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Michigan’s governor emphasizes voluntary efforts to curb the most severe coronavirus outbreak in the US

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<p>Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is declining to order state-wide lockdowns in response to her state experiencing <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/04/07/michigan-dealing-with-the-worst-covid-outbreak-in-the-country-heres-why/?sh=4cabf3867a1c">the most severe Covid-19 outbreak in the country</a>, opting instead to <a href="https://www.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2021/04/09/whitmer-calls-for-voluntary-actions-as-covid-19-surges-because-we-all-know-how-good-people-are-at-making-responsible-decisions">recommend</a> that people take “personal responsibility” and “voluntarily” take a break from spaces where transmission is more likely.</p>
<p>The decision to refrain from instituting mandatory restrictions is a striking development for a Democratic governor who last year garnered national attention for swiftly instituting and standing by social distancing laws even in the face of <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/10/10/922610152/the-boiling-resentment-behind-the-foiled-plan-to-kidnap-gov-whitmer">militant right-wing protests</a> and a kidnapping attempt against her. This time around, even as her state is experiencing a full-blown crisis, she’s taking a softer approach in what may be a political calculation about her reelection prospects next year.</p>
<p>Michigan has recently become the newest <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html">coronavirus epicenter of the US</a>. Case rates have <a href="https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2021/04/07/cdc-director-advocates-stronger-restrictions-michigan/7123032002/">risen 375 percent since late February</a>, and Michigan is home to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/us/michigan-covid-vaccine.html">16 of the 20 metro areas</a> with the nation’s highest recent number of cases. Sixteen Michigan hospitals are operating at <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/04/07/michigan-dealing-with-the-worst-covid-outbreak-in-the-country-heres-why/?sh=4cabf3867a1c">over 90 percent capacity</a>. Experts say that the surge is due to a combination of the enhanced contagiousness of the <a href="https://www.vox.com/22213033/covid-19-mutation-variant-vaccine-uk-south-africa">B.1.1.7 variant</a> and relaxed restrictions.</p>
<p>But Whitmer has taken a decidedly incremental approach on reinstating distancing rules as her state is overwhelmed by new cases. At a press conference on Friday, she took a position that indicated a reluctance to reinstate full-blown lockdowns.</p>
<p>“We all have to step up our game for the next two weeks to bring down rising cases,” she said. “And that’s why I’m calling on high schools to voluntarily go remote for two weeks past spring break, I’m calling on youth sports to voluntarily suspend games and practices for two weeks, and I’m strongly encouraging all Michiganders to avoid dining indoors and avoid gathering with friends indoors for two weeks.”</p>
<p>“Policy alone won’t change the tide. We need everyone to step up and to take personal responsibility,” she said.</p>
<p>Whitmer emphasized that she wasn’t making restrictions mandatory, but didn’t rule out future restrictions.</p>
<p>Her actions in this situation stand in contrast to her use of state of emergency executive orders and stay-at-home orders last spring to bring down the rate of cases in her state — a response that was <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/10/10/922610152/the-boiling-resentment-behind-the-foiled-plan-to-kidnap-gov-whitmer">popular</a> but also elicited vociferous push-back from conservative activists and the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/us/coronavirus-michigan-gretchen-whitmer.html">state’s Republican-controlled legislature</a>.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/us/coronavirus-michigan-gretchen-whitmer.html">growing number of public health officials</a> and experts are calling on Whitmer to take more aggressive action, and it is possible that she will do so at some point in the future. But for now, there are a few factors that could be playing a role in her resistance to issuing mandated actions.</p>
<p>One is the issue of efficacy. A great deal of <a href="https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/article/survey-results-show-evidence-americans-are-feeling-covid-fatigue-engaging-in-less-protective-behaviors/">polling data</a> shows that fatigue with Covid-19 restrictions is a very real phenomenon, and that even many months ago people were reporting a decline in compliance with rules. Whitmer might be concerned that with the spread of the vaccine, better weather, the relaxation of restrictions in other states, and growing optimism, it could be difficult to achieve compliance with mandatory restrictions. There could be a concern that making rules required will make people resentful while not significantly improving health outcomes.</p>
<p>Another factor is political calculation. She may fear backlash and disapproval at a time when people are sick of restrictions, something of concern to her as she approaches reelection next year — in a state where Republicans control the legislature and have wasted no opportunities to <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/10/9/21509239/gretchen-whitmer-kidnapping-plot-wolverine-michigan-governor">paint her past Covid-19 restrictions as tyrannical</a>.</p>
<p>Political observers believe Whitmer’s management of the pandemic will play a pivotal role in determining her reelection — and the reality is that perception of the virus is different now than it was a year ago.</p>
<p>But some public health experts say that trying to take what seems like a moderate position on social distancing during a crisis-level surge is a dangerous mistake.</p>
<p>“What it looks like happened is she tried to be fair and meet us in the middle,” Debra Furr-Holden, a Michigan State University epidemiologist whom Whitmer appointed to a coronavirus task force, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/us/coronavirus-michigan-gretchen-whitmer.html">told the New York Times</a>. “And what I think we’ve learned — and I hope other states will get the message — is that there really isn’t a lot of middle ground here. We just have to tighten up and hold tight.”</p>
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source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/4/10/22377449/michigan-coronavirus-covid-whitmer">https://www.vox.com/2021/4/10/22377449/michigan-coronavirus-covid-whitmer</a>

vox Michigan’s governor emphasizes voluntary efforts to curb the most severe coronavirus outbreak in the US

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is declining to order state-wide lockdowns in response to her state experiencing the most severe Covid-19 ou...

