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Author: Sharon Zhang

  • Report: US Only Paid 19 Percent of International Climate Funding Target in 2020

    The U.S. has fallen tens of billions of dollars short of paying its agreed-upon “fair share” of climate funding targets, a new report finds as world leaders undergo climate talks at the COP27 conference in Egypt this month.

    According to a new analysis by Carbon Brief, the U.S. was supposed to be paying about $40 billion of the U.S.$100 billion that wealthy countries have pledged to pay each year for climate financing in developing countries by 2020. This figure is proportional to the amount of historical emissions emitted by each country; the U.S. is a top emitter of greenhouse gasses and is responsible for about 52 percent of historical emissions by wealthy countries.

    However, the analysis of 2020 data, the closest year for which data is available, found that the U.S. paid only $7.6 billion that year into that goal. This represents only about 19 percent of its fair share.

    Other wealthy countries are also falling behind, though the U.S. is proportionately the worst offender. Canada only gave 37 percent of its fair share, the report found, while Australia gave 38 percent and the U.K. gave 76 percent. Germany, France and Japan provided more than their fair share, but their funding is in the form of loans and not grants, which are only further marginalizing recipients by making them indebted to these countries.

    Overall, only $83 billion of climate financing was given in 2020, with $60 billion coming from countries and $23 billion coming from climate funding organizations and private sources.

    Wealthy countries had agreed to the $100 billion target in 2009 in order to help poorer countries adapt climate-friendly energy sources and fund resiliency measures like infrastructure and farming.

    Wealthy countries released a roadmap in 2021 to reach the $100 billion goal by 2023, which would miss the original goal by two years. Further, research shows that $100 billion is a miniscule amount of funding compared to what is actually needed to build resiliency and keep the climate crisis in check in poorer countries.

    Analysts and advocates say that the money is crucial not just to maintain a liveable planet but also to advance climate justice.

    The failure to fund the target will be crucial to talks at COP27, which began on Sunday. Though countries in the Global South have not contributed significantly to the climate crisis, they are and will continue to be the hardest hit by the climate crisis, as they have fewer resources to respond to climate disasters like heat waves and floods.

    Countries like the U.S., meanwhile, have contributed greatly to the crisis, but continually fail to commit to action that is strong enough to meet the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius or lower; the United Nations has found that there is “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place” for the world to reach.

    The report is a show of how the U.S. is shirking its international responsibility to mitigate the climate crisis even though $40 billion is an almost negligible amount of money to spend on climate goals when compared to the hundreds of billions of dollars the U.S. spends on defense each year — much of which goes toward private defense contractors — or the trillions of dollars that the government allows the wealthy to hoard with sweeping tax cuts.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Report: Big Shipping Companies’ Profits Increased 30,000 Percent Amid Inflation

    A new report from House Oversight Committee lawmakers confirms that corporate “profiteering” has been a major factor fueling inflation in the past two years, as executives have hid under the guise of inflation to fleece the public — all while bragging about it to their shareholders.

    The report was released Friday by the Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy. It found that many industries have increased their profits precipitously within the last two years, taking advantage of uncertainty caused by the pandemic and other factors that set the stage for “excessive corporate price hikes,” like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the report reads.

    Four major meat processors more than doubled their profits between 2019 and 2021, the report found, while two large rental car companies nearly multiplied their profits by six times. In the oil and gas industry, four major companies increased their profits by 62 percent.

    Underscoring much of the instability across the global economy was the shipping industry, which saw disruptions due to supply chain issues. Still, these companies were able to profit from the issues nonetheless: the report found that three of the largest five shipping companies increased their profits by a staggering 29,965 percent, an increase of nearly 300 times their pre-pandemic profits.

    These findings are staggering, even if they have become relatively normalized under runaway capitalism. They represent, as progressive analysts have said for months now, a failure of political forces to attempt to rein in such price hikes and provide much-needed relief to the public.

    “Today’s analysis reaffirms what an overwhelming 80 percent majority of Americans already recognize according to a recent poll: under the guise of inflation, certain corporations excessively hiked prices far beyond what their costs necessitated, further driving inflation,” subcommittee Chairman Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Illinois) said in a statement. “It is unacceptable that certain companies and industries are engaged in extreme price hikes under the cover of inflation.”

    Corporate executives have been openly touting this strategy to shareholders, the report finds. Executives at companies like Hormel Foods, Tyson Foods, Autozone, and others have explicitly drawn the line between inflationary conditions and raising prices and profits in calls with shareholders, as the report points out.

    “[A] little bit of inflation is always good in our business,” one Kroger executive said in June 2021. A Tyson official said in February that “Our pricing actions and strength in the beef segment … more than offset the higher [costs of goods and services].”

    “Inflation is going to be a big factor for us next year,” one executive at beverage company Constellation Brands said early this year. “We’ll take as much pricing as we think the consumer can absorb.”

    In other words, while the working class has struggled to afford basic needs like rent, food and energy in recent years, corporations have viewed such conditions as an opportunity to even further squeeze the public for their money. Further, they’re not afraid to admit as such, openly discussing these plans in shareholder calls.

    The report is drawn from testimony and evidence from left-leaning organizations like the Economic Policy Institute and the Roosevelt Institute, which have indeed found that corporations are in large part responsible for inflation.

    However, even economists in traditionally conservative spaces have been citing corporate greed as a driver of high prices. Paul Donovan, the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, strongly urged the Federal Reserve to recognize this fact in an op-ed last week, writing that, because of inflation, “real wage growth is catastrophically negative” and that companies “have also taken advantage of circumstances to expand profit margins.”

  • Survey: Hundreds of County Sheriffs Think Their Authority Supersedes Federal Law

    A newly released survey finds that hundreds of county sheriffs believe their power as law enforcement overseers supersedes state and federal laws in an alarming show of right-wing radicalization of law enforcement across the U.S.

    In a survey of over 500 sheriffs conducted by The Marshall Project and political scientists Emily Farris and Mirya Holman, nearly half of respondents, or over 200 sheriffs, agreed with the statement that “The sheriff’s authority supersedes the federal or state government in my county.” Even more sheriffs, about 71 percent, agreed with the statement that they are willing to interject when they do not personally support a state or federal law.

    The survey is a show of the rise of “constitutional sheriffs,” or people who believe that they are a singularly powerful legal authority who outrank federal or state officials within county borders. In modern years, constitutional sheriffs have thrown their efforts behind the movement to overturn the 2020 election results; in some places, constitutional sheriffs are on the ballot this election.

    The movement’s organization, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, boasts hundreds of dues-paying sheriffs and has thousands of other members and sympathizers, including figures like Donald Trump-pardoned Joe Arpaio, a former county sheriff in Maricopa County, Arizona, who committed a long list of inhumane and potentially criminal actions during his time in office.

    The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled the group as extremist, with roots in white supremacy and ties to far right groups like the Oath Keepers — in fact, the group’s founder, Richard Mack, was once a board member of the far right militia.

    The growth of the constitutional sheriff movement is also representative of the growth of far right ideology among sheriffs; an alarming 11 percent of respondents said that they personally support the group, while about a quarter of respondents said they had never heard of them.

    Data shows that values of the constitutional sheriff movement are dangerous; a 2019 study found, for instance, that constitutional sheriffs are 50 percent more likely to have violent encounters with their constituents and federal Bureau of Land Management employees.

    At the same time, Mack has tied the constitutional sheriff movement to the rise of far right ideology within the mainstream Republican Party. In past years, for instance, constitutional sheriffs found popularity in refusing to comply with gun control laws put in place by Nevada lawmakers in response to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, comparing the state government to Nazi Germany.

    “A lot of [Constitutional sheriff] talking points are squarely among the center of the Republican party now,” Jessica Pishko, a former University of South Carolina researcher and author of an upcoming book on sheriffs, told USA Today.

    Recently, the group has taken hold among two mainstream far right movements. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, dozens of sheriffs objected to mask mandates and other COVID-19 restrictions put in place to prevent the spread of the deadly virus.

    Now, constitutional sheriffs have tied themselves to Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and destabilize future elections in the U.S. — conservative activists have in fact been seeking out such sheriffs to help them in the cause. Sympathetic sheriffs, who are likely to identify with Republican sentiments about the supposed tyranny of the federal government, can bring the support of armed law enforcement to the cause in a time when right-wing vigilantes are intimidating voters at the polls.

    The movements indeed have parallels; just as election deniers are seeking positions that could have power over election administration, constitutional sheriffs are in elected positions in which they are willing to violate the very laws they’re supposed to enforce.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Employees Sue Twitter After Musk Gives Little Notice for Mass Layoffs

    Twitter employees have filed a class-action lawsuit against the company over CEO Elon Musk’s recently-announced plan to lay off half of the staff, or about 3,700 workers, with little to no notice.

    The lawsuit was filed in San Francisco federal court on Thursday by five current or former employees, who say that the company was in violation of a federal law, known as the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, that requires employers to give workers advance notice of 60 days before carrying out mass layoffs.

    Workers had already begun receiving notice that they were fired on Thursday — the same day that workers received notice of the layoffs in a company-wide email. The email informed employees that, on Friday, those who were keeping their jobs would be notified via their company emails, while those who were laid off would be notified through their personal emails. This is likely because, on Thursday night, workers reported losing access to their company emails and logins.

    The lawsuit seeks a court order forcing Twitter to obey the WARN Act.

    “We filed this lawsuit tonight in an attempt to make sure that employees are aware that they should not sign away their rights and that they have an avenue for pursuing their rights,” Shannon Liss-Riordan, an attorney who filed the lawsuit, told Bloomberg. Liss-Riordan has also sued Tesla over a similar circumstance in which Musk laid off about 10 percent of its staff.

