Highlights from items in the local and national news this past month that you might not have heard about, along with some left wing perspective & analysis.
By I. Pliskin
Joe Biden Pardons “Kids for Cash” Pennsylvania Judge
Joe Biden has decided to use his presidential pardoning power to release Michael Conohan. Conohan was a Pennsylvania judge who made $1,000,000 in bribes and kickbacks in an arrangement to convict and send as many children as he could feasibly get away with to a for-profit juvenile detention facility in the state. The facility made more money the more children it locked up – so the more children were convicted, the more profitable the kiddie prison was, resulting in more kickbacks the prison could send to Judge Conohan.
The news of Biden’s decision to have Conohan released is pretty distasteful on its face – even more so when you see the way it shows how unfair the system is for those outside of power. Judges making 6 figure salaries have decided that isn’t enough money for them and instead have decided to send as many poor, vulnerable children to jail as they can – just to squeeze a few more coins out of the system for themselves. The great crime many of those children were guilty of was being too poor to have proper representation. But the judge gets to have his “get out of jail free” card, while the children have potential lifetimes of institutionalization with no presidential pardons in their back pockets.
It’s also important to point out the recently notable case of Marcellus Williams. Marcellus Williams was a death row inmate convicted on a murder charge, but evidence found after his charge made the case so uncertain that even the prosecutors on his case became staunch advocates for its appeal. The family of the victim, while not believing in Williams’ innocence, were staunch advocates against him being subjected to the death penalty. Despite this, the government still decided to go forward with his execution. All this goes to show that we don’t seem to have a “due process” as much as we have a system that protects the rich and powerful, while salivating at the mouth to chain and kill the rest of us.
I feel like it’s fallen out of fashion recently, but I think events and happenstances like these show the importance of the prison abolition and police abolition movements. These systems don’t actually keep us safe, they just perpetuate existing inequalities. If you’re interested in reading further on prison abolition and that movement, I personally would recommend the book “Captive Genders” which has multiple autobiographical accounts of the prison system’s disproportionate effects and violence against poor queer people of color. It’s also worth looking into the active movement to free Mumia Abu Jamal, a Philadelphia based activist and former Black Panther, who has been imprisoned since 1982 on a politically charged case involving the death of a police officer.
Republicans in Pennsylvania’s State Senate Put Forward Bill to Ban Trans Students from Playing in Sports.
The “Save Women’s Sports Act”, first introduced and failed in 2022, was recently re-introduced to the Pennsylvania state senate by the Republican Party. On its face, the bill has been put forward to make it so trans girls and trans women will not be allowed to play women’s sports in school. But when you look at the bill itself and the language it uses, there’s so much more going on here. It’s clear that republicans here don’t just care about “fairness in sports” and they clearly aren’t just targeting trans girls.
The first big thing to point out here is that while the bill is specifically targeting trans girls, this is a tactical, rhetorical decision that the republicans are making. They know that trans women specifically draw out a visceral response from the general public that makes them an easy target for this type of legislation. Similar arguments of “unfairness” appear in regard to trans boys participating in boys sports, but those arguments aren’t nearly as sticky—so they get left out when trying to make legislation like this. That’s important to consider: these bills aren’t based in the earnest beliefs and principles of the people that put them forward, but have been informed by tactical decision making and a desire to make people act on fear, ignorance, and discomfort against their individual and collective best interests.
The bill uses language of “strictly” determined “biological” sex as the basis for keeping trans girls out of participation in sports with their peers. Even if you’re the type to insist on this flavor of bigotry, it should concern you that it would be up to the government to make this definition and distinction legally. Within the past year it was legally ruled that burritos qualify as a sandwich. There is a longstanding pattern of women of color being barred from social participation on the basis that they don’t count as “real” women. Just this past year the Olympic Women’s Boxing winner was hounded by right wing media for not being a “real” women based on the word of a since-ousted and proven-to-be-corrupt commision that provided no substantial argument besides their word. Republicans in power don’t want to build fair sports—they want sports where if a girl is too brown, or too tall, or wears pants too often they can be disqualified.
It should also be noted that the language being put into bills like this one codify the idea that women and girls are naturally and “biologically” weaker and inferior to men and boys. It also codifies that people can be legally compelled into or out of actions, groups, or activities based on their natural “superiorities” or “inferiorities”. This bill doesn’t just restrict competitive sports between different schools. It would also restrict the ability of trans girls to participate in clubs or activities a school is holding if they involve athletics in any way. The Republican Party is using trans kids as a test bed for restricting the movement and activity of people on the basis of protected characteristics. They’re trying to see what types of arguments stick, what people will let them get away with, and on what issues people will look the other way.