Northern Ireland is experiencing some of the worst violence it’s seen in 8 years. Here’s why.

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<p>Rioting in Northern Ireland continued on Friday night, with demonstrators using <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/northern-ireland-riot-tiger-bay-police-b1829412.html">gas bombs against the police and setting a car on fire</a> in the capital of Belfast.</p>
<p>The night of violence marked the eighth straight day of demonstrations and unrest in five towns and cities across Northern Ireland — a trend that has some experts worried about the possibility that the region could be seeing a sustained resurgence of sectarian violence. Saturday, April 10, is <a href="https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/republic-of-ireland/warning-against-return-to-violence-on-anniversary-of-good-friday-agreement-40297644.html">the 23rd anniversary</a> of the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement that ended <a href="https://apnews.com/article/united-kingdom-northern-ireland-violence-coronavirus-pandemic-london-15fad727d466a125d952c9dcff82213d">30 years of such conflict</a>, known as “the Troubles,” but unrest and violence has flared up from time to time ever since.</p>
<p>Over the past week, a double-decker bus has been hijacked and set on fire; masked youths have hurled homemade gas bombs at police; rival gangs have thrown bricks and fireworks at each other. So far there have been no deaths reported, but at least <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/09/uk/northern-ireland-violence-explainer-gbr-intl/index.html">74 police officers</a> have been injured, and observers say that the period of turbulence marks the worst sectarian violence Northern Ireland has seen <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/northern-ireland-riot-disagree/">in eight years</a>.</p>
<p>Most of the rioters are young people — <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/09/uk/northern-ireland-violence-explainer-gbr-intl/index.html">some as young as 12</a>, the Police Service of Northern Ireland told CNN. The violence <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/04/northern-ireland-riots-why-tensions-have-reignited.html#comments">has been concentrated</a> in “unionist” communities, but conflict has also taken place in areas dividing unionist communities from “nationalist” neighborhoods. During the Troubles, unionists were largely Protestant and identified with loyalty to the United Kingdom, and nationalists were mostly Catholics, identified as Irish, and sought a united Ireland.</p>
<p>While conflict between the groups formally ended with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, tensions and violence that hark back to the Troubles still resurface, and are often tied to concerns that one group holds undue influence or power over national affairs. The current set of clashes has become high-profile enough that the Biden administration released a brief statement <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/northern-ireland-riot-disagree/">expressing concern</a> about rising violence.</p>
<p>Experts say that there is not one clear explanation for the recent clashes, but that there are a few different factors — which may be feeding off of each other. Brexit, and the sense in unionist communities that London is neglecting Northern Ireland by the terms of the agreement are one factor. Another issue is a recent decision by authorities to avoid prosecuting nationalist politicians for flouting Covid-19 protocols.</p>
<p>What is clear is that political observers see violence escalating at a worrying pace. “I think it’s very serious. It’s easy to see how things can escalate and hard to see how things can calm down,” Katy Hayward, a professor of political sociology at Queen’s University, Belfast, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/world/europe/northern-ireland-violence-brexit-covid.html">told the New York Times</a>.</p>
<p>Conflict and violence between unionists and nationalists <a href="https://www.vox.com/world/2019/2/18/18204269/brexit-irish-border-backstop-explained">dates back decades</a>. But the most recent spate of violence seems to be, at least in part, a response to a specific flashpoint in the relationship between the two communities.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/09/uk/northern-ireland-violence-explainer-gbr-intl/index.html">A great deal of the initial violence</a> came after state prosecutors decided last month they would not charge the leaders of nationalist party Sinn Fein for breaking Covid-19 regulations in June by attending the funeral for Bobby Storey. Storey was a former top member of the Irish Republican Army, the paramilitary group that waged a violent campaign against the British and for a reunified Ireland during the Troubles.</p>
<p>Many unionists perceived the decision to not prosecute the members of the party as a sign of political favoritism, given that unionists were told to cancel their traditional Twelfth of July parades last summer, and the loaded symbolism surrounding the funeral. The decision sparked outrage and protests.</p>
<p>“This is happening because of the PSNI [Police Service of Northern Ireland] and the judiciary system’s appeasement of republicans,” <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/northern-ireland-riot-disagree/">said</a> Ian Edwards, a resident of the Shankill Road, a Protestant community, referring to the nationalists who favor a united Ireland.</p>
<p>Experts say another major factor fueling the anger and protests is the way that many in Northern Ireland feel betrayed by the terms of Brexit — the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union — which was completed at the beginning of this year. In this scenario, unionists feel blindsided by the British government, which they believe has left them in a lurch, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/world/europe/northern-ireland-violence-brexit-covid.html">as the New York Times reports</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Under an agreement in a protocol struck by [British Prime Minister Boris] Johnson, Northern Ireland was given a special economic status that leaves it straddling the United Kingdom and the European Union trade systems.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/world/europe/truckers-uk-ports-brexit.html">However, it also imposes some new checks, particularly on goods flowing from mainland Britain to Northern Ireland</a> — something that is anathema to unionists who want equal treatment with the rest of the United Kingdom.</p>
<p>Despite the deal he signed up to, Mr. Johnson promised that there would be no new “border in the Irish Sea,” and, glossing over the looming difficulties, his government did little to prepare opinion in Northern Ireland for the changes.</p>
<p>Yet on Jan. 1, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/world/europe/brexit-britain-trade.html">when the post-Brexit trade rules came into force, businesses faced new paperwork</a> and some British companies stopped moving goods to Northern Ireland, causing some shortages on supermarket shelves. Amid rising tensions, checks on goods were halted temporarily after threats were made against customs staff.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In other words, Northern Ireland unionists feel they’ve been misled about the terms of Brexit and the economic impact it would have on them.</p>
<p>Another complicating factor is that the period around the Easter holiday often features “<a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/northern-ireland-riot-disagree/">increased communal conflict</a>,” Politico notes, because of Irish Republican Army commemorations among nationalists in Northern Ireland on the one side and unionist parades on the other.</p>
<p>Further complications may be coming from criminal groups who <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/world/europe/northern-ireland-violence-brexit-covid.html">might be trying to add to the chaos and exploit tensions over Covid-19</a> restrictions in order to cause problems for law enforcement.</p>
<p>There’s a complex array of factors that could explain what’s contributing to the current chaos — and given that swirl, it could evolve further in the future.</p>
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source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/4/10/22377216/northern-ireland-belfast-riots-violence-protests">https://www.vox.com/2021/4/10/22377216/northern-ireland-belfast-riots-violence-protests</a>

