. Any report on mitigation that fails to emphasize that fact is denying the very science to which the IPCC is committed," said Nikki Reisch of the Center for International Environmental Law.

The report's finding will feed into UN political negotiations, which resume in November in Egypt at COP 27.

© 2022 AFP

Florida lawmakers raid $100M from affordable housing for program that doesn’t exist
2022/4/3 
© Orlando Sentinel

An aerial photo of the Florida State Capitol in Tallahassee, Florida. 

- Felix Mizioznikov/Dreamstime/TNS

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — In the midst of a statewide housing crisis, the Florida Legislature swept $100 million out of a nationally respected affordable housing rental assistance program for low-income families into a home-buying program that exists in name only.

Affordable housing advocates say the Legislature broke a promise made only a year ago that it would never again raid the Sadowski Affordable Housing Act fund, created in 1992 as a dedicated source of revenue to finance affordable housing programs.

But over the past 20 years, the Legislature has removed $2.3 billion from the fund for other legislative priorities.

It’s just another example of diverting housing funds to other projects, one Orlando lawmaker and housing advocates said.

“The reality is when people ask us if we solved the housing crisis, we have to say it’s hard to tell because the money was diverted from our existing program to something new,” said Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando.

The transfer from the state housing trust fund, made during budget negotiations during the last week of session, leaves the rental assistance program with $53.25 million for the coming budget year that begins July 1.

“We have so many people here, including airport workers, hospitality workers and others, who are desperate for affordable housing,” Eskamani said. “My office gets phone calls every day from people looking for a place to rent.”

Language was slipped into the back of the budget bill during the last week of the session, transferring $100 million from Sadowski into the Hometown Hero Housing Program, for down payment assistance and closing costs, to be established and run by the Florida Housing Finance Corporation.

The bill creating the program was sponsored by Sen. Ed Hooper, R-Palm Harbor, who also co-chaired the Transportation, Tourism and Economic Development appropriations conference committee that made the change.

Hooper did not return a call or email seeking comment.

The budget doesn’t provide any guidance on how to set up the program, criteria for who can qualify for assistance or even how much money each individual or family can receive. That’s because the bill (SB 788) that would have created the program died in committee, said Jaimie Ross, president and CEO of the Florida Housing Coalition, a training and advocacy group on affordable housing issues.

Where the Senate came up with $100 million is a mystery, Ross said, because the original bill had no funding at all, basically leaving it up to the Florida Housing Finance Corporation to figure out where the funds would come from.

That this broken promise is occurring in the midst of an affordable housing crisis where people have seen rent going up 14% in the Orlando market alone makes the betrayal feel that much worse, Ross said.

The loss of that funding is especially sad, Ross said, because for every dollar spent on that program, the government can leverage another six dollars. The money is used to provide gap financing for housing projects that developers otherwise couldn’t afford to build.

“It would have a substantial impact on affordable housing in Florida,” she said.

The Florida Housing Finance Corporation held a conference call Thursday afternoon to deal with those questions, spokeswoman Caroline Benson said. But because the budget still has not been signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, she said, the agency was still in discussions with the Legislature and governor’s office of policy and budget to determine eligibility criteria for the Hometown Hero program.

“However, I can tell you we are looking closely at the language of SB 788,” Benson said.

As outlined in Hooper’s bill, the Florida Hometown Hero Housing program would have paid up to 5% or $25,000, whichever is less, of the down payment and closing costs for front-line emergency workers, teachers, law enforcement officers and a wide range of health care professionals. Only adults employed full-time whose incomes don’t exceed 150% of the state or local median income could apply for the zero-interest loan.

The program would not be available to other essential workers like grocery store clerks, airport workers, day care workers, farm workers, restaurant workers or hotel employees, housing advocates noted.

“We expect this program to function similarly to others that Florida Housing has run in the past such as the Hurricane Michael Homeownership Funding program and Hardest Hit Fund, as well as the other down payment assistance programs that we currently offer,” Benson said.

The absence of any official program hasn’t stopped the Florida Association-Realtors from promoting the Hometown Hero program. They have a website dedicated to it, with a professionally produced video, a two-page glossy handout, a 12-page white paper providing data supporting the need for the program, and an 11-page social media toolkit.

The Florida Association-Realtors said EMTs and paramedics would need to earn an extra $25,000 a year than currently to afford a median-priced home in Florida, about $348,000 in 2021. Nurses would need to make an additional $15,000 a year and firefighters would need to earn an extra $10,000 more a year, the board said.

David Hall, a Port St. Lucie member of the Board of Realtors, who serves on its legislative think tank, also sits on the board of directors of the Florida Housing Finance Corp. as an affordable housing advocate.

