#federal rights

[spythebandana]

. . . . . . . Uh . . . . These are not the same . . . They both are different reaches and considerations. Use of the CO law to keep Trump off the ballot brought up 2 important questions 1) Can you punish someone for being an insurrectionist if they haven’t been found guilty of insurrection in a court of law? 2) What role can a State rightly play in determining candidates for a federal election? Does the State have the right to remove a candidate from consideration for a federal election or is that overstepping their bounds?

The Supreme Court already ruled that it’s up to the individual States to determine how abortion is handled within that State. The Court has NOT made this determination in terms of ballots.

Different laws, different implications = a completely different treatment

This isn’t a double standard or the “patriarchy.” These are two VERY different legal cases. Please stop trying to simplify things in order to try to make a poorly conceived point.

The patriarchy demands double standards.

[supportingeducation]

Homeless Students Have Rights

Homeless students have rights with regards to their schooling, and everyone should know them. These rights are federally protected. The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act (MVHAA) was the first substantial federal legislation to address homelessness, and it was passed in 1987, under President Reagan. The original act had little to say about children – they weren’t part of the public…

[official-linguistics-post]

americans, if you haven't voted yet, for the love of all that is good PLEASE vote harris/walz tomorrow.

[reasonsforhope]

Federal regulators on Tuesday [April 23, 2024] enacted a nationwide ban on new noncompete agreements, which keep millions of Americans — from minimum-wage earners to CEOs — from switching jobs within their industries.

The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday afternoon voted 3-to-2 to approve the new rule, which will ban noncompetes for all workers when the regulations take effect in 120 days [So, the ban starts in early September, 2024!]. For senior executives, existing noncompetes can remain in force. For all other employees, existing noncompetes are not enforceable.

[That's right: if you're currently under a noncompete agreement, it's completely invalid as of September 2024! You're free!!]

The antitrust and consumer protection agency heard from thousands of people who said they had been harmed by noncompetes, illustrating how the agreements are "robbing people of their economic liberty," FTC Chair Lina Khan said. 

The FTC commissioners voted along party lines, with its two Republicans arguing the agency lacked the jurisdiction to enact the rule and that such moves should be made in Congress...

Why it matters

The new rule could impact tens of millions of workers, said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist and president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. 

"For nonunion workers, the only leverage they have is their ability to quit their job," Shierholz told CBS MoneyWatch. "Noncompetes don't just stop you from taking a job — they stop you from starting your own business."

Since proposing the new rule, the FTC has received more than 26,000 public comments on the regulations. The final rule adopted "would generally prevent most employers from using noncompete clauses," the FTC said in a statement.

The agency's action comes more than two years after President Biden directed the agency to "curtail the unfair use" of noncompetes, under which employees effectively sign away future work opportunities in their industry as a condition of keeping their current job. The president's executive order urged the FTC to target such labor restrictions and others that improperly constrain employees from seeking work.

"The freedom to change jobs is core to economic liberty and to a competitive, thriving economy," Khan said in a statement making the case for axing noncompetes. "Noncompetes block workers from freely switching jobs, depriving them of higher wages and better working conditions, and depriving businesses of a talent pool that they need to build and expand."

Real-life consequences

In laying out its rationale for banishing noncompetes from the labor landscape, the FTC offered real-life examples of how the agreements can hurt workers.

In one case, a single father earned about $11 an hour as a security guard for a Florida firm, but resigned a few weeks after taking the job when his child care fell through. Months later, he took a job as a security guard at a bank, making nearly $15 an hour. But the bank terminated his employment after receiving a letter from the man's prior employer stating he had signed a two-year noncompete.

In another example, a factory manager at a textile company saw his paycheck dry up after the 2008 financial crisis. A rival textile company offered him a better job and a big raise, but his noncompete blocked him from taking it, according to the FTC. A subsequent legal battle took three years, wiping out his savings. 

-via CBS Moneywatch, April 24, 2024

--

Note:

A lot of people think that noncompete agreements are only a white-collar issue, but they absolutely affect blue-collar workers too, as you can see from the security guard anecdote.

