What Happened Today: October 12, 2022
Biden’s labor proposal sends gig economy stocks tumbling; L.A. City Council president resigns after leak of racist comments; 6 million anxious children
The Big Story
Lyft and DoorDash stocks tumbled to record lows on Tuesday after the Department of Labor proposed a new rule on how companies should classify the employment status of their workers, a policy that could significantly bump up expenses for companies in the gig economy and other sectors. The new rule, which would go into effect after a public review period, would likely classify millions of workers as employees rather than independent contractors and entitle them to a minimum-wage salary, overtime pay, and other mandatory benefits.
Replacing a Trump administration policy that generally favored workers to be classified as independent contractors, the Biden administration proposal would grant more discretion to the Labor Department to evaluate several factors when determining an employee’s classification, including how much control a business has over a worker’s schedule and if that worker is solely dependent on one employer for their income.
Gig economy platforms like Uber and Lyft could potentially be forced to treat their fleet of drivers as employees, “a classification to employee [status that] would essentially throw the business model upside down and cause some major structural changes if this holds,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives. The proposal would also likely flip contractors into employees across several other industries, including home health providers, janitorial services, construction, and logistics firms who hire truck drivers by the thousands.
Lobbyists for the gig companies have already spent hundreds of millions of dollars to oppose similar employee classification efforts in the past, arguing that additional expenses will be passed on to consumers and could lead to hiring fewer workers. The National Retail Federation (NRF) was likewise critical of the proposal. “[The proposal] will significantly increase costs for businesses across all industries and further drive already rampant inflation,” said David French, an NRF executive. “This decision will only foster massive confusion, endless litigation, reduced innovation, and fewer opportunities for employees and independent contractors alike.”
Read More: https://www.freightwaves.com/news/biden-administration-revising-rule-on-independent-contractors
In the Back Pages: Black Skinhead
The Rest
→ With John Fetterman’s 10-point lead over Mehmet Oz in the Pennsylvania senate race reduced to a near toss-up, Fetterman’s first in-person media interview on Tuesday night since his stroke during the primaries has put the spotlight back on his health. Because this midterm race is one of the most closely watched and one that could determine control of the senate, both Fetterman’s supporters and detractors have rushed to define the implications of Fetterman requiring a closed-captioning screen that transcribed the questions from the NBC News reporter, Dasha Burns. Before the interview began, Burns said “it wasn’t clear he was understanding our conversation” without the aid of the transcription, which the campaign attributed to Fetterman’s auditory processing difficulties since the stroke. Republican opponents have pointed to the interview as evidence that Fetterman is unfit to serve.
→ Number of the Day: 42,127
The number of youths diagnosed with gender dysphoria in the United States in 2021, almost a threefold increase compared to 2017, according to the new study from Reuters and health technology company Komodo Health Inc.
“Over the last five years, there were at least 4,780 adolescents who started on puberty blockers and had a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis,” the report finds, even though “puberty blockers and sex hormones do not have U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for children’s gender care [and] no clinical trials have established their safety for such off-label use. The drugs’ long-term effects on fertility and sexual function remain unclear.”
“At least 14,726 minors started hormone treatment with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2017 through 2021,” the report finds, despite the fact that, according to experts, “hormone treatment may leave an adolescent infertile, especially if the child also took puberty blockers at an early age.”
Some experts are alarmed by the lack of rigorous patient analysis before diagnosing a child with gender dysphoria or prescribing puberty blockers. “In interviews with Reuters, doctors and other staff at 18 gender clinics across the country described their processes for evaluating patients. None described anything like the months-long assessments [preeminent experts in the field] adopted in their research.”
The Reuters report also noted that, according to experts, in considering the options for children struggling with gender dysphoria, “the risk of inaction [can be] even more alarming,” as children without such treatments “remain at increased risk of suicide.”
