As Republicans prepare to wage a war on crucial anti-poverty programs when they take control of the House, using the debt limit and major risks to the economy as a weapon, some members of the GOP are threatening to vote against raising the debt limit no matter what. According to CNN, several Republicans are saying that they will still vote against a bill raising the debt limit even if Republicans…
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is planning to bring a resolution aimed at ending U.S. support for the Saudi Arabia-led war in Yemen to a vote in the Senate as early as next week, saying it could have the votes to pass. Sanders told The Intercept this week that he will put a war powers resolution to a vote, which can be done without the backing of Senate leadership because of the nature of the…
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Federal labor prosecutors have determined that Apple employed illegal anti-union tactics while busting a union drive in an Atlanta store this year. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) officials have found that the company illegally held mandatory meetings in which managers made coercive statements against the union, while management interrogated and coerced employees as they organized to…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The Supreme Court has agreed to take up a case originally filed by Republican-led states to challenge President Joe Biden’s student debt cancellation plan in a case that will affect the bank accounts of tens of millions of people across the U.S. for years to come. The justices have fast-tracked the case and are slated to hear arguments in February. Until then, the cancellation plan will be on hold…
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The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled on Wednesday that Starbucks must negotiate with a union formed at an upscale Seattle location after officials determined that the company broke federal labor laws by refusing to bargain — an action the company has admitted to. Though the Starbucks roastery, located in the company’s hometown, voted to unionize in April, the company has refused to…
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The United States’s already colossal and record-breaking defense budget is about to get even bigger, with congressional negotiators slated to propose a staggering $847 billion for defense for 2023, new reporting finds — a $45 billion increase over President Joe Biden’s already massive defense budget request.
Four people familiar with negotiations told Politico that House and Senate lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have come to a “compromise” on the budget, which could balloon as high as $858 billion when programs outside of the congressional armed services committees are included. $847 billion is equal to the Senate Armed Services Committee’s proposal from earlier this year.
If approved, this would be the largest-ever defense budget, building upon previous years’ already unfathomably large allotments for U.S. militarism. As in previous years, the defense budget is likely to pass — no matter how absurdly high it gets — as it is deemed a “must-pass” budget item every year by both Democratic and Republican war hawks.
Antiwar and progressive advocates have strongly condemned the proposed budget, saying that it is an absurd amount of money to spend in a time of great economic inequality and a largely-unmitigated climate crisis.
“People are worried about being able to pay rent, about affording groceries, and about being able to afford healthcare. $847 billion for the Pentagon, over half of which goes directly to companies like Lockheed Martin, is a slap in the face to every constituent of every member of Congress that votes in favor of it,” CODEPINK National Co-Director Danaka Katovich said in a statement to Truthout.
“It shows a lack of care. It shows a fundamental difference in the interests working people hold versus the people that govern us,” Katovich continued.
Lindsay Koshgarian, director of the National Priorities Project, added that lawmakers are often deficit hawks for proposals to help the working class, but roll over for the defense budget, no matter the figure.
“The same legislators who refused to continue child tax credits that cut child poverty in half are now choosing to add tens of billions of dollars to an already-enormous Pentagon budget,” Koshgarian told Truthout. “The bonus for the Pentagon is more than the entire annual climate investment under the Inflation Reduction Act. The only ones who will benefit are the corporations that sell weapons to the U.S. and around the world.”
If this budget request goes through, the U.S. will have allocated $1.67 trillion toward military spending during the Biden administration alone. At this rate — with Biden’s increasing defense requests, and Congress’s repeated escalation of those requests — a $1 trillion annual budget for the Pentagon could soon be in sight.
Progressives, frustrated with the incessant increases to the military budget, have said time and time again that just fractions of the amount that the U.S. spends on defense each year could fund other urgent priorities.
Less than half of the likely proposal could pay for the next 10 years of climate action planned under the Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, or the entirety of Biden’s student debt cancellation plan. Meanwhile, less than a quarter of the $21 trillion that the U.S. has spent on defense since 9/11 would be enough to fund the construction of a fully renewable energy grid.
Progressive lawmakers fiercely criticized Biden’s defense request earlier this year.
“It is simply unacceptable that after the conclusion of our longest war and during a period of Democratic control of both chambers of Congress, the president is proposing record high military spending,” said Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) this spring.
“Appropriators and advocates are constantly called to answer for how we will afford spending on lowering costs and expanding access to healthcare, housing, childcare services, on fighting the Covid-19 pandemic, and on combating climate change — but such concerns evaporate when it comes to the Pentagon’s endlessly growing, unaudited budget,” Jayapal continued.
Indeed, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has never passed an audit. Critics point out that over half of the defense budget goes toward private contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, resulting in huge profits for these companies; in the first three quarters of 2022, while the public has been suffering due to inflation, Lockheed Martin made over $4.2 billion in profit, while Raytheon reported an operating profit of over $3.9 billion.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In a win for workers, the House passed a resolution on Wednesday to force the adoption of a railroad labor contract with, crucially, the inclusion of a hard-fought amendment for seven days of paid sick leave for rail workers.
The resolution advanced with a 290 to 137 vote, while the amendment providing sick leave passed largely on party lines, with only three Republicans joining all Democrats in voting to grant rail workers sick days.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) had originally planned to bring the resolution, sans sick leave, to a vote as is, but the Congressional Progressive Caucus said that it was able to negotiate a deal with House leadership on Tuesday night to have the sick leave proposal included. The seven days of sick leave in the proposal is less than the 15 days that workers had sought, but is still an improvement over current conditions.
Representatives Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), who submitted the amendment, celebrated its passage.
“Railroad corporations are raking in record profits — over $20 billion last year alone,” Omar said in a statement following the vote. “Meanwhile, their workers do not even have the basic protections of a single day of paid or unpaid sick time. In the face of these record profits, railroad workers have made a simple, dignified request for the basic protections of paid leave. And we in Congress need to listen to them.”
The legislation now goes to the Senate, where Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has pledged to block consideration of the resolution without first holding a roll call vote on the paid sick leave proposal, calling the current policy of rail workers being given zero paid sick days “unacceptable.”
“The bottom line is that the American people and workers throughout the country are profoundly disgusted by the kind of corporate greed that we are seeing,” Sanders said in an interview on MSNBC on Tuesday. “In the last three quarters of this year alone, the railroad industry made $21 billion in profits, provided $25 billion in stock buybacks and dividends…. Meanwhile, for workers on the railroads, they have zero, underlined, zero guaranteed sick leave.”
Sanders said there is a good chance that the sick leave proposal could pass with support from lawmakers from both sides of the aisle. Pointing out that Republicans claim to support the working class — however false those claims may prove in practice — he said, “Put up or shut up. If you can’t vote for this to give workers today, who really have hard jobs, dangerous jobs — if you can’t guarantee them paid sick leave, don’t tell anybody that you stand with working families.”
Paid sick leave became a major sticking point for Democrats and progressives after President Joe Biden urged Congress on Monday to force the adoption of the agreement, negotiated with Biden administration representatives in September, circumventing unions to prevent workers from striking in December. Several major unions involved in the contract negotiations — representing over half of the rail workers affected — had voted down that agreement.
Currently, strict attendance policies cause major fatigue and health issues for many rail workers. The contract offer had included some provisions for workers, including pay raises and three days off each year for routine health appointments, if scheduled 30 days in advance. This was insufficient to assuage many workers’ concerns, and still didn’t address the issue of paid sick leave that workers have been fighting for.
Unions and union workers had expressed frustration over Biden’s announcement, saying that it went against his supposed pro-union stances.
The AFL-CIO called on Congress to pass the sick leave provision in a statement on Wednesday. “To be clear, rail companies could do the right thing today and grant workers paid sick leave,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said. “But they’ve refused, putting profits over people. That’s how we got here.”
Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes (BMWED), one of the unions that voted against the agreement, called on workers and supporters to contact their congressional representatives to tell them to support the proposal after putting out a scathing statement about the original resolution on Tuesday, saying that, as negotiated, it would only make the situation worse for workers.
“[T]he big corporations, the monopolies that control America — the robber baron railroads — have again profiteered from the problem they created and shifted the consequences of it onto the Railroad Workers, the customers, and the general public,” the union said. “This cannot continue. There must be a change.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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As the House prepares to vote Wednesday morning to force the adoption of a rail contract and avert a rail strike, a growing number of progressives in Congress are calling for the inclusion of a key sick leave demand for which unions and workers have pleaded for months.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) appears to be leading the charge for the provision in Congress, telling reporters it is “outrageous” that the agreement, negotiated with the White House in September, lacks union members’ paid sick leave request. He is planning to demand a Senate vote on a provision to provide workers with sick leave.
“Will I demand a vote to ensure that workers in the railroad industry have what tens of millions of workers have, and workers here on Capitol Hill have: guaranteed paid sick leave? The answer is yes,” Sanders, who has been outspoken about the rail contract in recent months, told reporters on Tuesday.
At least one other senator, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York), is on board with the sick leave provision, according to HuffPost. “I’m hopeful we can guarantee them a week of sick days and I’m working with Sen. Sanders and others to get that done,” she said.
The vote was scheduled after President Joe Biden called on Congress to pass a bill to avoid a strike, angering rail unions, workers and labor advocates. In calling to do so, Biden essentially told Congress to override the will of the thousands of union members who voted against ratifying the contract, who have said that the agreement is insufficient to address workers’ concerns over punishingly strict attendance policies and their current complete lack of sick days.