    “We will now see if he is going to continue to thumb his nose at the laws of this country that protect employees,” Liss-Riordan said. “It appears that he’s repeating the same playbook of what he did at Tesla.”

    Rumors of layoffs had begun circulating this week among Twitter employees. One employee created a program that would help coworkers hold onto important documents and emails, The New York Times reported, and was later fired. Musk also made a sweeping change to employee benefits this week by removing the company’s monthly days off, known as “days of rest,” from their calendars.

    If Musk’s layoffs are found to be in violation of the WARN Act, it wouldn’t be the first time he’s been in violation of federal labor laws. Tesla has been the subject of multiple lawsuits by workers who say that the company’s California warehouse is a site of constant harassment for Black and female workers, who say they face horrific racism and sexual harassment, respectively, at work.

    Meanwhile, media experts have raised concerns over Musks’s plans for Twitter, especially in regard to his plans to unleash a deluge of posts from racists, anti-semites, and other members with far right ideologies onto the platform with little to no oversight, in the supposed name of free speech. The First Amendment right to free speech does not apply to private companies in this way, as private companies can moderate speech on their platforms, but Musk and the right seem to have no regard for that fact.

    Musk also fired top executives at Twitter earlier this week “for cause,” seemingly in an attempt to avoid paying out severance packages — but this move may also backfire on Musk, as the executives are considering their legal options to receive compensation.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • GOP Nominee Vows Party “Will Never Lose Another Election” in WI If He Wins

    The Republican gubernatorial nominee in Wisconsin had a bold and alarming promise for voters at a campaign stop this week: if he’s elected, he said, Wisconsin would never be under Democratic control ever again.

    “Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor,” gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels said to supporters on Monday.

    Michels, who came under fire for calling for violence against journalists earlier this election cycle, is an executive of a major construction and energy corporation, the Michels Corporation. He has been endorsed by President Donald Trump and has repeatedly spread Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, despite there being no evidence to back this claim.

    A recording of Michels’s statement was shared by American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic-aligned Super PAC, on Twitter. Michels “said the quiet part out loud,” the group wrote, adding, “Democracy is on the line in Wisconsin. Michels must be stopped.”

    If Michels’s past statements are any indication, he is serious about his pledge. He has said that he would be open to signing a bill decertifying the results of the 2020 election in his state — results that he has publicly questioned — and won’t commit to saying whether or not he would certify the result of the 2024 election if the Republican candidate loses.

    Michels has also pledged to replace Wisconsin’s state elections commission, which is the agency tasked with running elections in the state, and has not specified how he would run elections in the state in the future.

    If elected, Michels will indeed have sway over election results. He could simply refuse to certify election results if they don’t go his way — and though there are checks to his power in place, like election officials at other levels or the courts, he could pressure the legislature to change election laws to give partisan officials more power.

    Such a move in any state— to ignore the will of voters at the whim of far right officials — could be the end of democracy as we know it.

    The pledge to cement one-party rule in the state is one of the clearest statements that a mainstream Republican candidate has made in support of fascism in this election cycle.

    Republicans have made their alliance to fascism clear in other ways, however. They have shown that they are willing to resort to intimidation and violence over election results they’re unsatisfied with, and are working across the country to install operatives at every level, from the grassroots to the White House, to ensure Republicans take office regardless of the will of voters.

    Trump’s Big Lie about voter fraud has taken over the party, with GOP candidates for federal or state office in every state in the U.S. doubting the result of the 2020 election. It is not a detriment to candidates to blatantly deny the will of voters; in fact, the strategy appears to be a boon to candidates, who use election denial to get Trump’s endorsement. Refusing to embrace the lie, on the other hand, has proved a major liability for Republicans.

    As such, despite Michels’s alarming far right views, he is in a dead heat with his Democratic opponent Tony Evers, according to polls aggregated by FiveThirtyEight.

    Evers has criticized Michels for his remark. “Folks, we’ve known this for awhile — Tim Michels is a danger to our democracy,” Evers wrote on Twitter. “When you head to the polls on Election Day, remember that we’re fighting to protect our democracy, voting rights, and free, fair, and secure elections.”

  • 465 Billionaires Have Pumped an Eye-Popping $881 Million Into the Midterms

    A small group of billionaires who come from the top 0.000002 percent of wealthiest people in the U.S. have spent nearly $900 million in the federal midterm runoffs this election cycle, a new report finds, and could reach $1 billion in political spending by the time the cycle is over.

    According to a report released Thursday by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), just 465 American billionaires had donated an unprecedented $881 million by the end of September — even before last-minute campaign pushes in the last five weeks before Election Day. This is already more than the amount that billionaires spent in the entirety of the 2018 midterm election.

    Further, the vast majority of this spending — $643 million, or 73 percent — comes from just 20 billionaire households, including prominent figures like the Koch family, Peter Thiel, George Soros, Michael and Susan Bloomberg and Jeffrey Yass. Of the top 10 donor families, eight lean Republican while two lean Democrat.

    This is a staggering amount of money spent by an astoundingly small number of people in order to influence elections that will affect the entire U.S. population and beyond. The data is a stark illustration of the vast amount of influence that billionaires have over the political system that has been afforded to them by conservative tax cutting and Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which allows billionaires and corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections.

    Indeed, as the report finds, this small group of billionaires has spent 27 times more on this election than they ever spent around 2010, when Citizens United was decided; in the 2010 election cycle, for instance, billionaires spent $32 million.

    The majority of the $881 million spent this cycle has gone toward Republicans, by a three to two margin, ATF finds. Democrats have received about 39 percent of the funding, while 59 percent has gone toward Republicans. The rest of the funding, 2 percent, has gone toward causes that most progressives oppose, like supporting Israel or cryptocurrency, ATF finds.

    There has also been a massive influx of fundraising for Super PACs that are created for a single candidate. Such donations have risen by 150 percent between 2018 and this election cycle, increasing from $128 million to $323 million as of the beginning of November. About 75 percent of single-candidate Super PAC spending goes toward Republicans, the report finds.

    Such massive injections into elections are often more than just a political donation — they can represent huge tax savings for billionaires in the future or win them other political favors.

    “They aren’t donating to candidates because they like them. This is a transaction,” wrote former Ohio state senator Nina Turner about the report on Thursday.

    Indeed, billionaires have gained trillions of dollars of wealth throughout the past few years. This growth is at least partially due to a tax code that is written to favor the rich — in part because billionaires push candidates to do so. Yass, for instance, has dodged $1 billion in taxes over the past six years, while billionaire donor Ken Griffin spent $54 million to shoot down a tax-raising initiative — a move that is now saving him tens of millions of dollars in taxes each year.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • AOC Says Her Twitter Account Hasn’t Worked Properly Since She Criticized Musk

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) hit back at Twitter CEO Elon Musk on the website on Wednesday after Musk, perhaps bothered by comments Ocasio-Cortez made earlier that week, attempted to criticize her in a tweet.

    Musk tweeted a screenshot of Ocasio-Cortez’s merchandise website, showing a campaign sweatshirt on sale for $58, with the price circled in an attempt to criticize the lawmaker for selling merchandise at that price point.

    “Proud of this and always will be,” Ocasio-Cortez shot back. “My workers are union, make a living wage, have full healthcare, and aren’t subject to racist treatment in their workplaces. Items are made in USA. Team AOC honors and respects working people. You should try it sometime instead of union-busting.” She added that the proceeds from her shop go toward her team’s community organizing efforts.

    She also directly replied to Musk’s tweet, saying, “You’re a union buster with an ego problem who pockets the change from underpaying and mistreating people.”

    After those tweets, she noted that her Twitter account appeared to stop working properly and she was “conveniently” unable to view mentions and notifications correctly. “I was informed via text that I seem to have gotten under a certain billionaire’s skin,” she wrote. “Just a reminder that money will never buy your way out of insecurity, folks.”

    Musk has indeed gotten in legal trouble with labor officials for anti-union statements in recent years, and Musk’s Tesla is currently the largest U.S.-based car manufacturer without a union. Meanwhile, perhaps not coincidentally, Tesla is notorious for its poor working standards. Tesla is a uniquely unsafe place to work; in 2019, Forbes found that Tesla’s plant in Fremont, California, had three times more federal safety violations in the previous four years than that of the top 10 U.S. factories combined.

    Tesla’s work environment also appears to be incredibly abusive. In a lawsuit filed earlier this year by the state of California, the state alleged that Black workers in the Tesla factory constantly hear racial slurs and that the factory floor is racially segregated, with Black workers relegated to areas that other workers call heinous, racist names like “the slave ship” or “porch monkey stations.”

    The company was also sued last year by a woman who worked at the plant. She said she was the subject of constant sexual harassment at work, where she alleges coworkers would catcall her and aggressively touch her body multiple times a week.

    With the working conditions at Tesla in mind, Twitter users noted the irony that Tesla appears to sell apparel at an even higher price than Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign store. A sweatshirt from Tesla’s merchandise shop, similar to the Ocasio-Cortez sweatshirt Musk had tweeted about, costs $75. It’s unclear where the apparel on Tesla’s site is made.

    The attack on Ocasio-Cortez appears to have been triggered by tweets she made earlier this week criticizing Musk for his plans to overhaul the website, including charging $8 a month for verification on the platform — a proposal that has been met with widespread criticism.

