Category: Money, Class, and Poverty,

Refugee crisis in Greece: Tensions soar between migrants and locals

On By peanutgallerynhIn Europe,, Media and Culture,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

The European refugee crisis is now five years old. More than 120,000 migrants and asylum seekers arrived clandestinely in 2019, according to the International Organization for Migration, with the vast majority crossing the Mediterranean Sea. That’s a big drop from the more than 1 million who arrived in 2015. Yet due to a backlog of cases and closed borders in the North, the Greek islands have never looked like this.

…A common complaint from locals is that a thriving NGO industry — no doubt helping refugees that come ashore — comes at the cost of their businesses as more are encouraged to make the journey.

A meeting was held the following day in Moria village to discuss the situation. Angry shouts and applause reached Takis Bokolis, 50, smoking a cigarette outside of the town hall. Bokolis works pressing oil from his family’s olives. What bothers him most is the refugees cutting down the trees for firewood. “I want to cry. It’s so painful. We’ve grown up with these trees. They are my kid’s food,” he said. Local authorities haven’t intervened as refugees thin out the groves around Moria camp.

..No islander has been attacked by anyone from the camp. But businesses and homes were robbed. And Moria villagers, heavily outnumbered, worry about what will happen if things turn violent.

Refugee crisis in Greece: Tensions soar between migrants and locals

hmmmm

 

Brad Parscale used private firm to make “payments out of public view” to Don Jr’s girlfriend: report

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

Parscale Strategy, has essentially taken over the Republican Party’s fundraising machinery even as it “has billed nearly $35 million to the Trump campaign, the R.N.C. and related entities since 2017.”

In addition to being the central hub for online fundraising, Parscale Strategy has also been used to make “payments out of public view” to Lara Trump, the wife of Eric Trump, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Donald Trump, Jr.

…It is unclear just how much money Trump family members have made from the venture, however, because Parscale’s operation is “cloaked in secrecy, largely exempt from federal disclosure.”

Brad Parscale used private firm to make “payments out of public view” to Don Jr’s girlfriend: report | Salon.com

huh???!

The invisible city: how a homeless man built a life underground

On By peanutgallerynhIn Europe,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

These are the fundamentals of a home, and they insulate and shelter, they screen off a little privacy and secure our favourite bits-and-pieces. Home can be a simple matter of demarcation. All that for all of you! This little bit for me. Absent a clear-cut threshold, everything gets complicated and compromised: safety, sanctuary, a sense of rootedness and control, a place in the normal push-and-pull of communal trust.

The invisible city: how a homeless man built a life underground | News | The Guardian

sigh…

San Jose opens first tiny home community for homeless

On By peanutgallerynhIn Infrastructure and Transportation,, Local Interest,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

In San Jose alone, more than 6,000 residents sleep in cars, shelters or on the streets every night.

After making your way past the 10-foot gate surrounding the property, 40 tiny homes — 80-square-feet rectangular structures with just enough room for a single bed, desk, shelf and air conditioning and heating system — are in neat rows with gravel paths, lined with potted plants, leading from one home to another.

…The community is open to people who are part of the county’s rapid rehousing voucher program and are in the process of securing permanent housing but need a place to stay in the interim to avoid homelessness. The city hopes to serve 120 residents on the VTA site during the first year, aiming to rotate 40 residents into permanent housing every four months.

…Only eight of the 40 sleeping cabins are currently occupied.

City officials attribute that to the stringent criteria placed on eligible residents, including a thorough background check, and the task of having to track people down.

“People get lost in the system,” Jacky Morales-Ferrand, San Jose housing director, said in an interview following the event. “And, that’s actually one of the benefits of creating these interim sites, because as we create housing opportunities for people to move in, we know that we can connect them very quickly.”

…In addition to the cabins, the community features shared bathrooms, showers and laundry facilities, a kitchen space and common areas with computers, internet access and job boards. The community is protected around the clock by a security guard who sits in a patrol station next to the front gate.