House progressives have also called for the inclusion of the sick leave provision.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) said that he can’t “in good conscience” vote for the bill in its current form. “We fumbled this in Build Back Better, we can’t do that again,” he tweeted.
“Rail workers can’t schedule getting the flu on a Tuesday 30 days in advance,” Bowman added, referring to a provision in the current contract that would require workers to schedule medical appointments 30 days in advance. “What we’re seeing is an inhumane deal being pushed onto workers even after a majority voted it down. If we are a pro-labor party, we must stand up for them. They need paid sick leave now.”
Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) also vowed to vote against a bill that excluded the demand, saying, “Every worker deserves paid sick leave. I will not support a deal that does not provide our rail workers with the paid sick leave they need and deserve.”
“Railroad workers grind themselves to the bone for this country as their labor produces billions for Wall Street,” added Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York). “They demand the basic dignity of paid sick days. I stand with them. If Congress intervenes, it should be to have workers’ backs and secure their demands in legislation.”
It’s unlikely that House leadership will allow the paid leave provision to be included in the bill. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has vowed to bring the agreement to a vote as is, without sick leave. House progressives’ votes are also unlikely to be enough to tank the bill unless it faces widespread Republican opposition or if more Democrats speak up on behalf of the workers opposed to the current contract.
Republicans, unsurprisingly, appear to be opposed to the inclusion of the sick leave provision — as are a number of conservative and corporate groups and, of course, wealthy railroad owners, whose greed is the reason for the current showdown, labor advocates say.
Four of the 12 rail unions involved in the contract negotiations have voted down the agreement in recent weeks, representing over half of the 115,000 affected rail workers. The unions issued furious statements following Biden’s statement, lambasting the president for siding with rail industry owners over workers.
“[P]assing legislation to adopt tentative agreements that exclude paid sick leave for railroad workers will not address rail service issues,” the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes, one of the unions that voted against the contract, wrote in a statement. “Rather, it will worsen supply chain issues and further sicken, infuriate, and disenfranchise railroad workers as they continue shouldering the burdens of the railroads’ mismanagement.”
Railroad Workers United, an inter-union coalition of rail workers, condemned Biden and Democrats who are supporting the current agreement while praising progressives who are standing up for the sick leave provision.
“The ‘most labor-friendly President in history has proven that he and the Democratic Party are not the friends of labor they have touted themselves to be. These wolves in sheep’s clothing have for decades been in bed with corporate America and have allowed them to continue chipping away at the American middle class and organized labor,” said Railroad Workers United co-chair Gabe Christenson.
“Except for a handful of progressives — notably Bernie Sanders — who have shown their willingness to fight for us, the entire political machine must be changed,” Christenson continued.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In the weeks following right-wing billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter in late October, Republican members of Congress gained hundreds of thousands of followers on the platform, while Democrats experienced a purge of followers, a new report finds.
According to an analysis of ProPublica data by The Washington Post, the biggest shifts in follower counts for Republicans have almost all been gains, with the biggest winner being white nationalist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia), followed by far right Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), both gaining over 300,000 followers each. Senators Ted Cruz (Texas) and Rand Paul (Kentucky) both gained roughly 200,000 followers, while Rep. Matt Gaetz (Florida) added over 100,000 accounts to his follower count.
Meanwhile, the largest shifts in follower counts for Democrats have all been negative, save for Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (New York), likely because he is poised to take over for Rep. Nancy Pelosi (California) as the next leader of the Democratic caucus.
The accounts with the biggest losses belong to Senators Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), both of whom lost over 100,000 followers. Rep. Adam Schiff (California) — a member of the January 6 committee and the target of recent attacks from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) as well as a slate of false social media posts — has also lost around 100,000 followers.
Look, it’s congressional Twitter account follower data from @propublica in this @washingtonpost joint:https://t.co/ZFeagko9mo pic.twitter.com/XaR8s5R6Rd
— Derek Willis (@derekwillis) November 28, 2022
Not only do these changes in follow counts generally follow party lines, they also appear to follow the ideological spectrum — some of the furthest right members of Congress gained the most followers, while the most left-leaning members, Sanders and Warren, lost the most.
The Post notes that these findings suggest that left and liberal users appear to be quickly fleeing the platform in the Musk era, while right-wing users are joining Twitter or becoming more active. This could also be the result of the fact that Musk appears to be disproportionately banning prominent left-wing accounts, including antifascist activist and researcher Chad Loder and leftist anarchist collective CrimethInc, while elevating and responding to far right accounts.
The past weeks and years have shown that Musk is a part of the right wing, even though he insists that he is politically neutral. He urged followers to vote for Republicans ahead of the midterm election, has repeatedly donated to Republicans and has tweeted about dangerous far right conspiracy theories on topics like the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband and debunked COVID denialism. Musk’s anti-worker, anti-union management style and hostility toward antiracist and other social justice movements also point to a right-wing ideology.
Musk has also hinted that he will reinstate former President Donald Trump, who was banned for inciting violence around the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Musk has already reinstated accounts belonging to other far right figures like Jordan Peterson (banned for anti-trans hate speech) and the personal account of Greene (banned for COVID disinformation and violent rhetoric).
Such actions have led commentators to speculate that Musk views his ownership of Twitter as a way to advance his right-wing beliefs.
“[I]t’s now impossible to ignore the emerging reality that Musk values owning Twitter as a powerful weapon for right-wing activism,” MSNBC columnist Zeeshan Aleem wrote in an op-ed last week.
“As the richest man on Earth and a proudly exploitative executive, he has a direct interest in amplifying the power of the right,” Aleem continued. “He shares the Republican Party’s hostility to unions, higher tax rates on corporations and the ultra-wealthy, and regulations on businesses. He also seems to find the left’s growing focus on anti-bigotry off-putting, and he doesn’t like challenges to his authority.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The House will intervene in a dispute between unionized rail workers and rail companies by moving to impose a labor contract on workers that excludes their top attendance demands, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) announced after President Joe Biden issued a call for Congress to act on Monday night.
In his statement, Biden said that the adoption of the contract, negotiated earlier this year and rejected by unions representing over half of the more than 115,000 rail workers affected by negotiations, is necessary to avert a “potentially crippling national rail shutdown.”
“[A]t this critical moment for our economy, in the holiday season, we cannot let our strongly held conviction for better outcomes for workers deny workers the benefits of the bargain they reached, and hurl this nation into a devastating rail freight shutdown,” Biden said.
Unions have expressed ire over Biden’s statement. “We’re trying to address the issue here of sick time. It’s very important,” Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen president Michael Baldwin told CNN. “This action prevents us from reaching the end of our process, takes away the strength and ability that we have to force bargaining or force the railroads to … do the right thing.”
“A call to Congress to act immediately to pass legislation that adopts tentative agreements that exclude paid sick leave ignores the Railroad Workers’ concerns,” wrote union Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes (BMWED) in a statement. “It both denies Railroad Workers their right to strike while also denying them of the benefit they would likely otherwise obtain if they were not denied their right to strike.”
The deadline for an agreement is December 8, at which point union members will strike if an agreement isn’t reached. Though several unions have ratified a contract, members across unions have agreed to strike in solidarity with the four unions that have rejected the agreement.
This could have an enormous impact on the U.S. economy, affecting water supplies and potentially costing $2 billion a day in lost economic output, according to railroad trade group the Association of American Railroads. Workers and union supporters say that the blame for the strike would lie nearly entirely on rail owners’ greed and their abject refusal to provide workers with basic provisions enjoyed by many other workers, like paid sick leave and not being penalized for taking time off.
The rail workers say they face grueling working conditions and are expected to work for weeks without a day off, not even for situations like a doctor’s visit, recovering from a heart attack, or the death of a parent. Indeed, one impetus for the current dispute was a locomotive engineer’s death from a heart attack earlier this year after he was forced to delay a doctor’s appointment due to work demands.
Pelosi said shortly after Biden’s statement was released that the House will take up a vote to adopt the agreement “with no poison pills or changes to the negotiated terms,” meaning that workers would not get the sick leave demands they have asked for. As it is, the deal contains raises and would allow employees to take a day off for routine health appointments, if requested 30 days in advance. This agreement, workers say, is not nearly sufficient to address the punishing attendance policies that they face.
It is unclear if the Senate will be able to pass the agreement; in its current form, it will likely see opposition from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who has called for Congress to ensure that workers’ demands are met.
“If the rail industry can afford to spend $25.5 billion this year to buy back its own stock and hand out huge dividends to its wealthy shareholders, please do not tell me it cannot afford to guarantee paid sick days to its workers and provide them with a decent quality of life,” he wrote in a tweet on Saturday, adding later that “Congress must stand with rail workers.”
Workers and labor advocates are furious over Biden’s statement, which comes at odds with his pledge to be a pro-labor, pro-union president.
“This is a legacy defining moment for Joe Biden,” wrote inter-union caucus of railroad workers Railroad Workers United. “He is going down as one of the biggest disappointments in labor history.”