    “One guy’s business plan for a $44 billion over-leveraged purchase is apparently to run around and individually ask people for $8,” she said in a tweet on Wednesday. “Remember that next time you question yourself or your qualifications.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Watchdog Group Sues Secret Service Over Deleted January 6 Texts

    A government watchdog group is suing several prominent defense- and security-related federal agencies, including the Secret Service and the Pentagon, over text messages sent by officials regarding the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, which were deleted after oversight officials requested to see them earlier this year.

    In a lawsuit filed against the Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Defense, U.S. Army and National Archives on Wednesday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) argues that the texts were illegally deleted and that the agencies didn’t do enough to attempt to retrieve them. The texts, they say, could reveal crucial information about the actions of officials in coordinating a response to the far-right attack.

    Specifically, the agencies are in violation of the Federal Records Act (FRA), the lawsuit contends, which requires agency heads and archivists to take action through the Department of Justice to retrieve records that have been “unlawfully removed or destroyed.”

    These texts could be crucial to the government’s investigation into the attack, potentially containing details about whether or not key Trump administration officials prepared for the violence that day and decisions made in response to the Capitol breach. Communications with the far right Oath Keepers could also have been included in the texts, CREW writes in its lawsuit.

    If the texts were uncovered, they could provide an explanation for decisions like the Secret Service’s request to remove then-Vice President Mike Pence from the Capitol before he could certify the results of the 2020 election.

    The records “contain evidence of criminal misconduct or other wrongdoing,” CREW wrote. “Their loss would leave a major gap in the factual record, impeding efforts to obtain answers and accountability for an unprecedented assault on American democracy.”

    The news that there were missing records related to the attack within these agencies was uncovered by investigative journalists this summer. Texts had been deleted across several agencies, reporters have found, including the Secret Service, DHS, the Army and the Pentagon. Further, they were deleted after federal investigators and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filers had requested to see the texts, raising questions not only about what was in the texts, but also why they were deleted.

    The agencies have claimed that the texts are unrecoverable, and political commentators have noted that the deletion of the texts is a major scandal.

    “Missing and destroyed federal records from top officials undermine government transparency and accountability, and it is imperative that agencies are complying with record-keeping laws,” CREW senior vice president and Chief Counsel Donald Sherman said of the lawsuit. “The loss of these particular federal records would leave a major gap in the factual record concerning the January 6th attack on the Capitol, impeding efforts to obtain answers and accountability for an unprecedented assault on American democracy.”

    CREW asks for the agencies to be declared in violation of the records act and ordered to immediately begin working with the Attorney General to recover the texts. The lawsuit comes after CREW has made a number of unsuccessful attempts to retrieve the records or pressure agencies to do so.

    Last week, CREW filed a separate lawsuit against the Secret Service, also on the matter of the text deletion. The group had filed a FOIA request in August seeking records concerning a device replacement program that the Secret Service claimed was the reason why the texts are missing. But the Secret Service never got back to the group with the documents, CREW said in their lawsuit.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Emails Show Trump Team Saw Clarence Thomas as Key to Overturning 2020 Election

    Newly uncovered emails from key figures on former President Donald Trump’s legal team show that his lawyers viewed embattled Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as a powerful secret weapon and perhaps their only influential legal ally in their plan to overturn the 2020 election.

    According to an email exchange from December 2020 obtained by congressional investigators and reported on by Politico, at least two lawyers on Trump’s legal team believed that Thomas was their “only chance” to legally challenge the results of the election before the election certification date rolled around.

    “We want to frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue some sort of stay or other circuit justice opinion saying Georgia is in legitimate doubt,” Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro wrote in an email addressed to Trump’s legal team on December 31, 2020. “Realistically, our only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion by Jan. 6, which might hold up the Georgia count in Congress, is from Thomas – do you agree, Prof. [John] Eastman?”

    “I think I agree with this,” replied Eastman, a Trump lawyer who was key in crafting the plan to overturn the election. “If the court were to give us ‘key,’ that might be enough to kick the Georgia legislature into gear because I’ve been getting a lot of calls from them indicating to me they’re leaning that way.”

    In a separate email to Trump lawyers the same day, Chesebro wrote, “if we can just get the case pending before the Supreme Court by Jan. 5, ideally with something positive written by a judge or justice, hopefully Thomas, I think it’s our best shot at holding up the count of a state in Congress.”

    The emails, which Eastman had attempted to keep hidden, surfaced as the result of an order from a federal judge last month directing him to turn the communications over to the January 6 committee.

    Thomas is the justice assigned to oversee issues coming out of Georgia in the Supreme Court, and would have overseen any attempts by the Trump team to elevate their lawsuits regarding the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia to the Supreme Court.

    Thomas also appears to have close ties to the effort to overturn the 2020 election and has been an ally to Trump in the past. His wife had leveraged her political connections to text and email high-level officials to push them along in their effort to stop the certification of the election results. Eastman was among the group of Trump allies with whom Thomas’s wife had discussed the plan.

    Meanwhile, Thomas was the lone justice to vote with Trump in his bid to block White House records from being sent to the January 6 committee earlier this year and has refused to recuse himself from other Trump- and January 6-related cases, despite his close personal ties to the Trump movement. Though that decision happened after those emails were sent, the lawyers were likely aware of Thomas’s political leanings and the sway that his wife could have in that realm.

    Other recently-released emails show the Trump legal team’s frenetic efforts around one of their legal challenges in Georgia, perhaps confirming that Trump was aware that voter fraud statistics often cited by him and his team were false.

    Around the same time as the Thomas emails, Trump’s lawyers were scrambling to get the then-president to sign onto documents that they worried had voter fraud statistics that could invite legal trouble for him down the line.

    “I have no doubt that an aggressive DA or US Atty someplace will go after both the President and his lawyers once all the dust settles on this,” Eastman wrote to two other Trump lawyers.

    They ended up removing the figures, which led them to another problem: they were facing a tight deadline, but Trump was on a plane without access to a notary. “There’s no one they can call to come to the White House that’s a notary?” one GOP-tied attorney wrote. “I don’t know how we file without it. Presidential trip to a UPS store?”

    They ultimately got a White House clerk to attest to the document signing, which ended up being key to the federal judge’s decision to order Eastman to turn over the emails. The emails, the judge wrote, “show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 40 Justice and Watchdog Groups Urge Twitter Advertisers to Hold Musk to Account

    Dozens of justice and watchdog groups are urging top Twitter advertisers to use their influence over the website to urge new CEO Elon Musk to embrace content moderation or threaten to pull their funding if he doesn’t.

    In a letter to 20 top advertisers, 40 groups warn that, while Musk has promised advertisers he won’t turn the website into a “free-for-all hellscape,” his actions have indicated otherwise.

    The letter was signed by groups like Media Matters for America, Public Citizen, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Center for Transgender Equality, and others. They say that Musk’s promises to advertisers “in no way accurately portray his plans for Twitter,” and that if he carries out even a fraction of what he has pledged for supposed “free speech” on the platform, “then Twitter will not and can not be a safe platform for brands.”

    “Within 24 hours of Musk taking ownership, the platform was inundated with hate and disinformation. Not only are extremists celebrating Musk’s takeover of Twitter, they are seeing it as a new opportunity to post the most abusive, harassing, and racist language and imagery,” the letter reads. “This includes clear threats of violence against people with whom they disagree.”

    Indeed, hateful tweets flooded the platform just hours after Musk’s takeover, as right-wing users feel they can freely tweet slurs, attack LGBTQ people and glorify Nazism with Musk in charge. Meanwhile, in one of his first posts on Twitter after obtaining the company, Musk tweeted a false right-wing conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi, amplifying it to an even wider audience.

    “Without deliberate efforts by Twitter to address this type of abuse and hate, your brands will be actively supporting accelerating extremism,” the groups wrote.

    Musk, who calls himself a “free speech absolutist,” has already taken steps to overhaul content moderation on the platform — which, while flawed, has worked in removing abusive and misleading content in the past. Since obtaining the company, Musk has fired Twitter’s top content moderation chief, and the team that oversees content has reportedly been blocked from accessing their moderation tools, rendering them unable to penalize accounts that violate Twitter’s hate speech policies.

    As social media websites have learned over and over again throughout the years, content moderation is key to attracting advertisers; typically, advertisers don’t like seeing their promoted content sandwiched between hateful posts and racist slurs.

    At the same time, advertising makes up a vast majority of Twitter’s revenue — so advertisers can have massive influence over how the website is run, if they so choose. The groups urge the advertisers to use this power to “notify Musk and publicly commit that you will cease all advertising on Twitter globally if he follows through on his plans to undermine brand safety and community standards including gutting content moderation.”

    “Elon Musk has consistently failed to comprehend that freedom of speech does not mean freedom to abuse and that online spaces should be safe for women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community and other marginalized groups,” Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, one of the letter signatories, said in a statement.

    In recent days, Musk has proposed making users pay for verification on the platform, floating plans to charge $20 a month for the blue checkmark and then later $8 after the initial idea was met with widespread backlash. He has postured as though the idea is a tool to equalize the platform; in reality, however, it’s likely aimed at creating an alternative profit stream, though it’s questionable as to how much money this would actually bring in.

    Ironically, he has also promised that paid users would get search and reply priority, which means that their posts would be shown more than those of unpaid users — a move that would only further solidify the disparities between users who can afford to pay about $100 a year for the service and users who cannot.

    The plan was widely mocked by Twitter users. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) expressed scorn for the idea, laughing “at a billionaire earnestly trying to sell people on the idea that ‘free speech’ is actually a $8/mo subscription plan,” she wrote on the website on Tuesday.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Advocates: Supreme Court Should Nix Legacy Admissions, Not Affirmative Action

    Progressive advocates are calling for an end to legacy considerations in the college admissions process as the Supreme Court has indicated it is open to striking down a race-conscious admissions policy that advocates say has led to crucial advancements in equality in higher education.