vox Northern Ireland is experiencing some of the worst violence it’s seen in 8 years. Here’s why.

Rioting in Northern Ireland continued on Friday night, with demonstrators using gas bombs against the police and setting a car on fire in ...

Supreme Court rules against California’s Covid-19 restrictions on grounds of religious liberty

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<p>The Supreme Court blocked California’s Covid-19 restrictions on religious gatherings in private homes in a late-night order on Friday, saying that the law infringes on constitutionally protected religious rights in a 5-4 vote.</p>
<p>The decision, in which Chief Justice John Roberts voted with the three dissenting liberal justices, marks <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/04/10/986010977/supreme-court-rules-for-worshippers-and-against-california-covid-restrictions">the fifth time</a> that the Supreme Court has sided with religious adherents protesting California’s laws designed to slow the spread of <a href="https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19">the coronavirus</a>. And it underscores how Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s replacement of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in November has tilted the high court toward overruling state Covid-19 restrictions on religious services.</p>
<p>The unsigned majority opinion argued that California’s law — which limits both religious and non-religious gatherings in homes to no more than three households — treats religious gatherings unfairly in light of allowances for gatherings in commercial spaces. “California treats some comparable secular activities more favorably than at-home religious exercise, permitting hair salons, retail stores, personal care services, movie theaters, private suites at sporting events and concerts and indoor restaurants,” the opinion said.</p>
<p>But in her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer, wrote that the majority opinion was making the wrong comparison between unlike activities: “The First Amendment requires that a state treat religious conduct as well as the state treats comparable secular conduct. Sometimes finding the right secular analogue may raise hard questions. But not today.”</p>
<p>In her dissent, Kagan explained that California’s law doesn’t single out religious gatherings but simply treats all at-home gatherings differently than commercial spaces.</p>
<p>“California limits religious gatherings in homes to three households. If the state also limits all secular gatherings in homes to three households, it has complied with the First Amendment. And the state does exactly that: It has adopted a blanket restriction on at-home gatherings of all kinds, religious and secular alike,” she wrote.</p>
<p>The reason for the restrictions on households that don’t apply to commercial spaces, she wrote, is that gatherings in private homes are considered categorically riskier because of the more intimate way people gather in them.</p>
<p>That argument was in line with the majority opinion from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that the Supreme Court ultimately rejected.</p>
<p>In that opinion, judges Milan Smith Jr. and Bridget Bade wrote that it made sense for California law to treat commercial and non-commercial spaces differently: “The state reasonably concluded that when people gather in social settings, their interactions are likely to be longer than they would be in a commercial setting; that participants in a social gathering are more likely to be involved in prolonged conversations; that private houses are typically smaller and less ventilated than commercial establishments; and that social distancing and mask-wearing are less likely in private settings and enforcement is more difficult.”</p>
<p>The case that prompted the decision was brought by two Santa Clara County residents who said that Covid-19 restrictions violated their free speech rights by preventing their Bible study and prayer sessions with eight to 12 individuals.</p>
<p>The Supreme Court’s decision in their favor is a reminder of how Barrett’s arrival has shifted the ideological makeup of the court, and its outlook on clashes between states and advocates for minimizing Covid-19 state restrictions on religious gatherings.</p>
<p>As legal analyst Adam Liptak <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/us/supreme-court-coronavirus-prayer-meetings.html">notes at the New York Times</a>, before Ginsburg’s death last year, the Supreme Court allowed California and Nevada to restrict religious service attendance, and Roberts, the chief justice, was siding with what was then a liberal contingent made up of four justices.</p>
<p>But that pattern shifted after Barrett’s arrival last fall, and the Supreme Court <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/20a87_4g15.pdf">blocked</a> New York’s restrictions on religious services.</p>
<p>Conservative activists rankled by Covid-19 restrictions hailed Friday’s Supreme Court ruling as a victory for the right and for freedom to worship.</p>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr" xml:lang="en">That the state of California thinks it should be able to regulate who can pray together inside private homes is almost as appalling as the desire of all the brainwashed Fauci worshipping sheep for more arbitrary authoritarian COVID rules to keep them “safe” <a href="https://t.co/55fy62CyHc">https://t.co/55fy62CyHc</a></p>
— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) <a href="https://twitter.com/BuckSexton/status/1380867269639671818?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 10, 2021</a></blockquote>
</div>
<p>Meanwhile, commentators on the left have said the issue at hand is not religious liberty but rather an emerging culture war over the status of religion in American life. <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/161987/supreme-court-fulton-philadelphia-religious">In a New Republic</a> piece about the trend of the new conservative majority’s rulings on Covid-19 and religion, Katherine Stewart writes that the Supreme Court’s recent legal interventions are designed to “validate a false underlying narrative of religious persecution” in America.</p>
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source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/4/10/22377008/supreme-court-california-religion-covid-restrictions">https://www.vox.com/2021/4/10/22377008/supreme-court-california-religion-covid-restrictions</a>

vox Supreme Court rules against California’s Covid-19 restrictions on grounds of religious liberty

The Supreme Court blocked California’s Covid-19 restrictions on religious gatherings in private homes in a late-night order on Friday, sayi...