A labor friendly Whitehouse wouldn’t issue a statement with misinformation and outright lies. Union leaders agreed put it to members for a vote—despite politicians and pundits strong arming members, 4 unions representing a majority of organized rail labor rejected the deal. https://t.co/MOa6cIP2cL pic.twitter.com/xvOd5BsmAJ
— Ross Grooters (@RossGrooters) November 29, 2022
“Full sellout from the White House for the majority of rail workers who rejected the deal the President brokered, preemptively denying them the right to strike,” wrote Labor Notes journalist Jonah Furman. “This was the ‘which side are you on?’ moment, and the White House chose the railroad bosses.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Special fascist election police units formed in three Republican-led states to perpetuate Donald Trump’s voter fraud lies have so far been unable to uncover evidence of widespread voter fraud in their investigations of the 2022 midterm elections, further cementing that, as election officials have said, such fraud doesn’t exist.
Though these units have been probing isolated incidents — something that local election officials already do otherwise — they have turned up “no indication of systemic problems,” as The Associated Press reports. This undermines the supposed goals of the groups, formed in Florida, Georgia and Virginia, to uncover voter fraud, as even efforts by special groups formed to scour their states for supposed election crimes have turned up empty.
Their findings, or lack thereof, line up with the findings of other government officials who have also found zero evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2022 election — just as masses of agencies, election officials and journalists, even conservative groups and Trump-aligned officials, found no evidence of widespread fraud in 2020, contradicting Trump’s claims.
That didn’t stop Republican officials from continuing to perpetuate the “Big Lie” about the election, however, spurring the creation of a mass voter suppression movement led by Republicans across the country.
The formation of election police — what Georgia state Rep. Jasmine Clark (D) called a “solution looking for a problem,” per the AP — was a part of that trend. And though they have turned up short on evidence of fraud, election experts say that they have already likely achieved their real goal: placing a chilling effect on the entire electoral process.
On top of existing voter suppression laws, election police units send the message to voters and potential election workers that there is a target on their backs if they step one toe out of line. Indeed, in Florida, far-right Gov. Ron DeSantis’s election police force arrested 20 people earlier this year who had prior convictions but who were nonetheless able to register to vote, apparently leading them to believe that they could cast a ballot.
At least one of those arrested has had his case dismissed, but arrests have achieved their goal: many of those who have been convicted of crimes say they are now afraid of voting, and won’t risk casting a ballot and being arrested.
“We’ve heard stories about voters who are eligible to vote but have a criminal conviction in their past, and they are now scared to register and vote,” which is “deeply concerning,” Michael Pernick, NAACP voting rights attorney, told the AP.
In reality, Republicans are trying to create a pathway, either legal or through force, to ensure that Republicans never lose elections again, as Wisconsin GOP gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels said earlier this month before losing to Democrat Tim Evers.
In Arizona, for instance, a Republican-controlled county is refusing to certify its election results ahead of a Monday deadline to do so, in protest of incumbent Mark Kelly winning his race for U.S. Senate in the state. Though there is no evidence of voter fraud in the state, Republicans seem to be trying to circumvent the Democrat’s win or invalidate it altogether. Democrats have threatened legal action over the move.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Workers at two Peet’s Coffee locations in Davis, California, are filing for a union this week, hoping to join a growing cafe labor organizing wave and to become the first of the company’s over 330 locations to unionize.
As first reported by More Perfect Union, workers at the Peet’s locations say they have been organizing for five months with Workers United, a subsidiary of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) that’s behind Starbucks workers’ union drive, which has unionized more than 250 stores over the last year.
Workers are confident they will be successful, with union leaders at both stores saying that employee support for the union is nearly unanimous. They have asked management to agree to a list of non-interference principles and requested that management not retaliate against workers for unionizing.
Workers say they were prompted to organize by poor working conditions within the chain. Pay starts at minimum wage, they say, which in California is $15 an hour — below the living wage of at least $21.82 an hour for an adult in the state with no children, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator. Workers are also sent home early from their shifts, which cuts their pay and places stress on the remaining staff.
“I really love what I do, and I really believe in the Peet’s values, but every year it gets harder to do this job, it gets busier and busier and everything gets more and more expensive,” organizer Alyx Land told More Perfect Union. “At my last review, I got the highest mark you can get and that raise was 50 cents. With inflation, that’s less money than I made last year. It radicalized me.”
“It’s just not enough money, fundamentally, for the jobs we’re doing here — they’re really demanding, physically and mentally, and very technical,” Land continued.
Hostile customers and the increasing popularity of mobile orders has created stressful and sometimes abusive conditions at work, employees say, with company higher-ups taking little action to mitigate problems like harassment from customers. Meanwhile, there is little opportunity for upward movement for workers.
“There’s no recourse for harassment by customers, we’ve had a few members of our clientele who have made a lot of employees really uncomfortable and not comfortable coming to work,” said North Davis worker Schroedter Kinman. “What ends up happening is nothing gets done, and people continue to be uncomfortable and feel unsafe in the workplace.”
Similar issues have been reported by unionizing Starbucks workers, who also say that low pay, harassment from customers and seeming indifference from management in solving such problems drove them to unionize.
In speaking with workers, it’s clear that they face many of the same issues that Starbucks workers faced in August 2021. The rise of mobile ordering has doubled workloads with no increase in staff or pay to compensate. https://t.co/EdYEVRqOKv
— Jordan Zakarin (@jordanzakarin) November 28, 2022
If successful, the Peet’s workers will form a union at one of the largest coffee chains in the country. They would also join workers at local coffee shops, like Darwin’s in Boston, Colectivo in Wisconsin and Spot Coffee in Buffalo, the last of which inspired the Starbucks movement.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In the wake of several high-profile mass shootings, Democrats are pushing for the Senate to pass an assault weapons ban before Republicans take control of the House in January.
Last Thursday, President Joe Biden renewed his call for Congress to pass an assault weapons ban after shootings at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia, and at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, left 11 dead and dozens injured. There have been over 600 mass shootings in the U.S. this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, putting 2022 on track to become the second-highest year for gun violence on record.
“The idea we still allow semi-automatic weapons to be purchased is sick. It’s just sick. It has no, no social redeeming value, zero, none. Not a single solitary rationale for it except profits for gun manufacturers,” Biden said. “I’m going to try. I’m going to try to get rid of assault weapons.”
The House passed an assault weapons ban earlier this year that would ban the sale, transfer, manufacturing and importing of certain military-style assault weapons that have become the weapon of choice for many mass shooters. The bill would still allow people to keep guns they already own, but could prevent shooters from obtaining guns just before carrying out a shooting, as many shooters have done, including the Walmart gunman.
However, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) predicted over the weekend that Democrats wouldn’t have the votes to overcome a filibuster in the Senate, likely marking another potentially life-saving bill stopped in its tracks by the archaic rule.
“I’m glad that President (Joe) Biden is gonna be pushing us to take a vote on an assault weapons ban,” Murphy said in a CNN interview on Sunday. “Does it have 60 votes in the Senate right now? Probably not. But let’s see if we can try to get that number as close to 60 as possible.”
“If we don’t have the votes, then we’ll talk to [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer and maybe come back next year, with maybe an additional senator, and see if we can do better,” he went on.
He said that lawmakers need to discuss the fact that there are many counties where right-wing law enforcement officials aren’t enforcing state or federal gun restrictions, including in the Colorado county where the anti-LGBTQ shooting took place. He also suggested refusing to send federal funding to such counties.
The next few weeks could be Democrats’ last chance to pass an assault weapons ban for at least two years. Republicans, who have a close relationship with the gun lobby, are unlikely to pass an assault weapons ban in the House, which they are slated to control by a slim majority in the upcoming Congress; even if a few Republicans would vote for the bill if it came to the floor, as two Republicans did earlier this year, it’s unlikely that Republican leaders would bring the ban to a vote in the first place.
Biden had urged the Senate to pass the assault weapons ban after it was passed by the House in July following a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and a racist shooting in Buffalo, New York, in May, which left a total of over 30 people dead, including 19 children.
At the time, the White House released a statement of administration policy — which carries more weight than a simple public statement — pointing to the reduction in gun deaths in the 10 years following the 1994 assault weapons ban. “For those 10 years, mass shootings declined. When the ban expired in 2004, mass shootings tripled,” the statement read.
Congress increased its scrutiny of gun manufacturers following this summer’s shootings, and the House Oversight Committee found in a report that major gun companies have made over $1 billion in revenue on sales of assault weapons over the last 10 years. Such companies have sold the guns behind infamous shootings like the school shootings in Uvalde and Parkland, Florida; the Las Vegas massacre in 2017; and the mass killing at a gay nightclub in Florida in 2016.
These manufacturers are increasingly marketing to young people, creating “a gun violence epidemic by liberalizing markets and aggressively pursuing profits,” as Jonathan Ng wrote for Truthout earlier this year. Mass shooters are often young; the anti-LGBTQ Colorado Springs shooter is 22, while the Uvalde shooter bought the guns that he would use to massacre children shortly after his 18th birthday.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) announced on Thursday that he is seeking to become the chair of a powerful Senate committee that has wide influence over what he is planning to prioritize in the role: Medicare for All, workers’ rights and affordable college.
The Vermont senator is likely to take the helm of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, where he has previously served as a member. From the top spot, he will be able to steer the committee’s priorities on health policy and other areas of special interest to progressives.
