I said last night that helping to organize my colleagues into a union — the largest union of private school, full time, non-tenure track professors in the country — was the most important thing I’d ever done. I’m feeling emotional about it this morning, so let me explain. We are beset by big imbricated problems and different scales. Climate change. Fascism breathing down our necks. US-supported genocide. Defunding and ideological attack on the very ideas of education and the public sphere. The problems are enormous.

This document by @thenewschool econ chair @sanjaygreddy analyzing what the university can afford to pay its adjunct professors is extraordinary, not least for the number of inventive euphemisms he comes up with for saying "the administrators are overpaid and pad at their jobs."

https://twitter.com/sanjaygreddy/status/1599233995715141632

@TheNewSchool @sanjaygreddy "There is plentiful evidence to suggest that the University’s administrative expenses, mainly on salaries, may be rather higher than for other comparable institutions."

“Prisons…are continuing to lean on Covid as an excuse to strip prisoners of rehabilitative opportunities…while conveniently ignoring any Covid protections which would inconvenience prison officials or deprive them of incarcerated labor.” jewishcurrents.org/newsletter/thu… That’s from another excellent @jewishcurrents newsletter dispatch from imprisoned journalist Christopher Blackwell. It’s a reminder of how seeing Covid as a disaster—which is to say, as a state of exception to rules—empowers the worst parts of the state.

Thinking about the narrative structure of the DMZ tour I took yesterday with @kim_fortun and @SonaliVaid. First stop is Imjingak, where we learn about the pain of division: severed rail links, separated families. It sets up the problem. Stop two is the 3rd Tunnel and the associated museum about the history of the DMZ (and to a lesser extent the nature there). It answers the question of why problem persists: North Korean violence, cheating, etc., plus shows how the hardened border is now inscribed in nature.

I was happy to talk to @benjaminopowers to talk about Americans giving money to the Canadian far right. grid.news/story/misinfor… @benjaminopowers I am a broken record when I say that the heart of the Canada-US relationship is not trade or shared defense, but rather ordinary people and their ideas crossing and recrossing the border.

I wish this article about Starbucks firing unionists mentioned how extremely common this is. Research by @KBronfenbrenner has shown that pro-union workers are fired in more than half of organizing drives. (Have I got this right, Kate?) nytimes.com/2022/02/08/bus… Workers organizing their unions get fired despite the law saying unequivocally that firing a worker for organizing a union is illegal. So why does it happen so often?

New York State allocated $27 million to give to undocumented victims of Hurricane Ida. (That's good.) But the eligibility structure is such that the fund has disbursed only $725,674, with an average grant of only $5,000. (That's bad.) ny1.com/nyc/all-boroug… Why does the Hurricane Ida documented relief fund carry such a terrible curse? Because even this program is stuck in the paradigm of worthy and unworthy poor, deserving and undeserving immigrants. Families and households aren't, it turns out, "documented" or "undocumented."

I'm thinking this morning about the similarities between the Ottawa truck convoy and Occupy--not because they are alike in politics, but because in both cases the medium became the message. That is, the form of protest came to stand in for the content of the protest. Thinking about the medium as the message--here, angry masculinist disruption via giant belching diesel trucks--helps explain why the Ottawa convoy has spread internationally, and how American fascists can glom onto it without caring about the specifics of Canadian politics.

An interesting column by @davidsirota about big insurance companies continuing to insure big oil and gas project that create climate change while withdrawing homeowners' coverage for homes at risk of burning down because of climate change. dailyposter.com/what-if-i-cant… @davidsirota The larger point here about how it's ordinary homeowners that have the financial and other risk from climate change, while big financial companies continue to reap the profits is a good one.

A thing I’ve learned in the last 5-2 years is that a huge amount of this country’s problems boil down to a culture that celebrates being an asshole, to the extent that many Americans will act like assholes even when it hurts themselves materially. Some of this is about power. Just as working class people will give up, say, wages in order to have more control over their workdays and lives, rich people give up material things (e.g. better health outcomes) to keep more control of society.