How America’s one-click obsession is warping the future of work

<p>Bill Bodani Jr. spent most of his adult life working at Bethlehem Steel, just outside Baltimore.</p>
<p>Around the year 2000, an injury on the job forced him into early retirement in his mid-50s. Not too long after that, Bethlehem Steel went bankrupt and was finally dissolved in 2003. Bodani’s pension was eventually slashed from $3,000 to $1,600 a month. At 69 years old, he was forced to take a job as a forklift driver at an Amazon warehouse, located in the same place the old steel mill used to sit, where he was paid roughly $12 an hour, a steep drop from his previous wage of $35 an hour.</p>
<p>These are the kinds of stories you encounter in Alec MacGillis’s new book about Amazon called <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374159276"><em>Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America</em></a>. It’s not a book about the inner workings of the company or the peculiarities of its mega-billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos. Instead, it’s a book about what Amazon has done to the country, about the many ways it has transformed our economy and accelerated its most destructive tendencies.</p>
<p>I reached out to MacGillis, who’s also a veteran reporter at ProPublica, to talk about the rise of Amazon and how it’s altered the geography of the country, how Amazon bullies employees and strong-arms local governments, and if he’s encouraged by the recent efforts of <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22320009/amazon-bessemer-union-rwdsu-alabama">Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama</a>, to unionize. (The unionization vote was held after this conversation, and it would <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/4/8/22362911/amazon-union-legal-challenge-alabama-vote-results-bessemer">appear that Amazon won</a>, though the results are likely to be contested.)</p>
<p>This is a conversation about the consequences of Amazon’s dominance, but it’s also a conversation about my complicity and yours. Many of us use Amazon every day, and we’re content to look the other way in exchange for what MacGillis calls “one-click satisfaction.” If nothing else, this exchange is a chance to reflect on what that says about our world and what we might do to improve it. (Amazon hasn’t responded to MacGillis’s book, but the company <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/27/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-rebuffs-warehouse-safety-concerns.html">has consistently defended</a> its working conditions and emphasized its role as a job creator — although it was <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/03/amazon-apologizes-for-tweet-dismissing-claim-workers-pee-in-bottles.html">forced to apologize</a> last week after falsely denying allegations that workers are occasionally made to urinate in bottles.)</p>
<p>A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.</p>
<h4>Sean Illing</h4>
<p>Your book is about how Amazon has essentially altered the geography of the country in terms of both wealth and power. So I’ll start there: Which parts of the country have gained, and which parts have lost?</p>
<h4>Alec MacGillis</h4>
<p>This book didn’t start as a book about Amazon. It started as a book about our growing regional disparities. We’ve always had richer and poorer places, but the gaps have gotten so much bigger. We used to have wealth and prosperity spread out much more evenly across the country. In the mid-1960s, for instance, the 25 wealthiest cities in the country by median income included Cleveland, Milwaukee, Des Moines, and my favorite, Rockford, Illinois. And then a whole bunch of other Midwestern cities. Today, there <a href="https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bust/">are just a handful</a> of non-coastal cities on that list of 25.</p>
<p>As recently as 1980, there were only a few parts of the country — mostly in Appalachia and the Deep South — that had median incomes more than 20 percent below the average, and then you had a small number of places that were 20 percent above the average, like DC and the New York suburbs, for example. But now <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0002716219868141">whole swaths of the country</a> are 20 percent below the average and it includes basically the entire Midwest, while huge strips of the coast are now above the 20 percent above the average.</p>
<p>So the goal was to write about this massive shift. We talk a ton about income inequality but not enough about regional inequalities. And I settled on Amazon as the perfect frame for this story.</p>
<h4>Sean Illing</h4>
<p>Is Amazon to blame for this, or did larger forces, like globalization, make this redistribution inevitable?</p>
<h4>Alec MacGillis</h4>
<p>Amazon is both a symptom and a cause. It’s a good frame for the book partly because Amazon is everywhere and everything is in its shadow. So it’s a metaphor in that sense. But then it’s also a cause because regional inequality is tied to the concentration of so many sectors of our economy in certain places and in certain companies.</p>
<p>I like to explain this by pointing to what has happened to media. It used to be that media revenue was spread all around the country — among local newspapers, TV, radio, etc. But now with the shift to digital, we have a situation in which 60 percent of all digital ad revenue is flowing to two tech companies [Facebook and Google], both of which are based in the Bay Area.</p>
<p>The same thing has happened in the retail world, where the money and business activity used to be spread all around the country, but now it flows to a single company that’s based in Seattle, a town that’s now experiencing <a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-hits-record-high-for-income-inequality-now-rivals-san-francisco/">incredible levels of inequality</a>.</p>
<p>So to your question, would this be happening regardless of Amazon? It’s a big question, and my answer is twofold. Yeah, there are structural changes in the economy that definitely encourage agglomeration and a winner-take-all dynamic. But at the same time, Amazon has absolutely made things worse.</p>
<p>Amazon might say, “We just happen to be the company in this slot right now, but it could have easily been someone else.” But that overlooks the fact that this particular company, with this particular leadership, made specific decisions over the years that have made things worse, with a particularly <a href="https://fortune.com/2019/03/01/amazon-federal-corporate-income-tax/">aggressive pursuit of tax avoidance</a> at all levels, with particularly <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/3/22365330/amazon-apology-pee-bottles-worker-warehouse-union-pocan">high-pressured demands on workers at warehouses</a>, with a particular decision to put its second headquarters <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/10/amazon-reveals-the-truth-on-why-it-nixed-ny-and-chose-virginia-for-hq2.html">in the DC area</a>, one of the richest in the country, instead of trying to rebalance things.</p>
<h4>Sean Illing</h4>
<p>There’s a lot going on there, but first I want to be super clear about the way Amazon moves into some of these communities. You describe a two-step process: Amazon upends all of these brick-and-mortar retail businesses and then swoops into the areas where the laid-off employees live and hires them as underpaid bodies in their warehouses.</p>
<p>Is that basically right?</p>
<h4>Alec MacGillis</h4>
<p>It is. And that’s what’s confounding about the response I got from them, which is, “Well, at least we’re providing jobs in these places. We’re not like Google and Facebook. We actually have a physical presence, and we’re hiring thousands of people in these communities that lack jobs.”</p>
<p>And that’s true to a certain extent. They absolutely are employing people in numbers way beyond the other tech giants. They’re <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2019/03/30/largest-employer-each-state-walmart-top-us-amazon-second/39236965/">now second only to Walmart</a>, gaining fast for biggest employer in America. But what that overlooks is that there has been this massive wipeout of brick-and-mortar retail. We talk about coal miners getting laid off, but countless more <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/11/22/if-that-was-retail-apocalypse-then-where-are-refugees/">retail workers have been laid off</a>. The professional retail clerk took more losses than any other in recent years.</p>
<p>To put it simply, what you have now are the sort of jobs that once allowed a 55-year-old woman in Elmira, New York, to manage a jewelry counter at a department store being replaced by a warehouse job that pays less, involves much more strenuous working conditions, is far more socially isolating, and that same 55-year-old woman will have a much harder time hacking it.</p>
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</div>
<h4>Sean Illing</h4>