“As chairman of the committee, he will focus on universal healthcare, lowering the cost of prescription drugs, increasing access to higher education, and protecting workers’ rights on the job,” Sanders’s communications director Mike Casca said in a statement.
Sanders’s HELP chairmanship could lead to an advancement in priorities that he has previously advocated for but that have not necessarily taken hold among other members of Congress; he could, for instance, pursue legislation like his bipartisan proposal to safely import drugs from other countries in order to lower prices for patients.
Meanwhile, he would have a larger, more visible platform to champion Medicare for All, for which he has advocated relentlessly for years; earlier this year, he introduced legislation to establish Medicare for All in the U.S., which is the only wealthy country in the world without a universal health care system. Though the idea is far from having enough votes to pass, his advocacy could help sway senators to his side.
“I think there’s a caricature out there of Bernie Sanders that doesn’t take note of the fact that the guy is a politician who has been doing this for a really long time,” Social Security Works executive director Alex Lawson told The Washington Post. “He knows how to work with his colleagues.”
In lieu of Medicare for All, for instance, Sanders has spent the last couple of years relentlessly advocating for the lowering of prescription drug prices, introducing bills to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices and commissioning reports to highlight the issue.
He has also pushed for the expansion of Medicare to include dental, vision and hearing — a measure that has support among a wide set of Democrats in the Senate, but that has been rejected by pharma-funded conservative Democrats Senators Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona) and Joe Manchin (West Virginia).
Sanders’s chairmanship could be a headache for the pharmaceutical industry, which is notorious for being the most powerful lobby in Washington. As one pharmaceutical lobbyist told The Washington Post, “He’ll go after [the drug companies] at every turn, and they only have a couple friends left in the caucus any more so it’s going to be tough.”
The HELP Committee also has wide jurisdiction over federal labor regulations on issues like wages and working conditions, meaning that Sanders’s chairmanship could advance his agenda to expand workers’ rights in a pivotal time for the labor movement. Sanders has tried to get the federal minimum wage raised to $15 an hour — an issue that falls under the purview of the HELP Committee — but was shot down by Sinema and Manchin in 2021.
Other issues like the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would massively increase workers’ union and collective bargaining rights, also fall under the HELP Committee’s jurisdiction, and could see movement under Sanders. The bill passed the House last year but never came to a vote in the Senate, where it only went as far as being referred to the HELP committee. Sanders could direct the committee to take a vote on the bill or hold hearings on the proposal and on workers’ rights at large.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (California) announced on Thursday that she is stepping down as leader of the Democratic caucus after two decades in the role — and, while she often obstructed the left wing of her party during her time in leadership, the legislator favored to follow her, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, could be even more damaging to the left if he is chosen as her successor.
“With great confidence in our caucus, I will not seek reelection to Democratic leadership in the next Congress,” Pelosi said on the House floor. She will remain in office, as will her first and second in command, Representatives Steny Hoyer (Maryland) and James Clyburn (South Carolina), the former of whom is also stepping down.
As leader of the Democratic caucus, Pelosi, a centrist and one of the richest members of Congress, often butted heads with the left-leaning members of her party. She has publicly feuded with the progressive “Squad” — something that the group pushed back on in 2019, pointing out that the leader was picking on newly elected women of color at the time — and has made decisions that have deeply frustrated progressives.
In 2020, for instance, Pelosi endorsed a centrist in his race to unseat progressive Sen. Ed Markey (Massachusetts), an original sponsor of the Green New Deal. This endorsement came despite her supposed position of supporting Democratic incumbents, which she did with her endorsement this year of Rep. Henry Cuellar (Texas), the only anti-abortionist in the caucus.
Pelosi has proven a roadblock to progressive policy as well, and in recent years has dismissed progressive priorities like the Green New Deal (“the green dream or whatever”), Medicare for All (“I’m not a big fan”), and student debt cancellation (“not even a discussion”). In the meantime, she has repeatedly proved a supporter of policies that help enrich the ultra-wealthy.
However, Jeffries could be far more hostile to leftists if his past positions are a reflection of how he would lead; if Pelosi was a force that stopped progressives in their tracks, Jeffries could be a bludgeon actively forcing the progressive movement back, depending on how he decides to exercise his power.
Jeffries, a former lawyer, identifies as a progressive but has alliances in the center or right wing of the party; as The American Prospect reported last year, the New York lawmaker has stayed silent as supposed fellow progressives have lobbied for issues in recent years, and started a PAC last year, called Team Blue, that was formed specifically to protect Democratic incumbents from progressive challengers. His co-founder for Team Blue was Rep. Josh Gottheimer (New Jersey), a conservative Democrat who was key in torpedoing the Build Back Better Act last year.
Crucially, Jeffries has voiced unfiltered antipathy toward the left. In a profile by Edward-Isaac Dovere in The Atlantic last year, Jeffries contrasted himself, a “progressive,” with the left-leaning factions of the party that he was even then favored to take over in the House. “There will never be a moment where I bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism,” he said.
In a separate interview in The New York Times about the upcoming primaries for the midterm election and in the heat of negotiations for the Build Back Better Act last year, Jeffries took his stance against the left even further, outright attacking anti-establishment leftists.
“The extreme left is obsessed with talking trash about mainstream Democrats on Twitter, when the majority of the electorate constitute mainstream Democrats at the polls,” he said. “In the post-[Donald] Trump era, the anti-establishment line of attack is lame — when President [Joe] Biden and Democratic legislators are delivering millions of good-paying jobs, the fastest-growing economy in 40 years and a massive child tax cut.”
The left would say that there are plenty of reasons to be anti-establishment in a time when the establishment is embracing corruption and corporate rule, but Jeffries may view anti-establishment views as a personal attack. Even in times when Democrats as a whole may have been pivoting away from Wall Street, Jeffries has taken donations from deep-pocketed conservative interests; he has been one of Congress’s leading recipients of hedge fund donations and is one of the only Democrats who has taken donations from Fox News’s PAC, News Corp.
At the same time, Jeffries has taken positions that progressives — or at least many within the progressive base — would find heinous. For instance, he is vehemently pro-Israel, and has supported legislation that would penalize companies and Americans that support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement; this legislation is a major slap in the face to Palestinian advocates and could endanger Americans’ right to participate in political boycotts at all.
Jeffries isn’t facing other challengers for the leadership spot yet, but progressives aren’t likely to support him; after all, Jeffries was once rumored to be a target to be primaried by those close to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), though that effort never came to pass. The leadership election is slated to take place in roughly two weeks, on November 30, meaning that if there will be a progressive or left-leaning challenger, they will likely have to emerge soon.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Ticketmaster is under fire from the Senate’s top antitrust legislator for appearing to abuse its monopolistic position over the ticket market in the wake of the platform’s snafu when Taylor Swift concert tickets went on sale this week.
On Wednesday, Senate Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights Subcommittee Chair Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) sent a letter to Ticketmaster CEO Michael Rapino, saying that the company appears to be abusing its grip over the market, which she said resembles a monopoly. In her letter, she cited issues that have plagued ticket buyers in recent years, like high fees that can almost equal the price of a ticket itself.
“Ticketmaster and LiveNation dominate the live entertainment supply chain with powerful positions in primary ticketing, secondary ticketing, concert promotion, artist management, tour sponsorships, and event venue operation,” Klobuchar wrote. “Ticketmaster’s power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services. That can result in dramatic service failures, where consumers are the ones that pay the price.”
Klobuchar went on to say that “there have been numerous complaints about your company’s compliance” with an antitrust consent decree that it signed in 2010 when it merged with Live Nation. “I am concerned about a pattern of non-compliance with your legal obligations,” she wrote.
The lawmaker added in a Twitter post on Wednesday that “What is going on with Ticketmaster is an example of why we need strong antitrust enforcement! Monopolies wreak havoc on consumers and our economy.”
Antitrust experts say that the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation — which they say happened as a result of lax antitrust regulation — has laid the groundwork for Ticketmaster’s current grip on the market.
NEW: Ticketmaster is destroying live music.
Their scam fees now cost as much as 78% of a ticket. They control the events, the venues, even the artists.
There’s a movement pushing the Justice Department to take on their monopoly. @Doctorow breaks it down. pic.twitter.com/Ai0AwuVJQX
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) October 19, 2022
Though Ticketmaster claims it only dominates about 30 percent of the concert market, analytics companies have found that it captured 66 percent of sales among major ticket platforms last year. Meanwhile, in 2010, the Justice Department found that Ticketmaster’s hold over major concert venues was over 80 percent — and that was even before regulators allowed the merger to go through.
The merger has not only hurt consumers, but also the music scene at large, experts have found, as smaller venues and artists are hurt by the company’s dominance and control over the industry.
Concertgoers often have no choice but to use Ticketmaster, however. On Tuesday, as tickets for Swift’s tour went on sale, the website crashed and fans waited for hours in the digital queue just to have tickets sell out; tickets then began popping up on resale sites like Stubhub for tens of thousands of dollars.
Ticketmaster also made headlines this summer when Bruce Springsteen fans, hoping to see Springsteen on his first tour in years, went to purchase early access tickets on Ticketmaster only to see tickets being sold firsthand for up to $5,500 due to Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing system that adjusts ticket prices based on demand.
Numerous House representatives and senators have called for Ticketmaster to be broken up in recent days.
“Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, its merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) on Twitter. “Break them up.”
