[ed. British Open Week.]
Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Chiefs Quarterback Len Dawson enjoying a cigarette and a beer during halftime at Super Bowl I (1967)
via:
[ed. Looks like a Fresca to me, but it was a different time for sure.]
The Tech Backlash We Really Need
The tech backlash can be framed, in part, as a reaction to the technological accident. “When you invent the ship,” the French tech theorist Paul Virilio wrote, “you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you invent the plane crash.... Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.” This negativity, the ever-looming accident, is the potential for harm that every new technology inevitably brings into existence.
Along these lines, one type of critique of the Cambridge Analytica scandal described it as the event that should awaken the field of computer science to the ethical ramifications of its work, in the same way that other disciplines have had their own moral wake-up calls, some of them deliberate outcomes and others accidents. For chemistry, perhaps it was the invention of dynamite and later poison gas, for physics the atomic bomb, for civil engineering bridge and dam failures, for biology eugenics, and for medicine the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. Now computer science has had its own moment of reckoning, should it choose to perceive it as such, one that should spur the development of a professional code of ethics and institutional safeguards against unethical design practices.
The tech backlash can also be understood as a backlash against corporations and bad actors rather than technology per se. The problem, on this view, does not lie with the nature of digital technology’s progress, but rather with the corporations that have designed, developed, and deployed digital tech for the sake of their bottom line, or else with malevolent users who have used it to unethical ends. In their own often specious defense, companies or bad actors may then talk about “accidents” and “unintended consequences” in order to deflect and diffuse responsibility for their actions.
These interlocking framings of the tech backlash are not altogether wrong, but they are incomplete and sometimes misleading. Focusing on the technological accident or intentionally malicious use can obscure what matters most: how a technology, used well and as intended, ultimately settles into the taken-for-granted material infrastructure of our daily lives.
How the Tech Backlash Fails
Social media platforms are the most prominent focal point of the tech backlash. Critics have understandably centered their attention on the related issues of data collection, privacy, and the political weaponization of targeted ads. But if we were to imagine a world in which each of these issues were resolved justly and equitably to the satisfaction of most critics, further questions would still remain about the moral and political consequences of social media. For example: If social media platforms become our default public square, what sort of discourse do they encourage or discourage? What kind of political subjectivity emerges from the habitual use of social media? What understanding of community and political action do they foster? These questions and many others — and the understanding they might yield — have not been a meaningful part of the conversation about the tech backlash.
We fail to ask, on a more fundamental level, if there are limits appropriate to the human condition, a scale conducive to our flourishing as the sorts of creatures we are. Modern technology tends to encourage users to assume that such limits do not exist; indeed, it is often marketed as a means to transcend such limits. We find it hard to accept limits to what can or ought to be known, to the scale of the communities that will sustain abiding and satisfying relationships, or to the power that we can harness and wield over nature. We rely upon ever more complex networks that, in their totality, elude our understanding, and that increasingly require either human conformity or the elimination of certain human elements altogether. But we have convinced ourselves that prosperity and happiness lie in the direction of limitlessness. “On the contrary,” wrote Wendell Berry in a 2008 Harper’s article, “our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning. Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible.”
We also often fail to question our commitment to the power of tools and technique. The Cambridge Analytica scandal revolved around the unethical manner in which data was collected from unsuspecting Facebook users by exploiting Facebook’s terms of service as well as around Facebook’s complicity and failure to acknowledge responsibility for its role in the affair. When Zuckerberg appeared before Congress, the few pointed questions he was asked also centered on Facebook’s responsibility to protect user data. While privacy is clearly important, the questions offered little concern about the legitimacy or advisability of data-driven politics — about the acquisition and exploitation of voter data and the manipulation of increasingly sophisticated means of precision advertising. No one seemed to worry that the political process is being reduced to this type of data sophistry. While Congress rightly condemned a particularly nefarious method of data acquisition, the capture of political life by technique remained unchallenged.
This line of questioning opens up a broader set of concerns about the project to manage human life through the combined power of big data and artificial intelligence. In an earlier age, people turned to their machines to outsource physical labor. In the digital age, we can also outsource our cognitive, emotional, and ethical labor to our devices and apps. Our digital tools promise to monitor and manage, among other things, our relationships, our health, our moods, and our finances. When we allow their monitoring and submit to their management, we outsource our volition and our judgment. We seem incapable, however, of raising any deeper concerns than whether the terms of service are intelligible and our data secure.
The tech backlash, in other words, leaves untouched the consequences of technologies that are successfully integrated into our social milieu. From this perspective, the tech backlash is not so much a rejection of the machine, to borrow an older, more foreboding formulation, but, at best, a desire to see the machine more humanely calibrated. It reveals, in fact, how deeply committed we are to our technologies. It reveals as well how thoroughly our thinking and our public debates unfold within parameters determined by a logic that may justly be called technological.
by L. M. Sacasas, New Atlantis | Read more:
Image:Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images
[ed. See also: Collective Awareness (Edge)]
Along these lines, one type of critique of the Cambridge Analytica scandal described it as the event that should awaken the field of computer science to the ethical ramifications of its work, in the same way that other disciplines have had their own moral wake-up calls, some of them deliberate outcomes and others accidents. For chemistry, perhaps it was the invention of dynamite and later poison gas, for physics the atomic bomb, for civil engineering bridge and dam failures, for biology eugenics, and for medicine the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. Now computer science has had its own moment of reckoning, should it choose to perceive it as such, one that should spur the development of a professional code of ethics and institutional safeguards against unethical design practices.The tech backlash can also be understood as a backlash against corporations and bad actors rather than technology per se. The problem, on this view, does not lie with the nature of digital technology’s progress, but rather with the corporations that have designed, developed, and deployed digital tech for the sake of their bottom line, or else with malevolent users who have used it to unethical ends. In their own often specious defense, companies or bad actors may then talk about “accidents” and “unintended consequences” in order to deflect and diffuse responsibility for their actions.
These interlocking framings of the tech backlash are not altogether wrong, but they are incomplete and sometimes misleading. Focusing on the technological accident or intentionally malicious use can obscure what matters most: how a technology, used well and as intended, ultimately settles into the taken-for-granted material infrastructure of our daily lives.
How the Tech Backlash Fails
Social media platforms are the most prominent focal point of the tech backlash. Critics have understandably centered their attention on the related issues of data collection, privacy, and the political weaponization of targeted ads. But if we were to imagine a world in which each of these issues were resolved justly and equitably to the satisfaction of most critics, further questions would still remain about the moral and political consequences of social media. For example: If social media platforms become our default public square, what sort of discourse do they encourage or discourage? What kind of political subjectivity emerges from the habitual use of social media? What understanding of community and political action do they foster? These questions and many others — and the understanding they might yield — have not been a meaningful part of the conversation about the tech backlash.
We fail to ask, on a more fundamental level, if there are limits appropriate to the human condition, a scale conducive to our flourishing as the sorts of creatures we are. Modern technology tends to encourage users to assume that such limits do not exist; indeed, it is often marketed as a means to transcend such limits. We find it hard to accept limits to what can or ought to be known, to the scale of the communities that will sustain abiding and satisfying relationships, or to the power that we can harness and wield over nature. We rely upon ever more complex networks that, in their totality, elude our understanding, and that increasingly require either human conformity or the elimination of certain human elements altogether. But we have convinced ourselves that prosperity and happiness lie in the direction of limitlessness. “On the contrary,” wrote Wendell Berry in a 2008 Harper’s article, “our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning. Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible.”
We also often fail to question our commitment to the power of tools and technique. The Cambridge Analytica scandal revolved around the unethical manner in which data was collected from unsuspecting Facebook users by exploiting Facebook’s terms of service as well as around Facebook’s complicity and failure to acknowledge responsibility for its role in the affair. When Zuckerberg appeared before Congress, the few pointed questions he was asked also centered on Facebook’s responsibility to protect user data. While privacy is clearly important, the questions offered little concern about the legitimacy or advisability of data-driven politics — about the acquisition and exploitation of voter data and the manipulation of increasingly sophisticated means of precision advertising. No one seemed to worry that the political process is being reduced to this type of data sophistry. While Congress rightly condemned a particularly nefarious method of data acquisition, the capture of political life by technique remained unchallenged.
This line of questioning opens up a broader set of concerns about the project to manage human life through the combined power of big data and artificial intelligence. In an earlier age, people turned to their machines to outsource physical labor. In the digital age, we can also outsource our cognitive, emotional, and ethical labor to our devices and apps. Our digital tools promise to monitor and manage, among other things, our relationships, our health, our moods, and our finances. When we allow their monitoring and submit to their management, we outsource our volition and our judgment. We seem incapable, however, of raising any deeper concerns than whether the terms of service are intelligible and our data secure.
The tech backlash, in other words, leaves untouched the consequences of technologies that are successfully integrated into our social milieu. From this perspective, the tech backlash is not so much a rejection of the machine, to borrow an older, more foreboding formulation, but, at best, a desire to see the machine more humanely calibrated. It reveals, in fact, how deeply committed we are to our technologies. It reveals as well how thoroughly our thinking and our public debates unfold within parameters determined by a logic that may justly be called technological.
by L. M. Sacasas, New Atlantis | Read more:
Image:Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images
[ed. See also: Collective Awareness (Edge)]
"Sorry to Bother You" and the Rationality of Evil
Boots Riley’s new film Sorry to Bother You is, as critics have pointed out, bizarre and brilliant, and every freedom-loving human being owes it to themselves to see it. It teaches you more about the importance of labor unions and class solidarity (and the nature of racial hierarchy) than you could learn from years of watching the news. (Which is sad, really.) But in addition to everything important it has to say about race and workplace politics, the film illustrates a useful point about economics, rationality, and monstrous evil. [Warning: A big bad batch of spoilers immediately follows. Do not read on if you have not seen Sorry to Bother You, because you will ruin the experience of watching Sorry to Bother You.]
Here’s the plot in a sentence: Cassius “Cash” Green takes a job as a telemarketer at a dubious and exploitative company, steadily moves up the corporate ranks after discovering how to use his “white voice,” betrays his radical activist girlfriend by joining the corporate class, finds out that the company’s actual purpose is to sell slave labor, experiences moral conflict, then finds out that the company is experimenting turning people into horses in order to maximize their physical productivity, then breaks free and participates in an uprising. I am leaving a lot out.
I want to focus here on the film’s central villain, the WorryFree company and its CEO, Steve Lift. WorryFree’s business model is as follows: It offers people “free” housing, food, and healthcare, in exchange for their signing a lifetime indentured labor contract. It promotes its “service” this way: Sign up for WorryFree and you’ll never need to think about money again. You’ll be fed, clothed, housed, and taken care of. All you need to do is agree to work. And you would have had to work anyway. WorryFree will give you guaranteed employment, comfort, and leisure time, for the rest of your life. You’ll never have another financial worry as long as you live.
If we just describe WorryFree as “indentured servitude,” it sounds implausible. Why on earth would anybody sign up for that? Riley’s dystopia seems ridiculous. But Riley’s film takes place in economically desperate times. Inequality has worsened, and many people are struggling with debt. If WorryFree promised to wipe people’s debt away, to make sure they would never again lack the necessities, its offer would sound tempting to people whose lives are defined by financial hardship. What if the company promised an 8-hour workday and a 40-hour week? What if its living standards were higher than than those you had now, or ever thought you could hope to have? The vast majority of people might still decline the offer. But the company only needs a small percentage of people to say yes. (In the film, Cash’s uncle considers signing up when he realizes he is about to lose his house to the bank.)
I actually think a weakness of Sorry to Bother You is that it portrays WorryFree as obviously horrible. In television commercials for the company, the workers feign happiness, but the conditions are clearly grim: They all wear uniforms, they sleep in bunk beds, they eat slop. If this kind of company did exist, it would be far cleverer in its lies: It would make WorryFree look like a true paradise, a “gated community” rather than a concentration camp. You would look at the commercials and think “Gee, that actually doesn’t seem so bad.” Riley is probably trying to show us the way that clearly horrific things can be treated as perfectly normal. But I think it’s also valuable to show that clearly horrific things can easily be made to seem reasonable, even by our current standards.
Slavery and indentured servitude have existed throughout human history, and still occur around the world today. Consider this report from 2013 on the conditions of migrant workers in Dubai:
Workers are hired from local recruitment agencies in their home countries working on behalf of UAE based businesses. Generally, workers are charged a fee by their prospective employer (normally over $1000 U.S.) to procure their visa and plane ticket to the UAE… When workers arrive in Dubai, they are systematically subjected to exploitation by their employers. Upon arrival passports are confiscated in an attempt to prevent employees from leaving. The workers cannot leave the country without a passport, and thus are barred from returning home… Additionally, migrant workers are denied their wages for at least the first few months, in an attempt by the employer to prevent their employees from leaving. Large amounts of employers do not pay their workers on a regular basis, creating a huge backlog of debt for the migrant workers… Laborers are forced to work long hours in the dangerous desert heat on construction projects, and are not given sufficient breaks as required by law… Workers describe the large number of deaths from heat exhaustion, overwork and suicide… Workers live in company-run shanty towns and face a life of squalor…For the vast majority of migrants these slums are their only option for housing, and neither the 14-hour workdays nor the miserable quarters they return to offer any reprieve. Workers have very few options to leave these situations.
