While we were watching the spectacle

[gotsnowgotslush]

Are we not entertained ?

(Apologies, to "Gladiator")

Every publication and media outlet sees to it.


What is said, is reported on.

What is done ?

Not so much.


In a 5-4 decision, the justices ruled that employers have the right to insist that labor disputes get resolve individually rather than allowing workers to join together in class action lawsuits.



NPR
@NPR
·
2h
In a case involving the rights of tens of millions of private-sector employees, the Supreme Court has ruled for the first time that workers may not band together to challenge violations of federal labor laws

12:43 PM · May 21, 2018

Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the decision “egregiously wrong.”


May 21, 2018

In a major defeat for workers, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that companies can force employees to seek damages individually, rather than as a group. The decision allows employers to require that workers pursue claims in individual arbitration hearings—which tend to be more favorable to employers—and bar them from filing class-action lawsuits or seeking group arbitration hearings.


https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/05/supreme-court-deals-a-big-blow-to-workers-rights/

The Supreme Court Just Fucked Over Workers

May 21, 2018

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that employers can limit class action lawsuits by their employees and instead force them to address grievances through individual arbitration. The ruling could also mean that employers can force employees to sign away their rights to file class action suits just to get a job.

https://splinternews.com/the-supreme-court-just-fucked-over-workers-1826193713


October 2, 2017

Liberal Justice Stephen Breyer said he was worried that a ruling against the workers would imperil “the entire heart of the New Deal,” laws and programs enacted in the 1930s under President Franklin Roosevelt to help workers during the Great Depression.

“I haven’t seen a way that you can, in fact, win the case, which you certainly want to do, without undermining and changing radically what has gone back to the New Deal,” Breyer told Paul Clement, a lawyer representing the employers.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...te-leaves-supreme-court-divided-idUSKCN1C71RP

October 2, 2017

Inside the courtroom, the scene was more than a bit odd. The Obama administration had sided in the court with the employees, but the Trump administration switched sides, leaving the National Labor Relations Board on its own to defend the NLRB's stated policy against class action waivers.

Lawyer Paul Clement, representing the three companies, and the Trump administration's Deputy Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, who was also supporting the companies, got quite a grilling from the court's four liberal justices.

https://www.npr.org/2017/10/02/5552...r-jabs-during-supreme-court-opening-arguments


Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent is five pages longer than the majority's opinion.

https://www.npr.org/2018/05/21/605012795/supreme-court-decision-delivers-blow-to-workers-rights

 

[Blue]

This is a frankly disturbing story. Your supreme court is actually saying;
"Yes lets go back to the humanitarian dumpster fire that was the nigh anarcho-capitalistic liberal economic policy. Workers wellbeing be damned, we believe there should be no legal protections for workers being exploited by their employers."

I keep saying the US looks like a stagnant empire in decline from the outside - because it keeps on reaffirming that notion. I guess that would make China an ascendency.

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

The Leadership Conference
@civilrightsorg
·
31m
The FIRST STEP Act gives broad authority to the Attorney General and would rely upon implementation by this administration. It would be unwise and harmful to vest so much discretion in an AG – Jeff Sessions – who is so hostile to meaningful justice reform. #RejectHR5682


Committee on May 9 and now awaits a floor vote.

Dear House Judiciary Committee Member:

On behalf of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the 74 undersigned organizations, we urge you to vote “No” on the FIRST STEP Act that will be considered during the mark up. Any effort to pass prison reform (or “back-end” reform) legislation without including sentencing reform (or “front-end” reform) will not meaningfully improve the federal system. Across the country, states that have enacted legislation containing both front and back end reforms have reduced rates of incarceration and crime.1 Any legislation that addresses only back end reforms is doomed to fail in achieving these goals. Without changes to sentencing laws that eliminate mandatory minimums, restore judicial discretion, reduce the national prison population, and mitigate disparate impacts on communities of color, the FIRST STEP Act alone will have little impact. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights plans to include your position on The FIRST STEP Act in our voting scorecard for the 115th Congress.


