5LL #12 - Judges, Wage Theft, Foreign Policy Principles, Creativity, Wellness
Judging the Judges
Brianna Rennix and Oren Nimni, Current Affairs
Judges are odd and uniquely frustrating creatures. Most have the demeanor of an especially hidebound DMV attendant, but their power and prestige gives them even more control over our day-to-day lives. Judges are often the last thing between you and imprisonment, deportation, homelessness, poverty, or the loss of your children. Their courts are tiny fiefdoms, and everyone who enters must cater to their whims. For lawyers—especially ones who actually care about their client—it’s almost malpractice not to.
How Restaurants Get Away With Stealing Millions From Workers Every Year
Dana Hatic, Eater
Wage theft permeates the restaurant industry, from fast food to fine dining. Though some cities and states have taken steps to protect workers, the problem is rampant: According to a recent New York Times editorial, the Department of Labor’s wage and hour division reported almost “84 percent of full-service restaurants it investigated between 2010 and 2012 had violated labor standards,” and those included wage and tip violations.
What Does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Think About the South China Sea?
Daniel Bessner, The New York Times
A foreign policy for the left won’t emerge overnight. A conversation is just starting to take place, and it will continue as more socialists win power and shape American politics. Though a concrete agenda remains a ways off, there are five broad principles that merge the left’s commitment to egalitarianism and democracy with a sober analysis of the limits of American power.
Against Creativity
Oli Mould, Jacobin
With the onset of this language, institutionalized into terms such as “the creative industries,” the “creative economy” and the “creative class,” creativity has become the critical paradigm of economic growth. But rarely is it asked, what is it that we’re supposed to be creating? In reality, what this version of creativity produces is simply more of the same: inequality, injustice, and dispossession.
The Great Equalizer
Megan Erickson, The Nation
In Natural Causes, Barbara Ehrenreich explores the stories told by death-defying elites to make her own biological and political point: “no matter how much effort we expend, not everything is potentially within our control, not even our own bodies and minds.” In death, we will once again be equals—and so an egalitarian politics also means accepting this outcome.
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