If you’re the type of person that sees bills like these and thinks they’re good, or possibly just feels indifferent towards them, then I would challenge you to look into the politicians that are pushing them to find out what they’re actual priorities are. What are they actually doing for their communities and their constituencies? These are the same type of politicians regularly fighting for austerity. How can a politician supposedly be fighting to save student sports, when they’re the same ones cutting funding to schools? If you’re the type of person who’s on the fence about these things, look into these politicians: the things they do, the things they vote for. Ask yourself: are they actually making decisions in my interest? Or are they playing off my fears and apprehensions and biases?
Imprisoned Philadelphian, Victim of “Sex for Lies” Conviction Scheme, Finally Released.
After 41 years, Philadelphian Russell Williams is finally being released from prison. The presiding judge stated that his release was not to be taken as an exoneration. Nonetheless Williams’ charge was appealed from first degree murder (a life sentence) to a third degree murder charge on a plea deal. Williams and his lawyer insist on his innocence, but stated that taking the guilty plea was the best bet for allowing Williams’ release for time served.
The basis of this appeal? Ongoing investigations into police bribing people into giving false testimonies in exchange for access to drugs and sexual favors. This practice has been dubbed “Sex for Lies” by those looking into the matter. Going back to the 80s, it’s been uncovered that, in the wake of a backlog of difficult to solve cases, it became a common practice among officers to approach people with the promise of sex or illicit drugs if they would agree to provide testimony that would help them place a desired suspect and close a case. They would often make this type of offer to people already facing a likely conviction. They would then tell the person that if they didn’t cooperate they would convince the judge to throw the book at them and lock them in jail. But if they cooperated by repeating whatever fake testimony coerced them into giving, they would not only get a lighter sentence, but also access to sex workers or private intimate time with existing girlfriends. The police and the judicial system have also been keeping these lies going by punishing anyone who does come forward as providing this testimony with the charge of lying under oath. Nonetheless, evidence and testimony from people involved continues to come forward, bringing these cases to light.
Hearing about cases like these should come as no surprise for those who understand the fundamental nature of these criminal and judicial systems. The job of the police and these judges and these jails aren’t to keep us safe. The job is to throw a bunch of people in jail, especially if they’re poor and black, and to keep them in jail. Day-to-day people aren’t being punished for doing crimes: they’re being punished because they can’t afford to pay a good lawyer. If the officers involved in this practice wanted to reduce violence and murders, there’s a whole lotta things they could have done to attempt that. But I can’t think of anything worse they could do in that position than knowingly conjuring lies and sticking charges on whoever they can dig up to meet a description. A type of behavior the system protects and rewards. The cops get to look like they’re solving all these cases, the prosecutors get a bunch of slam dunk cases that make them look good, politicians brag about how they’re “cleaning up the streets”—and the whole lot work to cover each other’s backs. All the while nothing ever actually gets better for anyone outside of power, and the only difference is that there are more people in jail.
Beyond anything, one thing I think should especially be said is don’t talk to the police without a lawyer. Not only will they lie, but they will use the full force of the state to compel others into lying. Don’t give them the ammunition to make that any easier. I also think it’s worth noting with the Luigi Mangione situation, that we should absolutely not default to believing the police or the state’s claims against him, placing him as the killer. And that extends to anyone else: the powers that be need to be pushed to actually work to prove the claims they want to make. Part of what allows schemes like “Sex for Lies” to go on is a public that is way too willing to just default to what the powers that be put forward as the truth.
Negligence Ruled Cause of Pennsylvania Chocolate Factory Explosion
In 2023, 60 miles northeast of Philadelphia in Berks County, there was a large explosion that killed 7 and injured many of the workers of R.M. Palmer Company, a chocolate manufacturer. In the year since, OSHA has investigated the cause behind the explosion and found a Rube Goldberg machine of multiple instances of corporate and utility provider negligence chained together at the expense of 7 people. The factory had a badly corroded steam pipe that cracked and cooked a fitting on the gas line. The utilities company UGI was told that this bad steam pipe was a threat to the gas line 2 whole years before the explosion but didn’t do anything to reinforce the gas line—even though the plastic pipe fitting made by DuPont had a “known tendency to crack.” When the gas line did crack, multiple employees were ignored when they said they smelled gas and made to continue working until a spark ignited the gas and caused the explosion. To this day, the factory’s policy compels employees to stay in place and continue working if they smell a gas leak instead of evacuating. The fine that the company got from OSHA was only $44,000, while the average pay of an assembly line worker was $39,100/year.
