The government this week announced it will soon introduce subsidized garrison shops for soldiers that will be financed by a 2,5 per cent tax which will now be deducted from the remuneration of every government employee.
Nowhere in the world have workers subsidized other workers but in Zimbabwe anything is possible with this illegitimate government. Government workers that are not party of the garrison grave train should resist this despicable exploitation by an employer who wants to avoid dealing with the economy by introducing piece meal solutions. The other civil servants are also in the same predicament as soldiers. Their salaries are grossly inadequate to cover basics such as school fees, medical bills, rentals, water charges and all other expenses like the soldier who will enjoy garrison prices.
Why then burden other government employees with equally inadequate salaries to subsidize the soldiers?
This government should put its house in order and face the truth.
The truth of the matter is no tricks and gymnastics will work until this coup government faces the truth of its illegitimacy and the crooked and corrupt lot that has captured the State.
Civil servants should rightfully refuse exploitation by this illegitimate government by refusing these robbery schemes.
If this coup government wants to introduce these garrison stores they should not venture into other civil servants salaries. Those fallacious schemes should be financed by any other source of financing that does not prejudice other equally affected workers
Hon. Gideon Shoko Secretary for Labour and Social Security
There’s a long way to go when it comes to creating a more transparent cosmetics industry.
Photo: Ferda Demir/Getty Images for IHKIB
On Jan. 1 of this year, the 2018 Humane Cosmetics Act of California went into effect, banning the sale of cosmetics that have been tested on animals. Both Illinois and Nevada signed equivalent bills, with federal-level legislation to possibly follow in the not-too-distant future. While this represents an incredible milestone for the animal welfare community, as the United States takes a big step toward joining the global community of cruelty-free nations, the significance is also largely symbolic.
“It is worth noting that testing cosmetics on animals is extremely rare, as the industry moved away from this inhumane practice almost a decade ago,” points out Mia Davis, Credo‘s Director of Environmental & Social Responsibility. Some exemptions will legally remain — as in the case of drugs like sunscreen, ingredients that were grandfathered in from previous testing or industries, as well as ingredients with special safety concerns — but the efforts initiated by California, Illinois and Nevada should ensure that all cosmetic products sold will be cruelty-free as of Jan. 1. “Brands are not going to make a cruelty-free version for California and another one for the rest of the country, of course,” reasons Davis.
The HCA’s passage also hints at progress toward beauty reform, specifically when it comes to the regulation of labels. The politics of beauty labels — regarding animal cruelty, but also consumer health — are heated. Policy loopholes can result in considerable miscommunication between beauty brands and their customers. For example, a lack of uniformity between designating organizations allowed so-called cruelty-free brands (some that publicly denounced cosmetic animal testing, like Caudalie and Urban Decay) to legally sell to China’s mainland market, where up until January, this resulted in mandatory cosmetic animal testing abroad.
Should it pass, the federal-level HCA will address this type of discrepancy. Victoria Katrinak, Manager of Animal Research & Testing at The Humane Society of the United States, shares, “The new HCA language … would prohibit a company from putting a cruelty-free label on their product if it was tested…to satisfy foreign testing requirements.” She adds that although state-level legislation does not address labelling directly, companies can no longer use “outsourced” data derived from animal-testing abroad in order to substantiate the safety of their ingredients.
Why does this matter? Because past experience proves that transparency is sorely lacking when the industry is left to self-regulate. Misleading marketing vis-a-vis ambiguous or inaccurate labels remains a rampant problem, calling the government’s hands-off, pro-business approach into question. Yet a growing body of evidence and consumer demand is pushing the industry in the direction of more stringent regulations regarding the ethical baseline in beauty.
Several ethical dilemmas presently stem from a lack of label oversight. Among nail polish brands, complaints of “green-washing” target those brands that purport to exclude the “bad chemicals,” indicating these omissions with “n-free” labels. But with no legal definition specifying which ingredients are toxic, some brands are taking liberties in how they label their formulas. A seven-free polish can effectively be “cleaner” than its 10-free, or even 16-free, counterpart due to these inconsistencies in nail polish labels that leave consumers on their own to do extensive brand and ingredient research.