Read More: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-care/
→ All American children above the age of 8 should be screened for anxiety, according to new recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a panel of experts whose guidelines often affect standard practices of care. The panel notes a rapid increase in anxiety among children, thanks in no small part to the school closures that were driven by public health officials during the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, almost 6 million children have received an anxiety-related disorder diagnosis. The task force also reaffirmed its suggestion that all adolescents be screened for depression. Since 2017 there has been a 41% increase in the use of antidepressants among U.S. adolescents. The task force says screening children during routine visits to the pediatrician might help some children who would otherwise fall through the cracks. “The anxious child who might be chewing at their collar at 3 years old turns to biting their nails at 9, and then is struggling in school in their teens,” said the assistant director of the pediatric behavioral health integration program at Montefiore Medical Group in New York City.
→ Video of the Day:
“I was biting my tongue on my political opinion,” Kanye West tells Tucker Carlson, and now we know why, as redacted clips of Carlson’s conversation with Kanye West—or Ye, as he’s now known—have been posted online. The footage features the rapper making numerous antisemitic statements that were not featured in Carlson’s broadcast of the interview, which aired over two nights and was edited to focus on Ye’s dislike of the Clintons and the Obamas, his opposition to abortion, and his experience of cancel culture. Not included, though, were his views that it would be better for his kids to celebrate Hanukkah than Kwanzaa because at least the former “will come with some financial engineering.” He also clarified that “When I say Jew, I mean the 12 lost tribes of Judah, the blood of Christ, who the people known as the race Black really are.” That is a myth commonly espoused by Black Hebrew Israelite groups, known for spreading racist and anti-Jewish canards. The leak of these clips comes shortly after Ye was blocked from Instagram and Twitter twice for posting antisemitic messages.
→ Protests erupted Wednesday inside a Los Angeles City Council meeting, following the leak days earlier of a private conversation in which three Latino council members made disparaging remarks about Black and indigenous constituents. President Biden has called on the council members to resign, but as of Wednesday, all three members held on to their primary roles, though member Nury Martinez resigned from her leadership role as council president. The recording, which was first posted to Reddit and then obtained by The Los Angeles Times, features Martinez, who had been the council’s first Latina president, and fellow council members Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León strategizing over how to redistrict the city to their advantage, calling Oaxacan immigrants in her district “short little dark people” and describing the 3-year-old Black son of a white council member as a “changuito,” Spanish for “little monkey.” Martinez, who was elected on a Families First platform, added that the 3-year-old “needs a beatdown. Let me take him around the corner, and then I’ll bring him back.”
→ The CEO and the entire board of directors of Hockey Canada resigned on Tuesday, following reports released by Canada’s parliament that found that the organization created a slush fund from fees paid by kids in its youth leagues and used these to settle sexual assault allegations. Hockey Canada, founded in 1964 and long considered one of the country’s most beloved institutions, oversees amateur and professional hockey nationwide, from its vast network of local youth leagues to the national championships and the Olympics. This past summer, a woman alleged she was assaulted by numerous members of the junior hockey team in 2018 and that Hockey Canada paid her in a settlement but did not discipline any players. Since then, many sponsors of Hockey Canada, including Nike and Tim Hortons, have suspended their corporate sponsorship, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said that the time has come for Hockey Canada to have “a real reckoning.”
→ Chart of the Day:
The population of New York City’s homeless shelters are surging, according to data from the city, with thousands of migrants bussed up by the governors of Texas and Arizona straining an already strapped system; 11,000 asylum seekers have entered New York’s homeless shelter system since May. Since a 1979 court order, New York City is the only city in the country that has a “right to shelter,” where anyone who seeks a bed must, by law, be given one. Facing the rising number of homeless people seeking shelter, Mayor Adams said in September that “no city official, advocate, or court ever could have contemplated” such a dire situation, and so “the city’s prior practices, which never contemplated the bussing of thousands of people into New York City, must be reassessed.” Adams, like Bill de Blasio, has sought to incentivize the construction of more affordable housing by mandating that new developments in newly rezoned areas must include affordable units—a strategy that, according to a 2020 review from the Manhattan Institute, has not produced nearly as much affordable housing as de Blasio had hoped.