One of the things I repeat to my students all the time is how people fought and died--literally--for the 8 hour day and 40 hour week for 75 years before it was enshrined in federal law. And then it was standard for maybe 60 years before employers reneged again. It's fascinating to see the demand for shorter and more predictable hours--8 hours for work, 8 hours for sleep, and 8 hours for what we will--reassert itself as a major struggle at Nabisco, Kellogg's, Deere, New York Magazine, etc., etc.

New in the Maine constitution: “All individuals have a natural, inherent and unalienable right to food, including the right to grow … consume the food of their own choosing for their own nourishment, sustenance, bodily health and well-being.” modernfarmer.com/2021/11/maine-… Although it’s very telling that constitution amendment is very explicit that private property rights trump the “natural, inherent and unalienable right to food.”

As an American Jew, I reject Israel for many reasons: I reject the current violence, perpetrated by Israeli Jewish citizens and the state, against Palestinians; I reject the current politics of Israel which seems to encourage and embolden Jewish fascism, which is repugnant to me I reject my government (that is, the United States government) supporting ideologically and materially the violence and dispossession Israel--state and citizens--visits on Palestinians. As a diaspora Jew I reject the ideology that insists I do not belong where I am.

Avoiding grading by putting in one of my book orders for next semester. Featuring (unchanged in recent years): @LaneWindham, @beverlygage, the untwittered but wonderful Bethany Moreton, @ToniGilpin et al., and David von Drehle. And a stapler, because we'll be back in person! My labor class is unchanged because every year it's the best class I teach, and why mess with it? (I mean, the reason to mess with it would be to add @rsgexp's book, but I don't know what I'd take out to make space.) My disaster class needs some tinkering, so no book order yet.

A quick thread about something I've been pondering. The two states I think the most about--Connecticut and New York--have radically different vaccination regimes. Connecticut's system is entirely by age (plus teachers and day care workers). The idea is that by keeping it simple and vaccinating people quickly, you deal with equity issues by making vaccines less scarce and easier to get.

The worst part of the Nate Silvery nonsense today is that every epidemiologist, especially every infectious disease epidemiologist, is exhausted right now. They’ve been worried and overworked since January. Everything they’ve worried about, warned about, has come true. It is exhausting and dispiriting to play Cassandra for months. Many of them have done so while their research budgets have been frozen, while their universities have imposed austerity on them. They’ve put their actual research on hold.

I think nearly every day about how the American press and American policymakers ignore Asia's success fighting Covid.

https://twitter.com/wang_seaver/status/1338600890232569856

It'S nOt JuSt ThE uNiTeD StaTeS!! EuRoPe ShOwS uS CoViD cAn'T bE cOnTrOLlEd!!

Such is the way of academia that my main scholarly writing work this year won't be seen until July. But I remain proud of two very short things that I wrote about Covid. To wit: A blog post about crises of care in disaster, using the Halifax Explosion to talk about Covid. lawcha.org/2020/05/05/cov…

Donald Trump is tweeting proudly of a letter thanking him "for announcing that religion is essential." The organizers apparently spent 5 months and could only get 13 rabbis to sign. In contrast... In contrast to Trump's 13 rabbis, here are more than 50 Orthodox rabbis on Trump's hate speech and authoritarianism. utzedek.org/rabbinic-state…

Remember that the correct answer to any question posed by a cop or an FBI agent is "I refuse to say anything without my lawyer."

https://twitter.com/Jose_Pagliery/status/1268269855762976770

There is some controversy about whether the US government actually used the phrase "premature antifascist" to describe people who were actively antifascist in the 1930s, especially those who volunteered to fight fascism in Spain.

1. I just retweeted @BreeNewsome quoting this tweet with the very correct indignation that in a time of crisis, people like Tim Scott are more worried about preserving economic precarity than actually helping people. Let me put this in some historical context.

https://twitter.com/MaryCaitlinByrd/status/1242885130290630657

2. The American welfare system, such as it is, has been based since the colonial period on the distinction drawn in the Elizabethan Poor Laws (Elizabethan as in Elizabeth I) between the worthy and the unworthy poor.