Not only, then, is the WorryFree business model not a fantasy, but it’s actually not nearly as bad as things that actually literally exist in the world today. The only reason WorryFree looks “dystopian” is that it’s Americans signing up to live in company towns and be permanently ruled over by employers, rather than poor migrant laborers from Bangladesh and Indonesia.
I suspect that the aspect of WorryFree that seems most implausible is the “lifetime” part of the agreement. Sure, we may concede, there is nothing in a free-market, freedom-of-contract society that prohibits people from signing up to work on a corporate campus where everything is ruled by the company and labor is exchanged for room and board rather than money. And with Facebook planning to build a private city ruled over by Mark Zuckerberg, it’s not crazy to think such a thing might actually happen. If Facebook told people they could live in a cushy Facebook apartment for free, and eat in any of Zucktown’s high-quality bistros for free, in exchange for spending 8 hours a day moderating comment sections (and, of course, surrendering all of one’s ordinary rights and being ruled over by an undemocratic private government that has no obligation to respect one’s free speech or personal privacy), would people not take the offer? It’s startling to realize just how easy it is, in a time of concentrated economic power, to get people to turn over their rights in exchange for comfort and security.
But even having conceded that cities run as corporate dictatorships are perfectly possible and legal, would “lifetime” labor happen? After all, if people didn’t like the bargain, they could just leave. We can imagine Facebook and Amazon’s spokespeople defending their company towns exactly like this: Sure, we may prohibit our residents from expressing political opinions, and sure they may not be allowed to vote on town policies (which are entirely set by the CEO), and sure we surveil them and kick them out of their housing if they criticize our company, and sure we pay them “in kind” rather than with money, BUT they could leave anytime they liked. Nobody has to live here, everyone is doing so by their own free will.
Now, I want to point out that nobody should accept justifications like this. People shouldn’t have to sacrifice their rights in exchange for material security, rights should be inalienable. “Would you prefer destitution and liberty or prosperity and dictatorship?” is a false choice, and we must demand both. Companies should be democratically-run, and it can be just as objectionable when corporations stifle their employees’ basic free speech rights as it is when governments do it.
But also: The idea of forced labor that you can’t walk away from isn’t as far-fetched as you think. First, technically we do still have it in this country, since involuntary servitude can still be imposed as a penalty for a crime, and here in Louisiana people routinely get put to work as part of their sentence. Considering how easy it is to make something into a crime, and the fact that states can farm out inmate labor to private corporations, it’s not impossible to produce involuntary corporate servitude even under our present legal regime. However, it would be quite simple to go full “WorryFree.” You just need to be committed enough to “freedom of contract.” Already, courts have a pretty expansive view of what you can “contract away”: You can sign away your right to take your employer to court if they wrong you, and your right to leave and work for a competitor. A truly committed advocate of free contracts can argue that indenture contracts should be no different: If you sign the contract, it’s a contract, period. Why shouldn’t people be allowed to create voluntary agreements with employers signing their freedom away, considering that they can sign away everything else? Why should the state interfere with that right? One of the things I find so frightening about free-market absolutists is that because they do seem to believe that contracts are “sacred,” there’s almost no limit to what can be squeezed out of people if you get them to sign on the dotted line. You might say “Well, a person should never be able to agree that the company can keep them locked inside.” But one could insist that you are simply imposing your own values on people’s freely-made choices. A person can agree to engage in BDSM activities in which they are kept bound and chained, why should employment be different? Unless you are leftist who understands how economic forces are coercive, it’s easy to see how a judge could decide that these situations aren’t different. (One libertarian answer to this is that indenture contracts are impermissible because you can’t “alienate your will” and a contract can always be broken. But even if some pathetic outer limit is placed on the range of possible contractual agreements, it’s possible to construct a contract in which the penalties for breaching the contract are so harsh that leaving isn’t realistic. Suppose the Dubai workers were told that if they left, they would have to pay their own transport back home, and would have to reimburse the company for the transport there.)
Alright, but what about the horse-people? WorryFree CEO Steve Lift, a prototypical Silicon Valley tech bro, is secretly trying to turn workers into horse-human hybrids (“equestri-sapiens”) so that they will increase their productivity. Even “freedom of contract” types might recoil at this plan, though I might ask: If the workers agreed that part of joining WorryFree meant being subjected to human experiments, and signed a waiver saying they consented to whatever the company decided to do to them, I can already picture Justice Kavanaugh’s 5-4 opinion explaining that the risk of being transformed into a horse-person was implicitly assumed by the worker who signed the contract.
But I want to dwell here on Steve Lift himself. When Cash meets Lift, and uncovers the horse-person scheme, he goes apoplectic. He realizes Lift is a maniac. (In addition to being a massive racist.) But Lift’s response is interesting: “I’m not evil,” he says. “I don’t want you to think I’m irrational. I’m helping the economy.” (I am paraphrasing.) Lift says he is increasing worker productivity. He’s innovating new technology, and using it to increase output. Everybody is benefiting from the economic growth he brings. (And sure enough, when Cash exposes the scheme, the news media hails Lift as a brilliant entrepreneur.) The worst aspect of this is: Lift isn’t wrong, and this should show us why “economic rationality” is a terrible substitute for moral judgment.
Here’s the plot in a sentence: Cassius “Cash” Green takes a job as a telemarketer at a dubious and exploitative company, steadily moves up the corporate ranks after discovering how to use his “white voice,” betrays his radical activist girlfriend by joining the corporate class, finds out that the company’s actual purpose is to sell slave labor, experiences moral conflict, then finds out that the company is experimenting turning people into horses in order to maximize their physical productivity, then breaks free and participates in an uprising. I am leaving a lot out.
I want to focus here on the film’s central villain, the WorryFree company and its CEO, Steve Lift. WorryFree’s business model is as follows: It offers people “free” housing, food, and healthcare, in exchange for their signing a lifetime indentured labor contract. It promotes its “service” this way: Sign up for WorryFree and you’ll never need to think about money again. You’ll be fed, clothed, housed, and taken care of. All you need to do is agree to work. And you would have had to work anyway. WorryFree will give you guaranteed employment, comfort, and leisure time, for the rest of your life. You’ll never have another financial worry as long as you live.If we just describe WorryFree as “indentured servitude,” it sounds implausible. Why on earth would anybody sign up for that? Riley’s dystopia seems ridiculous. But Riley’s film takes place in economically desperate times. Inequality has worsened, and many people are struggling with debt. If WorryFree promised to wipe people’s debt away, to make sure they would never again lack the necessities, its offer would sound tempting to people whose lives are defined by financial hardship. What if the company promised an 8-hour workday and a 40-hour week? What if its living standards were higher than than those you had now, or ever thought you could hope to have? The vast majority of people might still decline the offer. But the company only needs a small percentage of people to say yes. (In the film, Cash’s uncle considers signing up when he realizes he is about to lose his house to the bank.)
I actually think a weakness of Sorry to Bother You is that it portrays WorryFree as obviously horrible. In television commercials for the company, the workers feign happiness, but the conditions are clearly grim: They all wear uniforms, they sleep in bunk beds, they eat slop. If this kind of company did exist, it would be far cleverer in its lies: It would make WorryFree look like a true paradise, a “gated community” rather than a concentration camp. You would look at the commercials and think “Gee, that actually doesn’t seem so bad.” Riley is probably trying to show us the way that clearly horrific things can be treated as perfectly normal. But I think it’s also valuable to show that clearly horrific things can easily be made to seem reasonable, even by our current standards.
Slavery and indentured servitude have existed throughout human history, and still occur around the world today. Consider this report from 2013 on the conditions of migrant workers in Dubai:
Workers are hired from local recruitment agencies in their home countries working on behalf of UAE based businesses. Generally, workers are charged a fee by their prospective employer (normally over $1000 U.S.) to procure their visa and plane ticket to the UAE… When workers arrive in Dubai, they are systematically subjected to exploitation by their employers. Upon arrival passports are confiscated in an attempt to prevent employees from leaving. The workers cannot leave the country without a passport, and thus are barred from returning home… Additionally, migrant workers are denied their wages for at least the first few months, in an attempt by the employer to prevent their employees from leaving. Large amounts of employers do not pay their workers on a regular basis, creating a huge backlog of debt for the migrant workers… Laborers are forced to work long hours in the dangerous desert heat on construction projects, and are not given sufficient breaks as required by law… Workers describe the large number of deaths from heat exhaustion, overwork and suicide… Workers live in company-run shanty towns and face a life of squalor…For the vast majority of migrants these slums are their only option for housing, and neither the 14-hour workdays nor the miserable quarters they return to offer any reprieve. Workers have very few options to leave these situations.
Not only, then, is the WorryFree business model not a fantasy, but it’s actually not nearly as bad as things that actually literally exist in the world today. The only reason WorryFree looks “dystopian” is that it’s Americans signing up to live in company towns and be permanently ruled over by employers, rather than poor migrant laborers from Bangladesh and Indonesia.
I suspect that the aspect of WorryFree that seems most implausible is the “lifetime” part of the agreement. Sure, we may concede, there is nothing in a free-market, freedom-of-contract society that prohibits people from signing up to work on a corporate campus where everything is ruled by the company and labor is exchanged for room and board rather than money. And with Facebook planning to build a private city ruled over by Mark Zuckerberg, it’s not crazy to think such a thing might actually happen. If Facebook told people they could live in a cushy Facebook apartment for free, and eat in any of Zucktown’s high-quality bistros for free, in exchange for spending 8 hours a day moderating comment sections (and, of course, surrendering all of one’s ordinary rights and being ruled over by an undemocratic private government that has no obligation to respect one’s free speech or personal privacy), would people not take the offer? It’s startling to realize just how easy it is, in a time of concentrated economic power, to get people to turn over their rights in exchange for comfort and security.
But even having conceded that cities run as corporate dictatorships are perfectly possible and legal, would “lifetime” labor happen? After all, if people didn’t like the bargain, they could just leave. We can imagine Facebook and Amazon’s spokespeople defending their company towns exactly like this: Sure, we may prohibit our residents from expressing political opinions, and sure they may not be allowed to vote on town policies (which are entirely set by the CEO), and sure we surveil them and kick them out of their housing if they criticize our company, and sure we pay them “in kind” rather than with money, BUT they could leave anytime they liked. Nobody has to live here, everyone is doing so by their own free will.
Now, I want to point out that nobody should accept justifications like this. People shouldn’t have to sacrifice their rights in exchange for material security, rights should be inalienable. “Would you prefer destitution and liberty or prosperity and dictatorship?” is a false choice, and we must demand both. Companies should be democratically-run, and it can be just as objectionable when corporations stifle their employees’ basic free speech rights as it is when governments do it.
But also: The idea of forced labor that you can’t walk away from isn’t as far-fetched as you think. First, technically we do still have it in this country, since involuntary servitude can still be imposed as a penalty for a crime, and here in Louisiana people routinely get put to work as part of their sentence. Considering how easy it is to make something into a crime, and the fact that states can farm out inmate labor to private corporations, it’s not impossible to produce involuntary corporate servitude even under our present legal regime. However, it would be quite simple to go full “WorryFree.” You just need to be committed enough to “freedom of contract.” Already, courts have a pretty expansive view of what you can “contract away”: You can sign away your right to take your employer to court if they wrong you, and your right to leave and work for a competitor. A truly committed advocate of free contracts can argue that indenture contracts should be no different: If you sign the contract, it’s a contract, period. Why shouldn’t people be allowed to create voluntary agreements with employers signing their freedom away, considering that they can sign away everything else? Why should the state interfere with that right? One of the things I find so frightening about free-market absolutists is that because they do seem to believe that contracts are “sacred,” there’s almost no limit to what can be squeezed out of people if you get them to sign on the dotted line. You might say “Well, a person should never be able to agree that the company can keep them locked inside.” But one could insist that you are simply imposing your own values on people’s freely-made choices. A person can agree to engage in BDSM activities in which they are kept bound and chained, why should employment be different? Unless you are leftist who understands how economic forces are coercive, it’s easy to see how a judge could decide that these situations aren’t different. (One libertarian answer to this is that indenture contracts are impermissible because you can’t “alienate your will” and a contract can always be broken. But even if some pathetic outer limit is placed on the range of possible contractual agreements, it’s possible to construct a contract in which the penalties for breaching the contract are so harsh that leaving isn’t realistic. Suppose the Dubai workers were told that if they left, they would have to pay their own transport back home, and would have to reimburse the company for the transport there.)
