Thursday, May 19, 2022



The plight of black women

I have been reading stories recently that were put up on medium.com. Medium is basically a place where people can put up thoughts and experiences that might not find a home elsewhere. It is primarily a place for opinions about the world or some part of it.

And there are quite a few stories put up by black American women in which they recount their experiences with relationships. And the stories are basically a tale of woe. Like many others, they use internet dating to meet potential partners and they do find that hard going.

Meeting a compatible partner is tricky at any age and always has been. And the big issue is what one finds attractive or acceptible in another person. And you will never get perfection in another person. The other person may lack attraction in most ways but there have to be a few things there that are positive. And what black women look for is not mysterious or unusual.

But they often find NOTHING attractive in black men. They find black men to be inconsiderate, violent, useless and parasitical. And the women say that loud and clear. Some of the entries on medium.com amount to a long hate session about black men

And there is no easy solution to that. The obvious solution is to find a white man in the hope that he will be more civilized. And black women do look in that direction. But white men who date black women are few and they are pretty fussy. They want a black woman with lots of desirable qualities. So at most a black woman has on average only a 5% chance of teaming up with a white man.

So almost all black women are stuck with black men if they are to have any kind of partner. So they are in an unusually unfortunate position. Because they live in a predominantly white society, they tend to acquire the attitudes, expectations and values of whites. What they want is black man who behaves accordingto white standards. And they will very rarely get that

I am not of course saying that white men are always good partner material. With my record of four marriages and many relationships, I would have to be one of the problem people. In the circumstances, I am very glad that at age 78 I do nonetheless have a loving lady in my life. And I met her through the internet! -- JR.

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Judge: California’s women on boards law is unconstitutional

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A Los Angeles judge has ruled that California’s landmark law requiring women on corporate boards is unconstitutional.

Superior Court Judge Maureen Duffy-Lewis said the law that would have required boards have up to three female directors by this year violated the right to equal treatment. The ruling was dated Friday.

The conservative legal group Judicial Watch had challenged the law, claiming it was illegal to use taxpayer funds to enforce a law that violates the equal protection clause of the California Constitution by mandating a gender-based quota.

David Levine, a law professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, said he was not surprised by the verdict. Under state and federal law “mandating a quota like this was never going to fly,” Levine said.

State Senate leader Toni Atkins, a Democrat from San Diego, said the ruling was disappointing and a reminder “that sometimes our legalities don’t match our realities.”

“More women on corporate boards means better decisions and businesses that outperform the competition,” Atkins said in a statement. “We believe this law remains important, despite the disheartening ruling.”

The decision comes just over a month after another Los Angeles judge found that a California law mandating that corporations diversify their boards with members from certain racial, ethnic or LGBT groups was unconstitutional.

The corporate diversity legislation was a sequel to the law requiring women on corporate boards. The judge in the previous case ruled in favor of Judicial Watch and the same plaintiffs without holding a trial.

The law voided Friday was on shaky ground from the get-go, with a legislative analysis saying it could be difficult to defend. Then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed it despite the potential for it to be overturned because he wanted to send a message during the #MeToo era.

In the three years it has been on the books, it’s been credited with improving the standing of women in corporate boardrooms.

The state defended the law as constitutional saying it was necessary to reverse a culture of discrimination that favored men and was put in place only after other measures failed. The state also said the law didn’t create a quota because boards could add seats for female directors without stripping men of their positions.

Although the law carried potential hefty penalties for failing to file an annual report or comply with the law, a chief in the secretary of state’s office acknowledged during the trial that it was toothless.

No fines have ever been levied and there was no intention to do so, Betsy Bogart testified. Further, a letter that surfaced during trial from former Secretary of State Alex Padilla warned Brown weeks before he signed the law that it was probably unenforceable.

“Any attempt by the secretary of state to collect or enforce the fine would likely exceed its authority,” Padilla wrote.

