Clear It with Sidney | Hillman Foundation

Clear It With Sidney

The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein

Clear It with Sidney

Sidney's Picks: John Lewis & Sudden Evictions

Photo credit: 

John Lewis in 1965, Creative Commons. 

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • John Lewis’s final letter to the nation passed the civil rights torch to the Movement for Black Lives. (NYT)
     
  • It’s illegal for bosses to ask their workers about their plans to organize, but a third of Fortune 500 companies are using online surveys to identify and crush “union hotspots.” (One Zero)
     
  • Tenants in Philadelphia are being evicted without warning by an opaque, heavily privatized system. (Philly Inquirer)
     
  • How can television contextualize, dramatize, and analyze the Black Lives Matter moment?, asks Wesley Morris, naming five Hillman Prize-winners as scholars to ground this project in reality. (NYT)
     
  • Unable to delay the election, Trump schemes to derail it. (The Nation)

Sidney's Picks: An Eviction Crisis & A Constitutional Crisis

Photo credit: 

EVICT,” by Steve Rotman, Creative Commons

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • Millions of renters face eviction if Congress doesn’t act by Saturday. Some landlords illegally initiated eviction proceedings even before the moratorium expired. (Video) (ABC, NYT)
     
  • The constitutional crisis deepens as Oregon state lawmakers demand that the federal government withdraw its shadowy agents from Portland. Judge blocks federal agents from arresting legal observers. (PBSKVAL, Nation, AP)
     
  • Thousands of workers walked off the job, Monday as part of the Strike for Black Lives. (Yahoo)
     
  • Nationwide testing backlogs may be hiding the true spread of COVID-19, experts say. What looks like a plateau could instead be a maxed-out system. (NYT)
     
  • Jobless claims rise as the fate of the $600/week enhanced unemployment benefit remains undecided. (CNBC)

Sidney's Picks: Unmarked Feds Snatch Protesters; Goya's Dirty Labor History

  • Federal agents without badges are grabbing protesters off the street in Portland and throwing them in vans. (WaPo)
     
  • With Goya Foods in the news, let’s take a look back at their dirty campaign to deny their majority-Latino workforce a union contract. (American Prospect
  • How Trump and his cronies are exploiting the pandemic to bust unions. (New Yorker)
     
  • MO Death Trip: Missouri will spend $15 million in federal COVID relief funds on enticing tourists to the state. (KS Star)
     
  • NLRB seeks an injunction to force a Nevada gold mining conglomerate to recognize the union it says it illegally disregarded. (NV Independent)
     
  • Mask use is widespread in the US, but compliance varies dramatically by region. (NYT)

Sidney's Picks: Strike for Black Lives & COVID-19 in ICE Detention

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • More than 40% of staff at a massive ICE detention facility have tested positive for COVID-19. (USA Today)
     
  • OSHA has only issued one citation for a COVID safety violation and unions are demanding to know why the agency isn’t stepping up. (CNBC)
     
  • An in-depth investigation into everything that’s wrong with Florida’s COVID-19 data. (COVID-19 Tracking Project)
     
  • In a historic win for tribal sovereignty, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that eastern Oklahoma remains a reservation because Congress never revoked the treaty that created it. (ICT, SCOTUS Blog)
     
  • The death of Sha-asia Washington, a 26-year-old Brooklyn woman who died after a C-section is reviving urgent concerns about maternity care for Black women. (The City)
     
  • Indigenous-led research reveals new secrets about the mysterious Spirt Bears of British Columbia. (NYT/Flickr)

Sidney's Picks: Making Essential Workers Whole

Photo credit: 

 Shana-Kay Henry, a physician’s assistant in New York City holds up a card showing how much she owes in student loans, photo by Bayete Ross Smith, used with kind permission of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. 