    As the Supreme Court appears poised to abolish affirmative action, a decades-old policy that has been integral to balancing racial diversity in higher education, progressives contend that officials truly concerned about inequities in the college admissions process should take a hard look at legacy admissions instead of demonizing affirmative action.

    “Affirmative Action for the rich is legacy admissions. Yet SCOTUS is focusing on race despite almost all sitting justices justices hold [sic] Ivy League degrees,” wrote Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) on Twitter on Monday.

    “The real issue is legacy admissions, not affirmative action,” he continued in a separate tweet. Other progressive advocates, like the Debt Collective, agreed in tweets this week.

    Bowman and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) introduced a bill earlier this year that requires colleges that receive federal funding to end legacy and donor admissions practices, saying that they represent yet another barrier for students of color and poor students in accessing colleges that have historically aimed to box out certain groups — in this case, Jewish people. Studies have found that legacy admissions often make up a large proportion of an admissions class, especially at elite universities.

    There is hypocrisy inherent in scrutinizing one policy over the other, advocates say, as both legacy admissions and affirmative action disproportionately benefit certain groups — but while one benefits the already privileged, the other benefits those who have been systematically oppressed and historically discriminated against in the academic world.

    Because of systemic forces still disadvantaging Black, Latinx and Native American communities, affirmative action remains a critical policy lending such students opportunities for higher education where they may otherwise be turned away. Affirmative action provides the dual benefit of diversifying college campuses.

    Meanwhile, the practice of privileging applicants who have family ties to a university, especially at elite universities, gives disproportionate advantage to rich white students, research has found.

    This practice is widespread across academia. As a report by Education Reform Now found this week, about 80 percent of the top universities that admit less than a quarter of applicants each year give preference to legacy applicants.

    “Legacy preferences provide a birthright advantage to the children of alumni in the college admissions process,” the report read. “They represent a textbook example of systemic racism, since most beneficiaries of legacy preferences are white, while students of color and students from low- and middle-income households are much more likely to be the first in their families to go to college.”

    “After a century of use, eliminating legacy preferences is long overdue, but it will be absolutely necessary for them to end should the Supreme Court bar the consideration of race in admissions, as it is expected to do,” the report continued.

    The Supreme Court is in the process of hearing a case brought by a group led by conservative lawyer Ed Blum, who has a history of fighting against a variety of progressive policies including affirmative action. Blum’s argument uses Asian Americans as a bludgeon against the policy — even though the majority of Asian Americans support affirmative action — to claim that Asian Americans are being discriminated against in the admissions process.

    This argument is an oversimplification, many Asian Americans who have gone through the admissions process say. Many say, instead, that Blum is using Asian Americans as a pawn in his ultimate goal of ending affirmative action, which could, depending on the outcome, lead to a precipitous drop in college admissions of Black, Latinx and Indigenous people in coming cycles and return the country to historic practices of discriminating against such people in the process.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Warren, Sanders Slam Federal Reserve’s “Disregard” for Working Families

    A group of Democratic lawmakers led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) is pressuring the Federal Reserve to explain why it’s continuing to raise interest rates at such a rapid pace when economists across the political spectrum say that rate hikes will only hurt the working class with little upside for the economy at large.

    In a letter sent to Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Monday, 11 members of Congress lay out a wide swath of evidence from both Powell himself and from economists that American families will be in for “pain” in the coming months, as Powell has said, as the Fed plans to raise interest rates by 75 basis points, or 0.75 percent, for the third consecutive time this year.

    The letter, signed by progressive lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Representatives Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), expresses “concern” about the Fed’s “alarming” plans and “disturbing warning” to American families about what to expect in coming months.

    As the lawmakers point out, the Fed has predicted that as it continues raising rates through next year, unemployment will rise from its current rate of about 3.5 percent to 4.4 percent in 2023 and 2024. This means that about 2 million people will lose their jobs as economic growth slows and the labor market grows weaker, Powell has said.

    “I wish there were a painless way to do that. There isn’t,” Powell said in a press conference in September, contrary to what progressive economists have said about the way that the Fed could wrangle inflation with minimal impact to the labor market.

    Other experts’ estimates of the impact on the economy are more dire. Bank of America estimates that unemployment could jump as high as 5.6 percent, which could mean the loss of over 3 million jobs. Meanwhile, according to a survey released last month by The Wall Street Journal, economists predict that there is a 63 percent chance that the U.S. will enter a recession in the next 12 months, in large part due to the Fed’s relentless rate hikes.

    Economists, who have been raising warnings about the damage that the rate hikes could cause for months, have been puzzled about Powell’s decisions, the letter points out. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has said that whether or not there will be a global recession comes down to “policy choices and political will,” economists are unclear on what the Fed’s goals are.

    “The Fed clearly wants the labor market to weaken quite sharply. What’s not clear to us is why,” one economist wrote in a report earlier this year, as the letter writers pointed out. Economists have also questioned whether or not the rate hikes could have as much impact on inflation as they’re supposedly meant to have, saying that the impacts on the working class could outweigh any supposed benefits.

    Even the Fed itself admits that the rate hikes may have little impact on inflation, considering the vast amount of other factors at play, like corporate price gouging and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the letter reads. The lawmakers list a variety of times that Powell has admitted that the Fed’s power over commodity prices is limited.

    “As one economist noted, the Fed can’t ‘click its heels three times, raise rates and have inflation drop. There’s a myriad of factors going on now, and it’s a mistake to think the Fed controls any more than a handful of those,’” the letter says. “Nevertheless, you continue to double down on your commitment to ‘act aggressively’ with interest rate hikes and ‘keep at it until it’s done,’ even if ‘[n]o one knows whether this process will lead to a recession or if so, how significant that recession would be.’”

    “These statements reflect an apparent disregard for the livelihoods of millions of working Americans,” the lawmakers wrote, “and we are deeply concerned that your interest rate hikes risk slowing the economy to a crawl while failing to slow rising prices that continue to harm families.”

    While progressives warn that the Fed’s rate hikes would be at best a band aid on the problem, they say that raising interest rates to suppress demand is a neoliberal policy that passes economic pain onto the consumer at any cost — even a recession. Progressive advocates say, instead, that providing relief to the public while targeting corporations who are using inflation to raise prices would be a good start.

    President Joe Biden appears to agree that corporate price gouging is an important underlying cause for inflation, at least in part. On Monday, he warned oil and gas companies that, if they don’t take action to lower gas prices at the pump, they could face a corporate windfall tax that would capture excess profits. Indeed, the oil and gas industry — and corporations as a whole — have been enjoying huge profits as inflation has soared, while Americans are increasingly having to take out predatory loans for basic expenses.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Labor Board Says Starbucks CEO Schultz’s Comment to Pro-Union Worker Was Illegal

    Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s suggestion to a pro-union worker earlier this year that they should “work somewhere else” constituted an illegal threat, labor officials are alleging.

    During a meeting between Schultz and Long Beach, California, workers in April, Schultz told pro-union worker Madison Hall, “I’m sensing a lot of anger from you about Starbucks.” Hall had been a leader of the union effort at a Long Beach store.

    “If you hate Starbucks so much, why don’t you work somewhere else?” Schultz continued. Hall later resigned. It had been Schultz’s first week returning as CEO of Starbucks — a move the company made specifically so he could lead their union-busting campaign, the union said at the time.

    Labor officials have filed a complaint over Schultz’s remarks, saying that the CEO “threatened employees with discharge by inviting employees to quit their employment because they engaged in union and/or protected concerted activities,” per Bloomberg.

    According to the union, prior to the remark, Schultz had asked workers how he could help restore trust in the company, to which Hall said that the company could lighten up on and be more transparent about its anti-union campaign.

    “The worker was immediately silenced and told not to bring the union movement,” the union said in a press release. “Schultz ‘apologized’ on behalf of the employee to the rest of the group.”

    “We are fighting to make Starbucks a better company and better place to work. We want to bargain with the company as equals and have a real voice,” Josie Serrano, a Long Beach barista, said in a statement. “Howard Schultz is not good for Starbucks. Threatening a barista for simply wanting to make Starbucks better is not only absurdly inappropriate, but downright childish and mean.”

    The company has denied wrongdoing, saying that Schultz made the comments to keep the meeting on topic.

    Starbucks Workers United attorney Gabe Frumkin told Bloomberg that the interaction showed not just Hall but all of the employees present that the company could retaliate against them if they organize a union. Schultz’s comment “shows that they can either change the terms of your work relationship, or end it entirely based on the fact that a worker has voiced support for a union,” Frumkin said.

    This is the second labor charge that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has filed in response to Schultz’s actions. In August, the NLRB charged the company with breaking labor laws when Schultz promised wage raises for nonunionized employees only.

    Overall, according to the union, the NLRB has issued 37 complaints alleging over 800 labor law violations by Starbucks.

    Workers have successfully unionized over 250 stores so far. Their campaign appears to be entering a new phase as they begin to sit down with the company to negotiate first contracts. But the company has been extremely resistant to making progress at such negotiations and has walked away from bargaining meetings across multiple stores after just minutes in the room, workers say.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “Political Game Changer”: Biden Calls for Tax on Big Oil’s Excess Profits

    President Joe Biden called for a windfall tax on energy companies in a speech on Monday, a move that would deliver a major win to the climate and progressive advocates who have been calling for a tax on excess profits made amid high inflationary rates.