Privately owned prisons, stockholders, and profit

Further, while the bill says any savings should be reinvested in programming, it retains a provision permitting the Attorney General to recommend how any savings should be spent, including on “law enforcement,” effectively creating the option for savings not to be reinvested. Further, the bill also provides that in order to expand programming, BOP shall enter into partnerships with private organizations and companies under policies developed by the Attorney General, “subject to appropriations.” This could privatize what should be public functions and could allow private entities to unduly profit from incarceration. In the end, any positive reform contemplated by the FIRST STEP Act is heavily contingent upon sufficient funding to create or expand evidenced based recidivism reduction programming and access to a halfway house or home confinement, which is highly unlikely. The bill, as drafted, is therefore an empty promise, unlikely to achieve meaningful prison reform and unlikely to reduce crime or rates of mass incarceration.

If Congress is serious about addressing meaningful prison reform, it will pass legislation that would deal with the conditions of confinement such as reducing the use of solitary confinement, providing adequate medical care to prisoners, and addressing exorbitant prison phone rates. While we appreciate the inclusion of some promising provisions in the introduced bill, such as prohibitions on the shackling of pregnant women, reforms to the federal compassionate and elderly release programs, and an audit of the program several years after its implementation, these changes are not significant enough to overcome our primary concerns with the bill and many could be adopted administratively by the Bureau of Prisons. Furthermore, we remain concerned that the challenges and solutions to reforming our federal prison system have not been fully explored by this committee and that no hearings have been held in order to give due consideration to the FIRST STEP Act in particular.

http://www.pfaw.org/blog-posts/pfaw...reform-requires-more-than-the-first-step-act/


Trump pushes for prison reform bill modeled on Texas


May 18, 2018

The White House event was intended to boost the First Step Act, bipartisan legislation Cornyn has pushed as a successor to reforms in Texas over the past two decades

(Pay no mind the racism, and the racist system, because that is not important, according to...)

Although prison reform legislation enjoys broad consensus in Congress, it has become bogged down in debate over calls to add sentencing reform measures that would reverse policies mandating long prison sentences even for some for non-violent crimes.

Jared Kushner, however, said the White House would prefer to pass prison reform legislation immediately, without tying it to sentencing reform. "Right now that's an issue that still needs debate," Kushner said. "We're not here to have a debate. We're here to do."



https://www.chron.com/news/politics...or-prison-reform-bill-modeled-on-12926529.php




May 21, 2018

https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/613094373/trump-s-push-for-prison-reform


Caygle: “This is a very interesting case of strange bedfellows in terms of who is lining up on each side. On one side, in support of this prison reform bill, you have Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), and Doug Collins (R-GA), but you also have the backing of Jared Kushner and the White House and President Trump who said: at the summit on Friday: ‘send me a bill, I will sign it.’ You also have the Koch brothers, and then on the other side, you have Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Dick Durbin, and a litany of Civil Rights groups like the ACLU and the NAACP who are opposed to this bill. So the way people are lining up is not your typical Republican vs. Democrat.”

On incarceration and solutions

Chettiar: “The real problem here is mass incarceration. That is the locking up of 2.3 million Americans, mostly black and brown. And the real way to solve that is to reduce the number of people entering prison, so that there are not people suffering unnecessarily in prison. When you step back to look at what the solution is to that, that is sentencing reform, as opposed to what the White House is trying to do, which what they’re calling ‘prison reform,’ which is code for helping people while they’re in prison but not actually letting them out or reducing the amount of people flowing in.”

On the political game behind legislation:

Chettiar: “The First Step act is actually a step backwards. That’s a cave to Jeff Sessions and what it does, is it would hand Trump a political win without actually doing much to end mass incarceration.”

 

[rae121452]

Are we not entertained ?