HomeFirst not only operates the community but provides a wide range of services to residents, healthcare assistance, personal finance advice and career readiness training.

To encourage residents to work with the organization to obtain permanent housing, they are each required to pay 10 percent of their income — or $20 if they’re not employed — for the first six months. Afterward, the rent will increase by 10 percent every six months, capping at 30 percent.

San Jose opens first tiny home community for homeless

hmmmmm

The Grooming Gap: What “Looking the Part” Costs Women

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Media and Culture,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

Madison, who works a customer service job at an airport spa, has an employee handbook that says “makeup should be well maintained” and “hands and nails must be well manicured.” She says the few men she works with just ignore these guidelines “because they’re meant for women but [it] doesn’t explicitly say that.” Her wages ($13.25 per hour + 15% retail commission) do not include additional pay to purchase manicures or makeup.

…The grooming gap refers to the set of social norms regarding grooming and appearance for women, including the time women workers must spend to conform to these norms and the material consequences it has on their lives.

We’ve all heard the common advice to “look the part” at work. For men, that can often just mean business casual clothing and a short haircut. For women, it can mean hours spent each week on makeup, hair styling and curating an outfit that’s both attractive and professional.

…Physically attractive workers have higher incomes than average-looking workers, but that this relationship is eliminated when controlling for grooming in women. In other words, if you purchase the right clothes, makeup and haircut, higher wages are more within reach. It’s true that men need to abide by certain grooming rules, too, but they are less complex, less expensive and less time consuming.

…Studies confirm that, 42% of the time, products marketed to women are more expensive than comparable products targeted to men.

The grooming gap also results in a loss of free time: 55 minutes each day for the average woman, the equivalent of two full weeks each year.

The Grooming Gap: What “Looking the Part” Costs Women – In These Times

hmmm

The real cost of not wearing makeup at the office

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Media and Culture,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

While I rarely stray above the limit that I set for myself, I wanted to know if I was spending an appropriate amount on personal grooming for my income level. I also wanted to know if I was spending it on the right things.

Yet when I consulted personal finance websites and publications, many seemed to wave off these expenses as “nonessentials,” failing to consider the penalty that many women would pay by reducing (or cutting out) these expenses. Beauty blogs and women’s magazines—on the other hand—were helpful in suggesting cheaper alternatives, yet they also published beauty routines that seem unaffordable.

…While a male founder can pitch his expensive enterprise software start-up in jeans and T-shirt, “When it comes to women, we have to look the part of the market that we’re serving. If we’re selling designer bags, we have to be wearing designer everything,” Wrigley explains. 

…For Wrigley, the grooming expectation for a female CEO goes beyond raising capital. When asked about the impact of social media on such pressures, Wrigley says that there are a lot of image-related pressures for female entrepreneurs in the consumer-centric space. “The number of questions I got about my personal Instagram following is bizarre.”

…“The whole ‘Don’t wear makeup if you want to save money’ is not an option for a lot of people. It’s also demeaning. It pits this sort of ‘I’m the smart cool girl who doesn’t wear makeup’ to ‘Well, you’re the brainwashed girl who does wear makeup.’”

The real cost of not wearing makeup at the office

hmm

‘Chick Beer’ for Women? Why Gender Marketing Repels More Than Sells – Harvard Business School Working Knowledge

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Media and Culture,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

Why do these gender appeals alienate the very audience they aim to attract? People resist being categorized—or made to feel like they are unwillingly reduced to a single identity—particularly when the product they’re being nudged toward evokes a stereotype about their gender.

Suggesting that women will clamor for a product wrapped in pink packaging just because some marketer assumes that all women love pink can come across as downright insulting.

…”There’s something very off-putting about feeling like you’re being reduced to a single category of membership.”

…“The moment you affix a gender identity label on the higher-value button, we see that people’s preference for the button goes down, suggesting that women were actually avoiding the very item that was trying to appeal to them,” Kim says.