Alright, but what about the horse-people? WorryFree CEO Steve Lift, a prototypical Silicon Valley tech bro, is secretly trying to turn workers into horse-human hybrids (“equestri-sapiens”) so that they will increase their productivity. Even “freedom of contract” types might recoil at this plan, though I might ask: If the workers agreed that part of joining WorryFree meant being subjected to human experiments, and signed a waiver saying they consented to whatever the company decided to do to them, I can already picture Justice Kavanaugh’s 5-4 opinion explaining that the risk of being transformed into a horse-person was implicitly assumed by the worker who signed the contract.
But I want to dwell here on Steve Lift himself. When Cash meets Lift, and uncovers the horse-person scheme, he goes apoplectic. He realizes Lift is a maniac. (In addition to being a massive racist.) But Lift’s response is interesting: “I’m not evil,” he says. “I don’t want you to think I’m irrational. I’m helping the economy.” (I am paraphrasing.) Lift says he is increasing worker productivity. He’s innovating new technology, and using it to increase output. Everybody is benefiting from the economic growth he brings. (And sure enough, when Cash exposes the scheme, the news media hails Lift as a brilliant entrepreneur.) The worst aspect of this is: Lift isn’t wrong, and this should show us why “economic rationality” is a terrible substitute for moral judgment.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: WorryFree CEO Steve Lift, played by Armie Hammer
Tuesday, July 17, 2018
Lake Clark Adventure
An Alaska National Park as Big as Connecticut. Annual Visitors? 23,000. (NY Times)
[ed. Lake Clark National Park and Preserve is special. In the 35 years that I've lived, worked, and traveled throughout Alaska it's still one of the most impressively wild and beautiful places I've ever visited.]
Here's a story. Over the course of my career and out recreating in Alaska, I've come close to serious injury (or worse) a number of times. So many that I kind of mentally segregate close calls into four categories now: Aviation. Animals. Recreation. General stupidity. This is an Aviation story:
After successfully weathering my first winter in Alaska, the next summer my folks came up for a visit, and my in-laws thought it would be fun to fly out to Lake Clark Preserve - Twin Lakes specifically - for a weekend of camping and lake trout fishing. My father in law at the time, Bill, had a PA-14 (basically a four-seater Super Cub) and the plan was to ferry two groups separately, with him flying back and forth most of the day and refueling in Nondalton (a small Native village along the way). I was in the first group with my father and sister in law and most of the gear. My wife, mom and mother in law were in the second group.
We had some problems right from the start. First of all, the floatplane was so loaded with four people, fuel and gear we couldn't get up on step to take off at Lake Hood in Anchorage (Bill was a big guy, a doctor, and former lineman for Northwestern). Instead of a direct shot out, we had to circle the lake several times, building up enough speed to finally inch our way up into the air (of course, once you're flying and burning fuel that's ceases to be a problem). Anyway, after several attempts, we did finally get airborne, barely, and a couple hours later were descending over the crystal turquoise waters of Lower Twin Lake (so crystal in fact that Bill had to drop a couple rocks he kept in a bag in the plane just for these situations, creating ripples on the water to gauge where the lake surface was).
We beached the plane and began unloading. Unfortunately, while stowing the gear and surveilling the surrounding area for bears, a stiff breeze came up and our floatplane slowly began drifting away. By the time we realized what was happening it was nearly 30 yards offshore. Bill, cussing, quickly stripped to his underwear and jumped into the bone chilling water, swimming determinedly toward the plane as it continued drifting further and further away. The water couldn't have been much above freezing but he finally made it and was able to pull himself up onto one of the floats, get the plane started, and motor back to shore. An ominous sign.
Shortly after, once we'd started a fire and he'd warmed up a bit, he took off again to get the rest of the party, leaving me, my dad and my sister in law on this beautiful deserted lake. For the next few hours we had a great time catching lake trout and grayling, one after the other, and hiking and exploring around in the woods. After a while though, we began nervously checking the sky. The clouds were getting darker, and we listened intently for the distant buzz of a little plane. We had a lot of camping gear but almost no food (that was in the next shuttle). No shotgun or any other type of bear protection (in the plane). So we caught a couple trout, put them on sticks and roasted them over the fire, picking off what we could eat with our fingers.
Then the rain started. A cold and steady drizzle. By that time (a couple hours past Bill's projected return time) we started getting really worried. Another hour went by, and with hypothermia becoming a real possiblity we finally heard that sweet little buzz. Bill came gliding in through low dark squalls and when he finally beached the plane told us we had to load everything up and get out as soon as possible. The weather was getting worse. In fact, that's why he'd taken so long. After repeated attempts to get back to Anchorage which was fogged in, he'd finally turned around and decided the trip was a no-go. Even worse, he'd been unable to refuel in Nondalton because that was socked in too. So rather than returning to Anchorage we'd have to head for Kenai instead, across Cook Inlet.
We quickly broke camp, loaded up our gear and took off. Bill checked Nondalton again and it was still socked in. The only way out was through Lake Clark Pass, a famously narrow and convoluted route back to the other side of the mountains. The ceiling kept dropping as we headed into the pass, flying low over the occasional plane wreck here and there that litter its steep, incised slopes, with the churning Chilikodrotna River below. I remember thinking, there sure aren't many places to land a plane down there (none).
Then, the engine died.
You know how the steady drone of a plane's engine can lull you into sleep? (another Aviation story). I was almost dozing off when suddenly there was just complete silence. Instant attention! I thought we'd drop like a rock, but we were gliding, floating through the steep river canyon with just the rugged, rocky river below. Bill immediately switched tanks, hit the ignition button and the engine coughed back to life. Whew (forgot there were two independent tanks, main and alternate). Unfortunately, because he'd been flying all day and hadn't been able to refuel, the plane was already running on its alternate tank (which had now run dry!) and he was trying to coax whatever was left in the main tank (that he'd run down before switching to the alternate) to carry us through the pass and out across the inlet.
We flew on a bit longer and were nearly out of the pass, with Cook Inlet ahead of us, when the engine died again. This time, Bill hard banked the plane one way then the other. I thought he was looking for a place to land (but there weren't any!), then realized (since the fuel tanks in a PA-14 and most other small aircraft are located in the wings) that he was actually trying to get whatever drops were left near the tips to run back down toward the engine. He turned the radio to an emergency frequency, hit the ignition switch again and miraculously the little plane coughed back to life, one more time.
A few very tense minutes later we were out of the pass, but unfortunately now over Cook Inlet (with its murderous tidal rip currents), without enough gas to make it to Kenai. The only hope was to aim for a small island in the middle of the Inlet, Kalgin Island, with a little lake on its southern end. We were all dead silent. Then the engine died one last time. My father in law didn't even try to restart it this time, just held the plane steady as we glided lower and lower, hoping we'd make it to the island, or at least go down close enough to swim. Could we make it over the trees that loomed large along the beach and adjoining lake? It was going to be close. At the last moment we just barely cleared them and set down quietly on Kalgin Island lake. Bill didn't say a word, and the rest of us just sat there stunned. As the plane slowly drifted to a stop he opened the door, climbed out on one of the floats, dislodged a paddle and started paddling toward shore. When the little plane finally came to rest in the weeds he jumped off, still never saying a word, and stomped off into the woods. We just looked at each other, like... what's he doing? Is he totally pissed or something and has to walk it off? But, after about 15 minutes of waiting, there he was again emerging from the trees carrying two 5 gallon cans of aviation gas. Apparently he'd cached them years before for just such an emergency. Amazing.
Anyway, somewhat anticlimactically, we re-filled the tanks and took off again. By now it was nearly nine o'clock at night but still early evening in Alaska. The bad weather had cleared by then and we were able to make it all the way back to Anchorage (with gas to spare), where we landed on Lake Hood roughly 12 hours after our adventure began.
Sadly, Bill, my sister in law Mary Lynn, and my dad are all gone now, so I'm the only one left to tell this story. It's one of the first close calls I put in my Aviation category, but by no means the worst or last. Just one of the more interesting ones.
I did enjoy being in Lake Clark Preserve that day though, it was truly beautiful.
Youth Soccer Participation Has Fallen Significantly in America
With its gables, turrets and iron railing, U.S. Soccer House — as the mansion housing the U.S. Soccer Federation is known — looks more like a fortress than the headquarters of a major sports organization. It is fitting: The federation is on the defensive.
It is bad enough that the men’s national team failed to qualify for this summer’s World Cup, a fact the federation was reminded of daily as the tournament in Russia dazzled global audiences on its way to crowning a new champion Sunday.
The real threat, however, to its mission to make soccer one of America’s pre-eminent sports is here at home, where youth players are abandoning the game in alarming numbers.
Over the past three years, the percentage of 6- to 12-year-olds playing soccer regularly has dropped nearly 14 percent, to 2.3 million players, according to a study by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, which has analyzed youth athletic trends for 40 years. The number of children who touched a soccer ball even once during the year, in organized play or otherwise, also has fallen significantly.
In general, participation in youth sports nationwide has declined in the past decade, as children gravitate to electronic diversions and other distractions.
Yet in recent years, while soccer continued declining, baseball and basketball experienced upticks, buoyed by developmental programs begun by Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association.
“It’s lost more child participants than any other sport — about 600,000 of them,” said Tom Farrey, executive director of the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program. As he pointed out, that’s enough to fill every stadium on any given match day during the 2026 World Cup, which the United States will host with Mexico and Canada.
The decline has been felt everywhere: recreational leagues in longtime soccer hotbeds here; high-profile traveling teams from Maryland to California; programs targeted at Latino and immigrant populations in South Texas. High burnout rates from pushing children into travel soccer too young as well as the high costs of programs have also contributed to the lower numbers. (...)
The exodus of players in youth leagues has drawn recriminations over clubs and leagues that have pushed and profited from a “pay-for-play” model that has turned off parents and kept out talent from poorer, underserved communities.
“My family would not have been able to afford to put me in soccer if I was a young kid today,” Hope Solo, the former goalkeeper of the 2015 Women’s World Cup championship team, said at a conference in New York last month. “That obviously alienates so many communities, including Hispanic communities, the black communities, the rural communities and underrepresented communities. Soccer, right now, has become a rich, white-kid sport.” (...)
This year, Carlos Cordeiro was elected president of the federation to succeed Sunil Gulati, who declined to run for a fourth term after the men’s team failed to qualify for the World Cup for the first time since 1986.
Mr. Cordeiro has promised to increase the numbers in youth soccer by making it more affordable and more inclusive. Currently, American households with more than $100,000 in annual income provide 35 percent of soccer players, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, compared with 11 percent from households earning $25,000 or less.
by Joe Drape, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ed Garza
It is bad enough that the men’s national team failed to qualify for this summer’s World Cup, a fact the federation was reminded of daily as the tournament in Russia dazzled global audiences on its way to crowning a new champion Sunday.
The real threat, however, to its mission to make soccer one of America’s pre-eminent sports is here at home, where youth players are abandoning the game in alarming numbers.Over the past three years, the percentage of 6- to 12-year-olds playing soccer regularly has dropped nearly 14 percent, to 2.3 million players, according to a study by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, which has analyzed youth athletic trends for 40 years. The number of children who touched a soccer ball even once during the year, in organized play or otherwise, also has fallen significantly.
In general, participation in youth sports nationwide has declined in the past decade, as children gravitate to electronic diversions and other distractions.
Yet in recent years, while soccer continued declining, baseball and basketball experienced upticks, buoyed by developmental programs begun by Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association.
“It’s lost more child participants than any other sport — about 600,000 of them,” said Tom Farrey, executive director of the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program. As he pointed out, that’s enough to fill every stadium on any given match day during the 2026 World Cup, which the United States will host with Mexico and Canada.
The decline has been felt everywhere: recreational leagues in longtime soccer hotbeds here; high-profile traveling teams from Maryland to California; programs targeted at Latino and immigrant populations in South Texas. High burnout rates from pushing children into travel soccer too young as well as the high costs of programs have also contributed to the lower numbers. (...)
The exodus of players in youth leagues has drawn recriminations over clubs and leagues that have pushed and profited from a “pay-for-play” model that has turned off parents and kept out talent from poorer, underserved communities.
“My family would not have been able to afford to put me in soccer if I was a young kid today,” Hope Solo, the former goalkeeper of the 2015 Women’s World Cup championship team, said at a conference in New York last month. “That obviously alienates so many communities, including Hispanic communities, the black communities, the rural communities and underrepresented communities. Soccer, right now, has become a rich, white-kid sport.” (...)
