July 2020 | Hillman Foundation

Clear It With Sidney

The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein

July 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)

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. (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)

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)