The recent documentary Toxic Beauty depicts another political battle over beauty labels; namely, Johnson & Johnson’s decades’ long resistance to print warning labels on products containing talc. In spite of evidence linking talc’s contamination by the carcinogen asbestos to cases of ovarian cancer in lifelong customers, the company rigidly stands behind sponsored studies to defend the safety of its products. “In truth, one would have to have a product tested in an unbiased lab and know the formulation, and combinations of chemicals that interact with each other, in order to really know what’s in your [beauty] product, according to most of the experts in our film,” says Phyllis Ellis, director of Toxic Beauty.
Another oft-cited regulatory loophole permits hidden phthalates (which have been shown to be potential endocrine disrupters) to go undisclosed in products listing synthetic fragrance as an ingredient. Consumer watch groups have arisen to make up for the lack of governmental oversight, with organizations like Safe Cosmetics and the Environmental Working Group raising awareness and advocating for change. Without private efforts by these consumer groups, we would be left to navigate an industry that is packed with undisclosed and hidden carcinogens, endocrine-disrupters, and toxins found in our beauty and personal care products.
“‘Safest’ [likely means] don’t use anything with the word ‘fragrance’ or ‘parfum’ on the label because those words alone can indicate hundreds of chemicals, [some of which are harmful],” states Ellis. “Talc, asbestos, mercury, lead… Why are any of these in products we put on our skin, hair, lips?” And why, considering the deleterious impact this has on public health, are responsible retailers, brands, experts, and advocacy groups left to fight the battle for wellness in beauty alone?
According to Jessica DeFino, a beauty journalist who covers cosmetic regulation, “Most labels in the beauty industry are nothing more than overblown marketing terms; very few are regulated.” [Editor’s note: DeFino is also a frequent Fashionista contributor.] She explains how these ethical issues arise when brands use words with vague definitions in order to impart a false sense of consumer security. DeFino points out that words and labels with concrete definitions (i.e. “vegan,” “oil-free”) raise fewer red flags. However, labels with ambiguous definitions like “clean,” “green,” “non-toxic,” “organic” and “natural” — none of which are legally defined — allow brands to take advantage of health-minded consumers who feel falsely reassured of the product’s safety. In reality, the lack of regulatory oversight renders these colloquial terms meaningless. (There is a bill seeking to legally define the term ‘natural’ for this very reason.)
The perils of labeling do not stop there, yet the matter is complex. On the one hand, DeFino points out that a sense of safety is largely subjective and that the government might not be the appropriate entity to make such determinations. “Should the government get to decide what those mean?” she asks, “Probably not… And even if they did, brands would find a way around it, coming up with new unregulated labels to slap on a bottle.”
Experts tend to agree that the government’s role via legislation like the HCA is to establish an ethical baseline for the industry, and also agree that reform is urgently needed. “The law that governs the approximately $90 billion beauty industry is from 1938 and is only one and a half pages long,” Davis emphasizes, adding that, “it allows carcinogens in baby shampoo.”
The need for improved beauty ethics has changed the entrepreneurial landscape, with the efforts of individual retailers, brands and groups arising to educate the public. In such a competitive market, it takes courage to take a public stance to formulate and sell only those products deemed non-toxic by the research. This is why clean beauty advocates emphasize transparency as a fundamental tenet of the movement.
With the industry taking a long-due stance on behalf of animal welfare, perhaps this next decade will see similar progress made in the name of human welfare, too. “We’re talking about safety and health of millions of Americans who use these products,” writes Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (NY-18) of the aforementioned Natural Cosmetics Act. “My bill will set the standard for ‘natural’ personal care products and do right by American consumers by putting transparency first.” So far that’s two labels addressed — ‘cruelty-free’ and ‘natural’ — how many more do we have to go?
Back in 2013, Danielle Teuscher and her spouse turned to the use of donor sperm to conceive and grow their family. They chose an “open ID” donor, meaning that the donor was open to being known by the child once the child turned 18. All was good, until Christmas 2018, when Teuscher’s family decided to take 23andMe home DNA tests and included Teuscher’s donor-conceived daughter in on the fun.
Teuscher’s daughter’s test results showed that she was likely related to a paternal grandmother who was “open to contact” on 23andMe. In a short message, Teuscher reached out and let the woman know about the predictive granddaughter’s existence, and that they were open to contact. That must have been a big surprise to this unknowing grandmother. The next thing Teuscher knew, she received a Cease and Desist letter from the sperm bank, which said that Teuscher was liable for $20,000 in damages for breaching the contract between Teuscher and the sperm bank.
