DL Open Thread: Friday, November 29, 2024

One More Reason To Hate Notre Dame.  The football team/school, not the Cathedral:

The (Supreme) court’s conservative justices are increasingly hiring the law school’s graduates and faculty to work in their chambers. Two recent graduates are among the four clerks working this term with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Notre Dame graduate and longtime law professor. A third graduate is slated to clerk for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. next year.

In addition, two of the school’s professors — legal historian Christian Burset and Patrick Reidy, who is also a Catholic priest — are clerking for Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh this term.

The justices, meanwhile, are flocking to Notre Dame to teach, lecture and enjoy the elaborate Fighting Irish football festivities. Their growing ties in part reflect shared legal views between the conservative justices and the Catholic law school, whosereligious liberty clinic — started by Dean Marcus Cole to defend religious freedoms — often files briefs in cases before the court.

But the nexus between South Bend and the Supreme Courtalso represents frustration among conservatives with liberal elite law schools that have been criticized as inhospitable to their views. Those who interact with the justices say they are drawn to the Midwestern campus because of its breadth of conservative legal scholarship, in addition tothe appeal of football and an all-day tailgate.

Nursing Homes Turn To Trump To Help Kill Off Residents:

Covid’s rampage through the country’s nursing homes killed more than 172,000 residents and spurred the biggest industry reform in decades: a mandate that homes employ a minimum number of nurses.

But with President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the industry is ramping up pressure to kill that requirement before it takes effect, leaving thousands of residents in homes too short-staffed to provide proper care.

“Staffing is everything in terms of nursing-home quality,” said R. Tamara Konetzka, a professor of public health sciences at the University of Chicago.

While the rule’s effectiveness was uncertain, she worried that repealing it would send the wrong message. “We would be losing that signal that nursing homes should try really hard to improve their staffing,” she said.

Consider it lost.

The quality of care in the nation’s 15,000 nursing homes and the lack of adequate staffing for their 1.2 million residents has been a concern for decades. Inspection reports continue to find homes leaving residents lying in their own feces, suffering severe bedsores and falls, contracting infections, choking on food while unattended or ending up back in a hospital for preventable reasons. Some nursing homes overuse psychotropic medications to pacify residents because they do not have enough workers to attend to them.

Stiglitz: Dump Neoliberal Economics.  Now:

As the Biden administration stressed on the eve of the election, the economy looks strong, especially compared with others in the G7. But this wasn’t good enough. Americans haven’t forgotten that the Democrats let loose the financial sector (Clinton), then bailed out the banks while homeowners and workers who lost their jobs in the Great Recession carried the cost (Barack Obama). Moreover, it was Clinton who unleashed globalisation, tacitly believing in a trickle-down economics that would ultimately benefit everyone. The only real difference between Democrats and Republicans on this score is that Democrats claimed to feel the pain of those who were losing out.

For the Democrats, that message should be clear: abandon neoliberalism and return to your progressive roots in the presidencies of Franklin D Roosevelt and Lyndon B Johnson. The party needs to provide a new vision of a society that offers education and opportunity to all; where markets compete to produce better products that enhance living standards, rather than to devise better ways of exploiting workers, customers, and the environment; where we recognise that we have moved on from the industrial age to an economy oriented around services, knowledge, innovation, and care. A new economy needs new rules and new roles for government.

There is a big difference between this new vision and the tweaks offered by the Harris campaign (a little more education funding here, and a few dollars to help first-time homebuyers there). Articulating a robust programme will not be easy, and implementing it would be harder still. But the future of America depends on it being done.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.  Won’t try.

How Sweet Potato Pie Impacted The Civil Rights Movement.  Back when I worked summers at Tanzer’s Market at New Castle Avenue and A Street, our butcher/meat manager Dave Robinson was a deacon at the Black church just a couple of blocks away from the store.  Every weekend, I’d order a dinner from the Church through Dave, and eat it during my lunch break:  Fried chicken, collard greens with fatback, potato salad, and sweet potato pie. Never realized the significance of sweet potato pie, which I loved, until now:

In the seasonal debate over whether pumpkin or sweet potato pie should be the signature Thanksgiving dessert, most Black people would vote for the latter. For them, sweet potato pie isn’t just a dessert. It’s a pie with cultural power that connects them to family and the past.

In his book Food Power Politics: the Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, the sociologist Bobby Smith II explores how food was both weaponized and used as a tool of resistance in the struggle for Black equality, telling the story of the activist and cook Georgia Gilmore – whom he calls an unsung civil rights heroine for the way she used sweet potato pie to advance the cause.

A cook at a popular Montgomery, Alabama, restaurant, Gilmore stopped riding the bus in October 1955, after she paid her fare and the white driver left without her. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and the Montgomery bus boycott began in earnest that December, Gilmore was ready. She quietly started making and selling food, including her sweet potato pies, to support drivers who were taking people to work.

When Dr Martin Luther King Jr was indicted for violating an Alabama law forbidding boycotts, Gilmore testified in his support. Her job fired her, so King gave her money to start a home restaurant.

Her home in Montgomery became a headquarters where civil rights activists and leaders relaxed, refueled and made plans over her home-cooked fried chicken sandwiches, pork chops, lima beans and greens. Even presidents Lyndon B Johnson and John F Kennedy were patrons. Her home joined a circuit of safe-space restaurants for civil rights activists that included Paschal’s in Atlanta, Dooky Chase in New Orleans, and Big Apple Inn in Jackson, Mississippi.

“Georgia Gilmore wasn’t just serving a hot lunch. It was a lunch rooted in African American foodways,” Smith says. “And we know … that sweet potato pie is oftentimes a central actor in those foodways. It’s a way to keep Black people on [activists’] minds, even if they’re not thinking about the food that deeply. It’s doing the work.”

What do you want to talk about?