Rep. David Cicilline, who previously sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking for an investigation into the company, wrote, “[Ticketmaster]’s excessive wait times and fees are completely unacceptable, as seen with today’s [Taylor Swift] tickets, and are a symptom of a larger problem. It’s no secret that Live Nation-Ticketmaster is an unchecked monopoly.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Workers for more than 100 Starbucks locations nationwide are staging a strike on the company’s “Red Cup Day” on Thursday in protest of union-busting tactics that the company has relentlessly unleashed on pro-union workers.
The “Red Cup Rebellion,” as workers have dubbed it, will see more than 2,000 workers on strike, the union says, with 112 stores on strike in dozens of cities from coast to coast. It is the largest national action taken by Starbucks Workers United so far, as the union comes up on the first anniversary of its first stores voting to unionize.
“Red Cup Day” is usually one of the company’s most profitable days, when workers give customers Starbucks-branded reusable red holiday cups with certain purchases. Striking workers will instead give out red union-branded reusable cups to customers “in response to Starbucks’ union-busting tactics and refusal to bargain,” the union wrote.
“Whether it’s firing one of my coworkers for wearing a suicide awareness pin, how they’ve closed down a dozen locations in the process of unionizing, or how we’re being denied benefits that non-union stores are getting, Starbucks has left behind the very values that drew many of us to the company in the first place,” said union organizer and Buffalo barista Michelle Eisen in a statement. “You cannot be pro-LGTBQ, pro-BLM, pro-sustainability, and anti-union.”
“This Red Cup Day, we’re organizing for a voice on the job and a true seat at the table,” Eisen continued.
The company has waged a relentless anti-union campaign, racking up nearly 40 complaints from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) encompassing hundreds of alleged labor violations. This includes four requests for injunctions from the agency — one of the strongest actions that labor officials can take against a union-busting company.
Workers have continually protested actions from the company, with dozens of strikes in the past months; earlier this year, workers in Boston waged a 64-day long strike in protest of the company’s hourly availability policy, and workers at the flagship roastery in New York City are currently in the fourth week of a strike as workers say the company has refused to fix mold and bed bug problems in the store.
The union has also been frustrated recently as the company, after delaying contract negotiations for months, has been stonewalling workers who come to the bargaining table, despite many of them taking days off to bargain. Workers have reported that the company’s negotiators will walk out of negotiations after just minutes of being in the room, refusing to bargain.
“They do the same thing in every session,” Eisen told The Washington Post. “It’s further delay tactics. They’re legally obligated to show up to the table, but they’re not done playing games.”
The company’s union-busting campaign isn’t just a problem for Starbucks workers, the union says — rather, it’s a problem that affects the entire labor movement as other companies learn from Starbucks’s actions.
“Starbucks’s continuous and lawless union busting has cast doubt on the future of the American labor movement. If Starbucks can break the law to stamp out their workers’ unionization efforts, they could be writing the playbook for countless other companies to follow,” the union said.
Workers hope that the “Red Cup Day” strike will demonstrate how essential workers are in the company’s profitability.
“One of the ways Starbucks makes their billions is by exploiting our labor, especially on days like their famous ‘Red Cup Day,’” said Boston shift manager Willow Montana. “If the company won’t bargain in good faith, why should we come to work where we are understaffed, underpaid, and overworked?”
The protest has garnered the support of major progressive leaders like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who tweeted on Thursday, “I’m proud to stand with Starbucks workers on strike today across the country. CEO Howard Schultz is illegally union busting and firing workers for organizing. Mr. Schultz, it is time to recognize the stores that unionized and negotiate with workers in good faith.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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A federal judge has struck down an anti-immigration policy originally invoked by President Donald Trump that has seen millions of asylum seekers expelled, marking a victory for immigrant advocates and human rights experts who have long called the policy cruel and inhumane.
Washington, D.C. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled on Tuesday that the policy, known as Title 42, is “arbitrary and capricious” and that it is in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which guides how federal agencies make and enforce regulations.
With “GREAT RELUCTANCE,” Sullivan wrote, he has issued a stay, as requested by the Biden administration. This means that the policy will stay in place until December 21, at which point officials will have to stop enforcement of the policy.
Title 42 had originally been put in place in 2020 to supposedly stop the spread of COVID-19, though public health experts say that there is no evidence that it has done so. Further, in vacating the policy, Sullivan wrote that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had failed to consider the “harm that could be caused” by expulsions and didn’t consider alternative approaches to the policy, such as processing asylum seekers outdoors, having them self-quarantine, or even solutions like vaccination and testing.
“It is unreasonable for the CDC to assume that it can ignore the consequences of any actions it chooses to take in the pursuit of fulfilling its goals, particularly when those actions included the extraordinary decision to suspend the codified procedural and substantive rights of noncitizens seeking safe harbor,” Sullivan wrote.
Sullivan concluded that the CDC had never had solid reasoning for implementing Title 42, as Immigration Council Policy Director Aaron Reichlin-Melnik pointed out on Twitter. The judge cited records brought by the plaintiffs, which show that during the first seven months of the policy, only one asylum seeker per day on average tested positive for COVID.
Immigration groups that have sued over the policy, which was put in place by Trump but embraced by the Biden administration, celebrated the judge’s ruling.
“This is a huge victory and one that literally has life-and-death stakes,” said American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney Lee Gelernt, who led the lawsuit. “We have said all along that using Title 42 against asylum seekers was inhumane and driven purely by politics. Hopefully this ruling will end this horrific policy once and for all.”
“Title 42 was never about public safety or the pandemic, but rather is shrouded in xenophobia and anti-immigrant campaigns to keep immigrants out of the U.S.,” said Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) litigation director Tami Goodlette. “Judge Sullivan’s decision sends a clear message to those who try to bake their xenophobia into future policies: Seeking asylum is a human right.”
Under Title 42, border agents have expelled asylum seekers nearly 2.5 million times. The Biden administration was blocked from being able to end the policy earlier this year. But, even as it has postured as being against the policy, the Biden administration has expelled more asylum seekers under the policy than the Trump administration ever did. Biden officials even expanded the use of the policy last month in order to expel Venezuelan asylum seekers at the border.
These expulsions have put asylum seekers escaping violence and political instability at risk of being returned to hostile and dangerous conditions in places like Haiti or camps along the Mexico-U.S. border.
Progressive lawmakers and immigration advocates have expressed deep frustration over the Biden administration’s use and expansion of the rule, despite Biden’s promise that he would end use of the policy during his first year in office. Detractors of the rule say that Title 42 has been used to discriminate against non-white immigrants, pointing out that Ukrainian asylum seekers who are fleeing conditions similar to those faced by asylum seekers from certain predominantly Black, Latinx or non-Christian-majority countries have not been expelled at nearly the same rate.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock’s campaign has filed a lawsuit against Georgia over Republican officials’ decision this week to bar early voting on Saturdays for the upcoming runoff election, slamming officials for their allegedly “cherry-pick[ed]” interpretation of state voting laws.
Over the weekend, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office sent out a memo saying that, due to a combination of restrictive voting laws put in place by Republicans in recent years, voters will not be given the opportunity to cast a ballot on the only eligible Saturday, November 26, for the early voting window because of its proximity to a holiday. In this case, the holidays would be Thanksgiving on the Thursday before and a Confederate holiday commemorating Robert E. Lee on Friday that the state has dubbed “State Holiday.”
However, voting rights advocates and Democrats say that this interpretation of the law is false. In the lawsuit, which was joined by the Democratic Party of Georgia and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, attorneys filing on behalf of the Democrats argue that Raffensperger “misreads” and “cherry-picks” provisions of laws to apply them to the runoff election, when in reality they apply only to general or primary elections.
“Despite the law’s command that counties begin offering advance voting ‘as soon as possible,’ Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has taken the unsupportable position that counties are barred from opening the polls on Saturday, November 26,” the lawsuit reads. The attorneys point out that Raffensperger had previously said that voters would likely have a chance to vote on that Saturday.
The plaintiffs seek to ensure that counties are not precluded from offering early voting on that Saturday.
The Republicans’ argument for the restriction on Saturday voting comes from a 2016 law that supposedly bars early voting on a Saturday following a state holiday. This supposedly wasn’t a problem in the 2020 cycle’s runoff election for both U.S. Senate seats for the state, as those took place nine weeks after the general election.
However, due to a voter suppression law passed last year by the Republican-dominated general assembly, runoff elections now take place four weeks after Election Day, with the early voting window coinciding with Thanksgiving and the state holiday.
But state officials haven’t followed the 2016 law in this way in the past, one voting rights expert found.
“During the 2020/21 GA Senate runoff, multiple GA counties offered early voting on the Saturday following a holiday (Christmas Day); and the same statutory language that [Raffensperger] relies on now was in place back then,” election law expert Marc Elias pointed out on Twitter on Tuesday. “What changed?” Elias is the founder of voting rights group Democracy Docket and a partner in the Elias Law Group, which helped file the lawsuit.
Voting and civil rights groups have also taken issue with Raffensperger’s interpretation, especially frustrated by the symbolism of colonialist and Confederate holidays barring people from voting.
On Tuesday, the Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia and the Southern Poverty Law Center sent a letter to election supervisors in all 159 counties in the state urging them to add at least three additional early voting days on top of and before the currently scheduled five days of early voting, including on Sunday, November 27 and the two days immediately preceding Thanksgiving.