    In his response to major oil companies posting record-breaking profits, Biden cited wartime policies to stop corporations from war profiteering and said that oil companies must take steps to lower gas prices or face a tax on their profits.

    “If they passed the rest [of the profits] onto the consumers, the price of gas would come down around an additional 50 cents,” Biden said. “But rather than increasing their investments in America, or giving American consumers a break, their excess profits are going back to their shareholders and are buying back their stocks and their executive pays are going to skyrocket. Give me a break.”

    Oil companies must “invest in America by increasing their production and refining capacity” and lower prices, he said. “If they don’t, they’re going to pay a higher tax on their excess profits and face other restrictions.” He said he will work with Congress to explore the government’s options for this action.

    Oil majors reported huge profits last week as they released their Q3 finances for this year. Exxon, Chevron and Shell made record or near-record profits totalling billions of dollars each; Exxon, in fact, made the largest quarterly profit ever reported by an international oil company, at a profit of $19.7 billion. Experts have said that the high profits that the fossil fuel industry has experienced — and the stock buyback programs and shareholder enrichment that they allow — are evidence that the companies are price gouging customers at the pump.

    Meanwhile, gas prices have stagnated after steadily falling from peak levels for a few months, and remain high at about $3.76 per gallon on average across the country.

    The news was celebrated by Democrats, progressives and climate advocates who have been calling for a corporate windfall tax for months. They say that a windfall tax could be a crucial way for Democrats to tackle the current economic pressures facing Americans and that the move could represent a rebuke to corporations as they grow bolder in squeezing the public for profit.

    “President Biden is right. At a time when Exxon, Shell and Chevron increased their profits by 168 percent to $81 billion in the last 2 quarters by charging outrageously high prices at the pump, we need a windfall profits tax,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) on Twitter. “The revenue should go directly back to the American people.”

    In March, Sanders introduced a bill that would capture 95 percent of profits made by any large corporation in excess of pre-pandemic levels, in hopes of curbing greed-fueled inflation. And, earlier this year, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) introduced a narrower tax that would capture 50 percent of the price increase of oil barrels compared to pre-pandemic levels. The profits from the tax would be sent directly back to consumers.

    Those bills were never brought to a vote, and conservative Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) has expressed his opposition to the idea, which, partnered with Republicans’ almost certain uniform opposition, would likely doom any chance of passing legislation that comes before Congress. But Biden’s support of the idea could bring renewed energy to the proposal, bringing it from the sidelines to the mainstream in Congress.

    “This is exactly the type of leadership we’ve been waiting for from President Biden. Big Oil has made nearly $300 billion in excess profits this year by gouging us at the pump,” said Stop the Oil Profiteering spokesperson and climate activist Jamie Henn in a statement. “With 80 percent of voters supporting the policy, this could be a political game changer for Democrats. It’s a clear way for them to play offense against opponents who are in the pockets of Big Oil.”

    Advocacy groups have rallied around the policy. Earlier this year, over 120 progressive and climate groups sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) urging them to support the idea, saying that the oil and gas industry has been exploiting crises like the Russian invasion of Ukraine to rake in profits and further cement its dominance over the global energy system.

    The implementation of a windfall tax would not be without precedent. As Sanders pointed out when he introduced his bill, the U.S. has enacted similar windfall taxes during the first and second World Wars and during the Korean War in order to combat war profiteering.

    Further, U.K. lawmakers levied a windfall tax on oil and gas producers earlier this year — the implementation of which could provide lessons for Biden. Climate advocates have criticized the U.K. law for being too lax and for allowing the government to continue subsidizing oil and gas companies while taxing them; Shell, for instance, has paid none of the 25 percent tax on profits so far despite making a record-breaking $30 billion in profits so far this year because the company made investments in production.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Right-Wing Hostility to Elections Harkens Back to Jim Crow “Apartheid,” AOC Says

    As armed vigilantes have taken it upon themselves to allegedly intimidate voters at ballot drop off locations across several states, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) is warning that the right wing in the U.S. is creating an “environment of fascism” — and that the only way to combat it is to build a strong movement to defend democracy.

    In an MSNBC interview about the ballot box vigilantes, Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that political violence is rampant on the right; officials in the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have warned as such, she said.

    “There is absolutely no doubt that the data shows that the vast majority of incidents of domestic terror come from white nationalism, and that we are really truly facing an environment of fascism in the United States of America,” she said. “This type of intimidation at the polls brings us to Jim Crow. It brings us back and harkens back to a very unique form of American apartheid that is not that long past ago.”

    Experts have indeed likened Republicans’ current voter suppression efforts to Jim Crow laws, which were designed to keep Black people from voting. In modern times, voter suppression has taken the form of laws that appear to specifically target and restrict Black and Latinx voters’ voting access, racist district maps drawn by GOP lawmakers, the criminalization of Black people who may have been misled about legal guidelines for voting, and more.

    “We have never fully healed from [Jim Crow] and those wounds threaten to rip right back open if we do not strongly defend democracy,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

    Federal officials have warned about the heightened potential for violence and threats in the days surrounding the upcoming elections. On Friday, DHS, FBI, U.S. Capitol Police and the National Counterterrorism Center released a report warning that “perceptions of election-related fraud and dissatisfaction with electoral outcomes likely will result in heightened threats of violence against a broad range of targets.”

    As early voting rolled out last week, right-wing groups began watching polls and ballot boxes. The most widely publicized incident took place in Arizona, where heavily armed vigilantes allegedly threatened voters at drop boxes, though voter intimidation incidents and threats have also surfaced in states like Pennsylvania and Oregon.

    The watchers are seemingly motivated by debunked right-wing conspiracy theories that took hold on internet forums that there are people stuffing ballot boxes for Democrats — claims that are based on fabricated evidence. They are also motivated by people like Donald Trump and the Republican Party, who have been waging a years-long campaign to throw doubt into the election process altogether.

    Later in the interview, Ocasio-Cortez discussed how Republicans and conservatives have presented a false dichotomy in their political messaging, which claims that voters have to choose between advancing social issues or having a strong economy and democracy.

    “This idea that it’s either or is very dangerous,” she said. “The idea that emphasizing social equity is somehow a detriment to our democracy is playing into the hands of the folks who don’t want us to talk about either.”

  • AOC: McCarthy’s Relative Silence on Paul Pelosi Attack Shows “Who He Is”

    In the wake of an attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-California) husband by an alleged assailant who regularly posted right-wing conspiracy theories online, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has rebuked Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (California) for his relative silence on the issue.

    On Twitter on Saturday morning, Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that McCarthy had not yet commented on the attack that took place the day before, and noted that he has a history of defending violent threats when they are directed at his political enemies.

    “Last year, a GOP Congressman shared a depiction of himself killing me,” Ocasio-Cortez said, referring to an incident last year when Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) posted an animated video on Twitter depicting him killing Ocasio-Cortez. “When the House rose to censure, [McCarthy] defended him.”

    “Yesterday, a man sharing that member’s rhetoric tried to assassinate the Speaker and her spouse,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “What has [Mccarthy] said? Nothing. This is who he is.”

    The man who allegedly attacked Paul Pelosi in the couple’s San Francisco home on Friday has posted about the 2020 election being stolen and other debunked conspiracy theories surrounding the pandemic, QAnon and supposed “grooming” from the LGBTQ community.

    McCarthy has yet to make a formal public statement on the attack, remaining silent on his Twitter account and failing to publish any press releases on the matter. He did downplay the attack on far right outlet Breitbart on Saturday, however.

    After Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet on Saturday morning, McCarthy said that the attack was “wrong” but quickly brought up threats that have been waged against Republicans and far right Supreme Court justices — a clear attempt to make it seem as though left-wingers are just as violent as right-wingers, which data has shown is blatantly untrue.

    Ocasio-Cortez highlighted in a separate tweet on Saturday morning that there is a vast discrepancy between the way Democrats and progressive politicians versus right-wing politicians respond to political violence.

    Attaching a video from 2019 when white nationalist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), then not an elected official, harassed Ocasio-Cortez and her staffers at Ocasio-Cortez’s office in the Capitol, Ocasio-Cortez wrote, “Reminder: This is who the Republican Party elects and elevates to positions of power. This is how they act in the halls of Congress, and this [is] the example they set for acolytes to follow.”

    “These people want media to [claim there is] ‘both sides’ fascism. Don’t fall for it,” she continued. “For full context, one of Greene’s companions in that video was part of the violent mob on January 6th — in case there was any doubt at all about how closely these fascists work with one another. Do not give them an inch.”

    McCarthy himself has privately admitted that he feared the most extreme right-wingers in his party would incite violence against other members of Congress in the wake of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol — but he still hasn’t renounced the violence of the Donald Trump militants who breached the Capitol that day.

    Violence and threats from the right wing are on the rise; threats against Pelosi in particular have been common among the right for many years. Over the past year, federal agencies have tracked a sharp uptick in political violence, the vast majority of which comes from the right.

    Republicans have repeatedly refused to condemn this violence — and in some cases, they have also celebrated it. For instance, they have uplifted Kyle Rittenhouse, the man who traveled across state lines and shot three people, killing two of them, who were participating in protests for the Movement for Black Lives in 2020; after his trial last year, Republican politicians floated the idea of hiring Rittenhouse as an intern and he was given a speaking slot at a prominent conservative conference.

  • Sanders: GOP Wants to Repeal Estate Tax, Give Elon Musk’s Family $83B Tax Break

    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) denounced the Republican Party’s economic plans on Thursday, calling Republicans out for pursuing moves like repealing the estate tax, which would only serve to further consolidate wealth within the richest groups of U.S. society.