This actually reminds me of another news story that’s stuck with me since I read it. In the same year, Nguyet Le, a manager at Arby’s in Louisiana, died because they were stuck in a walk-in freezer that had a broken door. It was known that the door was broken for about a year and multiple work orders were put in to fix it. Additionally, the backup emergency button has been disabled. But it just never got fixed, and unfortunately somebody had to die about it. All of these companies will kill you if it means they can save a couple hours of payroll. The worst consequence they will likely face won’t be jail time. It won’t be the chair. At most, the heads of these companies will get a stern talking to or have to pay a fine, while knowingly making decisions they know will likely hurt, maim, or even kill you, your co-workers, your friends. There’s no way fixing a freezer door, or repairing a bad pipe actually costs as much as someone’s life. But the system is so much in the favor of the bosses that they know that’s not a cost they really have to worry about. When a machine breaks, the boss just buys another. When the worker breaks, the boss just buys another one’s time and capacity.
I’m sure anyone reading this is already, at the least, entertaining the notions of union building, worker power, and all that whatnot. I think it’s important here to emphasise that when we’re talking about improving things for workers we don’t just get stuck on income and compensation, but that we also have real conversations about things like safety for workers and how we can use our collective power to accomplish that end. Especially considering that Covid is still a pervasive threat to our collective health, and we’re sitting on the edge of potential widespread bird flu.
Casino Workers Clashing with Union Boss for Smoking Ban in Atlantic City Casinos
Casino workers, especially a workers group by the name of Casino Employees Against Smoking’s Effects (CEASE), are fighting to get smoking banned inside Atlantic City casinos. A large amount of casino workers are seeing the negative health effects of long term exposure to secondhand smoke – developing cancers, heart issues, and other smoke related ailments. Region 9 of the United Auto Workers, which represents dealers in a third of the casinos in Atlantic City, is in support of a ban on smoking inside the casinos. Local 54 of UNITE HERE, a union which represents a great deal of casino workers in the area, and especially the union’s president Donna DeCaprio, are actively opposing pushes to ban smoking in casinos in the city. The reasoning is that smokers are responsible for a majority of casino revenue in the city. Threatening the ongoing patronage of those customers would threaten the profitability of the casinos, and so threaten the job security of casino workers. Decaprio proposes that instead of a ban, casinos should be pushed to take measures to improve ventilation and to move designated smoking areas further away from where dealers and other casino employees are working.
From a general leftist perspective, this situation contains a lot of very interesting questions worth exploring. Unions and unionizing are popular institutions and actions in left politics. We know unions can and do deliver major benefits to their members, and that pressure from unions and growing unionization often urge companies to improve benefits and conditions to even the workers outside of those unions. We know solidarity is good, and that we shouldn’t scab or cross picket lines. What isn’t really talked about, clearly established, is what to do when the unions argue with each other. It’s not quite as easy to work out the “good” side when none of those sides are an overt capitalist business owner or business enterprise type of situation. Or what’s more, how does one work through apparent conflicts between unions as institutions and the workers themselves? What about contradictions between workers in a particular industry and the working class as a whole?
It was reported that compelling casino goers to go outside to smoke would break them out of compulsive gambling cycles they would be stuck in if they were allowed to smoke in place while still inside gambling areas. Are many of those customers not workers and community members themselves? How do we work out the contradictions when the jobs of some workers could rely on other workers being pushed into downward spirals of chain smoking and gambling? And when that whole system relies on poisoning co-workers against their will?
I pose all these questions as questions because I don’t really have clear prescriptive answers myself. In fact, I don’t think a single person can answer them. These are the kinds of questions and issues that require as many of us as possible to be asking one another, reading through history about the issues at hand as we explore old and new strategies and methods to work through together. It’s through critical collective power that we can ask ourselves these questions and come together to work through solutions that don’t make us as reliant on negative cycles of poisoning ourselves and the people around us.