“Georgia law affords you broad discretion to add additional days for advance voting,” the groups write, citing a law that says that early voting should begin “[a]s soon as possible prior to a runoff,” within certain parameters, which they say grants officials the right to offer additional days of voting.
“If you only offer advance voting on the five days required by statute (which, as noted above, is limited to weekdays), there is a significant risk that many voters will be unable to participate due to obligations during the workday,” the letter reads. “Moreover, any voters who are able to vote during the workday are at risk of facing extremely long lines given the limited options that are available.”
The runoff election could be crucial for the Democratic Party. If Warnock wins, it would expand Democrats’ razor-thin majority in the Senate from 50 seats to 51 seats, meaning that the party could potentially work around conservatives in the party like Senators Joe Manchin (West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona). It would also give the party breathing room in case there are absences or vacancies within the party.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In Elon Musk’s first three weeks as CEO of Twitter, he has orchestrated a firing spree at the company, laying off thousands of workers and, this week, seeking to crush dissent among employees by reportedly firing workers who have criticized him.
Overnight on Tuesday, Musk fired around 20 employees who have criticized him on the company’s Slack, a workplace instant messaging platform, according to tech newsletter Platformer. Workers were told that their “recent behavior has violated company policy” in emails, some of which employees received overnight.
“My twitter account was protected at the time, so I can only assume this was for not showing 100 percent loyalty in Slack,” one engineer, Nick Morgan, wrote on Twitter. “I’ve heard the same thing has happened to many others now.”
In a show of contempt for the workers he fired, Musk tweeted on Tuesday, “I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses. Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.” He also made an ableist comment against one of the fired workers in response to a post by far right harassment account Libs of TikTok.
Recent terminations appear to run directly against Musk’s supposed identity of being a “free speech absolutist.” The firings, along with the fact that Musk has begun banning and suspending users who make fun of him on the platform, are instead painting a picture of a man who will not tolerate criticism and who is openly hostile when people who work for him step out of line.
The group of firings came after Musk publicly fired an employee, Eric Frohnhoefer, who corrected a post Musk made on Monday about the speed of Twitter. Frohnhoefer, who said he had spent six years working on Twitter for Android, tweeted that Musk should “ask questions privately” of his workers, “maybe using Slack or email” — rather than making public, incorrect statements.
In response to Frohnhoefer’s posts, a Twitter user suggested that Frohnhoefer had an “attitude” that Musk wouldn’t want on his team, to which Musk responded: “He’s fired.” Musk’s tweet has since been deleted.
Frohnhoefer told Forbes that he didn’t get any official notice about his termination, but, rather, his work laptop was remotely shut down and password protected.
Guess it is official now. pic.twitter.com/5SRwotyD8J
— Eric Frohnhoefer @
(@EricFrohnhoefer) November 14, 2022The firings came after Musk fired thousands of workers at Twitter, seemingly with abandon. Shortly after he took the helm at the company, he laid off half of the staff, or about 3,700 workers. Then, over the weekend, Musk fired about 4,400 contractors that were working for the company, or about 80 percent of the contract workforce.
Even if Musk does stop the terminations soon — and former employees say he will have to if he wishes to continue having a functioning website — the recent round of firings will likely have a chilling effect on employees’ willingness to confront Musk or correct him when he’s wrong.
It’s within reason to assume that Musk is aiming to have employees who will capitulate to his every will. Workers at Tesla have reported there being a “cult-like” following for him at the company. “No company have I worked for, in our quarterly meetings, do you clap when a CEO walks into the podium. So that’s just something that people do at Tesla,” one worker told Insider in 2018. Other Tesla workers have been fired after calling attention to publicly-known issues with Tesla cars’ self-driving features online.
With Tesla’s seemingly anti-worker environment and reportedly virulently exploitative conditions, the problems appear to be mostly contained within the company. But cultivating such an environment within Twitter could have ramifications far beyond the social media company, as the platform has become a vital tool for journalists, politicians, organizers, and other important figures to communicate.
Commentators are noting that Musk will likely turn Twitter into a haven for right-wingers to push their agenda while silencing left-leaning speech, citing the fact that Musk appears to be increasingly conservative, spreading far right conspiracy theories and using his influence on the platform to tell users to vote for Republicans.
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As the midterm elections wrap up with a better-than-expected showing for Democrats, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is saying that the Democratic Party must make curbing the influence of deep-pocketed political donors one of its top priorities in order to save democracy from the far right.
The right is posing a credible and concerning threat to democracy in the U.S. — and their attacks on democracy are aided by the fact that billionaires and corporations are exercising ever increasing influence over elections, as enabled by 2010’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Sanders said in a new interview with Rolling Stone.
“We have got to do everything we can to defend American democracy,” Sanders said, explaining what he thinks the Democratic Party should prioritize for the next two years.
Something in this cycle that was “not talked about, I think, enough is the degree to which billionaire money impacted this election. It’s disgusting,” he said. “As I mentioned, I was in Pittsburgh with Summer Lee. She had to run against millions of dollars of AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] super PAC money coming in the last couple of weeks, and she ended up beating it back. This is a major, major problem.”
AIPAC, a pro-Israel group that has emerged as a strong force against progressive candidates in recent years, indeed spent over $1 million in the general election and $2 million in the primary trying to defeat progressive Summer Lee in her campaign for a Pennsylvania U.S. House seat. Lee ultimately triumphed, but AIPAC succeeded in defeating other progressive primary and general House candidates along the way, like Jamie McLeod-Skinner in Oregon, who lost to her Republican opponent by 2.5 points.
“So when you’re looking at democracy, it’s not just Trump. It is the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which has got to be dealt with,” Sanders continued.
Citizens United, which has been the subject of progressive ire for years, allows entities to pour an unlimited amount of money into elections.
This has handed an astounding amount of influence to billionaires and corporations, which progressives like Sanders say can essentially buy elections due in part to Citizens United. Indeed, OpenSecrets found in an analysis of House elections last week that, of the races called as of Thursday, 96 percent were won by the candidate who spent the most in the election.
Since Citizens United was handed down by the Supreme Court 12 years ago, the amount of money being poured into elections by deep-pocketed interests has been rapidly growing, with no signs of stopping.
According to a recent report by Americans for Tax Fairness, just 465 billionaires had poured an astonishing $881 million into the election by the end of September, putting them well on track to have spent a billion dollars on the election by the time Election Day came around.
Meanwhile, the flow of dark money — or political donations where the donors’ names and identities are hidden — has reached a record high for midterm elections, OpenSecrets has found. As of Election Day, outside groups, which are largely funded by dark money, had spent more than $2.1 billion in federal races this cycle, smashing the previous record of $1.6 billion, set in 2018.
Sanders has previously spoken up about this issue. In 2015, Sanders introduced a constitutional amendment that would undo the Citizens United decision, calling it “one of the most disastrous decisions in” the Supreme Court’s history at the time, and he has continually spoken up about the issue over the years.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The White House is reportedly considering once again extending the student loan payment pause that is currently set to expire at the end of the year, as President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 of student debt for borrowers is facing a court challenge from Republicans.
According to The Washington Post, two people with knowledge of the matter say that White House officials are in early talks about a potential pause extension, though no decisions have been made and it’s unclear if Biden has been involved in the talks.
“As the legal vulnerability has become clearer and clearer, the White House has been making increasingly firm plans to extend the loan repayment pause,” one source said. “The extension we’re likely to see is meant to make sure borrowers don’t have the rug pulled out from under them, rather than an indefinite replacement for loan forgiveness.”
When Biden announced the student loan forgiveness plan — to cancel $20,000 of debt for Pell Grant recipients or $10,000 for debtors who make less than $125,000 a year — in August, he said that his administration was extending the payment pause “one final time” through December 31.
But as a result of a lawsuit filed by six Republican-led states, the plan was blocked last week by Texas federal judge Mark Pittman, and was temporarily barred by an injunction issued by several Republican-nominated judges in the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals this week.
It’s likely that the plan will end up before the Supreme Court. From there, the fate of the plan is uncertain. Regardless of whether or not the plan will be struck down by the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, however, it could take months for a decision to be made.
If the moratorium is not extended, borrowers could be stuck in limbo, unsure whether they should begin paying the loans again when they could be canceled anyway or risk being in default status if the plan is ultimately nixed by the Court.
Debt cancellation advocates say that extending the moratorium is a bare minimum step that Biden can take in response to the court decisions.
“For three years, borrowers have been a political punching bag facing uncertainty about the future of their student loans. The judge’s decision makes the future even more worrisome,” said Student Debt Crisis Center President Natalia Abrams in a statement. “President Biden must pause payments further into the future to provide financial stability and peace of mind to 40 million Americans.”
The Debt Collective says that Biden has several options to provide relief to borrowers. They have called on the president to extend the moratorium indefinitely and say that he can cancel student debt using a different legal route in order to circumvent the current legal challenge. The group also says that he can and should simply ignore Pittman’s ruling, as student debt cancellation is a policy choice that shouldn’t be subject to court decisions to begin with.
“The problem is not the legal authority [to cancel student debt]. The authority is on strong footing,” the Debt Collective wrote on Twitter on Monday. “The problem is the courts are rigged. Right-wing judges are taking sides in policy debates that no one elected them to resolve. Biden must ignore them.”