In another study, the research team asked one group of participants to choose either a green or purple calculator to complete math problems, while in another group, they labeled purple calculators “for men” for male participants and “for women” for females. Among female participants, 51 percent chose the purple calculator when it had no gender labels, whereas significantly fewer, 24 percent, chose the purple one when it was labeled “for women.”

‘Chick Beer’ for Women? Why Gender Marketing Repels More Than Sells – Harvard Business School Working Knowledge

The author misses an obvious scenario for men choosing the gendered calculator: to choose the alternative was to choose one that was -by default- for women.

Thousands of women are trapped in Lebanon. They risk jail time to leave

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Middle East,, Money, Class, and Poverty,, Race,Leave a comment

Since October, Lebanon’s economy has buckled under soaring prices, a tanking currency, ballooning unemployment and a growing debt crisis.

…The Lebanese Pound has lost over 50% of its value, limiting migrant women’s ability to send financial support to their families. With plummeting demand for their work, many have stopped sending remittances and are sinking deeper into poverty.

…Growing numbers of women — who came to Lebanon in better economic times to earn a living and send money back to their families — are scrambling to return to their home countries. But many lack immigration papers, including their passports. 

…Rights groups estimate that tens of thousands of migrant women in Lebanon are undocumented. For these workers, the hurdles to leaving the country could amount to a dead-end.

… She left her job without retrieving her passport. Her boss had confiscated it when she started work, a practice that is illegal yet widespread.

…Migrant domestic workers in Lebanon are caught in a bind. The sponsorship system, known as Kefala, links legal residency to a work contract.

…If she tries to leave this working relationship, then her status in the country is illegal. If she tries to leave Lebanon, she will likely be detained, with undocumented workers accumulating fines for every year they spend in the country without contract.

…Lebanon’s security forces classify workers who leave their jobs without their sponsor’s consent as “runaways,” even if the employer violated the terms of the country’s standard contract for sponsorships, for example through overwork, withholding salary payments, or sexual and physical abuse.

…Like many other migrant women in Lebanon, she doesn’t believe her embassy will help repatriate her. She has decided to try to get herself deported, which will mean waiting out her departure in one of Lebanon’s notoriously overcrowded prisons where malnourishment and mistreatment are rampant, according to multiple reports by rights groups and local media.

It is ”common” for migrant domestic workers to voluntarily surrender to police, a diplomatic source in Lebanon told CNN.

…“My friends told me to get myself arrested. But then I heard the police aren’t arresting migrants anymore because their jails are so full.”

…The embassy worker told her that if and when she settles her fees, she would need to wait for another three months before she can go home.

…According to the International Labor Organization, ex-employers “frequently” press charges against domestic workers. Many demand that the worker reimburse them for recruitment fees.

“There may be a justified reason for that court case, but often, research shows that they are based on false accusations.”

…“If there is a court case it …(leaving the country) becomes a longer process and a more complicated process.”

Thousands of women are trapped in Lebanon. They risk jail time to leave – CNN.com

Sigh…

Garret Graves’ nutria bill passes the U.S. House; here’s what the bill would do

On By peanutgallerynhIn Environment,, Gulf Coast Region,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

The bill, co-sponsored by U.S. Rep. Garret Graves, R-Baton Rouge, would broaden the scope of the Nutria Eradication and Control Act to include all states — not just Louisiana and Maryland, where the invasive, orange-toothed rodent has eaten away coastal marshes for decades.

…Nutria are one of many factors contributing to rapid land loss along Louisiana’s coast. The major causes include oil and gas exploration, sea level rise, soil subsidence and the loss of replenishing sediment since the Mississippi River was brought under control with levees.