  • Can student debt relief make our essential workers whole? (Guardian/EHRP)
     
  • How corporate America crushed workers’ rights, and how COVID could revive organized labor. (Bloomberg)
     
  • Silicon Valley billionaires are terrified of journalists. Good. (Vice) 
     
  • How Dollar Stores became magnets for murder. (ProPublica/New Yorker) 
     
  • Schools might be able to reopen safely in the fall, if we shut bars and gyms now. (WaPo) 
     
  • Over 300 kids have caught COVID-19 in Texas daycares due to lax safety measures. (Texas Tribune)

Sidney's Picks: Racial Justice, the Coronavirus Explosion

The Best of the Week’s News

  • “My Body is a Confederate Monument” (NYT)
     
  • The virus gets the upper hand as the U.S. enters a devastating new phase of the pandemic. (Atlantic)
     
  • How Arizona lost control of its coronavirus epidemic. (WaPo
     
  • Survivors of three meatpackers who died of COVID are suing Tyson Foods, alleging the company lied to keep them on the job. (Des Moines Register)
     
  • Colorado is reinvestigating the 2019 police killing of 23-year-old Elijah McClain. (APElle)

Sidney's Picks: Happy Juneteenth!

Photo credit: 

Juneteenth Flag, Nafsadh / CC0

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • Hillman judge Jelani Cobb on Juneteenth and the Meaning of Freedom (New Yorker)
     
  • Mayor promises Juneteenth will be an official NYC holiday, starting next year! (NBC
     
  • Video: Reconstruction in America: 1865-1876 (Equal Justice Initiative)
     
  • The King County Labor Council expels the Seattle Police Officers Guild over racism and abuse of collective bargaining. (Crosscut)
     
  • New York City Council passes sweeping police reform legislation (CNN)
     
  • Florida sets all-time high for new cases of COVID-19, accelerating the state’s exponential growth in infections. (WESH-291-DIVOC

Sidney's Picks: Cambodian Seamstress Jailed for Speaking out Against Covid Risk at Work

Photo credit: 

Composite image of migratory birds by Ashok Boghani, Creative Commons

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • A seamstress in a Michael Kors factory in Cambodia served two months in prison for denouncing the covid risks in her workplace. (Buzzfeed)
     
  • Dockworkers will shut down West Coast ports on Juneteenth, in memory of George Floyd. (The Nation)
     
  • New research confirms that jails and prisons are incubators that spread coronavirus to the larger community. (WaPo)
     
  • Coronavirus stalks farm workers in California. (LA Times)
     
  • As coronavirus tightens its grip on Brazil, the country’s far-right president flirts with a military coup. (NYT)
     
  • Trump’s Department of the Interior argued that migratory birds are a menace to humanity. (Bloomberg Law

Sidney's Picks: Police Brutality, Habeas Corpus, and COVID

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • A judge suspended habeas corpus for protesters arrested in New York City this week, meaning that they can be held without charge for over 24 hours. (Gothamist)
     
  • The no-knock raid on Breonna Taylor was illegal. (WaPo)
     
  • The largest labor coalition in King County, WA gave an ultimatum to its member police unions: Fix your racism, or get out! (Crosscut
     
  • Coronavirus cases jump in Florida. (Sun Sentinel)

Sidney's Picks: A Death at Amazon, OSHA's Indifference, CNN Crew Arrested on the Air

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • Employers have a legal duty to protect their workers from hazards including coronavirus, but Trump’s OSHA refuses to enforce the law. (TNR)
     
  • Harry Sentoso took a job at Amazon’s warehouse in Irvine to bank some quick cash before retirement, 2 weeks later he was dead of COVID-19. (LA Times)
     
  • George Floyd, the 46-year-old black man killed by a Minneapolis police officer, was a beloved member of his community. (Buzzfeed)
     
  • How Wendi C. Thomas built MLK50, a non-profit newsroom dedicated to the low-wage workers of Memphis. (NYT)
     
  • A CNN camera crew was arrested live on the air in Minneapolis as they covered the aftermath of last night’s protests against the killing of George Floyd by a police officer. (CNN)

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