This year, Carlos Cordeiro was elected president of the federation to succeed Sunil Gulati, who declined to run for a fourth term after the men’s team failed to qualify for the World Cup for the first time since 1986.
Mr. Cordeiro has promised to increase the numbers in youth soccer by making it more affordable and more inclusive. Currently, American households with more than $100,000 in annual income provide 35 percent of soccer players, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, compared with 11 percent from households earning $25,000 or less.
by Joe Drape, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ed Garza
Monday, July 16, 2018
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Historic Win and the Future of the Democratic Party
This is the summer in which the Presidency of Donald Trump has begun to cohere. Disdain for voting rights, for women’s rights, for the protection of the environment, and for our alliances abroad is becoming American policy. There is nothing Trump will not do or say to flaunt his primacy. Not long ago, at a tense G-7 gathering in Quebec, he reportedly tossed a couple of Starburst candies at the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, and told her, “Don’t say I never give you anything.” By then, Merkel and the other Western allies had grown accustomed to the President’s contempt and his preference for autocrats, and so the moment passed as unremarkable, another paragraph in the story of the Trump era.
There are many ways to wallow in the everyday devolution. Prolonged viewing of MSNBC is a highly rated option. There are even various means of escape to recommend. The Yankees are awfully exciting this year, and Season 2 of “Glow” is strong. In the meantime, where can the outraged and the dispirited turn for a glimmer of hope?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is twenty-eight. She was born in the Parkchester neighborhood of the Bronx and lives there now, in a modest one-bedroom apartment. Parkchester was originally a planned community conceived by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and was for decades segregated, predominantly Irish and Italian. Today, it’s largely African-American, Hispanic, and South Asian. Ocasio-Cortez comes from a Puerto Rican family in which the parents’ self-sacrifice has been rewarded by their daughter’s earnest striving, and, now, a historic achievement. Come November, Ocasio-Cortez is almost certain to become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. As recently as ten months ago, she was waiting tables at a taco place near Union Square called Flats Fix. On June 26th, she pulled off a political upset in the Democratic primary for the Fourteenth Congressional District, soundly defeating the incumbent, Joseph Crowley, the most powerful politician in Queens County and the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives.
In the general election this fall, Ocasio-Cortez will face Anthony Pappas, a professor at the Peter J. Tobin College of Business. Pappas’s platform appears to center on tax cuts and an obsession with the legal ramifications of his unpleasant divorce, many years ago. It is unlikely that those concerns will be widely shared by voters of the Fourteenth District, which takes in parts of the eastern Bronx and northwest Queens and votes almost uniformly Democratic. (In an oddity of New York election laws, Crowley, who was also the Working Families Party candidate, will remain on that party’s line in November, but his spokesperson said that “this is a total non-thing,” emphasizing that Crowley is a Democrat, endorses Ocasio-Cortez, and “is totally supporting her. She is going to be a member of Congress.”) Ocasio-Cortez has natural presence. She is also well mannered, disciplined, shrewd, and self-possessed. When I asked her if Pappas has a chance, she smiled but would not bite.
When Ocasio-Cortez arrived, the owner greeted her as a local celebrity. In an instant, people crowded around. She is quick to shake hands, hug, hold a constituent’s shoulder. When kids come near, she kneels and talks on their level. Everyone wanted to tell her their reaction to her win, their shock and delight. “Thank you so much!” she told one after the other. These kinds of encounters were happening to her everywhere she went. At a pizza parlor in Grand Central, her waiter nearly swooned. Since the primary, she’s been fielding calls of congratulation “from everyone you can name,” including her ideological lodestar, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, who, she said, “seemed to come from a mentoring place.”
We sat down at a table near the window. She allowed that she was getting worn down. “You’re speaking to me when I am still emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and logistically processing all of this,” she said. “The whole thing’s got me knocked a little flat.”
With good reason. Not long ago, Ocasio-Cortez was mixing margaritas. Today, she is the embodiment of anti-corporate politics and a surge of female candidates in the midterm elections. “It’s a lot to carry,” she said. As a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, she was on the receiving end of Murdoch-media hysteria. The Post greeted her win with the headline “red alert.” Sean Hannity pronounced her “downright scary.” And Ben Shapiro called her a member of the “howling at the moon” segment of the Democratic Party. On the anti-Trump right, Bret Stephens wrote in the Times that “Hugo Chávez was also a democratic socialist,” and warned that, in a national election, the likes of Ocasio-Cortez will be “political hemlock for the Democratic Party.” None of it seemed exactly real. When I asked her where she was going to live in D.C., her eyes widened in surprise, as if it had not occurred to her that she would no longer be spending most of her time in the Bronx. “Not a clue,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez was born in the neighborhood, but, as she puts it, she “grew up between two worlds.” Before she started school, her father, an architect who was born poor in the South Bronx, and her mother, who was born poor in Puerto Rico, decided that the public education around Parkchester wasn’t good enough. They wanted Alexandria to get a leg up, and so, with help from relatives, they scraped together enough money for a down payment on a small two-bedroom house in Yorktown Heights, a prosperous suburb in Westchester County. By the time she entered Yorktown High School, Alexandria had become a driven student. She was aware of being an anomaly—the Puerto Rican kid from a hard-up family in a nearly all-white school—but, she says now, “I don’t think I had that class consciousness as a child.” She was intent on becoming an obstetrician-gynecologist.
Not all of Ocasio-Cortez’s teachers at Yorktown High were encouraging. One told her that the Times was too hard for her to absorb; another said that the Intel science fair was beyond her grasp. In fact, she read the Times daily and won second prize at the Intel fair, with a project on the anti-aging effect of antioxidants in roundworms. Back in the Bronx, some in her family struggled, particularly her cousins. “Their stories are not really mine to tell,” she said, “but growing up they were wearing T-shirts with pictures of their friends who had died—and that’s just scraping the surface.” The extended family in New York ranges across the experience of city life: some are police officers, “and the other half have gotten stopped and frisked.”
When Ocasio-Cortez was seventeen, she put together enough loans and scholarship money to go to Boston University. In the first week of her sophomore year, she got a call from home: her father was dying of lung cancer. His death was “destabilizing in every way,” she said. “My mother was done. My brother was lost. I took it hard, too, but I channelled it into my studies. That’s how I dealt with it. I was home for a week and went right back to school. The last thing my father had told me in the hospital was ‘Make me proud.’ I took it very literally. My G.P.A. skyrocketed.” She changed majors, from biochemistry to economics and international relations, and worked part time in Senator Edward Kennedy’s Boston office, dealing with constituent concerns, including immigrant issues.
What really shaped her politically, though, was coming home: “The crucible was the aftermath—moving back to the Bronx.” With her father gone, her mother had taken jobs cleaning houses and driving a school bus. The family went into debt and the house was on the verge of foreclosure. The experience, she said, was humiliating, paralyzing. Ocasio-Cortez put her career ambitions on hold. Her long days as a waitress and bartender, dealing with sexual harassment (“people touch you, they tell you things”)—the experience was hard, but it was formative. The family eventually sold the house, and Ocasio-Cortez’s mother, in order to save money, moved to Florida, where she now works as a secretary.
Just out of high school, Ocasio-Cortez had done some volunteer work as a phone-bank caller for the Obama campaign in 2008, but she devoted much more time to the Sanders campaign in 2016. She helped find a site for a Bronx campaign headquarters, in an old nail salon, and started knocking on doors. She met activists from all over the city: community organizers, Black Lives Matter leaders, members of various unions, environmentalists, feminists, L.G.B.T.Q. campaigners, democratic socialists. After Sanders failed to overtake Clinton, some of his staff started an organization, called Brand New Congress, with the aim of recruiting candidates in the Bernie mold to run for the House and the Senate. For the B.N.C. activists, Sanders had shown that a non-corporate, “small dollar” campaign based on a left-wing agenda could win, and not only in traditionally left-leaning districts.
At first, B.N.C. wanted to field candidates for every congressional seat. One of the group’s founders, a Harvard graduate and former Silicon Valley techie named Saikat Chakrabarti, went on “The Rachel Maddow Show” to launch the effort. Soon, applications flooded the B.N.C. Web site, eleven thousand in all. One of them came in the fall of 2016 from Gabriel Ocasio-Cortez. He was writing on behalf of his older sister. Alexandria smiled and recalled that her brother had asked her if he could send in the form and, on a lark, she said O.K. “But I was also working in a restaurant!” she said. “I mean, it’s one of these things where it was, like, ‘Eff it. Sure. Whatever.’ ” (...)
Crowley, who had not faced a primary opponent in fourteen years, had grown complacent. He focussed almost solely on what one of his aides told me was “the universe of prime voters,” people who had made a habit of coming to the polls for off-year ballots. Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez was reaching new voters, young people and older residents who had generally stayed away. She was, in the parlance of her campaign, “widening the electorate”—if not by tens of thousands then by just enough. And Crowley kept stumbling. At what was meant to be their first debate, Crowley didn’t show; his spokesperson lamely blamed scheduling issues. Ocasio-Cortez debated an empty chair with the incumbent’s name on it. Even a few weeks before the election, however, Crowley was getting polling information that showed him leading by more than thirty points.
The next debate was scheduled for a television studio, at the hyper-local channel NY1. “Early in the day, I was losing my mind, I was so nervous,” Ocasio-Cortez recalled. “By the time I sat down, I thought he could see my heart leaping out of my chest.” At first, Crowley was indulgent toward Ocasio-Cortez, treating her like a daughter who had come back from college with a lot of wacky ideas she’d picked up in Political Theory 201. But, as she pressed him on one issue after another, Crowley assumed a sour expression. Who was this young woman to lecture him on where he lived and raised his kids? Finally, tired of the attack, Crowley said that he was willing to endorse Ocasio-Cortez, if she were to win the primary. Would she do likewise?
“Well, Representative Crowley, I represent not just my campaign but a movement,” she replied. “I would be happy to take that question to our movement for a vote.” This seemed to gall him. He accused her of being weak on gun control. Where did you get that? Ocasio-Cortez asked. From a Reddit forum, he said. One could sense every voter under forty giggling. A Reddit forum.
Eight days before the election, Crowley and Ocasio-Cortez were to have another debate, this time in Parkchester. There were rumors that Crowley might bag it again, but, when Ocasio-Cortez saw that he’d tweeted pictures of himself at a subway platform nearby, she figured that he was coming. He was not. Instead, he sent Annabel Palma, a Latina former city councilwoman. He paid for his absence with a blistering editorial in the Times: “A spokeswoman for Mr. Crowley said he had scheduling conflicts that wouldn’t allow him to attend the two debates, inevitably leading voters to wonder—what are we, chopped liver?” On Twitter, Ocasio-Cortez noted that Crowley had sent as his surrogate “a woman with a slight resemblance to me.” The implication of a racist insult was lost on no one.
There are many ways to wallow in the everyday devolution. Prolonged viewing of MSNBC is a highly rated option. There are even various means of escape to recommend. The Yankees are awfully exciting this year, and Season 2 of “Glow” is strong. In the meantime, where can the outraged and the dispirited turn for a glimmer of hope?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is twenty-eight. She was born in the Parkchester neighborhood of the Bronx and lives there now, in a modest one-bedroom apartment. Parkchester was originally a planned community conceived by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and was for decades segregated, predominantly Irish and Italian. Today, it’s largely African-American, Hispanic, and South Asian. Ocasio-Cortez comes from a Puerto Rican family in which the parents’ self-sacrifice has been rewarded by their daughter’s earnest striving, and, now, a historic achievement. Come November, Ocasio-Cortez is almost certain to become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. As recently as ten months ago, she was waiting tables at a taco place near Union Square called Flats Fix. On June 26th, she pulled off a political upset in the Democratic primary for the Fourteenth Congressional District, soundly defeating the incumbent, Joseph Crowley, the most powerful politician in Queens County and the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives.In the general election this fall, Ocasio-Cortez will face Anthony Pappas, a professor at the Peter J. Tobin College of Business. Pappas’s platform appears to center on tax cuts and an obsession with the legal ramifications of his unpleasant divorce, many years ago. It is unlikely that those concerns will be widely shared by voters of the Fourteenth District, which takes in parts of the eastern Bronx and northwest Queens and votes almost uniformly Democratic. (In an oddity of New York election laws, Crowley, who was also the Working Families Party candidate, will remain on that party’s line in November, but his spokesperson said that “this is a total non-thing,” emphasizing that Crowley is a Democrat, endorses Ocasio-Cortez, and “is totally supporting her. She is going to be a member of Congress.”) Ocasio-Cortez has natural presence. She is also well mannered, disciplined, shrewd, and self-possessed. When I asked her if Pappas has a chance, she smiled but would not bite.