In fact, one in six food and service workers are bound by noncompete agreements. That's right - one in six food workers can't leave Burger King to work for Wendy's [hypothetical example], in the name of "trade secrets." (x, x, x)

Noncompete agreements also restrict workers in industries from tech and video games to neighborhood yoga studios. "The White House estimates that tens of millions of workers are subject to noncompete agreements, even in states like California where they're banned." (x, x, x)

The FTC estimates that the ban will lead to "the creation of 8,500 new businesses annually, an average annual pay increase of $524 for workers, lower health care costs, and as many as 29,000 more patents each year for the next decade." (x)

Clearer explanation of noncompete agreements below the cut.

Noncompete agreements can restrict workers from leaving for a better job or starting their own business.

Noncompetes often effectively coerce workers into staying in jobs they want to leave, and even force them to leave a profession or relocate.

Noncompetes can prevent workers from accepting higher-paying jobs, and even curtail the pay of workers not subject to them directly.

Of the more than 26,000 comments received by the FTC, more than 25,000 supported banning noncompetes. 

[archerinventive]

Pride month may be over, but that doesn't mean support for the community isn't still needed.

Here’s a list of a few resources you can use to help the LGBTQ+ community this month and for as long as it takes to rid the world of bigotry.

The Pride Foundation

The Equality Federation

Trans Veterans

The LGBT Aging Center

If you know of other trusted groups, please feel free to leave recommendations in the comments section. :)

Lots of love and well wishes to you all.

❤️ 🧡 💛 💚 💙 💜

A  huge shout out to my wonderful crew Abie Eke, Calla  Parmly, Dawn Vice, Josephine Chang, Lexi the First, Rae, Taze Campbell, and Xero Nazarova, for being such amazing Pride Knights! ❤️ 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Blue states should play “constitutional hardball”

NEXT WEDNESDAY (October 23) at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, GEORGIA, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

Nothing's more frustrating that watching the GOP smash norms and decency to advance policies that harm millions of Americas, unless it's that, plus Democratic officials stamping their feet and saying, "C'mon guys, play fair."

The GOP's game is called "constitutional hardball." Think: Mitch McConnell refusing to hold confirmation hearings on Obama's federal judiciary appointments, not never for Merrick Garland's Supreme Court seat – then filling the Federal judiciary with the least-qualified, most FedSoc-addled lunatics in US history, all for lifetime appointments.

As bad as this is at the federal level, it's even worse at in the states, especially the Republican "trifecta" states where the GOP holds the governorship and the state house and senate, where shameless gerrymandering and legislative attacks on hard-won ballot measures are the order of the day. GOP-held state governments engage in rampant interstate aggression, targeting out-of-state abortion providers, publishers, and journalists.

This is a one-sided Cold Civil War, because state Dems, for the most part, are unwilling to play hardball in return (the closest they come is when, say, California sets strict emissions controls and manufacturers adopt them nationwide, rather than making special cars for the giant California market). Republicans engage in constitutional hardball and Dems refuse to fight back, a phenomenon called "asymmetrical constitutional hardball":

https://columbialawreview.org/content/asymmetric-constitutional-hardball/

Writing for The American Prospect, Arkadi Gerney and Sarah Knight make the case for symmetrical constitutional hardball:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-10-18-playing-hardball/

The pair argue first, that the best way to get Republican state houses to play fair is to credibly threaten them with retaliatory action. They cite the recent attempt at a last-minute change the way that Nebraska's Electoral College votes are apportioned, which would have given all of five the state's EC votes to Trump. Maine threatened to effect the same change to its Electoral College system, which would have given all four of its EC votes to Harris. Nebraska surrendered.

But there's also a second advantage to playing Constitutional Hardball: it makes blue states better. For example, Minnesota gives free college tuition to exceptional low/middle-income students. Neighboring North Dakota got tired of losing all its smartest kids Minnesota schools and created its own subsidy. As Gerney and Knight point out, Minnesota (and other blue states) still has a huge advantage when it comes to attracting top talent, because attending university in a state with legal abortion is vastly preferable (and safer) than doing a degree in a forced-birth state.