…Gnawing away the roots of marsh plants, nutria leave little to hold the fragile landscape in place. More than 40 square miles of Louisiana’s coast have been turned into open water by nutria over the past two decades, according to the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

Garret Graves’ nutria bill passes the U.S. House; here’s what the bill would do | Environment | nola.com

hmmm

Tribes secure big voting rights win in North Dakota

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Money, Class, and Poverty,, Race,, The Americas,Leave a comment

Residents of reservations will be able to register and vote this year even if they don’t comply with the state’s restrictive voter identification law, which requires voters to have an ID with a residential address, under an agreement announced late Thursday.

…The address requirement has disenfranchised thousands of people living on reservations, because the state does not assign street numbers to their homes.

…Under the new consent decree, the secretary of state has promised to ensure Native Americans may vote if they do not have a street address or don’t know what it is. (Some buildings on reservations have formal addresses but no signage, and almost all residents rely on post office boxes and have those numbers on their tribal IDs.)

…The state has maintained the rule was designed to deter voting fraud, but Native Americans see it as a straightforward bid to suppress their reliably Democratic vote.

…Native Americans constitute about 5 percent of the state’s population, making them a crucial voting bloc in close contests. Different tribes have been challenging the law in federal court for almost four years.

Tribes secure big voting rights win in  North Dakota – The Fulcrum

Progress.

CA bill requires gender neutral children’s areas at stores

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Media and Culture,, Modern Parenting,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

Assembly Bill 2826, by Assemblyman Evan Low, D-Campbell, would apply to all retail department stores with 500 or more employees.

The bill would do away with so-called “boys aisles” and “girls aisles,” by requiring that children’s products be offered in a single, gender neutral section, according to Low’s office.

…Lawmakers also are considering a bill that would eliminate the “pink tax,” the discrepancy in pricing that sees women paying more for female-marketed products than men pay for male-marketed ones. 

CA bill requires gender neutral children’s areas at stores | The Sacramento Bee

Nice!

One chart shows the dire state of America’s middle class

On By peanutgallerynhIn Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

In 1985, the typical male worker needed 30 weeks’ pay to cover the $13,227 required for a family of four’s major living costs: housing, healthcare, transportation, and education. As of 2018, those expenditures had risen to $54,441, and the typical male worker has to work 53 weeks to get there (shown in the chart below). “This is a problem, as there are only 52 weeks in a year,” Oren Cass, the report’s lead author, wrote.

…Cass formulated the index on male earnings because men are historically considered the family breadwinners. His findings for a female breadwinner are even more telling: In 1985, she needed to work 45 weeks to afford the four annual expenses, compared with 66 weeks in 2018.

…The increase in so many disparate costs shows that middle-class Americans carry several financial burdens — they’re behind on homeownership, lagging in retirement savings, and have debt to pay off.

One chart shows the dire state of America’s middle class – Business Insider

yup.

Millennial Women Made LuLaRoe Billions. Then They Paid The Price.

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Media and Culture,, Money, Class, and Poverty,1 Comment

Elbert helped out in the family candy business and eventually ran a catering company, and Maurine opened a bridal shop — but the couple also had an interesting side hustle. In 1945, the couple founded the American Family and Femininity Institute, dedicated to teaching women that their place was in the home. In 1969 Maurine Startup published a book called The Secret Power of Femininity, which instructs women to, among other things, practice saying “I am just a helpless woman at the mercy of you big, strong men” to catch a guy. The couple turned this work into $300 “Femininity Forums,” sessions where they would teach women how to find a husband. Eventually, Maurine became the California chair of an organization dedicated to fighting the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. (The campaign, led by conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, was eventually successful — the ERA still has never been ratified by Congress.)

…The lawsuit filed on behalf of 190 consultants in late 2019, Belinda Hibbard v. LulaRoe LLC, detailed what they allege was the ideal LuLaRoe consultant: “Defendants targeted women, stay at home mothers, spouses of active military members, and other groups who had working capacity and some access to credit or savings, but also, generally, a lack of formal business or finance training.”

…According to Derryl Trujillo, a former employee who had been hired in February 2016 for LuLaRoe’s retailer services email team in the company’s Corona warehouse, this massive growth along with ineptitude of their mostly family executive team created a disaster. Instead of scaling back though, he told me, the Stidhams kept “growing and growing” the company.