***
Ocasio-Cortez lives around the corner from her favorite restaurant, Taqueria Tlaxcalli, on Starling Avenue. We met there for dinner on a steambath Sunday night just after her victory. The surrounding commercial area is among the most eclectic in the borough: it includes a sari emporium, the Al-Aqsa Restaurant, Bangla Bazaar, the Chang Li Supermarket, halal grocery stores, Iglesia Bautista Fundamental del Bronx, Crown Fried Chicken, the Asian Driving School, and Jerry’s Pizzeria.When Ocasio-Cortez arrived, the owner greeted her as a local celebrity. In an instant, people crowded around. She is quick to shake hands, hug, hold a constituent’s shoulder. When kids come near, she kneels and talks on their level. Everyone wanted to tell her their reaction to her win, their shock and delight. “Thank you so much!” she told one after the other. These kinds of encounters were happening to her everywhere she went. At a pizza parlor in Grand Central, her waiter nearly swooned. Since the primary, she’s been fielding calls of congratulation “from everyone you can name,” including her ideological lodestar, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, who, she said, “seemed to come from a mentoring place.”
We sat down at a table near the window. She allowed that she was getting worn down. “You’re speaking to me when I am still emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and logistically processing all of this,” she said. “The whole thing’s got me knocked a little flat.”
With good reason. Not long ago, Ocasio-Cortez was mixing margaritas. Today, she is the embodiment of anti-corporate politics and a surge of female candidates in the midterm elections. “It’s a lot to carry,” she said. As a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, she was on the receiving end of Murdoch-media hysteria. The Post greeted her win with the headline “red alert.” Sean Hannity pronounced her “downright scary.” And Ben Shapiro called her a member of the “howling at the moon” segment of the Democratic Party. On the anti-Trump right, Bret Stephens wrote in the Times that “Hugo Chávez was also a democratic socialist,” and warned that, in a national election, the likes of Ocasio-Cortez will be “political hemlock for the Democratic Party.” None of it seemed exactly real. When I asked her where she was going to live in D.C., her eyes widened in surprise, as if it had not occurred to her that she would no longer be spending most of her time in the Bronx. “Not a clue,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez was born in the neighborhood, but, as she puts it, she “grew up between two worlds.” Before she started school, her father, an architect who was born poor in the South Bronx, and her mother, who was born poor in Puerto Rico, decided that the public education around Parkchester wasn’t good enough. They wanted Alexandria to get a leg up, and so, with help from relatives, they scraped together enough money for a down payment on a small two-bedroom house in Yorktown Heights, a prosperous suburb in Westchester County. By the time she entered Yorktown High School, Alexandria had become a driven student. She was aware of being an anomaly—the Puerto Rican kid from a hard-up family in a nearly all-white school—but, she says now, “I don’t think I had that class consciousness as a child.” She was intent on becoming an obstetrician-gynecologist.
Not all of Ocasio-Cortez’s teachers at Yorktown High were encouraging. One told her that the Times was too hard for her to absorb; another said that the Intel science fair was beyond her grasp. In fact, she read the Times daily and won second prize at the Intel fair, with a project on the anti-aging effect of antioxidants in roundworms. Back in the Bronx, some in her family struggled, particularly her cousins. “Their stories are not really mine to tell,” she said, “but growing up they were wearing T-shirts with pictures of their friends who had died—and that’s just scraping the surface.” The extended family in New York ranges across the experience of city life: some are police officers, “and the other half have gotten stopped and frisked.”
When Ocasio-Cortez was seventeen, she put together enough loans and scholarship money to go to Boston University. In the first week of her sophomore year, she got a call from home: her father was dying of lung cancer. His death was “destabilizing in every way,” she said. “My mother was done. My brother was lost. I took it hard, too, but I channelled it into my studies. That’s how I dealt with it. I was home for a week and went right back to school. The last thing my father had told me in the hospital was ‘Make me proud.’ I took it very literally. My G.P.A. skyrocketed.” She changed majors, from biochemistry to economics and international relations, and worked part time in Senator Edward Kennedy’s Boston office, dealing with constituent concerns, including immigrant issues.
What really shaped her politically, though, was coming home: “The crucible was the aftermath—moving back to the Bronx.” With her father gone, her mother had taken jobs cleaning houses and driving a school bus. The family went into debt and the house was on the verge of foreclosure. The experience, she said, was humiliating, paralyzing. Ocasio-Cortez put her career ambitions on hold. Her long days as a waitress and bartender, dealing with sexual harassment (“people touch you, they tell you things”)—the experience was hard, but it was formative. The family eventually sold the house, and Ocasio-Cortez’s mother, in order to save money, moved to Florida, where she now works as a secretary.
Just out of high school, Ocasio-Cortez had done some volunteer work as a phone-bank caller for the Obama campaign in 2008, but she devoted much more time to the Sanders campaign in 2016. She helped find a site for a Bronx campaign headquarters, in an old nail salon, and started knocking on doors. She met activists from all over the city: community organizers, Black Lives Matter leaders, members of various unions, environmentalists, feminists, L.G.B.T.Q. campaigners, democratic socialists. After Sanders failed to overtake Clinton, some of his staff started an organization, called Brand New Congress, with the aim of recruiting candidates in the Bernie mold to run for the House and the Senate. For the B.N.C. activists, Sanders had shown that a non-corporate, “small dollar” campaign based on a left-wing agenda could win, and not only in traditionally left-leaning districts.
At first, B.N.C. wanted to field candidates for every congressional seat. One of the group’s founders, a Harvard graduate and former Silicon Valley techie named Saikat Chakrabarti, went on “The Rachel Maddow Show” to launch the effort. Soon, applications flooded the B.N.C. Web site, eleven thousand in all. One of them came in the fall of 2016 from Gabriel Ocasio-Cortez. He was writing on behalf of his older sister. Alexandria smiled and recalled that her brother had asked her if he could send in the form and, on a lark, she said O.K. “But I was also working in a restaurant!” she said. “I mean, it’s one of these things where it was, like, ‘Eff it. Sure. Whatever.’ ” (...)
Crowley, who had not faced a primary opponent in fourteen years, had grown complacent. He focussed almost solely on what one of his aides told me was “the universe of prime voters,” people who had made a habit of coming to the polls for off-year ballots. Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez was reaching new voters, young people and older residents who had generally stayed away. She was, in the parlance of her campaign, “widening the electorate”—if not by tens of thousands then by just enough. And Crowley kept stumbling. At what was meant to be their first debate, Crowley didn’t show; his spokesperson lamely blamed scheduling issues. Ocasio-Cortez debated an empty chair with the incumbent’s name on it. Even a few weeks before the election, however, Crowley was getting polling information that showed him leading by more than thirty points.
The next debate was scheduled for a television studio, at the hyper-local channel NY1. “Early in the day, I was losing my mind, I was so nervous,” Ocasio-Cortez recalled. “By the time I sat down, I thought he could see my heart leaping out of my chest.” At first, Crowley was indulgent toward Ocasio-Cortez, treating her like a daughter who had come back from college with a lot of wacky ideas she’d picked up in Political Theory 201. But, as she pressed him on one issue after another, Crowley assumed a sour expression. Who was this young woman to lecture him on where he lived and raised his kids? Finally, tired of the attack, Crowley said that he was willing to endorse Ocasio-Cortez, if she were to win the primary. Would she do likewise?
“Well, Representative Crowley, I represent not just my campaign but a movement,” she replied. “I would be happy to take that question to our movement for a vote.” This seemed to gall him. He accused her of being weak on gun control. Where did you get that? Ocasio-Cortez asked. From a Reddit forum, he said. One could sense every voter under forty giggling. A Reddit forum.
Eight days before the election, Crowley and Ocasio-Cortez were to have another debate, this time in Parkchester. There were rumors that Crowley might bag it again, but, when Ocasio-Cortez saw that he’d tweeted pictures of himself at a subway platform nearby, she figured that he was coming. He was not. Instead, he sent Annabel Palma, a Latina former city councilwoman. He paid for his absence with a blistering editorial in the Times: “A spokeswoman for Mr. Crowley said he had scheduling conflicts that wouldn’t allow him to attend the two debates, inevitably leading voters to wonder—what are we, chopped liver?” On Twitter, Ocasio-Cortez noted that Crowley had sent as his surrogate “a woman with a slight resemblance to me.” The implication of a racist insult was lost on no one.
Genetically Modified Tomatoes Give Fish a Futuristic Hue
Imagine a society in which fish are raised in pens and fed food laced with dyes from genetically modified tomatoes in order to trick consumers into thinking that the fish on their plates grew up in the wild, swimming free, hunting, and being hunted. It sounds like something out of dystopian sci-fi, but that future is, potentially, right around the corner.
In the wild, fish such as salmon or trout eat crustaceans or insects with natural pigments that lend their flesh a pink or red tint. Fish raised in ponds or sea pens, however, receive no such natural coloration. Their flesh is often pale pink or even gray—not so appetizing to consumers used to a healthy pink. Fish farmers routinely add dyes derived from petroleum to the fish’s feed to mask this lack of wild coloration. But researchers think they’ve found a better way to procure these colorful edible additives. Rather than making dyes from petrochemicals, they’re growing the colorants in genetically modified tomatoes.
Marilise Nogueira, a graduate student at the Royal Holloway, University of London who led the project, says the goal was to find an alternate way to produce ketocarotenoids, the class of colorful compounds used to dye fish, in a way that doesn’t rely on environmentally harmful petrochemicals.
The enterprise says something about the cultural and scientific moment we’re in—turning to genetic modification to replace a petroleum-based product that is used to compensate for the removal of a natural process.
Humans have been dying foods produced by farmed animals for centuries or longer—often for similarly deceptive reasons. Butter, for instance, was routinely enhanced with annatto, a yellow dye derived from the seeds of the achiote tree. While undyed butter fluctuated in color, becoming more or less yellow depending on the time of year and diet of the cow producing it, using annatto extract allowed farmers to establish the color of “good” butter. Color was also added to cheeses and prepared meats such as sausages.
By the 1900s, organic dyes made from edible substances such as annatto, spinach, and saffron were largely superseded by synthetic dyes, which are cheaper to produce and more consistent in quality.
In the past few years, however, society has been shifting back from synthetic dyes to plant-derived ones, says food historian Ai Hisano from Kyoto University in Japan. Hisano sees the tomato-derived fish dye as fitting in with this shift, though in a very modern way.
Whether the genetically modified tomatoes are part of a dystopian vision or just the latest in a long line of agricultural deception, the work required some clever manipulations of the tomatoes’ genes to get the dyes required.
Naturally, tomatoes produce similar dyes called carotenoids, which give them their signature red color. But tomatoes do not make these compounds in high enough concentrations to make them a viable colorant for fish feed.
So, using a variety of tomato called Moneymaker that had been genetically edited to add bacterial DNA associated with producing ketocarotenoids, the researchers engineered a tomato to make those different colorful compounds. But the gene editing by itself wasn’t enough to get the necessary high-yield tomato.
by Kat Eschner , Hakai | Read more:
In the wild, fish such as salmon or trout eat crustaceans or insects with natural pigments that lend their flesh a pink or red tint. Fish raised in ponds or sea pens, however, receive no such natural coloration. Their flesh is often pale pink or even gray—not so appetizing to consumers used to a healthy pink. Fish farmers routinely add dyes derived from petroleum to the fish’s feed to mask this lack of wild coloration. But researchers think they’ve found a better way to procure these colorful edible additives. Rather than making dyes from petrochemicals, they’re growing the colorants in genetically modified tomatoes.
Marilise Nogueira, a graduate student at the Royal Holloway, University of London who led the project, says the goal was to find an alternate way to produce ketocarotenoids, the class of colorful compounds used to dye fish, in a way that doesn’t rely on environmentally harmful petrochemicals.The enterprise says something about the cultural and scientific moment we’re in—turning to genetic modification to replace a petroleum-based product that is used to compensate for the removal of a natural process.
Humans have been dying foods produced by farmed animals for centuries or longer—often for similarly deceptive reasons. Butter, for instance, was routinely enhanced with annatto, a yellow dye derived from the seeds of the achiote tree. While undyed butter fluctuated in color, becoming more or less yellow depending on the time of year and diet of the cow producing it, using annatto extract allowed farmers to establish the color of “good” butter. Color was also added to cheeses and prepared meats such as sausages.
By the 1900s, organic dyes made from edible substances such as annatto, spinach, and saffron were largely superseded by synthetic dyes, which are cheaper to produce and more consistent in quality.
In the past few years, however, society has been shifting back from synthetic dyes to plant-derived ones, says food historian Ai Hisano from Kyoto University in Japan. Hisano sees the tomato-derived fish dye as fitting in with this shift, though in a very modern way.