<p>You called these new Amazon jobs “strenuous” and “socially isolating” just now, but that doesn’t adequately capture it like you do in the book. We’re talking about intensely rote and inhuman work. We’re talking about a company that uses algorithms to track productivity and bathroom breaks.</p>
<h4>Alec MacGillis</h4>
<p>These are really grueling jobs. There’s a reason why the turnover is so high. And if anything, the jobs have only gotten more rote and more repetitive and more isolated as the robots at the warehouses have gotten more automated. It used to be the iconic Amazon job was the picker who roamed the corridors looking for items, looking for the dildos. And there was a whole literature around that job. You walked so many miles a day that you wore out your shoes. But there was at least some level of autonomy and a bit of a hunt to the enterprise.</p>
<p>Now the warehouses have these incredible robots that zoom around and do a lot of the legwork, and the human pickers are standing in fixed locations for their entire 10-hour shift, pulling things out of the shelves as they come to them. And it’s actually a much more rote kind of activity. And there are other jobs that are even more mechanical, where you have employees essentially standing at one conveyor belt and taking things off of it so they can put them on another belt. Over and over and over again. For basically the entire shift.</p>
<h4>Sean Illing</h4>
<p><a href="https://theintercept.com/2021/03/25/amazon-drivers-pee-bottles-union/">There are reports</a> of Amazon workers peeing in bottles because they don’t want to be caught taking an extra bathroom break —</p>
<h4>Alec MacGillis</h4>
<p>Yeah, the core chapter of my book is titled “Dignity.” It’s about a man named Bill Bodani, who had to go work at an Amazon warehouse for half the wage he made at the steel mill in the exact same location. And he doesn’t have enough time to get to the bathroom often. He’s an older man, so he has to go a lot. He uses up his two short breaks over the 10-hour shift and, once in a while, he goes off in the corner with his forklift, tries to get out of view of the cameras, and takes a quick leak. It’s incredibly undignified.</p>
<h4>Sean Illing</h4>
<p>So Amazon only gives warehouse workers two bathroom breaks per 10-hour shift?</p>
<h4>Alec MacGillis</h4>
<p>Right. The way it generally works is you have a short meal break halfway through your shift and then you’re allowed two short bathroom breaks. And he just needed more. And it takes so long to get across the floor of these massive warehouses to get to the bathroom. So often, by the time you get there, you’ve all but used it up.</p>
<h4>Sean Illing</h4>
<p>A big part of your book details how Amazon is able to strong-arm local governments, often forcing obscene concessions. What sorts of demands does the company make from local officials?</p>
<h4>Alec MacGillis</h4>
<p>The company’s demands of local governments are extraordinarily aggressive. It seeks large reductions on its future tax bills, on the property taxes owed for the warehouse or data center, and sometimes also on the payroll taxes owed on the workers.</p>
<p>For one data center outside Columbus, Ohio, it even got the town to give it the land for it <a href="https://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2014/09/09/dublin-offering-amazon-free-land-as-lure-for.html">essentially for free</a>. And it demands secrecy from the local officials. They agree to call the projects by code names and not reveal Amazon’s identity until the very last second and to disclose no more than the bare minimum of documentation required by public information requests.</p>
<p>One county official in southwest Ohio apologized to the company when a quote of hers surfaced in a local news report. She assured them that she hadn’t granted the reporter an interview, that it was just something that she had let slip out in a public meeting. And she assured them it wouldn’t happen again.</p>
<h4>Sean Illing</h4>
<p>Why is Amazon consistently able to bend state and local governments to its will, even at the expense of the people who live in these places?</p>
<h4>Alec MacGillis</h4>
<p>It’s mostly the belief that they have no choice, that this is the only option on the table for their community. So if you’ve had your manufacturing base wiped out in Baltimore or southwest Ohio or wherever it might be, and then along comes this company that’s going to hire 2,000 people at a warehouse, it’s hard to say no.</p>
<p>What’s so confounding is that it’s clear the company’s going to come there anyway. They have to fulfill their promise of one- or two-day delivery. And in order to do that, they have to be in a lot of different places. And so it’s not like Amazon can just decide to not be in Maryland and go to Alabama instead if they’re not absurdly generous with their tax subsidies, because they have to be everywhere.</p>
<p>What I find striking isn’t just the obsequiousness when it came to offering the subsidies to Amazon, but also the obsequiousness when it came to promising secrecy, to the point of apologizing to Amazon when they had to occasionally give information to a reporter who asked.</p>
<h4>Sean Illing</h4>
<p>I want to deal with the elephant in the room, which is the role we’re all playing in Amazon’s dominance.</p>
<p>However destructive Amazon becomes, the one-click satisfaction it offers is probably too enticing for most people to give a shit about anything else. And the human costs of this are purely abstract for most people, just as the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-forced-uighur-labor-iphone-factory-2020-3">iPhone labor camps</a> in China are. But I suppose this is partly what makes global capitalism so powerful: It separates us from the costs of our conveniences. I’m not sure any company in human history has ever distilled this as neatly as Amazon does.</p>
<h4>Alec MacGillis</h4>
<p>I think that’s exactly right. Amazon has perfected that seamlessness. It’s just pure instant gratification. I’m holding out hope that, coming out of this year, we can jolt ourselves out of this situation we’ve been in. Whatever reservations we may have had about going all in on the one-click satisfaction went totally out the window during the pandemic. We felt like we had permission to fully embrace it, and not just with Amazon but with other forms of our daily life and consumption.</p>
<p>I hope we can snap out of this on the other side of the pandemic. And I’m not an absolutist. I’m not calling for boycotts. It’s not about just full renunciation. I use Amazon if I have to, if I can’t find what I’m looking for elsewhere.</p>
<p>But the scale of the embrace has driven the enormous growth and power of Amazon, and I think it’s so important for us to reengage with the physical world around us in the places we live, both in terms of going back to our local shops and also maybe not zonking out on Netflix so much. Otherwise, there’s not going to be much of a town or city or neighborhood for us to go back to.</p>
<h4>Sean Illing</h4>
<p>Do the <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22311708/amazon-union-alabama-vote-explained">recent efforts of Amazon employees</a> — in Alabama especially — to unionize give you much hope? [Editor’s note: This conversation took place before the vote, which <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/4/8/22362911/amazon-union-legal-challenge-alabama-vote-results-bessemer">Amazon appears to have won</a>.]</p>
<h4>Alec MacGillis</h4>
<p>Well, I won’t try to guess how things will turn out in Alabama. It’s going to be tough because Amazon has set the bar incredibly high in terms of expanding the pool of the electorate, which is something employers often do. They expand the pool beyond the likeliest yes voters so that it’s tougher to get a majority. So it’ll be tough. But the fact that there is an election at all in Alabama is extraordinary.</p>
<p>I tend to see all this in grand, historic terms. These Amazon warehouses are like the mass workplaces of our time. This is the place you now go if you just need a job at a given time, in a given place. You can probably get a job at Amazon. And it’s not going to pay all that much and it’s going to be really tough work, but it’s just what a lot of people now do, by the hundreds of thousands. And it’ll just keep growing and growing.</p>
<p>And so the question is, can Amazon be the Bethlehem Steel of our time? Those steel jobs were incredibly low-paying and grueling in the early 20th century, but then the conditions greatly improved, largely through unionization, and they were transformed into middle-class careers.</p>
<p>My hope is that the arc of history can turn one more notch and that these warehouse workers can enjoy their own 1950s moment.</p>
<br />
<br />
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22339827/amazon-bessemer-alabama-alec-macgillis-fulfillment">https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22339827/amazon-bessemer-alabama-alec-macgillis-fulfillment</a>