“It was like somebody stuffing their face too much at a Thanksgiving Day table, but they couldn’t stop eating,” Trujillo said.

…She lost friends because she was working 60 hours a week, desperate to make her business succeed.

“I was just in my house, seven days a week,” she said. “And I didn’t want to leave because I always had shipping to do or I always had pictures to take.”

According to Katie, working nonstop was part of the LuLaRoe culture, because your business was what you made it. To her, the implication was clear: If you couldn’t make your business work, you just weren’t trying hard enough. And there was no time for slacking off.

“If you did stop, your [Facebook] group just tanked,” Katie said. “If you stopped for 24 hours, your group, then you had to work that much harder to build it back up again.” The grind was also hard on her family. Her kids complained that she was always in her room or on the phone.

…But while consultants can place orders for styles and sizes of clothes, they never know which prints they will get until they open the box, and no two consultants get the same mix. Shoppers, therefore, will usually join multiple LuLaRoe groups on Facebook to try and find the piece they want because some styles or colors of clothes are popular or rare.

…Because each shipment is a mixed bag, with some pieces highly valued by “unicorn hunters” that sell quickly, and others — because of their size, pattern, or color — that might be really hard to sell, consultants take a risk with each order.

“Which is how LuLaRoe is making money,” Katie said. “You sell 40% of the prints, you keep buying more inventory, but the sell-through just isn’t there. … But you’re still stuck with all the ugly stuff. You buy another box, you sell 10 out of the 30 pieces, you’re still left with 20, you go in and order more. It’s just a constant cycle.”

In addition to this cycle, many LuLaRoe sponsors, according to Katie and other consultants, encouraged their consultants to buy more clothes if their sales were dropping. After all, the more options in size and color, the more potential customers.

…“If I would have a slow month, there was always ‘Well, did you order this many pieces? You know if you order this many pieces you’ll sell this much.’ And it was, ‘Well you only have five in each size. You should really have 10 so your customers have more of a variety to choose from,’” Katie said.

Still, she blames herself for continuing to spend more and more money, and takes full responsibility for her financial choices. But she said she was drawn in by the possibility that her mentors could be right, that she just needed to buy a little more or try a little harder.

…Katie’s popular mentor kept being trailed by other consultants who seemed to just want to be near her. Katie said the leadership conference was empowering and her association with the brand made her feel special.

“I was being independent. I had constantly depended on others for a long time, and here I was, doing something by myself,” she writes.

…Katie said around this same time, the products were becoming harder to sell. Not only was the market saturated with LuLaRoe consultants, the quality of the clothes became hit or miss. Some of the leggings arrived with holes in them, some had a moldy or mildew smell. Sometimes she would open her box of inventory and realize some of the items were completely ruined. When she tried to report the damages to the company, she said she was given the runaround by customer service.

…LuLaRoe was knowingly selling defective products to consultants, and then refusing to refund them. 

…She felt gaslit by promises that she would be getting great new inventory during LuLaRoe webinars, and then none would arrive in her boxes.

“I often compared it to a cycle of abuse,” she said. “Especially with the owners. The launch would go bad…they’d kind of place the blame on us, and we’d all be really, really mad and upset with them. And then Mark would come on [the webinar and] apologize and give this whole teary-eyed speech about how sorry he was, how he did it wrong. And everyone would be like, ‘Oh, that made me cry. It’s so good that they care so much about us.’ And then the next month he’d turn around and do the same thing.”

…The loss of her 401(k) hurt, but her husband has his own and has supported her both financially and emotionally. For those without safety nets, getting out of LuLaRoe could be much worse.

Karyn, the consultant in California, said her debt from LuLaRoe led her to bankruptcy. She was only able to sell around $1,100 worth of product, she said, nowhere close to the initial investment she’d made. She filed for bankruptcy when it was clear she had dug herself into a hole she couldn’t get out of.