    At a rally for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tina Kotek and congressional candidate Val Hoyle in Oregon, Sanders sharply criticized Republicans for wanting to repeal the estate tax — the tax on property passed onto a person’s heirs when they die. Because there is a relatively high exemption amount for the estate tax of about $13 million for individuals and $26 million for couples, the tax largely only affects the richest Americans.

    “The estate tax applies only to the top one-tenth of one percent [of Americans],” he said. “If we repealed it, which is what Mitch McConnell and Republicans want to do … $1.75 trillion in tax breaks to the top one-tenth of one percent.”

    “And then, in order to pay for this, they’ve got another brilliant idea. In this state and in Vermont, you’ve got elderly people struggling to pay for their prescription drugs, struggling to heat their homes and these guys want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid,” he continued, to loud boos from the audience.

    He went on to point out that this would benefit certain people to a huge extent, allowing dynastic wealth to stay within a small number of families rather than being, to some small extent, redistributed among the rest of the population.

    “If this repeal of the estate tax went into effect, Elon Musk’s family, they would get a tax break of $83 billion,” he said. “Now, frankly, I don’t have anything against Elon Musk’s kids, I don’t know who they are, I have nothing against them. But they don’t deserve to get $83 billion.”

    Indeed, Republicans are seeking to implement a number of blatantly regressive tax and economic policies if they take the House, which polls show they are favored to do. Last year, top Republicans unveiled a bill that would repeal the estate tax — a move clearly aimed at allowing billionaires and the richest Americans to consolidate their wealth while sapping the government of needed funds.

    Meanwhile, congressional Republicans have released an economic plan that includes proposals to repeal prescription drug cost-saving measures and provisions to make Affordable Care Act premiums more expensive, moves that would pilfer money from the bank accounts of the working class.

    Republicans have also threatened to slash Social Security and Medicare, two of the most effective anti-poverty programs in the country, if they take back the House. They have laid out plans to hike the eligibility age and make it ever harder for future generations to have a chance at reaching retirement.

    As such, Sanders emphasized the importance of young people and progressives in fighting back against the greed of corporations and the wealthy in order to build a more equitable future.

    While calling for strong voter turnout in this election, Sanders said, “I’m gonna be honest with you here, and maybe some of my friends here are gonna be a little offended, but the Democratic Party has not been strong enough in fighting for working families.”

    “We need you, your generation, from coast to coast to put pressure on Democratic leadership, to say, ‘To hell with the corporate PACs, stand up and fight for working families,’” he continued.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “This Is What Price-Gouging Looks Like”: Exxon Profits Break All-Time Records

    On Friday, Exxon posted the highest quarterly profits ever posted by any U.S. oil company.

    Exxon’s profit last quarter of $17.9 billion was the highest posted by any major international oil company in history. This quarter’s profits smashed that record, totalling $19.7 billion in the third quarter of this year, nearly triple what the company made over the same time period last year.

    Other oil giants also posted record profits this quarter. Chevron posted its highest ever profits of $11.2 billion, nearly doubling profits from the same time last year. TotalEnergies doubled its profits, posting a net income of $9.9 billion, a record profit for the company.

    Shell’s net income also multiplied from last year, reaching $9.45 billion, the corporation’s second-highest quarterly profits — afforded to them at least in part because of the company’s successful avoidance of paying a windfall tax that the U.K. has levied on them. The company also announced that it will be carrying out a $4 billion stock buyback plan because of the profits.

    These profits come as gas prices have skyrocketed over the past two years. Gas prices reached a high this summer and have since cooled down slightly but remain high at a national average of $3.76 per gallon as of Friday, according to AAA.

    Progressives and climate advocates have said that high gas prices are a direct result of price gouging by oil and gas companies — and that high inflation rates in general have been caused by corporate greed. Indeed, oil and gas companies have been experiencing a windfall that’s corresponded with all-time record profits for corporations this year.

    Experts agree that current gas prices are greed-driven. While workers across the U.S. are struggling to even drive to work because of gas prices, oil and gas CEOs have been enjoying high gas prices, which give them the funds to shower their executives and shareholders with cash. As gas prices soared this summer, for instance, Exxon laid out plans for a $30 billion stock buyback program to enrich their shareholders.

    “This is what price-gouging looks like,” the Institute for Policy Studies wrote on Twitter in reaction to news of Shell’s profits on Thursday. “Oil and gas companies won’t choose to stop exploiting people on their own — we need government action.”

    Lawmakers have proposed levying a windfall tax on oil companies’ profits as they exploit global inflation and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) went one step further in March, proposing that the U.S. levy a tax on all major corporations’ excess profits until 2024 in order to discourage them from price gouging. But these bills ultimately fizzled out, with conservatives like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) against the idea.

    These record profits are alarming from a climate standpoint. More profits for oil companies only further entrench their position and power at a time when climate experts are warning that the world must draw down its use of fossil fuels immediately or risk pushing the planet ever further into climate catastrophe.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Conservative Policies Are Associated with Early Death, Study Finds

    Working-age people living in states governed largely with conservative policies are more likely to die early than people in states with more left-leaning policies, a new study finds, corroborating observations and theories that left-wing political commentators have maintained for years.

    The study, published this week in PLOS ONE, analyzed a wide swath of policies relating to the criminal legal system, health care, taxes, climate and the environment, firearms, and labor, rating them between a 0 and 1 scale, where zero is the maximum conservative score and one is the maximum left-leaning score. They compared those policies with mortality rates in a 20-year span between 1999 and 2019.

    The authors found that the rate of death among people between 25 and 64 in states with predominantly conservative policies was higher than in states with predominantly liberal policies. In nearly every policy area that the authors analyzed, left-leaning policies were associated with a lower rate of death.

    Further, the authors found that these left-leaning policies could save lives if implemented nationwide.

    “Simulations indicate that changing all policy domains in all states to a fully liberal orientation might have saved 171,030 lives in 2019, while changing them to a fully conservative orientation might have cost 217,635 lives,” the authors wrote.

    This research lends statistical evidence to what the left wing has maintained for many years: left-leaning and leftist policies are not only a moral imperative but also, in many cases by design, save lives. Conservative policies, meanwhile, are often designed to consolidate capital and help corporations and the wealthy hoard ever more money and power — which comes with devastating human consequences.

    “If a state policy maker were to say to me, ‘it’s unfair to criticize my state because I have a low-educated, low income population,’ I would ask them, ‘why do you have a low-educated, low-income population?’” lead study author Jennifer Karas Montez, sociology professor at Syracuse University, told USA Today. “It’s because of your policy environment.”

    Indeed, co-author Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, told USA Today that the study showed that higher mortality was associated with policies “helping the private sector to thrive in hopes that the economic gains would trickle down to those who need more assistance.”

    The study found particularly strong links in certain realms: “between the gun safety domain and suicide mortality among men, between the labour domain and alcohol-induced mortality, and between both the economic tax and tobacco tax domains and [cardiovascular] mortality,” they wrote.

    The research is especially relevant, the authors write, as the life expectancy rate is far lower in the U.S. than it is in other wealthy countries. In 2019, U.S. life expectancy was 78.8 years — 5.7 years lower than in Japan, which has the longest life expectancy, 3.3 years lower than in Canada and 2.5 years lower than in the U.K.

    Conservative policies may be to blame for the U.S.’s relatively poor life expectancy. The authors say that the spread of conservative policies across the country could be contributing to a lower life expectancy for the U.S.

    Indeed, other studies have corroborated this claim. One study found that life expectancy in the U.S. could increase by almost four years if the country adapted more generous social policies.

    For instance, if the U.S. had Medicare for All, which is currently not in place in any state, it could have saved over 338,000 lives throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, another study found earlier this year. Other left-leaning ideas and policies — like higher rates of unionization, stricter gun policies, cutting carbon emissions, wider abortion access, and more — have also been shown by researchers to be potentially life-saving.

  • 1 in 4 Americans Say Bible Should Take Precedence Over People’s Will in US Law

    New polling finds that nearly half of Americans think the U.S. should be a Christian nation — and that, among those who believe as such, over half think that the word of the Bible should take precedence over the will of the public when it comes to writing laws.

    The research, by Pew Research Center, finds that 45 percent of adults surveyed say that the U.S. should be a Christian nation, while 51 percent disagree. While two-thirds of Americans say that churches and other houses of worship should stay out of government affairs, there is still a sizable — and perhaps alarming — amount of Americans who believe that Christianity should guide U.S. law, the polling found.

    Among those who said that the U.S. should be a Christian nation, a majority (52 percent) said that the federal government should never declare an official religion. But still, among that group, a larger share (54 percent) said that the Bible should have more influence on U.S. laws than the will of the public, while 22 percent said that the Bible should have an impact but not overrule the will of the people. This means that about 27 percent and 19 percent of the poll’s respondents agree with these statements, respectively.

    Additionally, about a third of the group that believes that the U.S. should be a Christian nation said that religious diversity “weakens American society,” or about 19 percent overall.

    Pew notes that some seemingly conflicting views shown in the poll may be explained by the fact that respondents may not fully agree on what it means for the U.S. to be a “Christian nation,” or that respondents don’t fully understand the implications of such a declaration. For instance, 60 percent of respondents said that the U.S.’s founders originally intended for the U.S. to be a Christian nation, even though it is explicitly written in the First Amendment that U.S. lawmakers should never establish a national religion through law.

    Some respondents may think that Americans should act under a unified set of morals, not that it should be written into the law, Pew said. Or, they may simply think that a majority of the population is already Christian — as exemplified by the fact that 33 percent of Americans evidently think that the U.S. is already a Christian nation, the poll found.