Red states are bent on making life horrible for some really great people. The hardworking, talented Haitian migrants caught in the Springfield pogroms that Trump incited would be a fine addition to any blue state town – anyone who's got the gumption to haul ass out of a failed state and make their all the way to Springfield is gonna be a fantastic neighbor, citizen and worker, just like my refugee grandparents and father, who endured a million times more hardship than their neighbors ever did, getting to Toronto, finding jobs, and starting their family.

Influxes of young, hardworking immigrants are especially good for rural towns with dwindling populations. No wonder rural towns with above-average net migration swung for Biden in 2020.

All over America, families are despairing of their lives in red states. Whether you're worried that you or someone you love might need to terminate a pregnancy, or you're worried about gender-affirming care for you or a loved one, you can put your worries to rest in a blue state. Same goes for nurses and doctors who are worried they can't do medicine unless it accords with the imaginary dictates of Bronze Age prophets as claimed by pencil-neck Hitler wannabe Bible-thumper with a private jet and a face from Walmart. Fill the blue states with great schools, libraries and hospitals, and invite everyone who wants to do their job in a free country to come and work at 'em. Line every state border with abortion and mifepristone clinics, and set up billboards advertising the quality of life, the jobs, and the freedom in blue state America.

Every blue state public pension fund should ban investments in fossil fuels, and invest like crazy in renewables, especially in Texas, to hasten the bankrupting of the petro-kleptocracy that controls the state. Blue states should tack surcharges on goods imported from "right to work" states where unions are effectively banned, to compensate for the additional product testing needed to ensure that scab products are safe to use (ahem, Boeing).

Create joint occupational licensure rules across blue states: if you're certified as a teacher, nurse, hairdresser or auto-mechanic in New York, you should be able to carry that certification with you to Minnesota, California, or Maine. Create multi-state funding pools to build public housing. Offer med-school scholarships to the smartest red state kids, at universities where they'll learn evidence-based obstetrics rather than the Lysenokist nonsense taught at the Roy Moore College of Pediatrics and Obstetrics.

Dems have to get over their fear of "states' rights" and start playing state-level hardball. This doesn't mean escalating cruelty. Quite the contrary: every cruel measure enacted as red state red meat is a chance for blue states to extend a kindness, and capture even more of the best, brightest and kindest of the nation, creating a race to the top that Republicans can only win by abandoning their performative cruelty and corruption.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/18/states-rights/#cold-civil-war

[blanket-burrito-protocol]

The 50th anniversary of AIMs (American Indian Movement's) occupation at Wounded Knee is coming up, so the Lakota People's Law Project is leading another push to free an AIM activist who was wrongly convicted of killing two federal agents in 1975- Leonard Peltier. He was convicted on false evidence and false testimony and sentenced to two life sentences. He is now 78.

LPL has a formatted email up on their website now which you can personalize and send to Biden to ask for clemency. (Please personalize emails like this so it doesn't get filtered as spam. Just move some words around, add some, take some, you don't have to write a whole email.) Please pass this around.

[royalarchivist]

The new Red and Blue team members are cool and all, but let's not forget the real MVP from today's event.

[lady-raziel]

You ever see a fictional guy and be like oohhh if I ever get isekaied I’m so getting him pregnant

[bugenjoyer]

Okay, after a stupid amount of on-and-off time working, it's finally uploaded.

Eclipse Federation Wormhole moments.

Enjoy.

[rebeccathenaturalist]

This is a big deal. No, $48,692.05 is in no way, shape or form a fair price for the many thousands of acres of traditional Chinook land that were never ceded but were taken by settlers anyway. However, the fact that this funding from the 1970 Indian Claims Commission settlement is being released to the tribe is the strongest move toward regaining recognition in years.

As a bit of background, the Chinook Indian Nation are some of the descendants of many indigenous communities who have lived in the Columbia-Pacific region and along the Columbia to the modern-day Dalles since time immemorial. They saw the arrival of the Lewis & Clark party to the Pacific Ocean in 1805, but shortly thereafter were devastated by waves of diseases like malaria and smallpox. The survivors signed a treaty to give up most of their land in 1851, but it was never ratified by the United States government. While some Chinookan people are currently part of federally recognized tribes such as the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation, and the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Reservation, the Chinook Indian Nation--comprised of the Lower Chinook, Clatsop, Cathlamet, Willapa, and Wahkiakum--have remained largely unrecognized.