But the sperm bank didn’t stop there. It also told Teuscher that it was ending Teuscher’s rights to the five other vials of the donor’s sperm which the sperm bank was storing for Teuscher — sperm which Teuscher planned to use to conceive a sibling to her daughter. The sperm bank further changed the donor’s status from “Open ID” to “anonymous” — a change applicable (and likely upsetting) to all families that chose that donor, not just Teuscher. And the sperm bank shut down the donor sibling portal that the sperm bank had been running, which had allowed Teuscher and other patients to connect with parents of genetically connected half-siblings to their children.
Like any good American, Teuscher responded by suing the sperm bank, NW Cryobank, alleging, among other things, that the clinic did not have the right to take her property (the five vials of sperm).
Can Teuscher Be Guardian Ad Litem For Her Own Daughter?
As the two sides slug it out, one of the positions taken by the sperm bank is that Teuscher should not be permitted to act as guardian ad litem for her own daughter, who is another plaintiff in the case, asserting her own legal rights. In support of its argument, the sperm bank submitted an affidavit from a well-known psychologist in the area of assisted reproductive technology. The psychologist asserts that since the question of whether to find out the identity of your genetic father is always a deeply personal question, giving decision-making authority on the matter to a parent cuts against the child’s autonomy. The sperm bank thus moved that an independent guardian ad litem be appointed for the daughter.
I’m no psychologist, but as a lawyer, that seems like a pretty aggressive argument to advance. Every parent of every donor-conceived child makes the decision regarding whether and how to discuss their biology, and many make the decision not to tell their children despite numerous opportunities to do so. It’s a strange position as a legal matter to contend that those parents who might choose to tell their children their genetic history are less fit as guardians because the children would then lose the autonomy of choosing not to know their genetic history.
In any event, the judge found it just as unpersuasive as I do, and ruled in Teuscher’s favor.
Why Is This Case Such A Big Deal?
I spoke with Professor Jody Madeira, of Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law, about the implications of this case. She explained, “this case is extremely important for several reasons. First, it perpetuates donor anonymity as an ideal, which is akin to Don Quixote tilting at windmills — widespread testing ensures that banks can no longer guarantee anonymity. Second, this case sets a terrible precedent for other situations that families are experiencing NOW.”
Madeira explained that she knows of cases involving parents of a donor-conceived child with a genetic condition that (a) have connected with other families from the same donor experiencing an identical situation; and (b) know who the exact donor is, either because they have been matched to him via a home DNA testing kit, or because they have been able to identify him on Facebook or through other families. (Look at all of this subverting of child autonomy going on!) But even given the serious health concerns at play, parents who use donors continue to have a dilemma. If they use the 23andMe or Ancestry.com service to contact the donor, they may be in the very same situation as Teuscher, risking a demand letter and legal action from the sperm clinic. But if they don’t, they might go without critical medical information that might be needed to protect the life and health of the very child who was conceived with the aid of the donor.
And What About Mom’s Property Rights? And The Dystopian Implications.
Among the other issues, Teuscher’s attorney, Jill Teitel, finds the destruction of property rights especially axiomatic. She wrote to me, “NW Cryobank does not have any right to withhold Danielle Teuscher’s gametes from her. Its customer contracts say nothing indicating that NW Cryobank can seize its customers’ gametes or other fertility-related property that customers agreed to store at NW Cryobank facilities. There is no legal authority that a company can simply take its own customers’ paid-for property when it disagrees with their actions. The fact that the ‘property’ at issue is Ms. Teuscher’s only possibility of bearing a genetic sibling to her daughter is particularly dystopian.”
As this case rages on, I want to be balanced and understanding given the sperm bank’s difficult position of defending the anonymity it promised to its donor clients. However, we live in a different world now, even from the one that existed in 2013. To side with the sperm bank would have some serious negative consequences, both to access to information and to property rights. Sorry, sperm bank. Have you considered settling? Because I don’t think anyone living in 2020 thinks you should win this case.