(Apologies, to "Gladiator")

Every publication and media outlet sees to it.


What is said, is reported on.

What is done ?

Not so much.


In a 5-4 decision, the justices ruled that employers have the right to insist that labor disputes get resolve individually rather than allowing workers to join together in class action lawsuits.



NPR
@NPR
·
2h
In a case involving the rights of tens of millions of private-sector employees, the Supreme Court has ruled for the first time that workers may not band together to challenge violations of federal labor laws

12:43 PM · May 21, 2018

Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the decision “egregiously wrong.”


May 21, 2018

In a major defeat for workers, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that companies can force employees to seek damages individually, rather than as a group. The decision allows employers to require that workers pursue claims in individual arbitration hearings—which tend to be more favorable to employers—and bar them from filing class-action lawsuits or seeking group arbitration hearings.


https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/05/supreme-court-deals-a-big-blow-to-workers-rights/

The Supreme Court Just Fucked Over Workers

May 21, 2018

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that employers can limit class action lawsuits by their employees and instead force them to address grievances through individual arbitration. The ruling could also mean that employers can force employees to sign away their rights to file class action suits just to get a job.

https://splinternews.com/the-supreme-court-just-fucked-over-workers-1826193713


October 2, 2017

Liberal Justice Stephen Breyer said he was worried that a ruling against the workers would imperil “the entire heart of the New Deal,” laws and programs enacted in the 1930s under President Franklin Roosevelt to help workers during the Great Depression.

“I haven’t seen a way that you can, in fact, win the case, which you certainly want to do, without undermining and changing radically what has gone back to the New Deal,” Breyer told Paul Clement, a lawyer representing the employers.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...te-leaves-supreme-court-divided-idUSKCN1C71RP

October 2, 2017

Inside the courtroom, the scene was more than a bit odd. The Obama administration had sided in the court with the employees, but the Trump administration switched sides, leaving the National Labor Relations Board on its own to defend the NLRB's stated policy against class action waivers.

Lawyer Paul Clement, representing the three companies, and the Trump administration's Deputy Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, who was also supporting the companies, got quite a grilling from the court's four liberal justices.

https://www.npr.org/2017/10/02/5552...r-jabs-during-supreme-court-opening-arguments


Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent is five pages longer than the majority's opinion.

https://www.npr.org/2018/05/21/605012795/supreme-court-decision-delivers-blow-to-workers-rights

and effectively cripples the power of unions.

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

If Ralph Reed is voting for this prison reform bill, there is money in it for him


May 20, 2018


Jesselyn McCurdy of the American Civil Liberties Union said she welcomes evangelical support for prison reform in principle, but worries the push for this legislation could squander an opportunity for more substantial reform. Among other concerns, she said the plan relies too heavily on releasing prisoners into halfway houses, which are underfunded.

Jesselyn McCurdy of the American Civil Liberties Union said she welcomes evangelical support for prison reform – but not for this bill. She worries about squandering what could be the only chance for awhile for significant change.

"Our concern is if we support this...we're leaving thousands of thousands of people behind in the name of a very quick, empty promise type of reform that won't result in many people actually coming home," McCurdy said.


https://www.npr.org/2018/05/20/6127...rs-prison-reform-becomes-a-front-burner-issue

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

The Orange Horror sitting in the Oval Office has a leisurely and enjoyable retirement

Monthly public appearance with signing
Monthly interaction with lowly proletarian individuals
Monthly interaction with International leader
Meetings
Phone calls
Verbal attacks on political
frienemies/enemies
Weekday tweets
Create International disturbance
Upset Democrats
Annoy the Press
Network with criminals
Executive Time with TV and food
Nights with Hannity
Weekly roadtrip to collect cash
Campaign trip to assist election of allies
Weekend dinner with important donor
Weekend golf
Weekend blockbuster crisis/scandal/ battle between Republicans and Democrats Weekend tweets


National holiday with golf
Golf vacation
International junket with golf