Focusing on homebuyers leaves out an entire group of Florida residents, advocates said.

“This crisis is not going to be solved by single-family homes,” said Ida Eskamani, Rep. Eskamani’s twin sister and a legislative affairs specialist for Florida Rising, a nonprofit organization focused on economic and racial justice.

“It’s not a step forward,” she said, noting that the state has millions to invest in all sorts of programs and corporate tax cuts. “If you want to create a new program, use other money, and don’t take away from the existing program.”

The Hometown Hero program is part of the deal lawmakers cut with the Realtors after they torpedoed their own planned constitutional amendment to redirect taxes collected on real estate deals to affordable housing, Ross said.

The Florida Association-Realtors had spent $2.75 million of $13 million raised on a constitutional amendment legislative leaders opposed to reverting a portion of document stamp taxes back to affordable housing funds.

Incoming Senate President Kathleen Passidomo had warned that the amendment amounted to picking a war with the Legislature, and the Realtors backed down, agreeing to work on a legislative solution to the housing crisis.

Last year was supposed to be the last time that the state housing trust fund would be raided.

“We expected it would be a new day and all our money would be appropriated,” Ross said.

#ABOLISHSCOTUS
The Supreme Court’s Abuses of the Shadow Docket Must Be Stopped

The Supreme Court has always been a wildly undemocratic institution. But its flagrant abuse of the shadow docket, in which the court’s decisions on key issues are made with zero transparency or explanation, takes it to a whole other level.

Supreme Court justices (L–R) Amy Coney Barrett, John Roberts, Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Stephen G. Breyer attend the State of the Union address on March 1, 2022. (Saul Loeb / Pool via Getty Images)

BY BENJAMIN MORSE

JACOBIN

They often come in the middle of the night — unsigned and without explanation. Some sentence people to death. Others adversely impact the political power of minority groups. They make up the shadow docket, a set of Supreme Court cases decided without traditional brief, oral argument, or signed opinion.

The Roberts Court has made a habit of abusing the legal mechanism. Under the cover of obscure hours and scant national attention, the justices have green-lit prison executions, curbed voting rights, and tossed aside public health precautions meant to address a raging coronavirus pandemic.

If the court continues on its current trajectory — and given a recent unsigned ruling throwing out an electoral map that favored black voters, it probably will — the misuse of the shadow docket is here to stay.

The Roberts Court’s use of the shadow docket precludes any form of transparency in consequential and potentially controversial decisions. Nine justices sitting for life, unaccountable to voters, have a compounded obligation to deliberate and decide high-stakes cases with thorough explanation. A review of the practice’s history, its proliferation, and on the ground impacts makes it clear: the shadow docket cannot continue. The public should demand sunlight in their shady high court.
A Shadowed Use

William Baude, a University of Chicago law professor, coined the term shadow docket, “a range of orders and summary decisions that defy [the court’s] normal procedural regularity,” in a widely read 2015 law review article.

But the practice has existed for generations. Any case the court decides outside of its regular caseload (their “merits docket”), which includes oral argument and lengthy signed opinions, is considered part of the shadow docket. As University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck explains in Slate:


What’s new (and alarming) is not the shadow docket itself; it is the extent to which the justices are using it more and more often to issue significant rulings that change the rights and responsibilities of millions of Americans, all without the daylight (including multiple rounds of briefing, oral argument, and lengthy opinions setting out principled reasons for the decision) that comes with plenary review.

The court’s use of the shadow docket, according to Vladeck, has received scrutiny in scattered cases throughout modern history. “From the execution of the Rosenbergs to Justice Douglas halting Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia to the stay of the Florida recount in what became Bush v. Gore, there certainly have been significant rulings on the shadow docket across the court’s modern history,” Vladeck told a hearing before a House subcommittee on courts.

Save for a handful of cases, there has been a lull in both practice and attention in the shadow docket. That is, until the Roberts Court met the Trump administration.

“Granting a stay pending appeal should be an ‘extraordinary’ act,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, using a technical explanation to denounce her conservative colleagues’ use of the shadow docket.


Sotomayor’s scathing dissent came in September 2019 after the court blocked a large share of Central American migrants from the asylum process. What the conservatives were doing, she effectively wrote, isn’t normal. In fact, their activity amounted to the abuse of what should be a decidedly infrequent practice, in service of the right-wing agenda.

There is data to back up the dissent. Only eight applications for emergency relief — a step that often leads a case to the shadow docket — were filed by the Department of Justice between 2001 and 2017, according to the American Bar Association. The Trump administration filed forty-one such applications in just four years.

