February 28, 2023

Tuesday, February 28, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Joe is always busy.

Biden Administration Plans Crackdown on Migrant Child Labor.

The Biden administration on Monday announced a wide crackdown on the labor exploitation of migrant children around the United States, including more aggressive investigations of companies benefiting from their work.

The development came days after The New York Times published an investigation into the explosive growth of migrant child labor throughout the United States. Children, who have been crossing the southern border without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in punishing jobs that flout child labor laws, The Times found.

The White House laid out a host of new initiatives to investigate child labor violations among employers and improve the basic support that migrant children receive when they are released to sponsors in the United States. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, called the revelations in The Times “heartbreaking” and “completely unacceptable.”

As part of the new effort, the Department of Labor, which enforces these laws, said it would target not just the factories and suppliers that illegally employ children, but also the larger companies that have child labor in their supply chains. Migrant children often use false identification and find jobs through staffing agencies that do not verify their Social Security numbers. (New York Times).

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Jill is always busy.

Jill Biden sees East Africa drought up close, seeks more aid.

LOSITETI, Kenya (AP) — U.S. first lady Jill Biden got an up-close look Sunday at the historic East Africa drought as she walked along arid land and listened as some Maasai women described how their children and livestock are going hungry. She appealed for more countries to join the United States to help alleviate the suffering.

Some areas of the Horn of Africa have endured five consecutive failed rainy seasons, meaning there was no rainfall or an insufficient amount to help farmers with their crops and livestock. An upcoming sixth rainy season, beginning in March, is expected to be about the same or worse.

Biden, who was on the final day of a five-day visit to Africa, toured an outreach center in the town operated by World Vision with support from UNICEF and the World Food Program. She chatted with people who had brought their children to be screened for malnutrition and she participated in a discussion with a group of women, including a mother of 10 children, who shared their stories.

“They talked about how their livestock are dying. Obviously, you can see the drought here, how bad it is,” the first lady told reporters afterward. “The one source of water here feeds 12 villages and each village has approximately a thousand to 1,200 people.”

Biden noted that the United States has provided 70% of the money sent to the region to help alleviate the suffering, “but we cannot be the only ones.”

“We need to have other countries join us in this global effort to help these people of the region,” she said, adding that the drought was competing with humanitarian efforts tied to Russian’s war in Ukraine and an earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people in Turkey and Syria.

“I mean, there are a lot of competing interests but, obviously here, people are actually, livestock, people are starving,” she said.

Meg Whitman, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, who accompanied Biden, said people know intellectually what’s going on in the region but “it’s different when you just see it.”

Some 4.4 million people in Kenya are facing high levels of food insecurity, with the number projected to rise to 5.4 million in March, according to an analysis by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification.

Already, 11 million livestock that are essential to many families’ health and livelihood have died. Many of the people affected are farmers who have watched their crops wither and die, and their water sources run dry. (AP).

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South Carolina, home of the first Democratic Presidential Primary, is coming into focus.

Ex-SC mayor taking over White House Office of Engagement.

Former Columbia, SC Mayor, Steve Benjamin, will take over the WH Office of Engagement. With a focus on making the White House inclusive and accessible to its citizens, the Office of Public Engagement is responsible for creating and coordinating direct dialogue between the Biden-Harris administration and the diverse American public.

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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — President Joe Biden on Monday announced the appointment of former Columbia, South Carolina, Mayor Steve Benjamin as a top adviser, filling a key White House role from a state that has become crucial to the Democratic Party ahead of the 2024 election cycle.

Benjamin will become director of the White House Office of Engagement. He takes over from another former mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, who had assumed the role in June and is returning to Atlanta, officials said.

Benjamin will oversee White House efforts “to ensure community leaders, diverse perspectives, and new voices have the opportunity to inform the work of the President in an inclusive, transparent and responsible way,” according to the White House.

Benjamin, 53, has long been considered a rising star in Democratic politics, serving three terms as Columbia’s mayor, and the first Black mayor in the city’s history. Serving as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and African Americans Mayors Association, Benjamin spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention and was among the candidates considered for Hillary Clinton’s running mate that year. He opted not to run for a fourth term in 2021.

Vice President Kamala Harris to promote broadband in South Carolina as 2024 looms.

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris is promoting the Biden administration’s achievements on broadband internet access during a visit to South Carolina, recently minted as the site of Democrats’ first presidential votes of the 2024 campaign.

Harris’ trip on Monday, her fourth to the early-voting state since becoming vice president, will “highlight progress on the Administration’s efforts to expand affordable high-speed internet nationwide,” according to guidance from the White House.

