September 11, 2020
Sidney's Picks: Wildfires, Lies, and Protests
The Best of the Week’s News:
September 4, 2020
Sidney's Picks: COVID Childcare Crisis
Photo credit:
Photo by Arlene Mejorando, courtesty of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project/Slate.
The Best of the Week’s News:
August 28, 2020
Sidney's Picks: Striking Hoppers, Missing Immigrants
Photo credit:
Trash bags awaiting pickup on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, where sanitation workers known as hoppers are striking for a living wage. For illustration only. By Tony Webster, Creative Commons.
- The garbage workers of New Orleans continue their strike because Black lives matter. (Discourse Blog)
- The Trump administration had a naturalization ceremony at the RNC, but they disenfranchised up to 300,000 people by delaying their ceremonies until after the election. (WaPo)
- Unionized professional athletes are striking to protest police brutality and teaching a lesson about the power of labor. (Nation)
- Armed right-wing extremists stormed the Idaho state legislature, pushing past police and shattering a glass door to pack the gallery. (NPR)
- Detroit’s embattled nursing home workers delay their strike, despite the urgent needs of their membership. (Dissent)
August 21, 2020
Sidney's Picks: Baby Chicks Smother as USPS Cuts Cause Backlog
The Best of the Week’s News:
- Baby chicks smother and rot in their packages as Trump’s cuts plunge a major USPS sorting facility into chaos and squalor. (LA Times)
- Some Friends: Posh Brooklyn Friends day school claims unions are against their “Quaker values.” (In These Times)
- Meatpacking plants were warned for years to get ready for a pandemic, now they say they couldn’t have known. (ProPublica)
- Kids are being stashed in hotels in a shadow immigration system. (WHYY)
- Millions struggle to survive without their $600/wk pandemic UI supplement. (Guardian)
August 14, 2020
Sidney's Picks: Trump Vows to Starve Post Office to Win Election
The Best of the Week’s News:
- Donald Trump announced that he would veto aid to the U.S. Post Office so that we “can’t have universal mail-in voting.” (Vox, WaPo)
- With mail slowing nationwide, the U.S. Postal Service is removing mail sorting machines from facilities around the country without explanation. (ABC7, Vice)
- The USPS says it’s unlikely that it will be able to process mail-in ballots in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania by Election Day. (NBC)
- Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor with no prior postal experience, is invested in competitors to the Post Office. (Verge, CNN)
- Cherry crush: Undocumented workers struggle to pick 24 billion cherries in 8 weeks (NYT)
August 7, 2020
Sidney's Picks: Sights on the NRA
The Best of the Week’s News:
- Top NRA execs accused of multi-million-dollar fraud in lawsuit by NY AG to disband the gun group. (The Trace)
- Target’s delivery workers says tip “glitches” are shorting their pay. (WaPo)
- Civilian sailors known as CIVMARs are succumbing to despair, trapped on Navy ships without basic hygiene supplies under a sweeping COVID control order, their union warns. (Navy Times)
- Daisy Coleman, a 23-year-old survivor of the infamous Maryville Rape case, has died by suicide. (NYMag)
- Trump supports housing segregation, unfortunately, many white liberals do, too. (The Nation)
July 31, 2020
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)
July 24, 2020
Sidney's Picks: An Eviction Crisis & A Constitutional Crisis
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. (PBS, KVAL, 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)
July 17, 2020
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)
July 10, 2020
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)
Pages