Donald Trump is out of office, but the court’s increased reliance on the shadow docket in consequential cases has continued. The Left has to deal not only with a six to three liberal deficit on the court but a near total information deficit when it comes to certain consequential rulings.
Dark Consequences

There is no one reason for the court’s increasing use of the shadow docket. Perhaps, with renewed scrutiny following a Republican-led takeover of the bench, certain members of the court want to obscure less popular rulings. Controversy, after all, often begets questions of legitimacy — and legitimacy is the only defense of the court’s supremacy. With the shadow docket, rulings are out of sight and out of the public’s mind.

But the explanation for its use is less important than the effects of the abuse of the shadow docket. As it turns out, the shaded actions have stark on the ground impacts — often at the expense of marginalized groups.With the shadow docket, rulings are out of sight and out of the public’s mind.

Take, for example, a nightmarish California jail at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. More than three hundred residents tested positive. Detainees were “packed into day rooms sharing the same air and bathrooms without social distancing” and inmates were given “watered-down disinfectant and makeshift masks made from bloodstained sheets.”

After a district court judge ordered an injunction that required officials at the Orange County Jail to implement precautionary health measures, jail officials filed an emergency application asking the Supreme Court to lift the injunction — effectively ending the mandate to safeguard the inmates’ lives. By a five to four vote in summer 2020, the Supreme Court gave them the go-ahead; their order was unsigned and delivered without explanation.

In the most recent case, black voters in Wisconsin — where, as the Times notes, “maps have for the last decade been among the most gerrymandered in the nation” — were denied an electoral district which would have strengthened their political power in the state assembly. The majority justices, none of whom signed their names, took issue with interpretation of the court’s precedent surrounding the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and racial gerrymandering.

As Rick Hansen, an election law expert, wrote after the decision was handed down:


This ruling is bizarre on many levels, all canvassed by the dissenting opinion. The state supreme court did not purport to do a full VRA analysis: it was adopting maps, and those maps could have been challenged later on VRA or equal protection grounds. In reaching this decision, the Supreme Court majority resolved some uncertain issues of statutory and constitutional interpretation. The Court did so on skimpy briefing with no oral argument or a chance to fully consider the issues, treating the stay request as a cert petition and deciding the full case on the merits.

There is significant risk in letting the trend persist. “If [the justices] can make significant decisions without giving any reasons, then there’s really no limit to what they can do,” David Cole, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told Reuters. “It’s hard for the public to know what is going on, and it’s hard for the public to trust that the court is doing its best work,” added Baude, the law professor who coined the phrase “shadow docket.”

It is not hard to imagine the public outcry if a governmental body like Congress engaged in this behavior. Say the House of Representatives and the Senate were to pass a bill, one affecting scores of people, all without deliberation and a tally of who voted and how. Constituents would rightly be outraged.

This is, in effect, what the court is doing. Had the aforementioned cases been conducted with both procedural regularity and public accessibility, perhaps the justices would have ruled for the incarcerated people in a coronavirus-infested jail. Perhaps the nine would have thought twice about limiting the political power of black people amid a growing assault on voting rights.

A Sunlit Reform

Advocates of curbing the abuse of the shadow docket laid out a laundry list of reforms in a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the issue last year. Vladeck suggested taking “pressure off the shadow docket,” allowing the court to take up time-sensitive issues under ordinary methods (briefing, oral argument, and a signed opinion). Vladeck explained that Congress could “mandate special appellate procedures that would allow faster and smoother adjudication of certain types of cases.”

Amir Ali, the deputy director of the Supreme Court and Appellate Program at the MacArthur Justice Center, mentioned the use of the shadow docket in the death penalty; he suggested that Congress could mandate a higher standard for the Supreme Court to overrule lower-court decisions that put executions on hold.

Another way to get rid of the shadow docket: get rid of the court itself. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor of African American studies at Princeton, writes in a piece headlined “The Case for Ending the Supreme Court as We Know It”: “Why should the Supreme Court, an unelected body that is richer, whiter, and more male than the United States is, continue to have such outsized power in the lives of ordinary people?” The shadow docket only adds urgency to her question.

The Roberts Court has turned the shadow docket from a bug to a feature. While the measure was once used infrequently as a possible expedient, it is now routinely capitalized on by conservative jurists to advance ideological interests without explanation.

A critique of the judiciary is now mainstream, with some members of Congress expressing genuine interest in reforming the court. The calls from prominent politicians add institutional and rhetorical oomph behind the once sidelined demand for a systemic reorganization of the highest court. Failing to include the shadow docket on the list of judicial grievances would be a mistake.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Benjamin Morse is a graduate student in political science at the City University of New York Graduate Center.