But the trip to Columbia also comes as Democrats’ national attention hones in on South Carolina, where a landslide 2020 primary win gave Joe Biden the momentum to notch Super Tuesday wins and bounce several opponents from the race. (AP).

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Elissa Slotkin Announces Senate Run in Michigan.

Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan announced she is stepping down. Michigan Congresswoman Elissa Slotnick announced she is ready to step up.

Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney made the rare exception in 2023. She came to Michigan to support Democratic Congresswoman Elisa Slotnick during Slotnick’s re-election campaign.

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Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat and former C.I.A. analyst who has notched several high-profile victories in a challenging district, said Mondaythat she would run for the Senate seat being vacated by Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat.

Ms. Slotkin is the first Democrat running in what could be a hotly contested primary followed by a marquee fight in the general election, held during a presidential year in a major battleground state.

“We need a new generation of leaders that thinks differently, works harder and never forgets that we are public servants,” Ms. Slotkin said in an announcement video released Monday morning.

In Michigan, an industrial Midwestern state that helped propel Donald J. Trump to the White House in 2016 before narrowly flipping back to the Democrats in 2020, Ms. Slotkin is planning a pitch heavily focused on jobs and economic matters. An adviser, granted anonymity to discuss internal strategy, said to expect a campaign message that emphasized American manufacturing, “jobs with dignity” and labor protections.

She also stressed the importance of “preserving our rights and our democracy so that our kids can live their version of the American dream.”

There have been two school shootings in Ms. Slotkin’s district over the last 15 months, including one at Michigan State University this month. She is expected to focus on issues of safety, especially combating gun violence, the adviser said.

Ms. Slotkin, an experienced fund-raiser who represents a Lansing-area district that includes plenty of Republican voters, has impressed state and national Democrats with her electoral track record. She flipped a Republican-held district in 2018, held it in 2020 and was widely seen as endangered last fall, but ultimately wonby five percentage points.

And in a nod to her focus on bipartisanship, she featured images of former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama in her biography-heavy announcement video as she noted that she had worked “in the White House under two presidents, one Republican and one Democrat.”

A number of the state’s most prominent politicians — including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Mayor Mike Dugganof Detroit and Representative Haley Stevens — have indicated they do not intend to run. Pete Buttigieg, the U.S. transportation secretary whose official residence is now in Michigan, has said the same.

On Friday, State Senator Mallory McMorrow, a prominent lawmaker who went viral last year defending L.G.B.T.Q. rights, also said she would not run.

Many elected officials and other power players in the state had been waiting to see whether Garlin Gilchrist II, the state’s first Black lieutenant governor, would jump into the race, and some had wanted to support him.

But on Sunday, he wrote on Twitter: “Serving our state in Washington, D.C. would be a great opportunity, but instead I will keep standing tall for Michigan, right here at home, as Lieutenant Governor. The Governor & I have more work to do. I look forward to working with our next US Senator to get it done.” (NY Times)

Touch 👇 the black box to watch Congresswoman Elisa Slotkin announce that she is running for the Senate seat from Michigan vacated by Senator Debbie Stabenow.

If you want to donate to Elissa Slotnick’s Campaign for the Senate, click here.

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“Not Fox! No, Not Fox.”

Rupert Murdoch Acknowledges Fox News Hosts Endorsed Election Fraud Falsehoods.

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the conservative media empire that owns Fox News, acknowledged in a deposition that several hosts for his networks promoted the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump, and that he could have stopped them but didn’t, court documentsreleased on Monday showed.

“They endorsed,” Mr. Murdoch said under oath in response to direct questions about the Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, according to a legal filing by Dominion Voting Systems. “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” he added, while also disclosing that he was always dubious of Mr. Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.

Asked whether he doubted Mr. Trump, Mr. Murdoch responded: “Yes. I mean, we thought everything was on the up-and-up.” At the same time, he rejected the accusation that Fox News as a whole had endorsed the stolen election narrative. “Not Fox,” he said. “No. Not Fox.”

Mr. Murdoch’s remarks, which he made last month as part of Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox, added to the evidence that Dominion has accumulated as it tries to prove its central allegation: The people running the country’s most popular news network knew Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election were false but broadcast them anyway in a reckless pursuit of ratings and profit.

Proof to that effect would help Dominion clear the high legal bar set by the Supreme Court for defamation cases. To prevail, Dominion must show not only that Fox broadcast false information, but that it did so knowingly. A judge in Delaware state court has scheduled a monthlong trial beginning in April.

The new documents and a similar batch released this month provide a dramatic account from inside the network, depicting a frantic scramble as Fox tried to woo back its large conservative audience after ratings collapsed in the wake of Mr. Trump’s loss. (New York Times)

One more thing.

