Dear friends,
Those of us raised in Western nations have felt acutely the rollback of rights and the attacks on people because of their race, ethnicity, sex, gender, or religion. We grew up expecting progress.
Without even realizing that we do it, we picture a timeline of the future unspooling and hear these words:
It's getting better all the time
Better, better, better
It's getting better all the time
Better, better, betterGetting so much better all the time
This is ahistorical, but apparently, this is how we do.
I haven’t written yet about the months of protests in Iran, which began in response to the arrest, detention, and death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the so-called morality police.
This weekend, Iran seems to have abolished the morality police.
It is more complicated, of course. The government has failed to confirm the initial report in the state media, and a three-day nationwide general strike is underway. It does not appear that the authorities have the resources to enforce the hijab rules.
Multimedia artist JR posted this on Instagram yesterday
On September 20, 2022, Nika Shakarami set her headscarf on fire as fellow protesters chanted “Death to the Dictator.” By the next day, the 16-year-old was dead.
A journalist in Tehran writes:
The guidance patrol in the form we used to see in the streets has completely disappeared and does not exist. On one of the days of demonstrations in Tehran, I passed through the IRGC guard forces without a hijab. They only looked at me. Their looks were furious, but they had no other interaction.
This establishes that there was a seditious conspiracy to oppose the peaceful transfer of power. Three other members of the Oath Keepers pleaded guilty to the same charge earlier this year. Four others will face trial this month.
“If Former President Trump disrupted the certification of the electoral vote count, as Plaintiffs allege here, such actions would not constitute executive action in defense of the Constitution. For these reasons, the Court concludes that Former President Trump is not immune from monetary damages in this suit,” Sullivan wrote.
[A] sound system played gospel music next to several orange shade tents filled with free food, water, hand warmers and voter guides.
The activity and materials were strictly non-partisan and set up more than 150 feet from the polling site, as the law stipulates.
to publicly downplay the risks of their fossil-fuel products on climate change.
Their goal is to hold ExxonMobil, Shell, and Chevron — among others — financially responsible for the devastation wrought by the 2017 hurricane season.
The coordinated deception spanning decades violates U.S. racketeering and antitrust laws among others, the suit claims.
"Puerto Rico was hit by the perfect storm and is the ultimate victim of global warming," said Marc Grossman, a partner at a firm representing the municipalities, in a statement.
The oil companies knew what they were doing. They should pay.
Governor Hochul signed legislation that bans employers from retaliating against employees for taking legally-protected time off. State Senator Liz Krueger, who sponsored the bill, explained in an email the importance of this protection:
Employees have the right to take legally-protected time off from their jobs to address certain medical, caregiving, and religious needs without penalty. Pregnant workers may need to take time off for a prenatal check-up or to obtain emergency medical care. Workers who are caregivers may need to stay home with a sick child or an elderly parent. Workers who have chronic health conditions, or who suddenly become ill, may need to seek ongoing or immediate medical attention.
This news interested me, in part, because of the temporal overlap with the threatened rail strike. Yesterday, a reader sent this article, which goes beyond the flap over paid sick days to the core labor issues in the rail industry.
A huge corporation reported record profits in investor calls while simultaneously demanding workers do more with less and sacrifice for the cause, using the pandemic and other external factors as excuses to cut expenses to the bone. Seemingly arbitrary headcount numbers resulted in slashed workforces. The resulting poor service was blamed on “worker shortages.” Policies set by business efficiency experts and MBAs in corporate headquarters clashed with the real-life needs of the workers on the ground who know their craft. Warnings by the people who know the work best — that all of this is actually dangerous — went unheeded, ignored, and people even got punished for speaking out.
Aaron Gordon, the author of the piece, described a YouTube video he saw in which a rail worker warned of dangerous conditions. In the one-month interval between seeing the video and publishing his first article on freight rail labor issues,
there were six main line freight train derailments reported by local media across the country, and many more that went unreported.
She also links the current crisis to Trump’s 2017 trade war, which led railroads to cut 40,000 jobs in three years. What ‘replaced’ the workers was
a system called precision scheduled railroading, or PSR. PSR made trains longer and operated them with a skeleton crew that was held to a strict schedule. This dramatically improved on-time delivery rates but sometimes left just two people in charge of a train two to three miles long, with no back-up and no option for sick days, family emergencies, or any of the normal interruptions that life brings, because the staffing was so lean it depended on everyone being in place. Any disruption in schedules brought disciplinary action and possible job loss.
The naked greed of corporations is increasingly on display. Fighting for time off is a symbol — not unimportant, but also not the whole story.
would help protect salmon fishery areas that support commercial and recreational fisheries, and that have sustained Alaska Native communities for thousands of years, supporting a subsistence-based way of life for one of the last intact wild salmon-based cultures in the world,” regional administrator Casey Sixkiller said in a statement recommending a veto.
There is something irrepressible about people who hunger for fundamental rights and strive to protect their homes. With each struggle and every victory, we are getting better all the time.
with love,
L
Fun fact: Pete Seeger, who wrote the song “Turn, Turn, Turn,” gave 45 percent of the royalties to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. The group challenges settler colonialism by resisting “Israel's policy of demolishing Palestinian homes, both in Israel and in the Occupied Palestine Territory.”