Whether the genetically modified tomatoes are part of a dystopian vision or just the latest in a long line of agricultural deception, the work required some clever manipulations of the tomatoes’ genes to get the dyes required.
Naturally, tomatoes produce similar dyes called carotenoids, which give them their signature red color. But tomatoes do not make these compounds in high enough concentrations to make them a viable colorant for fish feed.
So, using a variety of tomato called Moneymaker that had been genetically edited to add bacterial DNA associated with producing ketocarotenoids, the researchers engineered a tomato to make those different colorful compounds. But the gene editing by itself wasn’t enough to get the necessary high-yield tomato.
Image: Olena Danileiko/Alamy
Travel Bargains are Often Hiding in Plain Sight
It's always a thrill when I talk to a traveler who took advantage of a good airfare — or used a bunch of points to fly to a far-off land. But it's frustrating to hear from folks who struggle to nab a deal once they've read about it. Sometimes the deal expired. But often the bargain was just hiding in plain sight. Let's review some basic tools to help you find a good travel deal.
1. Google's ITA Matrix: This is my first stop when I'm researching airfares. The ITA software is used by all of the big airlines, including Alaska, American, United and Delta. One of the big benefits is the "calendar of lowest fares" option so you can see a month at a glance. Further, you can put in a length-of-stay spread of up to seven days. That way you can see if there's a lower fare if you stayed five days instead of six. Another important feature of this software is the ability to see the rules of a fare, including any "sell by" or "travel by" dates. These rules are not normally displayed in consumer-facing travel tools. Rather, it's reserved primarily for travel agents and airline sales agents.
Another important feature to the ITA Matrix: you cannot purchase airline tickets on the site. You have to take the information and plug it in on another site (like the airline's own website) or take it to a travel agent to write the ticket for an additional fee.
2. Google Flights: Google has improved its retail flight search/sales site. There are several powerful features to help you lock in the lowest rates. I like the "price graph" feature, where you can see at a glance how the prices change over the course of three or four months. It's easy to modify your length of stay, the specific airline and the number of stops.
Even though it's simple enough to change from a six-day to a seven-day stay, it's often necessary to search for one-way fares to see the cheapest options. This is simple in Google Flights. At the top bar where you enter your departure and destination cities, there's a button to select one-way or round trip. Then, when you find a good outbound flight, you can quickly choose to reverse the routing and show the return flights. This works best for domestic flights. For many international destinations, a one-way ticket still can be more expensive than a round-trip ticket.
You can purchase your tickets from Google Flights if you wish. Sometimes, though, the best price does not show up. So, you have to take the information from the fare display and either go to another online travel agency like Expedia or Priceline or a brick-and-mortar travel agency. Additional ticketing fees may apply.
3. Kayak's "Explore" feature: Some people really like the Kayak model of comparing prices on different websites. I don't. However, there is one feature on the Kayak site that's very helpful: the fare map. It's called the "Explore" section and you can start your search from any city. There's a "budget" slider that you can move back and forth to choose how much you're willing to pay for a ticket. And there's also a feature to choose the lowest fare for a particular month, a season or anytime.
The information provided by Kayak's map is pretty good. It's not perfect and sometimes it comes up with wacky combinations that nobody would use. But I find myself scrolling across the ocean to cities in Asia or Europe.
Once you see a fare you like, you can click on the "find flights" button next to the price. That's the moment of truth. Only about half the time does the actual price match the price that Kayak lists on its map. Then you have to check carefully to see the connections. For example, I just checked on a $297 round-trip fare between Anchorage and Las Vegas. Sounds good, doesn't it? Well, the outbound flight is 9.5 hours on JetBlue, flying first to Portland, then to Long Beach and finally to Las Vegas. But it's the return routing that gets the "stinker" award: leave Las Vegas at 10:55 p.m. on Spirit, arriving in Seattle at 1:25 a.m. Then, hang around until 8:59 p.m. for the JetBlue flight back to Anchorage. Of course, you can't check your bags all the way through, but with your 19.5-hour layover at SEA-TAC, you've got plenty of time to pick them up and re-check them. The whole package is sold on Kayak by CheapOair.
So, this is not exactly a "bait and switch" situation. But it's common for Kayak to display fares that either are unavailable or undesirable.
4. On-demand fare alerts: Many websites, including Kayak, offer to send out alerts if a fare drops between two cities. For example, if you're searching for tickets between Anchorage and Los Angeles, a little window will pop up offering to send you an alert. This can be handy. FareCompare.com also sends out alerts when prices change. Airfare Watchdog is another company that can send you an alert when prices change. Kayak, Airfare Watchdog and FareCompare.com offer these alerts for free.
1. Google's ITA Matrix: This is my first stop when I'm researching airfares. The ITA software is used by all of the big airlines, including Alaska, American, United and Delta. One of the big benefits is the "calendar of lowest fares" option so you can see a month at a glance. Further, you can put in a length-of-stay spread of up to seven days. That way you can see if there's a lower fare if you stayed five days instead of six. Another important feature of this software is the ability to see the rules of a fare, including any "sell by" or "travel by" dates. These rules are not normally displayed in consumer-facing travel tools. Rather, it's reserved primarily for travel agents and airline sales agents.Another important feature to the ITA Matrix: you cannot purchase airline tickets on the site. You have to take the information and plug it in on another site (like the airline's own website) or take it to a travel agent to write the ticket for an additional fee.
2. Google Flights: Google has improved its retail flight search/sales site. There are several powerful features to help you lock in the lowest rates. I like the "price graph" feature, where you can see at a glance how the prices change over the course of three or four months. It's easy to modify your length of stay, the specific airline and the number of stops.
Even though it's simple enough to change from a six-day to a seven-day stay, it's often necessary to search for one-way fares to see the cheapest options. This is simple in Google Flights. At the top bar where you enter your departure and destination cities, there's a button to select one-way or round trip. Then, when you find a good outbound flight, you can quickly choose to reverse the routing and show the return flights. This works best for domestic flights. For many international destinations, a one-way ticket still can be more expensive than a round-trip ticket.
You can purchase your tickets from Google Flights if you wish. Sometimes, though, the best price does not show up. So, you have to take the information from the fare display and either go to another online travel agency like Expedia or Priceline or a brick-and-mortar travel agency. Additional ticketing fees may apply.
3. Kayak's "Explore" feature: Some people really like the Kayak model of comparing prices on different websites. I don't. However, there is one feature on the Kayak site that's very helpful: the fare map. It's called the "Explore" section and you can start your search from any city. There's a "budget" slider that you can move back and forth to choose how much you're willing to pay for a ticket. And there's also a feature to choose the lowest fare for a particular month, a season or anytime.
The information provided by Kayak's map is pretty good. It's not perfect and sometimes it comes up with wacky combinations that nobody would use. But I find myself scrolling across the ocean to cities in Asia or Europe.
Once you see a fare you like, you can click on the "find flights" button next to the price. That's the moment of truth. Only about half the time does the actual price match the price that Kayak lists on its map. Then you have to check carefully to see the connections. For example, I just checked on a $297 round-trip fare between Anchorage and Las Vegas. Sounds good, doesn't it? Well, the outbound flight is 9.5 hours on JetBlue, flying first to Portland, then to Long Beach and finally to Las Vegas. But it's the return routing that gets the "stinker" award: leave Las Vegas at 10:55 p.m. on Spirit, arriving in Seattle at 1:25 a.m. Then, hang around until 8:59 p.m. for the JetBlue flight back to Anchorage. Of course, you can't check your bags all the way through, but with your 19.5-hour layover at SEA-TAC, you've got plenty of time to pick them up and re-check them. The whole package is sold on Kayak by CheapOair.
So, this is not exactly a "bait and switch" situation. But it's common for Kayak to display fares that either are unavailable or undesirable.
4. On-demand fare alerts: Many websites, including Kayak, offer to send out alerts if a fare drops between two cities. For example, if you're searching for tickets between Anchorage and Los Angeles, a little window will pop up offering to send you an alert. This can be handy. FareCompare.com also sends out alerts when prices change. Airfare Watchdog is another company that can send you an alert when prices change. Kayak, Airfare Watchdog and FareCompare.com offer these alerts for free.
by Scott McMurren, ADN | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. I didn't know Google even had travel apps.]
Sunday, July 15, 2018
Burberry Investors Question Destruction of $38 Million in Goods
Image: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg
[ed. Question?]
[ed. Question?]
George Carlin
[ed. Nothing against honest Mom and Pop's (which are foundational to every culture and getting screwed just like the rest of us). See also: If You Love Capitalism, Worry About Small Business.]
Nevis: How the World’s Most Secretive Offshore Haven Refuses to Clean Up
Tax havens hate attention. Places such as Jersey, Switzerland and the British Virgin Islands made a handsome living from helping their clients break other countries’ laws for decades, without anyone really noticing. And they liked it that way. Then came the 2007-8 financial crisis, and the good times ended. Rich nations, angry over the loss to their budgets caused by tax dodging, put diplomatic pressure on the havens. Activists, furious over the theft of hundreds of billions of pounds from poor countries, exposed them in the press. The release of vast troves of confidential information – SwissLeaks, the HSBC files, the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers – cemented a public perception that offshore financial centres exist to help the powerful dodge their obligations to the rest of us, and governments have queued up to punish them. In May, when Britain’s parliament voted to force transparency on its Caribbean islands, it was just the latest blow to the offshore havens.
This concerted campaign has threatened the tax haven business model. Since Swiss banks were forced to open up by the US Department of Justice in 2010, their share of the world’s offshore wealth has dropped from almost half to less than a third. In the British Virgin Islands (BVI), where UK investigators now have access to corporate ownership information, the number of new companies created annually has fallen by more than 50% since 2012. Jersey’s banking sector is barely half the size that it was in 2007.
Although cooperating with outsiders in this way has proven expensive, the havens clearly concluded there was little choice. If denied access to the global financial system, or sanctioned by Brussels or Washington, an offshore centre could be put out of business altogether.
This is good. Tax havens have helped the world’s wealthiest and most powerful keep a disproportionate share of the benefits of globalisation, by preventing the rest of us from seeing how much they own. This, in turn, has eroded trust in democracy and capitalism all over the world. Restricting the operations of tax havens, and enforcing true transparency on the ownership of property, is crucial if citizens are truly to take back control of their countries’ destinies.
Yet, at the heart of this increasingly encouraging picture, there remain a few holdouts – places that have stuck to the old habit of keeping the secrets of the powerful. Foremost among them is Nevis, a solitary volcano in the Caribbean with a population of just 11,000, which has been implicated in some of the most sordid financial scams of modern times, from Britain’s biggest-ever tax fraud to the fleecing of 620,000 vulnerable Americans in a $220m payday loan scam. The story of Nevis reveals the difficulties the world faces in trying to put an end to tax evasion, fraud and kleptocracy.
While Nevis’s rivals have lost business by opening up, Nevis has doubled down on secrecy. Not long ago, I spoke to a lawyer with extensive experience of the island, who asked not to be identified because he still needs to work with Nevisian officials. “The only good thing that Donald Trump could do, if he was ever so inclined,” he said, “is take a battleship and roll it up to Nevis, and literally train the guns and say: ‘Get rid of these bullshit laws or I’ll blow you to kingdom come.’”
In short, he said, “A bright light needs to be shone on this cockroach.”
Tax havens are often lumped together as if they all do the same job. In reality, they are distinctive and highly specialised predators in the financial shark tank. At the top of the food chain – as far as the western world goes, anyway – are places such as London, Switzerland and New York. These apex predators are surrounded by clouds of pilot fish that snap up the scraps: places such as Monaco, Jersey and the Cayman Islands.
These smaller centres all play different aspects of the offshore game: Jersey specialises in trusts, the BVI in incorporation, Liechtenstein in foundations. They also differ in their tolerance for criminality. Among the British territories: Gibraltar is dodgier than Guernsey, but cleaner than Anguilla. And they serve different geographical regions: Mauritius for Africa and India; Cyprus for the former Soviet Union; the Bahamas for the US.
In the world of offshore, Nevis is a bottom-feeder. It specialises in letting its clients create corporations with greater anonymity than almost anywhere else on earth. Last year, information on 70,000 Nevisian companies was leaked as part of the Paradise Papers investigation, but that didn’t help us find out who owns them: ownership information is so secret there that even the island’s own corporate registry doesn’t know. In other words, there was nothing substantial to leak. (...)
In simple terms, Nevis’s laws allow rich people to put ramparts around their property, to protect it from someone who might want to use the courts to take it away, whether that be a business partner, a spouse, an estranged child, or indeed anyone. All tax havens do this, but Nevis turned the ratchet many clicks further than its rivals, in its efforts to tempt business away from its rivals.