…“The amount of guilt I have over the shit I used to sell makes me sick.” “I have learned my lesson and I’m ashamed.” “I felt sick last night working on my taxes. So. Much. Money. I am so embarrassed and ashamed I let myself be so blind.”

Karyn thinks LuLaRoe came into her life at a time when she was the perfect target, and that’s how many women got sucked in.

“I was in a vulnerable place because I wasn’t happy,” she said, explaining she had been frustrated with her career and was looking for a distraction. “There’s a lot of guilt.”

Millennial Women Made LuLaRoe Billions. Then They Paid The Price.

From a shady as F*ck family, a shady scheme preying on isolated and vulnerable women.

The Great Google Revolt

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Media and Culture,, Money, Class, and Poverty,Leave a comment

From its earliest days, Google urged employees to “act like owners” and pipe up in all manner of forums, from mailing lists to its meme generator to open-ended question-and-answer sessions with top executives, known as T.G.I.F. It was part of what it meant to be “Googley,” one of the company’s most common compliments.

…Over the past year, however, Google has appeared to clamp down. It has gradually scaled back opportunities for employees to grill their bosses and imposed a set of workplace guidelines that forbid “a raging debate over politics or the latest news story.” It has tried to prevent workers from discussing their labor rights with outsiders at a Google facility and even hired a consulting firm that specializes in blocking unions. Then, in November, came the firing of the four activists. The escalation sent tremors through the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif., and its offices in cities like New York and Seattle, prompting many employees — whether or not they had openly supported the activists — to wonder if the company’s culture of friendly debate was now gone for good.

…With social media swallowing up the public square, it was hard not to notice that Google and Facebook had become an advertising duopoly with an unsettling grip on the entire world’s attention. And after the 2016 presidential election, the consequences of the social media revolution came to seem dystopian. Many engineers felt deeply anguished at the news that foreign governments had exploited their technology in an attempt to influence domestic politics. “It showed that pretty much any system large enough and complex enough can be co-opted for nefarious purposes,” Rivers said.

Others became increasingly concerned that the Trump administration might now use their tools in service of policies they found immoral. Unknown to them, Google was at work on a project that would bring these anxieties right to their own work spaces. In September 2017, the company quietly entered into a contract to help the U.S. Department of Defense track people and vehicles in video footage captured by drones. During a meeting that December, Google presented initial results that showed its artifical-intelligence software was more successful than human data labelers at identifying vehicles, according to an internal Google document we reviewed. By February, the effort, known as Project Maven, was slotted into a launch calendar for soon-to-be-deployed products.

…The discovery that their employer was working hand in hand with the Defense Department to bolster drone warfare “was a watershed moment,” said Meredith Whittaker, an A.I. researcher based in New York who led Google’s Open Research Group. “If they were able to do that without any internal backlash, dissent, we would have crossed a significant line.”

…Whittaker’s concerns that the technology would enable extrajudicial killings were met with platitudes, or worse.

…Over the summer, another secret program, nicknamed Dragonfly, came to light in The Intercept. The project would censor search results in China on behalf of the Chinese government, and after months of internal protest, Google appeared to back away from that program too.

…Executives had too much power over the company, and they had too little. They wanted more. They organized chat groups on encrypted apps like Signal, with innocuous names like “care package delivery” so that they wouldn’t be outed if a manager glimpsed their phones. They prepared tip sheets to help workers approach colleagues, in hopes of building a permanent organization.

Some senior Google executives spoke approvingly about the walkout, but the company also made clear there were limits to its tolerance for worker protests.

…Ross LaJeunesse, a top public-policy official at the company, had long been concerned that Google’s cloud business was drawing the company into a web of relationships with repressive foreign governments and other questionable actors. “It makes us an accessory if we are hosting their email systems or their data,” he said in an interview. 