“Dominion details the close relationship that Fox hosts and executives enjoyed with senior Republican Party officials and members of the Trump inner circle, revealing how at times Fox was shaping the very story it was covering. It describes how Mr. Murdoch placed a call to the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, immediately after the election. In his deposition, Mr. Murdoch testified that during that call he likely urged Mr. McConnell to “ask other senior Republicans to refuse to endorse Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories and baseless claims of fraud.”

Dominion also describes how Mr. Murdoch provided Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, with confidential information about ads that the Biden campaign would be running on Fox.” (New York Times).

Here is the public version of the Dominion Lawsuit.

Will a $1.6bn defamation lawsuit finally stop Fox News from spreading lies? by Margaret Sullivan.

But the $1.6bn potential price tag of this lawsuit?

The suit has excavated an ugly reality: that the corporate culture at Fox is less about the truth than about protecting profits and market position.

And it matters. The election lies that swirled on Fox News and throughout rightwing media during and after the 2020 presidential election have caused destruction.

The violent assault on the US Capitol might never have happened without this propaganda in the service of profits. And the deep political divisions in the United States can be laid to an alarming degree at the feet of this single media organization, which is the most popular and richest of the cable news networks.

But a vexing question arises: what’s to be done about it?

Advertising boycotts are almost pointless since Fox gets its massive revenue largely through carriage fees – the money that cable and satellite providers pay to individual networks; Fox is able to demand and get disproportionately high rates because it has such a fervent audience.

“Fox could get zero in ad revenue and still have a huge profit margin,” Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal media-watchdog organization Media Matters for America, told me.

That’s real money – not enough to put Fox out of business, but possibly enough to make coverage more responsible. It also would send a strong message to the public and to the company’s shareholders, both of which matter to Fox’s top brass.

Carusone also wants to see mainstream journalists stop legitimizing the network by treating their reporters as esteemed colleagues.

“The news industry is Fox’s biggest enabler,” he said. Because of the network’s more respectable past, that acceptance “has gotten grandfathered in”, he said.

If Dominion prevails, Fox News may be forced to become less reckless. For a media company that’s caused so much harm to American society, that would be a very welcome reform. (The Guardian).

One more thing.

You may remember that the FCC has a right, though a limited right, to sanction news broadcasters for "news distortion," which dates back more than 50 years. However, the scope of the “news distortion” policy applies only to the broadcast medium, “which means that the FCC has no power to enforce it against cable news networks, newspapers or newsletters (whether online or print), social media platforms, online-only streaming outlets or any other non-broadcast news platform. Second, broadcasters are subject to sanction only if they can be proven to have deliberately distorted a factual news report.” (From FCC.Gov).

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A little more on the racist who created Dilbert.

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A Bush comes out for DeSantis 2024.

Touch 👇 to watch Jeb Bush endorse DeSantis, who hasn’t even announced he is running.

The best part is where Jeb! says DeSantis has shown “that Florida can be a model for our country.”

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Coronavirus update.

What we really know about the origins of the coronavirus.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2021.

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WASHINGTON — The Energy Department’s conclusion, with “low confidence,” that an accidental laboratory leak in China most likely caused the coronavirus pandemic has renewed questions about what sparked the worst public health crisis in a century — and whether the virus at the heart of it was somehow connected to scientific research.

Scientists and spy agencies have tried assiduously to answer that question, but conclusive evidence is hard to come by. The nation’s intelligence agencies are split, and none of them changed their conclusions after seeing the Energy Department’s findings, officials said.

Scientists who have studied the genetics of the virus, and the patterns by which it spread, say the most likely cause is that the virus jumped from live mammals to humans — a scientific phenomenon known as “zoonotic spillover” — at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, the city in which the first cases of Covid-19 emerged in late 2019.

But other scientists say there is evidence, albeit circumstantial, that the virus came from a lab, possibly the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had deep expertise in researching coronaviruses. Lab accidents do happen; in 2014, after accidents involving bird flu and anthrax, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tightened its biosafety practices.

The debate is politically fraught. The lab leak theory gained currency among Republicans in the spring of 2020 after President Donald J. Trump, who used inflammatory terms to blame China for the pandemic, latched onto the idea. Many Democrats have not been persuaded by the lab leak hypothesis; some say they believe the explanation of natural causes, and others say there may never be enough intelligence to draw a conclusion.

The Energy Department’s findings have given a boost to House Republicans, who are investigating the pandemic’s origins. But apart from the politics, experts say that understanding what caused a public health crisis that has killed nearly seven million people could help researchers understand how to prevent the next one.

Here’s what we know, and don’t know, about the origins of the coronavirus. (New York Times).

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Women Reject Injustice.

