We Never Sleep

The Sunday Night Reader for 4/3/22

Apr 03, 2022

Eyes and Ears for Hire

The city of Champaign issued a request for proposals this week, looking to hire private security to work downtown on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights through the end of the year. The News-Gazette story quotes a Champaign Police Department saying that they will be the police’s “eyes and ears” and, once again, highlighting CPD’s stubborn hiring problems that other area departments don’t seem to be facing.

I don’t have a long argument about this, but I think it’s a terrible idea. Private security is less well trained and less accountable than the police. I don’t want Blackwater in the military, I don’t want AGB in Unit 4 schools, and I don’t want whoever wins this contract on Walnut Street.

The budget for the program hasn’t been disclosed, but, whatever it is, it would be better used in the style of the city’s community-based Gun Violence Prevention blueprint. Read more.

‘Sleepwalking into History’

Last week, I shared an optimistic version of what the future might look like after the crisis in Ukraine. This week, a more pessimistic take from Jared Yates Sexton.

“This is not an aberration. This is not an isolated incident. It is part of a larger societal crisis and merely a chapter in an ongoing struggle between progress and authoritarianism. Putin has made his choice. His war is indicative of a larger push by him and his like minded associates to seed corruption within the capitalist system, mobilize Right Wing and conservative movements around the world, and prepare populations for authoritarian takeovers.

Even if the war in Ukraine were to come to a triumphant close tomorrow, and it won’t, the truth wouldn’t budge. Any number of sanctions and treaties and any amount of saber-rattling cannot stop what is coming. There is no escaping the crashing of this moment and the prevalent ideologies…

Based on Russia’s aggression, NATO countries, including the United States and Germany, are flooding their defense budgets with cash in order to arm themselves against possible future incursions. The reaction to Putin’s gambit has been to prepare for future wars in a way that brings to mind the stockpiling of weaponry that led us into the previous world wars and the numerous wars that preceded them. The clash in ideologies, which extends from Russia all around the world, and the worsening crises that threaten democracy and human freedom, will not just be fought at the ballot box but, more than likely, on battlefields that might populate any given inch of the Earth…

Hiding behind missiles and tanks will only make the problem worse. What fascists want, what authoritarians require, is violence and a struggle over might. What defeats them, what truly vanquishes them in a way that transcends movies or fairy-tales, is the rejection of the rot that makes them possible in the first place.” Read more.

ALU

But back to optimism! What a huge win for the Amazon Labor Union, organizing an 8,300-person fulfillment center on Staten Island. Coverage in the New York Times explained the relationship between this upstart union and old-school forces like the Teamsters:

“[T]he win by a little-known, independent union with few ties to existing groups appears to raise as many questions for the labor movement as it answers: not least, whether there is something fundamentally broken with the traditional bureaucratic union model that can be solved only by replacing it with grass-roots organizations like the one on Staten Island…

The near-term question facing the labor movement and other progressive groups is the extent to which they will help the upstart Amazon Labor Union withstand potential challenges to the result and negotiate a first contract, such as by providing resources and legal talent.

‘The company will appeal, drag it out — it’s going to be an ongoing fight,’ said Gene Bruskin, a longtime organizer who helped notch one of labor’s last victories on this scale, at a Smithfield meat-processing plant in 2008, and has informally advised the Staten Island workers. ‘The labor movement has to figure out how to support them.’

Sean O’Brien, the new president of the 1.3 million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said in an interview on Thursday that the union was prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars unionizing Amazon and to collaborate with a variety of other unions and progressive groups.” Read more.

(The paper also had a great profile of the friends who masterminded the effort on a $120,000 budget — a pair of Black 30-somethings, labeled thugs by Amazon’s multi-million dollar union-busting lawyers. If you’re only going to read one article on the subject, make it that one.)

Heavy Rotation

“Fish and whistle / whistle and fish. / Eat everything that they put on your dish. / And when we get done / we’ll make a big wish / that we never have to do this again. / Again. Again. Again. / Father forgive us for what we must do. / You forgive us. / We’ll forgive you. / We’ll forgive each other ‘til we both turn blue. / And go whistlin’ and fishin’ in heaven.”

John Prine died two years ago next week. Here are some of my favorites.