To bring legal proceedings on Nevis, you have to file a bond of $100,000 with the court as proof that your case isn’t frivolous. If you win, that is only the beginning of your quest for the assets. Nevis’s regulator holds no information on either the ownership of the company or its assets. Nevis’s LLCs – Neufeld’s innovation – can’t be wound up, meaning you won’t be able to confiscate any assets they own, and you would have to seek redress elsewhere. If you seek to challenge the legality of a property being put in a Nevis-registered trust – for example, if you thought the property actually belonged to you – you have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the trust’s creation was fraudulent, and you would have to begin that legal challenge within a year of its creation. This is tricky, since Nevis law requires all information on the trust to be confidential, so you would be unlikely to know it even existed.
These ludicrously formidable defences are not really intended to be used, but instead – like the bright colouring of a poisonous tree frog – they exist to warn you off attacking in the first place. If they can persuade a plaintiff to settle out of court for less than is owed, then, for a rich person with vulnerable assets, they are well worth paying for.
by Oliver Bullough, The Guardian | Read more:
This concerted campaign has threatened the tax haven business model. Since Swiss banks were forced to open up by the US Department of Justice in 2010, their share of the world’s offshore wealth has dropped from almost half to less than a third. In the British Virgin Islands (BVI), where UK investigators now have access to corporate ownership information, the number of new companies created annually has fallen by more than 50% since 2012. Jersey’s banking sector is barely half the size that it was in 2007.
Although cooperating with outsiders in this way has proven expensive, the havens clearly concluded there was little choice. If denied access to the global financial system, or sanctioned by Brussels or Washington, an offshore centre could be put out of business altogether.This is good. Tax havens have helped the world’s wealthiest and most powerful keep a disproportionate share of the benefits of globalisation, by preventing the rest of us from seeing how much they own. This, in turn, has eroded trust in democracy and capitalism all over the world. Restricting the operations of tax havens, and enforcing true transparency on the ownership of property, is crucial if citizens are truly to take back control of their countries’ destinies.
Yet, at the heart of this increasingly encouraging picture, there remain a few holdouts – places that have stuck to the old habit of keeping the secrets of the powerful. Foremost among them is Nevis, a solitary volcano in the Caribbean with a population of just 11,000, which has been implicated in some of the most sordid financial scams of modern times, from Britain’s biggest-ever tax fraud to the fleecing of 620,000 vulnerable Americans in a $220m payday loan scam. The story of Nevis reveals the difficulties the world faces in trying to put an end to tax evasion, fraud and kleptocracy.
While Nevis’s rivals have lost business by opening up, Nevis has doubled down on secrecy. Not long ago, I spoke to a lawyer with extensive experience of the island, who asked not to be identified because he still needs to work with Nevisian officials. “The only good thing that Donald Trump could do, if he was ever so inclined,” he said, “is take a battleship and roll it up to Nevis, and literally train the guns and say: ‘Get rid of these bullshit laws or I’ll blow you to kingdom come.’”
In short, he said, “A bright light needs to be shone on this cockroach.”
Tax havens are often lumped together as if they all do the same job. In reality, they are distinctive and highly specialised predators in the financial shark tank. At the top of the food chain – as far as the western world goes, anyway – are places such as London, Switzerland and New York. These apex predators are surrounded by clouds of pilot fish that snap up the scraps: places such as Monaco, Jersey and the Cayman Islands.
These smaller centres all play different aspects of the offshore game: Jersey specialises in trusts, the BVI in incorporation, Liechtenstein in foundations. They also differ in their tolerance for criminality. Among the British territories: Gibraltar is dodgier than Guernsey, but cleaner than Anguilla. And they serve different geographical regions: Mauritius for Africa and India; Cyprus for the former Soviet Union; the Bahamas for the US.
In the world of offshore, Nevis is a bottom-feeder. It specialises in letting its clients create corporations with greater anonymity than almost anywhere else on earth. Last year, information on 70,000 Nevisian companies was leaked as part of the Paradise Papers investigation, but that didn’t help us find out who owns them: ownership information is so secret there that even the island’s own corporate registry doesn’t know. In other words, there was nothing substantial to leak. (...)
In simple terms, Nevis’s laws allow rich people to put ramparts around their property, to protect it from someone who might want to use the courts to take it away, whether that be a business partner, a spouse, an estranged child, or indeed anyone. All tax havens do this, but Nevis turned the ratchet many clicks further than its rivals, in its efforts to tempt business away from its rivals.
To bring legal proceedings on Nevis, you have to file a bond of $100,000 with the court as proof that your case isn’t frivolous. If you win, that is only the beginning of your quest for the assets. Nevis’s regulator holds no information on either the ownership of the company or its assets. Nevis’s LLCs – Neufeld’s innovation – can’t be wound up, meaning you won’t be able to confiscate any assets they own, and you would have to seek redress elsewhere. If you seek to challenge the legality of a property being put in a Nevis-registered trust – for example, if you thought the property actually belonged to you – you have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the trust’s creation was fraudulent, and you would have to begin that legal challenge within a year of its creation. This is tricky, since Nevis law requires all information on the trust to be confidential, so you would be unlikely to know it even existed.
These ludicrously formidable defences are not really intended to be used, but instead – like the bright colouring of a poisonous tree frog – they exist to warn you off attacking in the first place. If they can persuade a plaintiff to settle out of court for less than is owed, then, for a rich person with vulnerable assets, they are well worth paying for.
by Oliver Bullough, The Guardian | Read more:
Image:Planet Observer/UIG/Getty/Universal images
The Secrets of Leonard Leo
When President Donald Trump nominates a justice to the Supreme Court on Monday night, he will be carrying out the agenda of a small, secretive network of extremely conservative Catholic activists already responsible for placing three justices (Alito, Roberts, and Gorsuch) on the high court.
And yet few people know who they are—until now.
At the center of the network is Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, the association of legal professionals that has been the pipeline for nearly all of Trump’s judicial nominees. (Leo is on leave from the Federalist Society to personally assist Trump in picking a replacement for Justice Anthony Kennedy.) His formal title is executive vice president, but that role belies Leo’s influence.
Directly or through surrogates, he has placed dozens of life-tenure judges on the federal bench; effectively controls the Judicial Crisis Network, which led the opposition to President Obama’s high court nominee, Judge Merrick Garland; he heavily influences the Becket Fund law firm that represented Hobby Lobby in its successful challenge of contraception; and now supervises admissions and hires at the George Mason Law School, newly renamed in memory of Justice Antonin Scalia.
“Leonard Leo was a visionary,” said Tom Carter, who served as Leo’s media relations director when he was chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), in an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast. “He figured out twenty years ago that conservatives had lost the culture war. Abortion, gay rights, contraception—conservatives didn’t have a chance if public opinion prevailed. So they needed to stack the courts.”
Amazingly, said Carter, Leo has succeeded in this mission with few people taking notice. (...)
Leo is a member of the secretive, extremely conservative Knights of Malta, a Catholic order founded in the 12th century that functions as a quasi-independent sovereign nation with its own diplomatic corps (separate from the Vatican), United Nations status, and a tremendous amount of money and land.
The Knights, which recently have tussled with Pope Francis and resisted his calls for reform, take their own set of vows, as monks do. On the surface, the primary work of the order is humanitarian work around the globe, but it is also home to noted Catholic conservatives including Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, a frequent foe of the reformist pope.
“Leonard’s faith is paramount to him,” Carter said. “When he traveled, staff members had to find him a church near where he was staying so he could say [attend] Mass every day.”
To be sure, none of this is to repeat the odious claims of anti-Catholicism of papist conspiracies and dual loyalty. But Leo has spent a career shaping the federal judiciary to reflect rigid, conservative religious dogmas. (...)
Three Justices and Counting
Leo is most closely associated with the Federalist Society, which he joined in the 1990s. Sometimes thought of as a legal association, the Federalist Society is actually a large right-wing network that grooms conservative law students still in law school (sponsoring everything from free burrito lunches to conferences, speakers, and journals), links them together, mentors them, finds them jobs, and eventually places them in courts and in government. It’s like a large-scale fraternity, knitted together by ideological conformity. (The Federalist Society did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.)
The Federalist Society network is now estimated to include over 70,000 people. In 2016, they reported $25 million in net assets.
Leo played the decisive role in the appointments of Justice Alito (whom few people had heard of before Leo first promoted him), Chief Justice Roberts, and Justice Gorsuch—as well as in the unprecedented stonewalling of would-be Justice Merrick Garland.
Now, of the 25 people on Trump’s Supreme Court list, all but one are Federalist Society members or affiliates. Justice Gorsuch was the speaker at the 2017 Federalist Society gala. And when Gorsuch was asked how he had come to Trump’s attention, he told Congress, “On about December 2, 2016, I was contacted by Leonard Leo” (PDF). (...)
Ironically, while trying to downplay the Federalist Society’s influence, White House counsel Don McGahn, the point man on judicial nominees, managed to confirm it.
“Our opponents of judicial nominees frequently claim the president has outsourced his selection of judges,” McGahn said at a Federalist Society event last year. “That is completely false. I’ve been a member of the Federalist Society since law school, still am, so frankly it seems like it’s been in-sourced.”
And yet few people know who they are—until now.
At the center of the network is Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, the association of legal professionals that has been the pipeline for nearly all of Trump’s judicial nominees. (Leo is on leave from the Federalist Society to personally assist Trump in picking a replacement for Justice Anthony Kennedy.) His formal title is executive vice president, but that role belies Leo’s influence.
Directly or through surrogates, he has placed dozens of life-tenure judges on the federal bench; effectively controls the Judicial Crisis Network, which led the opposition to President Obama’s high court nominee, Judge Merrick Garland; he heavily influences the Becket Fund law firm that represented Hobby Lobby in its successful challenge of contraception; and now supervises admissions and hires at the George Mason Law School, newly renamed in memory of Justice Antonin Scalia.“Leonard Leo was a visionary,” said Tom Carter, who served as Leo’s media relations director when he was chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), in an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast. “He figured out twenty years ago that conservatives had lost the culture war. Abortion, gay rights, contraception—conservatives didn’t have a chance if public opinion prevailed. So they needed to stack the courts.”
Amazingly, said Carter, Leo has succeeded in this mission with few people taking notice. (...)
Leo is a member of the secretive, extremely conservative Knights of Malta, a Catholic order founded in the 12th century that functions as a quasi-independent sovereign nation with its own diplomatic corps (separate from the Vatican), United Nations status, and a tremendous amount of money and land.
The Knights, which recently have tussled with Pope Francis and resisted his calls for reform, take their own set of vows, as monks do. On the surface, the primary work of the order is humanitarian work around the globe, but it is also home to noted Catholic conservatives including Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, a frequent foe of the reformist pope.
“Leonard’s faith is paramount to him,” Carter said. “When he traveled, staff members had to find him a church near where he was staying so he could say [attend] Mass every day.”
To be sure, none of this is to repeat the odious claims of anti-Catholicism of papist conspiracies and dual loyalty. But Leo has spent a career shaping the federal judiciary to reflect rigid, conservative religious dogmas. (...)
Three Justices and Counting
Leo is most closely associated with the Federalist Society, which he joined in the 1990s. Sometimes thought of as a legal association, the Federalist Society is actually a large right-wing network that grooms conservative law students still in law school (sponsoring everything from free burrito lunches to conferences, speakers, and journals), links them together, mentors them, finds them jobs, and eventually places them in courts and in government. It’s like a large-scale fraternity, knitted together by ideological conformity. (The Federalist Society did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.)
The Federalist Society network is now estimated to include over 70,000 people. In 2016, they reported $25 million in net assets.
Leo played the decisive role in the appointments of Justice Alito (whom few people had heard of before Leo first promoted him), Chief Justice Roberts, and Justice Gorsuch—as well as in the unprecedented stonewalling of would-be Justice Merrick Garland.
Now, of the 25 people on Trump’s Supreme Court list, all but one are Federalist Society members or affiliates. Justice Gorsuch was the speaker at the 2017 Federalist Society gala. And when Gorsuch was asked how he had come to Trump’s attention, he told Congress, “On about December 2, 2016, I was contacted by Leonard Leo” (PDF). (...)
Ironically, while trying to downplay the Federalist Society’s influence, White House counsel Don McGahn, the point man on judicial nominees, managed to confirm it.
“Our opponents of judicial nominees frequently claim the president has outsourced his selection of judges,” McGahn said at a Federalist Society event last year. “That is completely false. I’ve been a member of the Federalist Society since law school, still am, so frankly it seems like it’s been in-sourced.”
by Jay Michaelson, Daily Beast | Read more:
Image: Lyne Lucien
Saturday, July 14, 2018
‘Find Your Passion’ Is Awful Advice
Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, remembers asking an undergraduate seminar recently, “How many of you are waiting to find your passion?”