I am reading Non Obvious Megatrends: How to See What Others Miss and Predict the Future. Written by Rohit Bhargava, who has spent a large part of his career at big ad agencies and who identifies as a futurist and innovator, it is the latest in a series of books he’s written called the “Non Obvious Trend Series.” This is the first book of his that I have read. He has some ideas that lawyers can apply to our own lives and careers (note that I wrote “lives” before “careers.”)
What I have found most useful so far is the section on nonobvious thinking.
Bhargava draws on the research of Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck, who says that people have either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. In the former, the ability and skills are set, while in the latter, it is expandable, open to new ideas and new experiences.
What is nonobvious thinking, and how do you do it? It takes a growth mindset, the attitude that there is always something new to be learned, a new way of doing something, a fresh approach to a problem that has stymied resolution. Nothing is set in concrete in a growth mindset. The growth mindset peeps are innovators and disruptors, unsatisfied with the status quo.
In the first part of the book, Bhargava describes the five mindsets of nonobvious thinkers. The first mindset is to be observant, to see what others miss. That’s very hard to do in these days of smartphone addiction, of people totally focused on what is on the screen, rather than the world around them. They miss so much by missing important clues in body language, speech patterns, and how people react.
Years ago, I conducted a wholly nonscientific experiment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. I walked the block from Third Avenue to Lexington along 77th Street. I did not see one single person who looked at me. Every last one of them was fixated on a screen, even those with strollers and dogs; no one paid me any attention. Have we lost our powers of observation? What do we see when we really look? Do we even care anymore? We should, as it’s a vital skill for good lawyering.
Another mindset of nonobvious thinkers is to be curious, always asking why. I think that depends on the setting as to whether this is a good idea. We’re all told in law school — or at least we should have been — “never ask a question that we don’t know the answer to.” Certainly in adversarial situations, that mantra makes sense. However, when interviewing a client, you want to know the full story, you want to be curious about what the client has told you and, even more importantly, what the client hasn’t told you, what the client has left out, whether inadvertently or intentionally. Consider the circumstances and the setting.
Be thoughtful, another mindset of nonobvious thinkers. I think more problems could be resolved if we would just slow down and think before we speak. But we tend to function in a “ready, fire, aim” mode, so hurt feelings and the like lead to the exchange of nasty emails that lead to litigation, where no one wins (except the lawyers who bill the hours). It’s so hard in the heat of litigation to see the other side, to understand that the opposing side’s ideas may be equally valid.
The most difficult conversation for any attorney to have is to tell that client that the opposition has valid points to consider. How many times have I (or you) heard the clients wail that we are “taking the other side?” If they only knew how wrong that was and how what we were doing is trying to protect the client from legal and financial trainwrecks.
Don’t be in such a hurry to respond. You don’t get points for being the quickest mouth in the land; you get points for being thoughtful when you do respond. Sometimes, waiting, just waiting, before answering can be a very effective technique. As the author says, don’t be afraid of silence.
Yet another mindset of nonobvious thinkers is to be fickle. Allow ideas to soak in before analyzing them. Collect ideas and then give them time to marinate. How many times have you had a brilliant idea for your litigation strategy right off the bat? Your negotiation tactics in a huge deal? Usually the best ideas, the most strategic ideas don’t happen overnight. You think about them, consult with others before deciding whether it truly is a brilliant idea or not. Being fickle means not being wedded to any one idea, to be flexible enough to figure out whether something makes sense or not.
Lastly, the final mindset is to be elegant, and that doesn’t mean in how you dress. Write simply. How many times has a client said that she didn’t understand a word of the memo because it was written in legalese? How many times have we been asked if we bill by the word? What about writing it simply from the get-go? Clients don’t want law review articles or an analysis of all the cases in the area. They want elegance, although they don’t know that’s what they want. They want simplicity and advice that is to the point. It’s the old “KISS” method — “Keep It Simple [or Short] Stupid.”
So, which mindset are you? Today, more than ever it’s imperative to have a growth mindset. We have to expand our thinking in how we practice. As we’re seeing, the fixed mindset ways of doing things doesn’t cut it anymore.
Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for over 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.
The lifetime appointments of federal judges — and the inevitable power they wield, particularly for those that envision a career in the upper echelons of the profession, is enormous. So even in the face of sexual harassment allegations, the actual consequences for misconduct in the federal judiciary will be remains uncertain. The Judicial Conference working group focused on misconduct reforms was formed two years ago, and though they’ve released a report on how to change policies, actual change for clerks and other court employees on the ground hasn’t been realized.