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Pilots Program to Increase Food Access to Improve Health Outcomes
While the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has already been running an in-hospital “Food Pharmacy” to help provide children and families with access to fresh nutritious food and education around healthy eating—it has recently just wrapped up a pilot for a program to give direct food deliveries to the homes of recent patients in food insecure households. Funded by grant money, in part by large regional grocer Giant and corporate pharmacy chain Rite-Aid, the temporary pilot program allowed recent hospital patients to sign up to receive a week’s worth of prepared meals, and six months of produce deliveries. As a surprise to no one, this greatly aided in the wellbeing of the children and their families. However, with the pilot completed and the grant funding depleted, the hospital now has to find other sources of funding, whether internal or external, if it wants to continue this program.
It’s good that families were able to get access to this assistance while they could, but there are some realities around this pilot and the current ambiguity of whether the program can continue that are worth viewing with a critical eye. For one, it’s interesting that the funding for much needed food assistance is coming from food selling companies that are seeing record profits—market consolidations and general inflation allowing them to disproportionately raise the prices of staple foods in their stores. It smells to me less like altruism and more like studying poor people like lab rats in the poverty these companies themselves bolster. All the more, this pilot program illustrates a big issue with the supposed charity of capitalists—they make it seem like a nice thing, but at the end of the day they do these things to make sure that it’s them that stay in control of who gets to eat and when. This stands as a big indictment of our healthcare systems as well. People in the US spend twice as much on healthcare as people in other countries while receiving a fraction of the care they need—all the while being so sucked dry that they can’t afford basic health needs like fresh nutritious food.
If reading about the pilot program makes you want to see that type of support being continued in the community, and if you’re also interested in our communities being the ones who determine our collective access to food, the Partisan has a sister project, the Philly Survival Collective, which is currently engaging in this type of work. Since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, Philly Survival Collective had been directly distributing food and necessities to families across the city and working to build grassroots networks of support. If this resonates with you, click here to learn more about the project and get in contact with the volunteers running the program.
Bird Flu Running Through Egg Supply, Hazard to Paychecks and Public Health
A major national egg producer has reported losing 12% of its supply of eggs after millions of its chickens had to be killed to control the spread of bird flu in one of the company’s facilities. Cereal maker Post (Raisin Bran, Honey Bunches of Oats) has reported losing 4.5 million of its own chickens to H5N1. Across the board, bird flu is running through chickens and running down the country’s supply of eggs. It’s expected that current losses will drive the average price of a dozen eggs upwards of 25 cents per season in the upcoming year.
What’s more is that, with 65 known cases of people sick with H5N1 within the last year, this virus that is predominantly adapted to spreading just between birds is now regularly jumping from infected animals to people. Most cases of bird flu transferring from animals to people seem to be cases of farm workers being forced to work in unprotected, minimally sanitary conditions around animals. Another way the virus has been spreading to people is through cows milk, especially recently popular unpasteurized “raw milk.” It is believed that cows’ milk is becoming infected with H5N1 through the use of “poultry litter” as a feed for dairy cows. Poultry litter is a mix of chicken poop, feathers, spilled chicken food, and other waste products that are scraped off of the floors of chicken production plants. This is a completely legal process for some reason.
This is the “back to normal” agents of the status quo have been vying for since the initial Covid outbreak and subsequent public protections. Public health has yet to return to that of the pre-pandemic restrictions status quo. What has happened instead is that punditry, political leaders, and popular media have come together to pretend everything is cool and under control, while using smoke and mirrors to avoid addressing any of the ongoing fundamental issues with collective health and public safety. And why would the people in power care? When viruses wipe out farm animals and record temperatures scorch fields of crops, they’ve figured they can just raise prices and we have little to no choice but to pay the difference. When infections lead to early onset health conditions and chronic illness, insurers have figured they can just deny claims and kick people off plans rather than pay out. The new normal so far isn’t things going back to how they were 5 years ago: it’s more sickness and destruction for us and bigger paydays for the people at the top.
The powers at be have decided that they’re okay pushing us to get sicker and sicker if it means we keep working their companies and consuming their goods. We owe it to ourselves not to roll over and passively let it happen to us. When we can’t even bother to do things like mask for ourselves and our own safety, we put it out of the question to do things like demanding better ventilation and air quality; we’re not pushing for paid time off whenever someone is infectious. And when we’re not pushing for better conditions for ourselves as people, it feels out of the question to bother asking that farm animals of all things get placed in better living conditions. Yet all these things are all interconnected, and at the end of the day it’s all of us who have to pay the price for all these shortcuts and bad decisions.
The Philadelphia Partisan 
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