How Afghan women are defying the Taliban ban on college education.

She's a young student in Afghanistan who graduated high school 3 years early at age 15. For years, she's dreamed of becoming an engineer, both to rebuild her country and to prove that women could work in what's often seen there as a male field.

M.H., who requested anonymity fearing Taliban reprisal for speaking to the press and criticizing their policy, was inches from reaching her goal this past December. But days after she completed requirements for a civil engineering degree, the Taliban banned women from universities. Her gender torpedoed her dream.

The Taliban "decided to withhold our diplomas just because we are women," M.H. told NPR. "Now I cannot even apply for any further education because I have no document to prove that I finished my engineering degree." To have any hope of leaving and establishing a career abroad, or even of working in a future Afghanistan where the Taliban are no longer in power, she's relying on the one alternative available to her — making a second attempt to earn a bachelor's degree by taking online classes in computer science from a university in the U.S.

When the Taliban entered her city, M.H. says, "I cried myself to sleep for many days, but then I told myself 'I cannot let this be my reality.' "

Though the regime allowed women to continue university education at first, "I did not trust them," M.H. said. After the takeover, women were only allowed into universities every other day to ensure total gender segregation, so she searched for online coursework to fill the rest of her time.

In 2021 she secured a scholarship for University of the People, a private online university based in Pasadena, California. The University of the People is accredited by the U.S. Distance Education Accrediting Commission, making its degrees equivalent to a U.S. college degree that is accepted by employers and other institutions of higher learning. Now, seven days a week, M.H. studies online, unless electricity or internet are unavailable.

Reshef is more optimistic that online courses could be stepping stones for Afghan students. "Even if the Afghan government does not recognize online degrees, our Afghan students can use their degrees to obtain online jobs or apply to a graduate program at traditional brick and mortar institutions" globally, he says. "A country in which only half of its population has access to college education is doomed to failure."

"Any initiative to educate Afghan girls and women is appreciated," says Sahar Fetrat, an assistant researcher with the women's rights division at Human Rights Watch. She cautions, however, that online education in today's Afghanistan can reinforce, to an extent, the Taliban's attempt to remove women from public spaces. "We must strive to push and reclaim women and girls' presence back in educational, social, political, and all spheres of life that have been robbed by the Taliban."

Furthermore, Durrani says, "It isn't fair to restrict women's education and careers to only those fields that they can study online." (AP).

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Meet Helen Hulick, The Woman Jailed For Wearing Pants To Court.

In November 1938, Helen Hulick was about to testify against two men who had burgled her building. But then, the judge held her in contempt of court — for refusing to wear a dress.

In 1938, 28-year-old kindergarten teacher Helen Hulick made history in a Los Angeles courtroom — by refusing to wear a dress. When Hulick appeared in court to testify as a witness to a burglary, she was chided by the judge for wearing slacks. Though she was asked to put on a dress in the next hearing, she refused, and was held in contempt of court and even sent to jail.

The case of Helen Hulick in 1938 reminds me of the dress code imposed on women in Missouri on January 13th, 2023.

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The Senate Judiciary Committee to hold the first hearing on the ERA in nearly 30 years on Tuesday, February 28.

On Tuesday February 28, 2023, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on how Congress can recognize the final ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and enshrine gender equality in the U.S. Constitution, giving a new meaning to “We the People.”

This will be the first Senate hearing on the ERA in nearly 30 years.

Tune in here tomorrow, starting at 10am ET. (Thank you, Linda Wharton, Roundup Consultant, for calling this to our attention).

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Will this generation study Shakespeare or Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison? Or care about the questions they raise?

The End of the English Major by Nathan Heller.

The crisis, when it came, arrived so quickly that its scale was hard to recognize at first. From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors. Women’s studies lost eighty per cent. “It’s hard for students like me, who are pursuing an English major, to find joy in what they’re doing,” Meg Macias, a junior, said one afternoon as the edges of the sky over the campus went soft. It was late autumn, and the sunsets came in like flame on thin paper on the way to dusk. “They always know there’s someone who wishes that they were doing something else.”

For decades now, the cost of education has increased over all ahead of inflation. One theory has been that this pressure, plus the growing precariousness of the middle class, has played a role in driving students like him toward hard-skill majors. (English majors, on average, carry less debt than students in other fields, but they take longer to pay it down.)

For the decline at A.S.U. is not anomalous. According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while suny Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.

During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before. (The New Yorker).

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Today at the Supreme Court.

Randi Weingarten is the President of the AFT (American Federation of Teachers).

The Supreme Court will hear two challenges to Biden's student-debt-relief plan on Tuesday.

The court's decision will determine if millions of borrowers will get up to $20,000 in loan forgiveness.

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