vox How America’s one-click obsession is warping the future of work

Bill Bodani Jr. spent most of his adult life working at Bethlehem Steel, just outside Baltimore. Around the year 2000, an injury on the job...

Biden’s Supreme Court reform commission won’t fix anything

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/sgRBwypAhXuYeMjHIJ9IbZk5KBY=/0x258:3603x2144/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22294571/1230698067.jpg" /></div>
<p>In 2014, Judge Thomas Griffith authored an opinion in <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=15333446924860763904&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr"><em>Halbig v. Burwell</em></a> that could have <a href="https://www.vox.com/2014/7/22/5821600/obamacare-halbig-subsidies-illegal-most-states">wrecked Obamacare’s insurance markets in over 30 states</a> and potentially stripped health coverage from millions of Americans. Griffith’s court eventually <a href="https://www.vox.com/2014/9/4/6105523/this-is-good-for-obamacare-dc-circuit-court-will-review-halbig">vacated his ruling against Obamacare</a>, and the Supreme Court rejected Griffith’s reasoning in <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-114_qol1.pdf"><em>King v. Burwell</em></a> (2015) — but not before the <em>Halbig</em> decision plunged the Obama administration, health care advocates, and patients into a year of terror that Obamacare would be gutted.</p>
<p>On Friday, President Joe Biden announced that he would sign an executive order creating a “<a href="https://twitter.com/ZoeTillman/status/1380540399517896705/photo/1">Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States</a>.” Griffith — who retired from the federal bench in 2020, allowing former President Trump to choose his successor — is <a href="https://reason.com/volokh/2021/04/09/biden-releases-names-of-members-of-his-judicial-reform-commission/">one of several prominent conservatives on this commission</a>, which the White House says Biden appointed to “provide an analysis of the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform.”</p>
<p>Yet, while the author of one of the most significant attacks on Obamacare in the last decade is on Biden’s commission, none of the leading academic proponents of Supreme Court reform were appointed (the overwhelming majority of the commission’s <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/04/09/president-biden-to-sign-executive-order-creating-the-presidential-commission-on-the-supreme-court-of-the-united-states/">three dozen members</a> are law professors or political scientists).</p>
<p>Biden initially said in October he would convene a commission of leading academics to <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/10/22/926607920/asked-about-court-packing-biden-says-he-will-convene-commission-to-study-reforms">study possible reforms to the Supreme Court</a>. At the time, Biden was torn between liberal activists who were enraged by Senate Republicans’ efforts to ensure that the GOP could control the Supreme Court, and Republican critics who accused Democrats of wanting to add seats to the Supreme Court in order to undo those efforts by the GOP.</p>
<p>Rather than take a position on whether to add seats to the Supreme Court, Biden ultimately punted the question until after the election with his promise to appoint a commission.</p>
<p>Now he has appointed such a commission and, measured solely by its intellectual firepower, the <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/04/09/president-biden-to-sign-executive-order-creating-the-presidential-commission-on-the-supreme-court-of-the-united-states/">names</a> on the commission are impressive. They include some of the nations’ most prominent legal academics, such as Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken and Harvard’s Laurence Tribe.</p>
<p>But the commission does not include law professors Daniel Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman, authors of a <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/10/30/20930662/pete-buttigieg-court-packing-anthony-kennedy-citizens-united">highly influential proposal</a> to expand the Supreme Court to 15 justices and have the key members of the Court be chosen in a bipartisan process that is intended to make the Court less ideological. And it does not include Aaron Belkin, a political science professor and <a href="https://www.takebackthecourt.today/press-release-statement-from-aaron-belkin-on-tuesdays-democratic-debate">leader of Take Back the Court</a>, a pro-reform organization. In choosing the members of this commission, the White House appears to have prioritized bipartisanship and star power within the legal academy over choosing people who have actually spent a meaningful amount of time advocating for Supreme Court reforms.</p>
<p>(I reached out to the White House for comment about several of the concerns raised in this piece, but have not heard back from them as of this writing. We will update this piece to include the White House’s comment if they respond.)</p>
<p>When the White House released the list of commission members on Friday, it swiftly won praise — from members of the conservative Federalist Society. Evan Bernick, a <a href="http://www.georgemasonlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/23_3_Millhiser.pdf">right-libertarian</a> law professor at Georgetown, praised the commission as a “powerhouse lineup of scholars.” Stephen Sachs, a Duke Law professor who won the Federalist Society’s Joseph Story Award in 2020, called the commission “<a href="https://twitter.com/StephenESachs/status/1380561439052726272">an astonishingly well-balanced list</a>.”</p>
<p>Ilya Somin, a libertarian law professor at George Mason University, wrote shortly after the commission’s membership was announced that “the composition of the Commission is also <a href="https://reason.com/volokh/2021/04/09/biden-releases-names-of-members-of-his-judicial-reform-commission/">bad news for advocates of court-packing</a>, who may have hoped that it will produce a report endorsing the idea.”</p>
<p>So, if the White House’s goal was to allay concerns among conservatives that President Biden might try to diminish the Republican Party’s influence over the judiciary, this commission appears to have accomplished that goal.</p>