The law required publicly held companies headquartered in California to have one member who identifies as a woman on their boards of directors by the end of 2019. By January 2022, boards with five directors were required to have two women and boards with six or more members were required to have three women.

The Women on Boards law, also known by its bill number, SB826, called for penalties ranging from $100,000 fines for failing to report board compositions to the California secretary of state’s office to $300,000 for multiple failures to have the required number of women board members.

The Secretary of State’s office said 26% of publicly traded companies headquartered in California reported meeting the quota of women board members last year, according to a March report.

Half of the 716 corporations that had been required to comply with the law didn’t file the disclosure statements.

Supporters of the law hailed it for achieving more gains for women. Other states followed California’s lead. Washington state passed a similar measure last year, and lawmakers in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Hawaii proposed similar bills. Illinois requires publicly traded companies to report the makeup of their boards.

Deputy Attorney General Ashante Norton said alternatives to a law mandating seats for women had been tried in California to no avail. In 2013, for example, the Legislature passed a resolution to get companies to add women to their boards, but few did.

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Victory for Ted Cruz as Supreme Court Rebuffs Biden Administration, Strikes Down Campaign Spending Rule

In a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a campaign finance rule regulating the repayment of loans by a candidate to his own campaign, handing a win on May 16 to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who challenged the Federal Election Commission (FEC) regulation.

“[The decision] is a resounding victory for the First Amendment,” a spokesperson for Cruz told The Post Millennial.

“Sen. Cruz is gratified that the Supreme Court ruled that the existing law imposed an unconstitutional restriction on free speech that unfairly benefited incumbent politicians and the super-wealthy. This landmark decision will help invigorate our democratic process by making it easier for challengers to take on and defeat career politicians.”

The appeal to the Supreme Court was brought by the FEC after a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia unanimously ruled against the agency last year.

The legal provision in question is in Section 304 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002, which imposed restrictions on post-election contributions by limiting the amount that a candidate may be repaid from such funds to $250,000.

Cruz lent his campaign committee money, and the committee deliberately failed to categorize the unrepaid part of the loan—$10,000—as a campaign contribution in order to launch a First Amendment-based challenge to the rule.

The case grew out of the 2018 election cycle that culminated in the Republican U.S. senator’s victory over Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat, by 2.6 percentage points. O’Rourke raised more than twice as much money as Cruz in the high-profile, record-breaking $115 million Senate race.

Cruz wrote in a brief that Section 304 unconstitutionally deters candidates from lending money to their campaigns by restricting the campaign’s ability to repay.

The $250,000 repayment limit, “by substantially increasing the risk that any candidate loan will never be fully repaid—forces a candidate to think twice before making those loans in the first place.” As the district court found, this limit burdens a candidate’s right to speak freely in favor of his own election and “runs afoul of the First Amendment.”

The Biden administration had argued that disallowing the rule would open the door to bribery in elections, but the high court found that the restriction on candidates’ post-election use of political contributions to recover personal funds lent to the campaign ran afoul of First Amendment speech protections.

The decision (pdf) in FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate, written by Chief Justice Roberts, was joined by the court’s five other conservative justices. Justice Elena Kagan wrote a dissenting opinion that was backed by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.

“The question is whether this restriction violates the First Amendment rights of candidates and their campaigns to engage in political speech,” Roberts wrote.

“There is no doubt that the law does burden First Amendment electoral speech, and any such law must at least be justified by a permissible interest.”

Roberts then directly quoted the 2014 plurality opinion in McCutcheon v. FEC, saying that “when the government restricts speech, the government bears the burden of proving the constitutionality of its actions.”

The government “is unable to identify a single case of quid pro quo corruption … even though most states do not impose a limit on the use of post-election contributions to repay candidate loans.”

The government failed to demonstrate that Section 304 of the BCRA “furthers a permissible anti-corruption goal, rather than the impermissible objective of simply limiting the amount of money in politics,” according to Roberts.

The rule “burdens core political speech without proper justification.”