…Sensitive material would not necessarily be labeled “need to know.” The onus would be on workers to determine whether they should look at it or not. “In my orientation, I was encouraged to read all the design documents I could find, look at anything about how decisions are made,” said Duke, the New York engineer. “Now they’re saying that’s no longer OK. That is a major shift in culture.”

…Kurian focused on hiring more sales and customer-support personnel and made clear that he was eager to do business with the government. At one point, Whittaker recalled her manager’s telling her that Kurian aspired to be “everywhere Lockheed is.” (Google said Kurian never made a direct comparison between Google’s business and Lockheed Martin’s defense work.) And in July, Kurian got an opportunity: Customs and Border Protection announced the first step toward bidding out a major information-technology contract.

…Before long, many realized that they, too, had been unwittingly working on technology that could benefit the agency.

The biggest uproar surrounded a project called Anthos, a program that allows customers to combine their existing cloud services and Google’s. According to a report in Business Insider, internal documents showed that Google had given C.B.P. a trial of Anthos. Some engineers working on the project were enraged. They had been told that Anthos was intended for banks and other businesses. Workers took to internal mailing lists to express their outrage about the project.

…Regardless of the merits of the contracts, there was the disturbing fact that the engineers working on them had been misled about the purpose of the technology they were creating. Some had decided to work on Anthos precisely because it did not appear to be destined for the national-security apparatus. “If workers aren’t told what the real purpose of their work is, they have no agency in deciding whether or not they want to help with those things,” Berland said. “They become unwittingly complicit.”

…Around the same time, employees discovered that Google officials had been meeting with a firm called IRI Consultants since at least May. The firm has done work helping to defeat organizing campaigns at hospitals and other workplaces, in one case by instructing managers to play up the history of Mafia influence on organized labor.

…. In September, the internal security team interviewed a handful of employees who had been involved in circulating the petition asking Google not to work with Customs and Border Protection and in unearthing the documents showing that Google already was.

The Great Google Revolt – The New York Times

“Don’t Be Evil.”

The Bail Reform Backlash That Has Democrats at War

On By peanutgallerynhIn American Injustice System,, Money, Class, and Poverty,, Race,Leave a comment

Earlier this week, Democratic leaders in the State Senate circulated several proposed changes to the law, offering to give judges more discretion in deciding whether to keep accused criminals in jail.

Those proposals surprised and incensed members of the Democrat-dominated Assembly, exposing a schism in the party ranks, which just a year ago was reveling in big wins in the 2018 elections and a succession of long-sought progressive policies.

…For reformers, the changes to the bail law were long overdue and deeply important: The new law would mean that thousands of people in jail awaiting trial would be released, allowing them to return home, safeguard jobs and families and maintain stability in communities decimated by decades of incarceration.

With bail eliminated for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, an estimated 90 percent of new defendants each year in New York would remain free as their cases move through the courts.

But opponents — including many police chiefs and county district attorneys — argued that the law was overly permissive and potentially dangerous, allowing the quick release of defendants on a variety of serious charges, including types of stalking, assault, burglary, drug offenses, arson and robbery.

…Democratic leaders have pushed back, but fear of potential political damage to moderate lawmakers on Long Island seemed to undergird the new Senate proposal, which was reported in Newsday.

Under it, the state would completely eradicate cash bail and set a roster of serious crimes and circumstances under which judges could still jail defendants; those accused of almost all misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies would continue to be exempt. But judges would be given the discretion to jail persistent offenders and those deemed likely to harm someone.

…Other supporters have suggested that the opponents of the new law are racially motivated, noting that a Facebook page devoted to repealing the law has been peppered with anti-immigrant sentiment and offensive comments about lawmakers from minority groups.

Some also accuse prosecutors of missing the leverage they held in the old bail system.

…”All of the sudden, district attorneys can’t just force somebody to sit in a cell because they can’t afford their bail and then push them to plead out on some garbage.”

The Bail Reform Backlash That Has Democrats at War – The New York Times

hmmmm