Now law students from some of the best law schools in the country are urging something concrete be done about the ongoing problem. Yesterday, the Harvard Women’s Law Association, Stanford Law School for Gender Violence Prevention, Women of Stanford Law, Yale Law Women, and the Yale Law School Title IX Working Group, and the national law student group, People’s Parity Project, signed a letter to the Judicial Conference asking for specific reforms, specifically: publicly reported federal judiciary “climate surveys,” expanding the Office of Judicial Integrity, centralized employment discrimination responses for federal judges, and information-sharing between law schools and the federal judiciary for reports of judicial misconduct.
And they want it quickly, because they’re frustrated with the thus far slow response to the problem:
We are frustrated by the slow progress in combating misconduct in the judiciary, and we urge immediate action… The brave testimony of Olivia Warren is a reminder that these issues must not be ignored. We remain committed to ensuring the federal judiciary is a safe workplace and hope to serve as a resource for future reforms.
While the letter, available in full below, provides concrete steps to combat the “unique closeness of a chambers environment, the early career stage of most law clerks, the importance of clerking relationships to future employment, and the opaqueness of available remedies have made law clerks extremely reluctant to report misconduct,” there’s also a recognition that this represents only one step in the process:
“This is not the first step to address misconduct, and it won’t be the last,” said Yale Law student Anna Kaul, Advancement Chair for Yale Law Women. “We will continue to call for transparency and accountability to ensure that judicial employees are afforded the safety and respect that all workers deserve.”
It may not be the final step in the process, but it is certainly a big one in the right direction.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).
People, for the most part, want to be part of a community, especially a compassionate one. We want to belong to something greater than ourselves. We may desire the support of that community when we struggle even if we don’t specifically ask for it.
The legal profession is no exception. We are people. We have stories. We get depressed. We stress. We cry. We laugh. We grieve. We are all more than our struggle, but when we look at our peers, we are often uncomfortable acknowledging that struggle, let alone a person with a life story.
As a macro community, we have survived common struggles. The struggle of law school. The struggle of licensing. The struggle of wearing or trying not to wear a suit comprised our client’s pain and suffering. The irony is that those very commonalities are the same struggles that often put us at odds with each other in the most uncivil of ways. A lesser, but crisis-level percentage of us share the common struggle of addiction, problem drinking, depression, and suicidal thoughts.
How do we, as a profession, foster a culture of compassion toward each other when we are often at each other’s throats? A culture of community in which we both take care of ourselves and our colleagues. It is through a compassionate community.
What is a compassionate community? The Center for Compassion defines it as a community in which “the needs of all the inhabitants of that community are recognized and met, the well-being of the entire community is a priority and all people and living things are treated with respect.”
There is a lot to unpack in that definition, but the term that jumps out is well-being. The profession has certainly made progress on that front with regard to the mental health prong. We have partially rolled back decades of drinking culture and mental health stigma, but so much remains not done, solo law to Biglaw.
The profession is nowhere near a tipping point, but breaking stigma and systemic mental health discrimination happen one person at a time, one lawyer at a time, one law firm at a time. In my opinion, most importantly, one story at a time.
Compassionate community is what lies in each of us. The ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others. The ability to empathize with the individual and collective struggle.
We all have that ability in us, but like resilience, it is something that we sometimes have to refine and nurture to expand beyond what we are comfortable living day-to-day. It may seem counterintuitive, but compassionate communities exist in a state of discomfort, testing barriers of empathy and compassion to keep expanding.
So how do we build and nurture empathy as a skill set so that we can foster a compassionate community? Here are a few suggestions.
Integrate empathy-building skills as part of your wellness initiative. Sometimes we forget that we have this empathy skill set when we deal with our struggles and daily life. A firm may have an excellent pro bono practice, and that is tremendous, but that is empathy on a lawyer-client vertical. Consider how to build it, lawyer, to lawyer laterally.
Encourage storytelling, whether it’s at a law school level, state or local bar event, your firm retreat, or new associate orientation. Stories do more than entertain. They put forward values and information within the community. When stories engage us on an emotional or empathetic level, it is again, science-driven, that we remember the takeaways better than when lectured to. In the realm of mental health, this emotional connection is vital because it lets others know that they are not alone in their journey, and that breaks stigma. It is also data-driven science that storytelling changes the brain, tie communities together, and drive those communities to be more empathic to each other.