    However, the fact that there is a rather large portion of respondents who seem to be hostile to religions other than Christianity and that they believe the Bible should essentially be translated as rule of law is concerning, especially in a time when Republicans are increasingly embracing Christian nationalism.

    Christian nationalism is a dangerous ideology closely associated with white supremacy and fascism; moves like the Supreme Court’s Christian, far right judges ruling to overturn federal abortion rights earlier this year are an example of the spread of Christofascism on the right and inside the corridors of power.

    The ideology is still unpopular, the survey found. Five percent of respondents said that they have a favorable opinion of Christian nationalism — a large number for such a fringe and malignant view, but still a small proportion overall. About a quarter of respondents said they have an unfavorable view of Christian nationalism, while 54 percent said they have never heard of the ideology.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Labor Officials Say Amazon CEO’s Anti-Union Comments Violated Federal Labor Law

    Anti-union comments made by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in interviews earlier this year constituted a violation of federal labor laws, labor officials have alleged in a complaint filed on Wednesday.

    As first reported by The Washington Post, the allegedly unlawful comments were made in two interviews in April and June, shortly after Amazon Labor Union (ALU) successfully unionized an Amazon warehouse for the first time in history.

    In April, Jassy said on CNBC that unions are a “more bureaucratic” and “much slower” method of affecting change than speaking directly with management — a common anti-union talking point that ignores that Amazon workers have repeatedly brought issues to management, to no avail. He also said that workers are “better off” without a union, a comment that was widely criticized.

    During a Bloomberg tech event in June, Jassy once again said that the company believes that workers are better off not unionizing and that it would be harder for workers to have a relationship with management if they were in a union.

    Through these comments, Amazon “has been interfering with, restraining, and coercing employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed” under federal labor law, National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) regional director Ronald Hooks said in the complaint. The company has denied wrongdoing, claiming that the comments were covered under labor laws.

    The NLRB requests that the company be forced to post a notice and send an email to employees informing them of their rights. If the company chooses not to settle the case, a hearing over the comments has been set for February.

    ALU applauded the NLRB’s filing. “These plutocrats will no longer threaten workers in interviews with the media,” ALU attorney Seth Goldstein, who filed the charge against the company, told The Washington Post. “They’re being held accountable.”

    Amazon has repeatedly broken the law during its workers’ union campaigns, according to the NLRB, by holding captive anti-union meetings directed toward unionizing workers, threatening union organizers with racist remarks, interfering with the union election in Bessemer, Alabama, last year, and more.

    The charge comes a week after workers at a warehouse near Albany, New York, voted against unionizing by a two to one margin, according to an NLRB count. After a breakthrough win earlier this year in Staten Island, New York, the union has been seeking its second victory, having suffered two losses since then.

    After the win last week, ALU President Chris Smalls vowed to keep fighting, saying, “When workers are empowered to take on a greedy uncaring company with a poor safety track record and a high churn rate of workers, it isn’t a loss, it’s an ongoing battle.” The union has another election in the pipeline; earlier this month, workers at a warehouse in Moreno Valley, California, filed to join ALU.

    And, indeed, even if the union votes fail in the face of fierce opposition from the company, ALU’s independent union movement has inspired countless other workers, like those at Trader Joe’s and Home Depot, to embrace an unconventional technique in organizing their workplaces — a model that has led to some groundbreaking wins in the past months.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • For the First Time, LGBTQ Candidates Are on the Ballot in All 50 States

    For the first time in U.S. history, voters in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. will have the chance to vote for an LGBTQ candidate, a new report finds.

    According to a new report by the LGBTQ Victory Fund, there will be at least 678 LGBTQ candidates on the ballot for the general election in November, an increase of 18 percent from 574 in 2020. This is partially due to an increase in the proportion of LGBTQ candidates tracked by the organization who won their primaries earlier this year, at 64 percent compared to 57 percent in 2020.

    The proportion of LGBTQ candidates who are people of color also increased this year. While people of color accounted for 31 percent of LGBTQ candidates in 2020 and 29 percent in 2018, 38 percent of LGBTQ candidates appearing on general election ballots are people of color this year. Fourteen percent of these candidates are Black and 13 percent are Latinx.

    Meanwhile, the proportion of candidates running for office who are not cisgender has hit an all-time high, representing 14 percent of LGBTQ candidates this year, compared to 8 percent in 2020.

    The vast majority of these candidates are Democrats or leftists, the report finds. Of the 1,065 LGBTQ people who ran for offfice in this election cycle, 903 ran as Democrats, while several others ran under a progressive or socialist label. On the conservative side, two ran as libertarians and 45 ran as Republicans.

    The increase in LGBTQ candidates comes amid a surge of attacks on LGBTQ people. Far right politicians have proposed hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills this year, seeking to bar trans children from participating in school sports, censor books about LGBTQ characters, and more.

    Perhaps threatened by the fact that acceptance of LGBTQ people has been trending upwards in recent decades, conservatives have also honed in on attacking LGBTQ people in the public sphere, seeking to demonize and scapegoat the LGBTQ community.

    LGBTQ Victory Fund President Annise Parker says that the increase in LGBTQ candidates is a response to such attacks. “As politicians in state legislatures and on school boards levied unprecedented attacks on our community and our kids, LGBTQ leaders responded, running for office in record numbers,” Parker said in a statement.

    “Voters are sick and tired of the relentless attacks lobbed against the LGBTQ community this year,” she said. “Bigots want us to stay home and stay quiet, but their attacks are backfiring and instead have motivated a new wave of LGBTQ leaders to run for office.”

    Some of these candidates are set to be the first LGBTQ people in their particular seat if they win. Maura Healey and Tina Kotek, both Democrats, are slated to be the U.S.’s first-ever openly lesbian governors if they win office, in Massachusetts and Oregon, respectively. If U.S. House Democratic candidate Becca Balint wins, she will be the first-ever openly LGBTQ person from Vermont to be elected to Congress.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 43 Percent of Americans Are Worried About Threats of Violence at the Polls

    Over two in five Americans polled over the past week say they are concerned about being subject to intimidation or violence when voting in the midterms, new polling finds, in an alarming show of the state of democracy in the U.S.

    According to a poll from Reuters/Ipsos of over 4,400 U.S. adults, about 43 percent of Americans say they are worried about facing threats at polling locations. Democrats are more likely to be concerned about violence, at about 51 percent versus Republicans’ 38 percent.

    Likely fueled at least in part by the far right’s attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Americans are also concerned that groups will carry out violence after the election if they’re unsatisfied with the outcome, the poll found, with over two in three Americans saying as such.

    The poll comes as there have been reports of armed far right vigilantes intimidating voters in Arizona. Though there have not yet been reports of violence, the vigilantes have apparently been taking pictures of people using ballot drop boxes and threatening to post their information online.

    The vigilantes appear to have been galvanized by debunked right-wing claims that so-called ballot mules are stuffing boxes with ballots for Democrats. While there is zero evidence of widespread voter fraud or anything resembling ballot stuffing, the belief appears to have become so entrenched that vigilantes are taking it upon themselves to supposedly “guard” ballot boxes.

    Despite having no basis in reality, voter fraud has become a concern among the public as well. The Reuters/Ipsos poll found that nearly half of Americans think that voter fraud is a “widespread problem,” while only 40 percent disagree. Republicans are more likely to believe in this lie popularized by Donald Trump, with two-thirds of Republicans saying they believe that widespread voter fraud is an issue and about one-third of Democrats saying as such.

    There have been other threats to voters from the right. In Florida, Gov. Ron Desantis’s fascist election police arrested 20 people earlier this month, claiming that they knowingly violated election guidelines — but like many others who have been prosecuted for election-related offenses, those arrested were simply unaware of their voter eligibility status.

    In this case, some of the voters arrested were supposedly previously told that they were eligible to vote, but then were arrested for illegally registering. At least 13 of the people who were arrested were Black.

    The fact that concerns of violence in relation to casting a vote are so widespread and that there are already reports of intimidation is an alarming show of the erosion of democracy in the U.S.

    The far right has been ramping up voter suppression efforts in recent years; between the Republican Party’s gerrymandering, plans to mass-challenge election results and infiltrate Democratic-majority polling places, or bills to flat-out allow Republican officials to overturn election results, experts say the GOP is setting the stage to rig elections so that they never lose — or effectively lose, despite voters’ will — again.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Slams Republicans’ Plans to Cut Social Security and Medicare in Op-Ed

    In an op-ed published Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) pointed out the sharp contrasts between Republicans’ economic policies and progressive Democrats’ ambitions, laying out a variety of policies that have popular support among the public but that are opposed by the GOP.

    Writing in The Hill, Sanders acknowledged that the Democratic Party is “far from perfect,” while urging voters to consider Republicans’ stances on key economic issues like Social Security and Medicare — two crucial anti-poverty programs that members of the party have plausibly threatened to cut if the GOP takes the House in the midterm election.

    “Too many Democratic members of Congress have been unwilling to stand up to the big money interests that dominate Washington and fight for working families,” Sanders wrote. At the same time, he said, “here is the simple reality: the Republicans in Congress are far worse when it comes to addressing the needs of the working class.”

    He then listed a variety of policies that Republicans nearly uniformly oppose, like cutting the prices of a wide variety of prescription drugs; raising the minimum wage; implementing universal health care; cutting child poverty through the expanded child tax credit; expanding workers’ unionization rights; and closing loopholes that allow corporations and the wealthy to avoid paying federal income taxes.