“Almost all of them raised their hand and got dreamy looks in their eyes,” she told me. They talked about it “like a tidal wave would sweep over them,” he said. Sploosh. Huzzah! It’s accounting!
Would they have unlimited motivation for their passion? They nodded solemnly.
“I hate to burst your balloon,” she said, “but it doesn’t usually happen that way.”
What Dweck asked her students is a common refrain in American society. The term “Follow your passion” has increased ninefold in English books since 1990. “Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life” is another college-counseling standby of unknown provenance.
But according to Dweck and others, that advice is steering people wrong.
“What are the consequences of that?” asked Paul O’Keefe, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale—NUS College. “That means that if you do something that feels like work, it means you don’t love it.” He gave me the example of a student who jumps from lab to lab, trying to find one whose research topic feels like her passion. “It’s this idea that if I’m not completely overwhelmed by emotion when I walk into a lab, then it won’t be my passion or my interest.”
That’s why he and two co-authors—Dweck and Greg Walton of Stanford—recently performed a study that suggests it might be time to change the way we think about our interests. Passions aren’t “found,” they argue. They’re developed.
In a paper that is forthcoming in Psychological Science, the authors delineate the difference between the two mind-sets. One is a “fixed theory of interests”—the idea that core interests are there from birth, just waiting to be discovered—and the other is a “growth theory,” the idea that interests are something anyone can cultivate over time. (...)
“If passions are things found fully formed, and your job is to look around the world for your passion—it’s a crazy thought,” Walton told me. “It doesn’t reflect the way I or my students experience school, where you go to a class and have a lecture or a conversation, and you think, That’s interesting. It’s through a process of investment and development that you develop an abiding passion in a field.”
Another reason not to buy into the fixed theory is that it can cause people to give up too easily. If something becomes difficult, it’s easy to assume that it simply must not have been your passion, after all. In one portion of this study, the students who thought interests were fixed were also less likely to think that pursuing a passion would be difficult at times. Instead, they thought it would provide “endless motivation.”
Dweck, one of the paper’s authors, has previously studied different types of mind-sets as they relate to intelligence. People who have a growth mind-set about their own intelligence tend to be less afraid of failure, according to her research, because they believe smarts are cultivated, not inherent. Interests are related to, but distinct from, abilities, the study authors told me: You can be interested in something but not very good at it. “I’ve been playing guitar for 25 years, but I can’t say that my abilities have gotten that much better in the past 10 years,” O’Keefe said.
Dweck told me that “find your passion” has a laudable history. “Before that, people were saying, ‘Find your genius,’ and that was so intimidating. It implied that only people who were really brilliant at something could succeed,” she said. “‘Find your passion’ felt more democratic. Everybody can have an interest.” But this study suggests that even the idea of finding your “true” interest can intimidate people and keep them from digging further into a field. (...)
K. Ann Renninger, a professor at Swarthmore College who was not involved with the study, has researched the development of interests and said that “neuroscience has confirmed that interests can be supported to develop.” In other words, with the right help, most people can get interested in almost anything. Before the age of 8, she said, kids will try anything. Between the ages of 8 and 12, they start to compare themselves with others and become insecure if they’re not as good as their peers at something. That’s when educators have to start to find new ways to keep them interested in certain subjects.
by Olga Khazan, The Atlantic | Read more:
“Almost all of them raised their hand and got dreamy looks in their eyes,” she told me. They talked about it “like a tidal wave would sweep over them,” he said. Sploosh. Huzzah! It’s accounting!
Would they have unlimited motivation for their passion? They nodded solemnly.“I hate to burst your balloon,” she said, “but it doesn’t usually happen that way.”
What Dweck asked her students is a common refrain in American society. The term “Follow your passion” has increased ninefold in English books since 1990. “Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life” is another college-counseling standby of unknown provenance.
But according to Dweck and others, that advice is steering people wrong.
“What are the consequences of that?” asked Paul O’Keefe, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale—NUS College. “That means that if you do something that feels like work, it means you don’t love it.” He gave me the example of a student who jumps from lab to lab, trying to find one whose research topic feels like her passion. “It’s this idea that if I’m not completely overwhelmed by emotion when I walk into a lab, then it won’t be my passion or my interest.”
That’s why he and two co-authors—Dweck and Greg Walton of Stanford—recently performed a study that suggests it might be time to change the way we think about our interests. Passions aren’t “found,” they argue. They’re developed.
In a paper that is forthcoming in Psychological Science, the authors delineate the difference between the two mind-sets. One is a “fixed theory of interests”—the idea that core interests are there from birth, just waiting to be discovered—and the other is a “growth theory,” the idea that interests are something anyone can cultivate over time. (...)
“If passions are things found fully formed, and your job is to look around the world for your passion—it’s a crazy thought,” Walton told me. “It doesn’t reflect the way I or my students experience school, where you go to a class and have a lecture or a conversation, and you think, That’s interesting. It’s through a process of investment and development that you develop an abiding passion in a field.”
Another reason not to buy into the fixed theory is that it can cause people to give up too easily. If something becomes difficult, it’s easy to assume that it simply must not have been your passion, after all. In one portion of this study, the students who thought interests were fixed were also less likely to think that pursuing a passion would be difficult at times. Instead, they thought it would provide “endless motivation.”
Dweck, one of the paper’s authors, has previously studied different types of mind-sets as they relate to intelligence. People who have a growth mind-set about their own intelligence tend to be less afraid of failure, according to her research, because they believe smarts are cultivated, not inherent. Interests are related to, but distinct from, abilities, the study authors told me: You can be interested in something but not very good at it. “I’ve been playing guitar for 25 years, but I can’t say that my abilities have gotten that much better in the past 10 years,” O’Keefe said.
Dweck told me that “find your passion” has a laudable history. “Before that, people were saying, ‘Find your genius,’ and that was so intimidating. It implied that only people who were really brilliant at something could succeed,” she said. “‘Find your passion’ felt more democratic. Everybody can have an interest.” But this study suggests that even the idea of finding your “true” interest can intimidate people and keep them from digging further into a field. (...)
K. Ann Renninger, a professor at Swarthmore College who was not involved with the study, has researched the development of interests and said that “neuroscience has confirmed that interests can be supported to develop.” In other words, with the right help, most people can get interested in almost anything. Before the age of 8, she said, kids will try anything. Between the ages of 8 and 12, they start to compare themselves with others and become insecure if they’re not as good as their peers at something. That’s when educators have to start to find new ways to keep them interested in certain subjects.
by Olga Khazan, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Toby Melville/Reuters
License to Clip
Rosemarie Abruzzese feared losing her cosmetology license and her job in 2017 after the Pennsylvania Board of Cosmetology said her past felony drug conviction made her a threat to public safety.
Her story is familiar, a license being threatened or denied outright because of a past crime.
Abruzzese was fortunate, though. She had access to a lawyer and appealed the decision to the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court. In April, the court ordered the board to grant her a probationary license, which means she can keep her job. If no other problems occur, the full license will be reinstated.
Eliminating licensing regulations that block people with criminal histories from getting work has gained support on the federal and state level. In 2015, the Obama administration released a list of best practices for states on occupational licensing. And President Donald Trump’s labor department is providing funding to states that want to study their licensing laws.
“If a person commits a crime, and they pay their debt to society, when does that debt end?” asked Jeff Robinson, director of the Trone Center for Justice and Equality, of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Does it end when you come out of prison? Because apparently it’s just beginning when you come out of prison. And that makes no sense.” (...)
Since 2016, 14 states — Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Hampshire and Tennessee — have passed laws revising offender licensing restrictions or requiring boards to track how many people are rejected based on a past criminal conviction. A licensing reform bill is pending in the California Legislature.
The National Employment Law Project has put an emphasis on changing licensing laws for the big industries that can lead to good jobs for people leaving prison, said Maurice Emsellem, its fair chance program director.
“Transportation, healthcare, education — industries like that, where there's a lot of background check restrictions. And if folks can get those jobs, they can really move up the income ladder,” Emsellem said. (...)
Background checks became a licensing hurdle for Pennsylvania barbers in 2015 after the licensing board added a question about criminal history to the application. Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections saw the number of inmates getting licensed through its training program take a severe dip. The overall number of barber and barber manager licenses awarded in the state annually dropped by almost 25 percent, according to the corrections department. Even after prison officials got the board to review mitigating factors, there were still fewer student inmates getting licensed.
In June, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf proposed repealing a law that allows certain boards to ban anyone who has a felony drug record from being able to work in the field for 10 years after completion of a sentence. He has also proposed abolishing 13 licensing boards, including those governing natural hair braiders and barbers.
Licensing can result in higher wages and more credibility for an industry, and reviewing criminal history is “vital” to the board’s ability to protect public health and safety, according to a statement from the Pennsylvania Department of State. The department oversees 29 of the state’s licensing boards. A spokesperson said the department favors removing unnecessary barriers to licensure. Board members do not answer questions from the press, the spokesperson said.
In 2015, Rosemarie Abruzzese was arrested on charges of trading pills with an undercover police officer, according to court records. Before being sentenced, she completed two court ordered treatment programs and applied for her cosmetology license.
She was sentenced to five years probation in September 2015. Nine months later, Abruzzese was working two cosmetology jobs and was the sole provider for her two kids. Then she got a letter that her license was in jeopardy. Despite the board’s state attorney recommending Abruzzese continue working, the board chose to suspend her license indefinitely.
When Abruzzese appealed, Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court President Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt wrote that the board had abused its discretion and made findings not based on fact.
“I love what I do,” Abruzzese said. “I love where I work. It helps me on a daily basis.”
With a job, Abruzzese said she can stay focused; stay accountable; and stay a productive member of society.
by Ashley Nerbovig, The Marshall Project | Read more:
Image: Robert Donald/Barcroft Images
Her story is familiar, a license being threatened or denied outright because of a past crime.
Abruzzese was fortunate, though. She had access to a lawyer and appealed the decision to the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court. In April, the court ordered the board to grant her a probationary license, which means she can keep her job. If no other problems occur, the full license will be reinstated.
Eliminating licensing regulations that block people with criminal histories from getting work has gained support on the federal and state level. In 2015, the Obama administration released a list of best practices for states on occupational licensing. And President Donald Trump’s labor department is providing funding to states that want to study their licensing laws.“If a person commits a crime, and they pay their debt to society, when does that debt end?” asked Jeff Robinson, director of the Trone Center for Justice and Equality, of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Does it end when you come out of prison? Because apparently it’s just beginning when you come out of prison. And that makes no sense.” (...)
Since 2016, 14 states — Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Hampshire and Tennessee — have passed laws revising offender licensing restrictions or requiring boards to track how many people are rejected based on a past criminal conviction. A licensing reform bill is pending in the California Legislature.
The National Employment Law Project has put an emphasis on changing licensing laws for the big industries that can lead to good jobs for people leaving prison, said Maurice Emsellem, its fair chance program director.
“Transportation, healthcare, education — industries like that, where there's a lot of background check restrictions. And if folks can get those jobs, they can really move up the income ladder,” Emsellem said. (...)
Background checks became a licensing hurdle for Pennsylvania barbers in 2015 after the licensing board added a question about criminal history to the application. Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections saw the number of inmates getting licensed through its training program take a severe dip. The overall number of barber and barber manager licenses awarded in the state annually dropped by almost 25 percent, according to the corrections department. Even after prison officials got the board to review mitigating factors, there were still fewer student inmates getting licensed.
In June, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf proposed repealing a law that allows certain boards to ban anyone who has a felony drug record from being able to work in the field for 10 years after completion of a sentence. He has also proposed abolishing 13 licensing boards, including those governing natural hair braiders and barbers.
Licensing can result in higher wages and more credibility for an industry, and reviewing criminal history is “vital” to the board’s ability to protect public health and safety, according to a statement from the Pennsylvania Department of State. The department oversees 29 of the state’s licensing boards. A spokesperson said the department favors removing unnecessary barriers to licensure. Board members do not answer questions from the press, the spokesperson said.
In 2015, Rosemarie Abruzzese was arrested on charges of trading pills with an undercover police officer, according to court records. Before being sentenced, she completed two court ordered treatment programs and applied for her cosmetology license.
She was sentenced to five years probation in September 2015. Nine months later, Abruzzese was working two cosmetology jobs and was the sole provider for her two kids. Then she got a letter that her license was in jeopardy. Despite the board’s state attorney recommending Abruzzese continue working, the board chose to suspend her license indefinitely.
When Abruzzese appealed, Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court President Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt wrote that the board had abused its discretion and made findings not based on fact.
“I love what I do,” Abruzzese said. “I love where I work. It helps me on a daily basis.”
With a job, Abruzzese said she can stay focused; stay accountable; and stay a productive member of society.
by Ashley Nerbovig, The Marshall Project | Read more:
Image: Robert Donald/Barcroft Images
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