Don’t need the first two tools? Here is the two-ask rule. It requires nothing but uttering five words. “How are you doing today?” Before the interaction terminates, let them know you are an open ear. The two-ask rule. You just became a part of a compassionate community.
There is so much more to building a compassionate community, but now you have a few tools that require few assets, little time and offer a fantastic reward. The ability to step outside our comfort zones and let each other know we care about each other.
Brian Cuban(@bcuban) is The Addicted Lawyer. Brian is the author of the Amazon best-selling book, The Addicted Lawyer: Tales Of The Bar, Booze, Blow & Redemption (affiliate link). A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, he somehow made it through as an alcoholic then added cocaine to his résumé as a practicing attorney. He went into recovery April 8, 2007. He left the practice of law and now writes and speaks on recovery topics, not only for the legal profession, but on recovery in general. He can be reached at brian@addictedlawyer.com.
At the same age, in 2002, members of Generation X were faring better, owning a little less than twice the national wealth of today’s Millennials, at 7.8 percent. But Baby Boomers were doing stunningly better in their 30s than Millennials today. There is not data going back far enough to show Baby Boomers’ share of national wealth when the middle of their generation was at age 30, but there is data available at the slightly older 35. At that stage, in 1990, Baby Boomers owned 25 percent of total U.S. assets.
Did 35-year-old Baby Boomers simply work 500 percent harder than the lazy, entitled, snowflake Millennials of today? Were they simply 500 percent smarter? You’ll run into those arguments, mostly from handfuls of right-wing Baby Boomers. But the data doesn’t back them up.
Maybe it’s systemic barriers rather than behavioral deficiencies that account for Millennials’ lesser share of the pie. Law school tuition was around $2,000 per semester in the mid-1980s. According to U.S. News and World Reports, for full-time law programs for the 2017-18 academic year, the average annual tuition at private law schools was $47,112. Meanwhile, U.S. News put the median private sector starting salary for 2016 law grads at a stagnant $68,375, and the median public sector starting salary for new lawyers at only $53,500. This same pattern of increasing entry costs just to earn lower incomes has repeated itself across the economy, all while expenses for necessities like child care, housing, and medical treatment have continued to balloon.
Recent polling suggests that Baby Boomers themselves recognize the problematic state of income and wealth inequality and are increasingly becoming more comfortable with something other than unchecked capitalism. Maybe that’s empathy. Maybe it’s just that more Baby Boomers are aging into eligibility to two of America’s largest existing socialist programs: Social Security and Medicare (otherwise known as “health insurance for old people”). These are among the most popular U.S. government programs in history.
In the early days of the last new century, President Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, said, “Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions,” and that therefore it is “our right and our duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.” Roosevelt used the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, named after its Republican champion in the Senate, to shatter the largest corporations of the Gilded Age.
Some 30 years later, the Great Depression ravaged the U.S. economy during the presidency of Herbert Hoover. Hoover believed a free-market economy would self-correct, and he cut government spending. The Depression worsened. It took Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin, the Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to end the Great Depression. FDR launched his New Deal in three waves to carry the United States out of the Great Depression. Among many other things, the New Deal gave rise to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Social Security Act (by the 1930s, the U.S. had become the only modern industrialized country without any form of national social security), and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which mandated a minimum wage and overtime pay for American workers. Conservative businessmen contemporaries criticized the New Deal for being “too socialistic.”
With Bernie Sanders steamrolling the competition in the Democratic primary, there has been a lot of overwrought handwringing. But nothing he is proposing is really that radical, other than daring to call himself a democratic socialist. Joining every other advanced, industrialized nation in having some kind of universal health care system is not a radical idea. Providing people with the opportunity to obtain the education they need to be competitive in a global labor market, without having to go six figures into debt for it, is not a radical idea. There are many examples of this working, both historically and internationally. A whole generation is doing worse — far worse — than their parents. When our predecessors, Republican or Democrat, saw unchecked capitalism spilling over its banks, they course-corrected to achieve something better. And they didn’t let critics railing about socialism stop them.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached atjon_wolf@hotmail.com.
Ellen Trachman is the Managing Attorney of 
Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for over 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at 
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of 