Kagan wrote that the Supreme Court, which in recent years has been weakening campaign finance restrictions, was making a mistake.

“In striking down the law today the court greenlights all the sordid bargains Congress thought right to stop. … In allowing those payments to go forward unrestrained, today’s decision can only bring this country’s political system into further disrepute,” she wrote.

Kagan embraced the bribery argument advanced by the Biden administration.

“Repaying a candidate’s loan after he has won election cannot serve the usual purposes of a contribution: The money comes too late to aid in any of his campaign activities,” she wrote. “All the money does is enrich the candidate personally at a time when he can return the favor—by a vote, a contract, an appointment.

“It takes no political genius to see the heightened risk of corruption—the danger of ‘I’ll make you richer and you’ll make me richer’ arrangements between donors and officeholders.”

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Southwest Flight Attendant Fired Over Pro-Life Views to Have Her Day in Federal Court, Judge Rules

A federal judge has ordered that fired Southwest Airlines flight attendant Charlene Carter’s religious discrimination lawsuit against the company and its union would proceed to trial, after the judge denied a request to dismiss the lawsuit.

The case, known as Carter v. Transport Workers Union of America Local 556, civil action 3:17-cv-2278, is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas. On May 5, Judge Brantley Starr, a Trump appointee, denied (pdf) a motion for summary judgment brought by the union and the airline.

Starr ruled that the suit should go to trial because “genuine disputes of material fact preclude summary judgment” on all claims.

National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix, whose organization is representing Carter in court, hailed the court ruling.

“This decision is an important step towards long overdue justice for Charlene,” Mix said in a statement. “The ruling rejects several attempts by Southwest and union officials to deny Ms. Carter’s right to bring this case in federal court and enforce her RLA-protected speech and association rights.

“Further, the decision acknowledges that, at its core, this case is about an individual worker’s right to object to how forced union dues and fees are spent by union officials to take positions that are completely contrary to the beliefs of many workers forced under the union’s so-called ‘representation,’”

Carter’s story goes back to 1996 when, as a Southwest employee, she joined the Transportation Workers Union of America (TWU) Local 556. A pro-life Christian, she quit the labor union in 2013 upon learning her union dues were being spent to promote social causes that violate her conscience and religious beliefs.

Despite resigning from the union, Carter was still required to pay fees in lieu of union dues as a condition of her employment. State-level right-to-work laws don’t exempt her from forced fees because airline and railway employees fall under the federal Railway Labor Act (RLA), which permits union officials to have a worker fired for refusing to pay union dues or fees. Despite this, the RLA protects the rights of employees to remain nonmembers of the union, to criticize the union and its leadership, and to advocate for changing the union’s current leadership.

When Carter discovered in 2017 that TWU local President Audrey Stone and other union officials used union dues to attend a pro-abortion event in the nation’s capital and that the company had accommodated local members wishing to attend by rearranging their work schedules, she took to social media to challenge Stone’s leadership. The airline demanded a meeting with Carter, informing her that Stone felt harassed by Carter’s activism.

A week later, the airline fired Carter. Not long after, Carter sued.

“Forced unionism, in all of its manifestations, including this one, is wrong and a violation of individual freedom and liberty,” Mix told The Epoch Times in an interview.

“In this case, we have an employee who is forced under the representation of a union that she does not support, and yet they claim to speak for her in all aspects of her working-conditions life, and when she found out that they were basically promoting causes and ideals that she opposed, she spoke up against it and then she lost her job,” he said.

“This is the coercion that workers across America, whether it be in the government sector, in the private sector, or in the rail, light railway, or railroad or airline industries, face when union officials get monopoly control over working conditions.

“And what we have here is Southwest Airlines, which is really a bad actor in this particular case, and the Transport Workers Union basically teaming up to thwart the political and ideological views of one of their employees.

“Notwithstanding Southwest’s branding that they love their employees, they don’t love Charlene Carter, because she has different political views than the union officials that claim to represent her.”

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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