Indeed, legal experts have pointed out that there were vast and bizarre insufficiencies in Pittman’s arguments.
Pittman openly admitted that he didn’t know basic tenets of the cancellation program, contradicted his own arguments that the plaintiffs recruited for the lawsuit by the GOP suffered damage as a result of the plan, and compared Congress granting the executive branch the authority to cancel student debt to the 1933 law that gave power to Adolf Hitler and rise to the Nazi party.
Some legal experts have taken issue with the fact that Pittman took up the case at all — after all, every other challenge brought by conservatives to challenge the plan has been dismissed by courts, having been determined by judges as an issue that shouldn’t be brought to the judiciary branch in the first place.
“[O]bjections to the Biden program present the classic kind of ‘generalized grievance’ that the Supreme Court has long held federal courts lack the constitutional authority to resolve,” wrote CNN legal analyst Steve Vladeck. If judges adjudicate based on their biases rather than established judicial roles, Vladeck wrote, then “the courts aren’t acting as courts; they’re just taking sides in policy debates that no one elected them to resolve.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) will steadily lose its ability to enforce federal labor laws if Congress doesn’t pass an increase in funding for the agency before this session ends in January, the agency union is warning.
Labor union activity has massively increased across the country over the past year, and the agency says it’s struggling to keep up as it undergoes a nine-year drought in budget raises. The union says that the U.S. will soon be facing a “crisis” in labor regulation as the agency’s workload piles up and it can no longer afford to pay all of its employees.
“With fixed costs rising by [more than or equal to] 4.6 percent, the NLRB is facing budgetary Armageddon. The agency is already in a hiring freeze, and for the first time in a decade we are hearing rumblings of employee furloughs,” the NLRB union wrote. “We are DESPERATELY asking Congress to increase our budget in the coming weeks.”
If Democrats don’t increase the NLRB budget before this session of Congress ends in January, it will likely be the party’s last chance to do so for at least two years; Republicans, who are slated to take the House, will not approve NLRB budget raises. This could majorly kneecap the burgeoning labor movement and workers’ ability to challenge employers when they violate labor laws.
The union went on to warn that, if the agency’s budget isn’t increased, it is “increasingly possible” that the agency will have to begin cutting staff. Indeed, the NLRB has warned this year that the budget stagnation has already led to a loss of 39 percent of staffing overall and 50 percent of field office staff in the agency.
“This is the crisis in labor law enforcement we have warned of,” the union said. “Only Congress can prevent this catastrophe from happening by increasing the agency’s budget.”
Democrats would do well to heed the union’s warnings if they want to support the labor movement. Republicans have threatened in recent months that one of their top priorities if they take the House will be to go after the labor movement, which will likely include attacks on the NLRB and labor officials in the Biden administration.
The fact that the NLRB budget has remained stagnant for so long — amounting to a nearly 25 percent budget cut when inflation is taken into account — is largely the fault of Republicans, labor advocates say.
“We have a huge target on our backs,” labor board attorney and NLRB union legislative co-chair Michael Bilik told Politico this week. “It’s been a top priority of Republicans to prevent us from getting a single dollar of an increase.”
The final weeks of this year are “clearly the best chance we’re gonna have in the next two years” to get the budget increased, Bilik said.
American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) governmental affairs director Bill Samuel also emphasized the importance of the budget issue. “At no other time in recent memory has the need for a robust and fully funded NLRB been greater,” Samuel said in a statement, per Politico. “This isn’t the time for furloughs. This is the time for funding.”
President Joe Biden has requested that Congress increase the NLRB budget from $274 million to $319 million for fiscal year 2023, but Congress has yet to pass such an increase. The agency itself has also been calling for a budget increase; NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo said earlier this year that the funding will be necessary to “conduct hearings and elections, investigate charges, settle and litigate meritorious cases, and obtain full and prompt remedies for workers whose rights are violated.”
Labor advocates have echoed these concerns. The NLRB has been harsher on union-busting employers during the Biden administration, and its efficacy in enforcing labor law in the past years has been despite the budget shortfalls, advocates say. This was a major turnaround from the Trump administration, which worked to gut the agency and create a major backlog of cases for NLRB workers to get through.
These delays have already harmed the labor movement; as Labor Notes pointed out earlier this year, Amazon had filed dozens of objections to the union election at its first unionized warehouse and then accused the board of not properly investigating the charges when the agency had had insufficient field staff to look into them.
The company then filed charges over alleged violations because of the delay, which caused even further delays as the parties awaited a hearing. “Dragging things out is Amazon’s goal; understaffing aids that goal,” Gay Semel wrote for Labor Notes.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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A ballot measure to create a universal free school meals program by reducing tax breaks for the wealthiest residents in Colorado has easily passed after federal lawmakers allowed a universal free lunch program to expire earlier this year.
Proposition FF has officially passed, according to a call by The Associated Press on Wednesday, with about 55 percent of voters in favor and 45 percent against with 88 percent of the vote in, per the New York Times.
The Healthy School Meals for All program will raise $100 million a year to provide and pay for meals in public schools, which advocates say will be crucial in lessening the burden of food insecurity for tens of thousands of students across the state.
The funding will be raised by a reduction in the state tax deduction that can be taken by people making more than $300,000 a year, which will increase their taxable income. This will affect about 114,000 households or about 5 percent of tax filers in the state.
The establishment of the program will allow about 60,000 Colorado students who can’t afford school meals but whose families don’t qualify for meal waivers to access meals, according to advocates. Students from any financial background will be able to access the meals, which proponents say will be healthy and made with local products.
“This is a massive victory for hungry children,” public policy director for Hunger Free Colorado Ashley Wheeland told the Denver Post. “The Prop FF campaign began and finished as a community-based effort with grassroots and advocacy organizations, non-profits, education service providers and educators sharing their own stories of how school meals for all would help thousands of Colorado children get the food they need to learn.”
Advocates say the universality of the program is crucial because it helps to dispel the stigma that may be faced by students whose family incomes qualify them for free school meals under the existing program.
The measure had been put on the ballot by the Democratically-controlled state legislature. Many districts in the state had seen an uptick in students eating lunch at school when they were provided for free under the federal universal school meal waiver program.
That program expired this June after leaders in Congress did little to attempt to renew it. Some Democrats had pushed to extend the waivers, saying that they had only grown more important as inflation caused grocery and food prices to skyrocket this year.
The program had allowed about 10 million children across the country to access free meals — in some cases, breakfast, lunch and dinner — and appeared to have led to drops in child food insecurity in 2020 and 2021, along with provisions like the expanded child tax credit.
Though advocates still push for the return of the federal school meal program, Colorado will now join states like California and Maine that implemented statewide programs after the federal program’s expiration this summer. Other states, like Vermont and Nevada, have passed legislation that will extend free school meals for the current school year but have not made the programs permanent.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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A measure to end the subminimum wage for tipped workers in Washington, D.C. passed overwhelmingly on Tuesday, marking a win for labor and wage activists who have been fighting the restaurant industry to pass such a measure for years.
Currently, the tipped minimum wage in D.C. is $5.35 an hour, leaving workers reliant on tips to survive. Initiative 82 would start phasing out that wage, eventually raising tipped workers’ minimum hourly wage to that of non-tipped workers, currently $16.10, by 2027.
With 90 percent of votes counted on Wednesday, according to The New York Times, the measure has 74 percent of the vote, with only 26 percent opposed.
Tipped workers say that the maintenance of the subminimum wage means their income is subject to the whims of customers and bosses, leaving them vulnerable to wage theft by greedy restaurant owners and resulting in vast uncertainty over their finances. Raising tipped workers’ base wages, advocates say, could provide workers with far more stability while workers as a whole would make more and still be allowed to collect tips.
Indeed, research has shown that workers are less likely to experience poverty in states that have already eliminated the tipped minimum wage, like Washington and California. These states have also been able to maintain a strong restaurant industry.
One Fair Wage, an anti-subminimum wage group, celebrated the passage of the measure. “Most people in America, regardless of their political affiliation, agree that everyone who works deserves to be paid a livable wage that allows them to feed their families and stay and work in D.C.” said Saru Jayaraman, One Fair Wage president, in a statement.
The vote is a redo of 2018, when the city held a vote on a similar issue. Though voters also voted then to phase out the subminimum wage, with 55 percent of voters favoring the measure, it was overturned when D.C. council members defied the will of voters and repealed the initiative, with Mayor Muriel Bowser declining to veto the repeal.
A Washington City Paper poll found that there isn’t a majority among city council members to do the same now, indicating that the measure will stand this time.
But still, Initiative 82 met its own share of resistance: the restaurant industry had waged a legal battle to stop the initiative from appearing on the ballot and spent over $643,000 to defeat the measure after a judge dismissed their lawsuit. Proponents of the measure raised only $438,000 — and won decisively anyway.
Other places also voted on wage-related measures on Tuesday, with mixed results. In Portland, Maine, residents voted against a proposal to eliminate the subminimum wage and raise the minimum wage to $18 an hour by 2025, even though workers must make at least $18 an hour to survive in the area, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator. Currently, the town’s minimum wage is only $13 an hour.