That changed briefly in 2001. On January 3 of that year, the Department of the Interior under the Clinton administration formally recognized the Chinook Indian Nation. In July 2002, the Bush administration revoked the federal recognition after complaints from the Quinault Indian Nation, as the Chinook would have had access to certain areas of what is now the Quinault reservation. This meant that the Chinook, once again, were denied funding and other resources given to federally recognized tribes, to include crucial healthcare funding during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Chinook Indian Nation has been fighting legal battles to regain federal recognition ever since the revocation. The funding released to them in this month's court decision doesn't make them federally recognized, but it is a show of legitimacy in a tangled, opaque system that indigenous people across the United States have had to contend with for many decades. Here's hoping this is a crack in the wall keeping the Chinook from recognition, and that they get more good news soon.

[i-like-forcefem]

Does it count as forcefem if my resistance is purely performative? Part of me desperately wants it and part of me is terrified of trying to be more fem and I dont know which would win in the moment...

That’s my favourite type of forcefem cutie!!!,when the doll wants it inside but is scared so still lashed out, when she desires nothing more then to be a girl, but has convinced herself it’s not allowed and hates the process of me forcing her into her true self!!! She says she’d do anything to just make it stop! But whenever I give her the chance to quit she hesitates and always messes up the little challenges I give her

And in time she’ll realise just how much she prefers this, she’ll thank me for how I wouldn’t take no for an anwser

And I’ve got myself a new doll

[rafasbiscuits]

everybody say happy birthday to roger!!

we miss you :(

[eggy-tea]

the thing that is SO WILD to me watching usamericans on the internet talk about their upcoming elections is that this is one of those incredibly rare occasions where you are choosing between two guys who have ALREADY DONE THE JOB.

look, i’m canadian. we have a first past the post parliamentary system and i don’t even get to vote directly for the person who will lead the country because i don’t live in any of the leaders’ ridings. i don’t live in any of the big important cities or even the big important provinces. i know ALL ABOUT “it feels like my vote doesn’t matter.” and all the same, i’m incredibly worried that a lot of people will vote conservative because they don’t like trudeau (fair! he sucks!) and hey, who knows, poilievre might be better. let’s give him a chance. time for a change etc. etc. (and of course there are a bunch of people who want what he’s selling and that’s depressing as hell too but they’re not the swing voters who will make a difference here.) never mind that the dude seems very happy to cozy up to our own local fascists. we don’t know for a fact what he’ll be like as pm, because he hasn’t been pm yet, and we DO know what trudeau is like, and we don’t like him.

the argument for change because it might be good is very compelling to our little animal brains when the status quo is BAD. poilievre is even banking on this! he’s been keeping his promises and stances deliberately vague so people can fill in the blanks with whatever they hope will happen.

and what’s so absolutely mind-breakingly incomprehensible to me is that THIS IS NOT THE CASE IN THE US but so many americans KEEP TALKING LIKE IT IS. each of these dudes has already done the job. they are known quantities. and you (realistically) only get to choose between the two of them. the political machine is going to go through with all of the usual debates and campaigning and thinkpieces and op-eds and rallies and whatever else pageantry, but biden and trump have told you who they are. they’ve SHOWN you who they are. it’s not often you get such a clear-cut choice with so much solid information behind it. you either vote for one of them and live with your choice or you hide your head in the sand and pretend that if you don’t vote one of them won’t win. and then you live with your cowardice because when the time came to choose you couldn’t bear to look.

(which is guess is also why so much effort is going into convincing people to just fucking vote oh my god i get it if you can’t because so many people have been deliberately disenfranchised in the us but if you can and you just don’t so help me…)

[qsmpexplosionhehe]

deceit

au :3

[museeeuuuum]

Every election, regardless of country, feels incredibly important these days. Please, fucking vote. If you follow me, I like to imagine you're a fan of museums. Your government decides funding for a lot of these institutions in your country.

Yes, yours.

Vote.