<p>Not that long ago, the idea of adding additional seats to the Supreme Court in order to change its partisan makeup was <a href="https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/51/lets-think-about-court-packing-2/">considered very radical</a>. President Franklin Roosevelt proposed doing so in 1937 in order to neutralize a Court that frequently struck down New Deal programs on spurious legal grounds, but his proposal was unpopular and ultimately went nowhere.</p>
<p>Yet several crucial events happened in recent years that convinced many Democrats that the federal judiciary is unfairly stacked against them. In 2016, after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February of that year, Senate Republicans <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/5/29/18644061/mitch-mcconnell-supreme-court-hearings-2020-merrick-garland">refused to even give a confirmation hearing</a> to President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, now-Attorney General Merrick Garland.</p>
<p>At the time, Republicans claimed that it was inappropriate to confirm a Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year.</p>
<p>But then Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/9/18/20917757/justice-ginsburg-ruth-bader-ginsburg-dies">died in September of 2020</a>, and Republicans immediately abandoned the position that they invented in order to justify scuttling Garland’s nomination. Trump’s nominee, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/10/26/21529619/amy-coney-barrett-confirmed-supreme-court">confirmed just eight days before the 2020 election</a>, which threw Trump out of office.</p>
<p>In the interim between Garland’s unsuccessful nomination and Barrett’s successful one, Democrats endured two other significant traumas. The first was that Trump became president, despite <a href="https://www.vox.com/21336225/voting-rights-senate-electoral-college-gerrymandering-supreme-court">receiving nearly 3 million fewer votes</a> than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Republicans also controlled the Senate for the entirety of Trump’s presidency — but they only controlled the Senate thanks to malapportionment. The Democratic “minority” in the Senate <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/11/26/20981758/brett-kavanaughs-terrify-democrats-supreme-court-gundy-paul">represented millions more Americans</a> than the Republican “majority” during Trump’s presidency.</p>
<p>Indeed, all three of Trump’s Supreme Court appointees were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by a bloc of senators who <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/10/26/21534358/supreme-court-amy-coney-barrett-constitution-anti-democratic-electoral-college-senate">represent less than half of the country</a>.</p>
<p>The second trauma was the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/9/22/17886814/brett-kavanaugh-christine-blasey-ford-deborah-ramirez">credibly accused of attempting to rape Dr. Christine Blasey Ford</a> while Kavanaugh and Ford were both in high school. Kavanaugh responded to these allegations with an angry rant before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which he <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/9/27/17911256/brett-kavanaugh-christine-blasey-ford-senate-hearing">seemed to threaten retaliation against Democrats</a> for repeating the allegations against him — “what goes around comes around,” Kavanaugh told the committee.</p>
<p>All of this contributed to a sense among Democrats that the Court has become too partisan, and led many prominent Democrats to conclude that radical action was necessary to prevent a GOP-led Supreme Court from <a href="https://www.vox.com/22286213/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-arizona-brnovich-democratic-national-committee-republican-party">dismantling voting rights</a> and otherwise entrenching Republican power.</p>
<p>Yet, when candidate Biden was asked about whether he’d support radical reforms such as adding seats to the Supreme Court, he <a href="https://www.vox.com/22286213/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-arizona-brnovich-democratic-national-committee-republican-party">initially said he opposed these reforms</a>. After Ginsburg’s death, he took a more agnostic stance, saying that, while he’s “not been a fan of court-packing,” his approach to the issue would depend on how the Barrett confirmation fight played out.</p>
<p>Now that Barrett’s been confirmed, however, Biden appears to be signaling with his new commission that significant reforms to the Supreme Court will not be on the table.</p>
<p>Court-packing is not something that anyone should do lightly. If Democrats did add seats to the Supreme Court in order to change its partisan balance, the result most likely would not be widespread acceptance of the newly liberal Court’s decisions. It would be <a href="https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/51/lets-think-about-court-packing-2/">massive resistance from Republicans</a>.</p>
<p>As Justice Stephen Breyer recently <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/04/07/supreme-court-justice-stephen-breyer-warns-against-packing-bench/7116124002/">warned during a lecture at Harvard Law School</a>, “structural alteration [of the Court] motivated by the perception of political influence” will erode trust in the Court’s decisions.</p>
<p>Yet, while Breyer is correct to warn that significant reforms to the Supreme Court are likely to undermine the Court’s legitimacy, the <a href="https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/51/lets-think-about-court-packing-2/">mere threat of court-packing can serve an important function</a>. If the justices believe that President Biden may send them six new colleagues if the Court dismantles what remains of the Voting Rights Act, then those justices may be less likely to dismantle the Voting Rights Act.</p>
<p>A healthy fear of a Democratic majority could lead the Supreme Court to become less partisan.</p>
<p>But Biden’s new commission sends the opposite message. With so many prominent members of the Federalist Society praising the commission right out the gate, it’s clear that conservatives do not feel threatened by this commission. And the justices themselves are just as capable of looking at the list of names that Biden picked and seeing that this commission is unlikely to support significant reforms.</p>
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source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/4/10/22375792/supreme-court-biden-commission-reform-court-packing-federalist-society">https://www.vox.com/2021/4/10/22375792/supreme-court-biden-commission-reform-court-packing-federalist-society</a>

