Good stuff that happened under the radar
The combination of the pandemic, the insurrection at the Capitol, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have made the last two years the worst time of my seventy-five years. It is so negatively overwhelming that it tends to obliterate, like a full moon, everything else that goes on including good stuff.
A rare exception to the bleakness was the triumph of little underdog Saint Peter’s University, of Jersey City, in the NCAA basketball tournament. I suspect that many of us unconsciously or subconsciously felt for a brief shining moment that if Saint Peter’s could make it to the Elite Eight, perhaps Ukraine could defeat Russia.
Here are two other good things that occurred recently that because of the aura of negativity, didn’t get a whole of media attention.
First, Sarah Palin lost her four-year-old defamation lawsuit against The New York Times. Palin sued claiming that a June 14, 2017 editorial about gun control published after a man opened fire on a congressional baseball team practice in Washington, D.C. had damaged her career as a political commentator and consultant.
The jury rejected her claim that her reputation was tarnished by erroneously linking an ad from her political action committee with the 2011 shooting of former Rep. Gabby Gifford of Arizona that occurred many months later.
The Times wrote the following in the original editorial entitled “America’s Lethal Politics: “In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized crosshairs.”
After facing profound criticism, The New York Times issued a corrected editorial online the same day indicating that the prior editorial was wrong and “incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabby Gifford. In fact, no such link was established. The editorial also incorrectly described a map distributed by a political action committee before that shooting. It depicted electoral districts, not individual Democratic lawmakers, beneath stylized crosshairs.”
The newspaper lauded the verdict, calling it “a reaffirmation of a fundamental tenet of American law: public figures should not be permitted to use libel suits to punish or intimidate news organizations that make, acknowledge and swiftly correct unintentional errors.”
This was an important case as it was a challenge to the traditional protection granted to the press by the 1964 Supreme Court decision in the New York Times vs. Sullivan. In this unanimous decision, authored by Justice Brennan, the Court ruled for The New York Times.
According to Oyez, an online multimedia archive of Supreme Court decisions, “When a statement concerns a public figure, the Court held, it is not enough to show that it is false for the press to be liable for libel. Instead, the target of the statement must show that it was made with knowledge of or reckless disregard for its falsity. Brennan used the term “actual malice” to summarize this standard, although he did not intend the usual meaning of a malicious purpose. In libel law, “malice” had meant knowledge or gross recklessness rather than intent, since courts found it difficult to imagine that someone would knowingly disseminate false information without bad intent.”
It is incredibly important that legitimate journalists are afforded protection when they seek to scrutinize public figures, even when they make mistakes in good faith. The press should not be given license to engage in shoddy journalism, but if they expeditiously and fully own up to their errors, and do not act out of ideological animus or with malice intent, they should be given a pass when they make “an honest mistake.”
A second good thing is that it appears that young workers (between 25-34 years of age) are gravitating towards unions after a dramatic decline in union membership over the last 35 years — from thirty-five percent to around 10.3 percent.
Many young workers who lived through the great recession of 2009 and the COVID-19 pandemic have experienced first-hand what it means to become suddenly economically insecure. They understand the importance of having a comprehensive benefits package — including COVID sick leave.
I believe the single best way to reduce ballooning income inequality is for a resurgence of organized labor. A good example of this is a recent contract that Kellogg signed with workers at its Cheez-It plant in Omaha, Nebraska, after a three-month strike. The wage and benefit improvement to the 570 workers was dramatic. It provided for more than a 15% wage increase over 3 years, improvements in health and pension benefits, no increase in employee health insurance premiums for existing workers and new hires will get increased entry-level salaries.
Author E. Tammy Kim in a February 17, 2022 article in The New York Times Magazine entitled “Do Today’s Unions Have a Fighting Chance Against Corporate America” writes about workers who haven’t joined the Great Resignation and are organizing at places like Amazon, Starbucks and John Deere and the pushback they are facing. Kim writes: “Amazon is now the avatar of a monopoly economy. That economy has made the world’s 10 wealthiest men twice as rich in the grisly months since March 2020. It’s an economy that makes me feel like the zillionth scampering fleck in some global ant farm. The days I don’t, it’s because of the workers I talk to and the small mutinies I see — at Amazon and in nursing homes, truck yards, schools, factories and grocery stores. “We’re definitely not gonna have a more favorable time to have a union,” Daniel Gross, a longtime organizer, recently told me. Which felt like his way of saying, The jig is up; we all know the score.”’
John Logan a professor of labor studies at San Francisco State University has indicated that “The pandemic has fundamentally changed the labor landscape” by increasing the leverage that employees have with their employers.
Very recently, workers at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, N.Y. by a margin of 2,644 to 2,131 voted to be represented by a union. This was a historic first at the nation’s second-largest private employer and was widely acknowledged as the most significant labor victory in a generation.
I really hope this is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to an uptick in unionization in America.