→ Five days shy of her 97th birthday, stage, screen, and television actress Angela Lansbury died on Tuesday. Best known as the crime-writer sleuth in the long-running “Murder, She Wrote,” Lansbury had a career that stretched more than six decades, beginning with her first Oscar nomination at the age of 20 for her debut film role in the 1944 Gaslight. Several other Oscar nominations would follow, along with two Golden Globes for her performance in The Manchurian Candidate and five Tony Awards over 40 years of stage performances, including her turn in the revival of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit in 2009. Her regular appearance in Disney movies over the years endeared her to generations of children, many of whom recall her as the voice of Mrs. Potts from the 1991 animated film Beauty and the Beast. “Oddly enough, children recognize my voice,” Lansbury said in 2012. “They’ll hear me and say, ‘Mom, that’s Mrs. Potts!’”
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
TODAY IN TABLET:
Yeah, Buoy!!! by Tony Badran
Yair Lapid trades Mediterranean gas fields claimed by Israel to Hezbollah in exchange for a line of rusting buoys.
Facts vs. Fictions by Robert Shlasko
A visit to my parents’ shtetl answered some of my questions—but not all of them.
The Women vs. the Mullahs by Bernard-Henri Levy
It’s time for the West to match the bravery of the protesters and stop accommodating their executioners.
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Black Skinhead
It’s not so easy to separate Kanye’s anti-Jewish tirades from his artistic greatness—both spring from his paranoid ego, writes Ross Anderson.
Last Monday, the man formerly known as Kanye West was in Paris, presenting his Yeezy Season 9 collection, with all eyes on his new “White Lives Matter” T-shirts. On Thursday he was on Tucker Carlson Tonight, expounding on abortion, atheism, the fashion industry, Obama, Elon Musk, how Gap executives knew about the Uvalde shooting beforehand, and how Donald Trump was held back by his Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner, who only carried out the historic Abraham Accords to “make money.” Last Friday, following the Carlson appearance, Kanye, naturally enough, accused rap mogul Diddy of being controlled by “the Jewish people,” which prompted Instagram to lock his account, bringing an end to his days-long spew on the app—not that he stopped there. Late Saturday night, Kanye repeated the cycle on Twitter, posting that he was “going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE” and (reiterating a point he’d made repeatedly on Instagram) that “black people are actually Jew” so he “can’t be Anti Semitic.” For the coup de grâce, Kanye tweeted, “Who do you think created cancel culture?” drawing that all-important line for the paranoid, messianic paragon of celebrity and fashion culture between himself and Jesus Christ, two martyrs betrayed by perfidious Jews. Twitter removed the tweet about going “death con,” but his account is still up, along with the “question” about the origins of cancel culture.
West’s spoutings draw from a particularly American strain of antisemitism, as spread by the Nation of Islam and its leader, the dishonourable Louis Farrakhan. As explained by John-Paul Pagano, their conspiracy theory claims that the Israelites were Black, and thus Black people today descend from them. The ugly corollary is that “white” Jews are Satanic thieves of their “birthright” and manipulate society through dominance of cultural and financial institutions.
It’s hardly surprising that someone as megalomaniacal and martyrdom-obsessed as West has stumbled upon these ideas. They are disturbingly common among Black entertainers without Ye’s history of mental instability and manic episodes, including his peers Jay-Z and Jay Electronica, and it’s both futile and disingenuous to try and separate West’s bigotries from his bipolar disorder (however oft it’s attempted, as Freddie deBoer writes). Paranoid delusion and anti-Jewish prejudice are, after all, perfectly compatible.
Regardless of its ultimate source, whether in his psyche or his newfound political convictions and alliances with right-wing influencers like Candace Owens, paranoid, bigoted conspiracy is consistent with the broader way Ye thinks. Namely, his epistemic ADHD leaves him full of ideas, with no means to parse them but his ego-driven instinct. Going by vibe and tone has led to his phenomenal success in fashion and music—few are more original and influential—but precisely these same ingredients have rotted his politics, along with his personal and business lives. Hasty, intransigent outbursts seem to have harmed everything in his life except his profile in the media. His antisemitic outbursts are but the ugliest face of that.
His marriage to Kim Kardashian is in tatters. His most recent album, Donda 2, was released as a rough draft and may never be completed. And his fashion output has completely imploded since its high point, only last year.
Read the rest here:
I always thought of the guy as just another overrated, no talent, produce nothing of value, Rap "artist." There is a s load of them out there.
"Paranoid delusion and anti-Jewish prejudice are, after all, perfectly compatible."
Well, yeah :)