vox Biden’s Supreme Court reform commission won’t fix anything

In 2014, Judge Thomas Griffith authored an opinion in Halbig v. Burwell that could have wrecked Obamacare’s insurance markets in over 30 s...

6 Killed After Earthquake Hits Indonesia

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="6 Killed After Earthquake Hits Indonesia" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2021-04/3tjc0k3_indonesia-earthquake_625x300_10_April_21.jpg" title="6 Killed After Earthquake Hits Indonesia" /></div>
<p class="ins_instory_dv_caption sp_b">At least six people have been killed after a 6.0 magnitude earthquake hit Indonesia.</p>
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<b class="place_cont">Jakarta, Indonesia:</b>
<p>At least six people have been killed after a 6.0 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Indonesia's main Java island, the country's disaster agency said Saturday.</p>
<p>"The agency has recorded six dead and one person who sustained serious injuries," said National Disaster Mitigation Agency spokesman Raditya Jati, adding that several villages in East Java had been evacuated.</p>
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source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/indonesia-earthquake-6-killed-after-earthquake-hits-indonesia-2410738">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/indonesia-earthquake-6-killed-after-earthquake-hits-indonesia-2410738</a>

news world 6 Killed After Earthquake Hits Indonesia

At least six people have been killed after a 6.0 magnitude earthquake hit Indonesia. Jakarta, Indonesia: At least six people have been ...