Wage advocates had better luck in Nebraska, where voters approved a measure to increase the state minimum wage from its current level of $9 an hour to $15 an hour starting in 2026, after which it would be adjusted yearly to the cost of living. The measure passed decisively with a margin of over 16 points with over 95 percent of votes counted, according to The New York Times.
The success of the measure, even in a red state, perhaps shows the appetite for an overhaul of the minimum wage at a federal level. The last time the federal minimum wage was raised was in 2009. Today, it still sits at a mere $7.25 an hour — marking the longest period in U.S. history that the minimum wage has gone without an increase.
When adjusted for inflation, the value of the minimum wage is now at its lowest point since the 1960s, the Economic Policy Institute found in a report earlier this year. Its real value has declined 17 percent since it was raised in 2009, according to the report.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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As the results of the midterm elections roll in and it’s becoming clearer that Democrats may have exceeded expectations despite the odds stacked against them, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) is emphasizing the impact of young voters on this election, saying that younger generations may be ushering in a new era of politics. According to exit polls, young voters overwhelmingly supported…
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) cautioned Twitter followers on Tuesday not to trust in lies that the Republicans Party will likely amplify on election night that election results aren’t valid unless they’re called the same day — a part of their strategy to attack mail-in voting and throw doubt into the election process.
“Many states don’t allow mail-in ballots to be counted before Election Day,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “But many races can’t be called until mail-ins are counted, which can take over 24 [hours]. This is normal, but some GOP are laying ground to claim any race not called tonight is suspicious. Don’t fall for it.”
It is, indeed, normal for ballot counting to take several days after the election, though some races are called the night of due to decisive margins. Because mail-in ballots can be postmarked on Election Day and still be valid, it takes a few days for all of the votes to even be available for election officials to count.
A variety of other factors — late closing times for polls on the West Coast, an increase in mail-in voting, and many particularly close races — mean that this election will be no different in that many races will have to be called later this week. In 2020, eight states didn’t call results of elections until after election night; several states, including crucial swing states, took a week or more.
Republicans are ignoring this reality, however, instead taking the opportunity — as they have with almost every other aspect of the election process — to attack voting and erode public trust in elections.
In recent weeks, Republicans have already been saying that, if vote counting takes several days, then that means that election officials are getting the “fix in” on the election, as Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano baselessly said in October. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) also added to the lie, saying, “Why is it only Democrat blue cities that take ‘days’ to count their votes? The rest of the country manages to get it done on election night.”
Both of these statements are plainly false, and these politicians likely know that. There has been zero evidence of elections being “fixed” in the U.S. — if anything, Republicans are the ones that are working toward rigging all future elections to ensure the party never loses again.
Cruz’s comment, meanwhile, is meant as an attack on Democratic votes and is not true in any sense; even aside from the point that large cities, which lean Democratic, have far more votes to count than less-populated Republican-leaning areas, many Republican counties also take days to count votes.
If election officials stopped counting ballots after Election Day, as Republicans seem to be suggesting, it would leave many votes uncounted, likely particularly affecting mail-in votes. According to the United States Election Project, about 25 million people have returned mail-in ballots as of Tuesday, with a total of over 58 million mail-in ballots requested across the country. If even a fraction of the mail-in ballots that have been returned or will be postmarked on Election Day arrive later this week, that would amount to millions of ballots that wouldn’t be counted at all.
On the flip side, if election officials simply called elections on election night while disregarding other votes that may come in, it could give Republicans an undue advantage. In 2020, for instance, early vote counts created a perception that Republicans were ahead — a phenomenon that political commentators dubbed a “red mirage” followed by a “blue shift.”
This could happen in Pennsylvania, for instance. Democratic-leaning Philadelphia typically takes a long time to count votes, and that process will be even further delayed this year as the GOP has worked to question the validity of thousands of votes in court. Other states like Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan may also see a “red mirage,” with many Democratic votes coming from mail-in ballots or large cities.
What Republicans are likely truly trying to do with comments about the length of ballot counting is set the stage for Republican candidates to reject the results of the election if they lose, as many Republicans have already threatened to do. If they lose, such candidates may point to statements like Cruz’s to say that the election was rigged against them — a blatant lie.
It’s unclear what the power-grabbing strategy of rejecting legitimate election results will lead to, but political scholars and insiders have warned that right-wing militants are planning more attacks like the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Congressional Republicans have, after all, spent the last two years defending the attack and rejecting attempts to prevent future similar attempted coups.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Far right Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is attempting to bar federal monitors from being able to enter polling places in Florida to ensure federal election laws are being followed in some of the state’s most Democratic-leaning counties, saying that only his administration’s supposed election monitors will be allowed in.
Due to uncertainty and fear around election safety as armed right-wing vigilantes have swarmed early polling places, the Justice Department (DOJ) announced that it would be increasing the number of polling places it will send officials to monitor from 44 in 2020 to 64 this year. The DOJ’s list of polling places includes three counties in Florida — Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach — that have among the highest concentrations of Democrats in the state.
The purpose of the DOJ officials’ presence, the agency says, is to “monito[r] elections in the field in jurisdictions around the country to protect the rights of voters.” It says that the agency has monitored elections in the field in some capacity since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
But DeSantis’s administration sent an aggressively-worded letter to DOJ officials on Monday night, signed by Florida Department of State Chief Counsel Brad McVay, saying that Florida officials will not allow federal monitors to enter the polling sites, even though Florida does give other “law enforcement” officials access to polling places.
Instead, the letter said, the Florida Department of State — which is under DeSantis’s jurisdiction — would “send its own monitors to the three targeted jurisdictions” to supposedly ensure “there is no interference in the voting process.”
The DeSantis administration’s definition of “interference” with voting is likely vastly different from that of federal officials. Republicans have spent the last two years loudly spewing lies about vast amounts of election fraud across the country — despite there being zero evidence of such fraud — to justify disenfranchising voters and destabilizing elections.
Claims of so-called election interference from the right have been used as an excuse for armed vigilante groups to show up to polling places in Arizona to intimidate voters or for lawmakers to pass dozens of voter suppression bills. This is all in the service, it appears, of ensuring that Republicans never lose elections again so the U.S. can be under a fascist one-party rule.
Over the past few months, DeSantis has been at the forefront of some of the most aggressively fascist anti-voting initiatives among Republicans nationwide; earlier this year, for instance, Republicans in the Florida legislature passed a bill at DeSantis’s behest that allows him to appoint his own election police force.
Those police have been used to intimidate voters who have been convicted of felonies — even if they are still eligible to vote — as a way to scare away formerly incarcerated people from attempting to vote or register to vote.
Earlier this year, DeSantis also ousted an elected official from office for criticizing him, appointing a far right ally in his place. The decision is being challenged in court, but even if it’s overturned, the move is a show of DeSantis’s willingness to exercise his power in increasingly undemocratic ways to chill dissent in his state.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. and U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman filed a lawsuit in federal court on Monday challenging a court ruling last week that has resulted in thousands of mail-in ballots being discounted.
Last week, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in a split decision that mail-in ballots with the wrong date on the mailing envelope should be set aside and not included in vote counts. People who vote by mail in Pennsylvania are required to sign and date the outer envelope containing their ballot.
The ruling was the result of a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee, the Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, as part of a deluge of election-related lawsuits that Republicans have filed to challenge mail-in voting.
Fetterman and Democrats are suing to get the ballots counted, arguing that the decision goes against the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits election officials from denying voting access based on an error on a document that is “not material” in determining a person’s voting eligibility. The lawsuit also says that not counting the ballots violates the First and 14th Amendments.
The requirement to date the envelope “serves no legitimate purpose,” the lawsuit reads, saying that ballots received before the deadline are “definitionally timely.”
“The Date Instruction imposes unnecessary hurdles that eligible Pennsylvanians must clear to exercise their most fundamental right, resulting in otherwise valid votes being arbitrarily rejected without any reciprocal benefit to the Commonwealth,” Fetterman attorneys and the Democrats wrote. “It furthers no governmental interest, and, consequently, the burden it imposes on voters — including Plaintiffs — violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”
It’s unclear how many ballots have been set aside by election officials. But polls show that the race — between Democratic candidate Fetterman and Republican Mehmet Oz — is incredibly close, and the mail-in ballots could determine the result of the election.
“As we fight this latest Republican attack on Americans’ democratic rights, Pennsylvanians should check their ballot status to ensure their vote is counted,” Fetterman and the Democrats said in a joint statement about the suit. “We are committed to using every tool at our disposal to protect Pennsylvanians’ constitutional right to participate in this election, including defeating the GOP in court.”
The Republicans’ lawsuit sent Pennsylvania voters scrambling to ensure that their ballots were cast. Voters were informed that their ballots were invalidated on Monday — just one day before Election Day. One voter told The Washington Post that she was in Colorado when she found out and decided to fly back home at her own expense in order to cast a ballot.
Many went to Philadelphia City Hall, where they were met by a two-hour line as voters eagerly waited to cast new votes. Some voters reported that they were still waiting in line when City Hall closed and police told the remaining people in line to leave.
Election volunteers said others who had cast mail-in ballots would simply be unable to cast a ballot due to the Republicans’ lawsuit because they have a disability or didn’t have transportation. And in many parts of Pennsylvania, counties don’t require officials to notify voters when their ballots are deemed invalid, meaning that many voters may never know that their votes weren’t counted if the state Supreme Court ruling stands.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.