    The GOP also opposes taking on corporate greed through a corporate windfall tax, which Sanders proposed in a bill earlier this year amid soaring worldwide inflation that has been coupled with soaring corporate profits.

    “Not a single Republican in Washington agrees” with these policies, he wrote multiple times.

    In fact, many Republicans support policies that only worsen these problems. Rather than closing tax loopholes for the wealthy, for instance, they have slashed tax rates for corporations and the 1 percent. And, instead of supporting the union movement and boosting workers’ wages and rights in the workplace, as the progressive movement has done, Republicans have vowed to go after the labor movement and top labor regulators if they take the House.

    Sanders has spent this month emphasizing that the Democratic Party should be focusing more on economic issues if they want to win over voters and keep control of Congress this year. In interviews, op-eds and on social media, the senator has said that Democrats must tout their economic platform — and have the “guts” to follow through and lead on bold measures taking on corporate power.

    Indeed, as Sanders has pointed out, multiple polls have shown that voters trust Republicans more than Democrats on economic issues. This is likely the result of years of misleading messaging from the party branding themselves as deficit hawks (but only when Democrats are in power) or blaming Democrats for issues like gas prices that are often out of their control.

    At the same time, the economy and inflation are top of mind for voters this election. Polls have found that inflation consistently ranks as a top concern for voters casting a midterm ballot, suggesting that Sanders is right in his hypothesis that focusing on the economy would be a winning strategy for the Democratic Party.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Secret Service Waited an Hour to Send Info on Threat Against Schumer on Jan. 6

    As far right militants were violently breaking into the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the Secret Service received news of a threat waged against Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (New York), one of the top Democrats in Congress — and evidently waited over an hour to pass it on to Capitol Police.

    In a report published on Tuesday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) says that the Secret Service received a voicemail with a shooting threat against Schumer at around 4 pm D.C. time, forwarded by an editor for far right publication Newsmax. Documents obtained by CREW show that the Secret Service held onto this information for over an hour before sending it to Capitol Police, despite evidence that the agency saw the message shortly after it was received.

    This was a crucial time during the attack, when minutes mattered. Around that time, the Donald Trump militants were roaming the halls of the Capitol and had breached the Senate floor and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-California) office. Just about 15 minutes after the voicemail was sent, Trump posted a video to Twitter repeating the lies about the election that had served as inspiration for the attack to begin with.

    Schumer and Pelosi had already been transported to a secure location at around 2 pm — but, as previous evidence has shown, several prominent politicians, like then-Vice President Mike Pence, had already suffered extremely close calls at that point. Extra information on threats was also crucial as officials hesitated to send in reinforcements.

    CREW previously uncovered that the Secret Service had also sat on a threat to Pelosi. In the days leading up to the attack, an account on Parler had made threats toward Pelosi and Biden, placing Pelosi’s name on a list of “enemies” and saying on January 2, 2021, that “Biden will die shortly after being elected.”

    According to internal emails obtained by CREW, the Secret Service was aware of these threats as early as January 4. Despite this, the agency didn’t send these messages to Capitol Police until January 6 at 5:55 pm, at which point much of the mob had been cleared out.

    The Secret Service has faced scrutiny for other actions related to January 6. Earlier this year, The Intercept uncovered that the agency had deleted a swath of text messages between January 5 and 6, 2021, that could have answered lawmakers’ and the public’s questions about key decisions made that day, like why agents had wanted to remove Pence from the Capitol before he had completed his duties in certifying the results of the election.

    Other top government agencies also had knowledge of the attack ahead of time, but declined to act. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security had been warned about the threat to the Capitol and members of Congress, but neither agency prepared a threat assessment, leaving the agencies thoroughly unprepared to handle the violence that the Trump militants would unleash.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • AOC, Pressley Slam Biden for Using Title 42 to Expel Venezuelan Asylum Seekers

    Democrats and progressives are condemning the Biden administration for its continued use of Title 42, a cruel anti-immigration pandemic policy that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is now using to expel Venezuelan asylum seekers arriving at the southern U.S. border.

    In a letter with 24 signatories, spearheaded by Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-New York) and Sen. Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey), lawmakers criticized DHS’s announcement, saying that the continued use of Title 42 is “morally wrong, discriminatory, and unlawful.”

    Expressing their “profound disappointment” with the DHS decision, the lawmakers said that “Title 42 violates our nation’s domestic and international legal obligations by placing asylum seekers at risk of extreme violence.” The letter was signed by prominent progressive lawmakers like Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan).

    The lawmakers wrote that the policy is racist, citing a report from a public health expert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying that Title 42 is used “to keep Hispanics out of the country.” The lawmakers also pointed out that experts have said that the policy — which is supposedly being employed to stop the spread of COVID-19 — has no public health basis.

    Using Title 42 against Venezuelans is especially heinous, the lawmakers wrote, given that the administration itself has acknowledged the danger of sending people at the border back to Mexico, noting that it puts people at risk of kidnapping, sexual assault or death.

    “It is critical that the Administration reassess the decision to implement Title 42 against Venezuelan asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border,” the lawmakers continued. “We have a moral and legal responsibility to ensure that our immigration policies respect human rights and recognize the dignity of all human beings seeking refuge.”

    The letter echoes one sent by dozens of human rights organizations earlier this month, also urging DHS to reconsider the policy. “DHS can and should take all legally permissible steps to restore access to asylum at ports of entry, regardless of the asylum seeker’s nationality or other factors, and to cease — not expand — Title 42 expulsions,” reads the letter, which was signed by immigrant rights groups like Human Rights Watch and RAICES.

    Earlier this month, DHS announced that it would be expanding the use of Title 42, a policy originally invoked by President Donald Trump that has been used to deport at least 1.8 million asylum seekers — including, infamously, last year and early this year when DHS sent over 20,000 Haitian asylum seekers to Haiti, despite the danger, violence and instability that some asylum seekers warned they would face there.

    The agency announced this time that it would be cracking down on asylum seekers from Venezuela, much to the dismay of immigrant rights advocates who have long contended that Title 42 is used to discriminate against non-white asylum seekers and should have been ended months, if not years ago.

    Earlier this year, the Biden administration announced that it would be ending the use of Title 42 in May. But the move was blocked by a Trump-appointed judge, and the Biden administration is working on appealing the injunction.

    Although advocates lauded Biden’s announcement that Title 42 would be ended, they also expressed frustration that the administration hadn’t ended the policy far earlier.

    Although Biden promised on the campaign trail that he would end the policy in his first year in office, he has actually ramped up the use of the inhumane policy, expelling more asylum seekers during his first months in office than Trump ever did. The Biden administration is still expelling tens of thousands of asylum seekers each month, despite moving to end the policy.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Starbucks Walks Out of Union Contract Negotiations After Months of Delays

    Starbucks company representatives abruptly walked out of every bargaining session the company had scheduled for Monday after just minutes in the room, in some cases, stalling negotiations yet again for what the union says are completely spurious reasons.

    Union members in Buffalo; Chicago; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Louisville, Kentucky; and Lakewood, California, sat down on Monday after months of anticipation to begin bargaining their first contracts in earnest with the company. These were set to be among the first round of contract negotiations, potentially setting the stage for how future sessions with the over 250 unionized stores will go.

    Workers say that company representatives from Starbucks and union-busting law firm Littler Mendelson were late to the session and made workers wait for hours. Then, after returning to the room, they abruptly left, citing the fact that some workers were joining the session virtually on Zoom — garnering deep frustration from workers who say that the company is using this as an excuse to continue to delay bargaining.

    “It’s as if Starbucks walked out of negotiations because they didn’t like the color of our hair,” said Al Kerr, a worker at the Elmwood Avenue store in Buffalo that was supposed to bargain on Monday, in a statement. “It’s completely ridiculous — not to mention childish — and clearly just another way for the company to stall.”

    The union also says that the company has previously allowed employees to join in on Zoom in the small handful of bargaining sessions that it’s had with union members prior to this week. Some who were slated to negotiate on Monday said that there hadn’t been established ground rules banning Zoom before the meeting.

    “I joined the Power and Baseline bargaining session virtually and we had no problems,” Starbucks Workers United leader Michelle Eisen said, referring to one of the three bargaining sessions that had happened prior to Monday. “Why it’s suddenly an issue for Starbucks and their lawyers just doesn’t make any sense.”

    Starbucks has filed an unfair labor practice charge in each of the stores slated to negotiate on Monday, saying that the presence of the Zoom callers was a sign that the union wasn’t bargaining in good faith.

    The union is also planning to file an unfair labor practice charge, saying that this is just the latest example of the company, not the workers, being unwilling to come to the bargaining table in good faith.

    According to the union, despite the company saying that it was ready to begin bargaining, the company has made it hard for workers to get a meeting on the books.

    Starbucks presented workers with a slate of dates to bargain in October — but said that workers had to adhere to a rule requiring three weeks of advance notice for time off requests for the sessions. Although workers at 156 stores accepted proposed bargaining dates, only 37 stores had a date on the books as of last week, with the majority of sessions being pushed back to next month.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Clarence and Ginni Thomas Must Be Investigated by Congress, Watchdog Says

    A government watchdog is urging Congress to open investigations into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas, for their connections to the attempted coup on January 6, 2021, which was orchestrated by a mob of Trump loyalists and their large set of collaborators within the Republican Party.

    Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) sent a letter to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on Monday urging them to investigate Ginni and Clarence Thomas — the former for her involvement in the attack and attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 election and the latter for his refusal to recuse himself from cases related to the attack.

    The group, led by CREW President Noah Bookbinder, says that lawmakers should assess both individuals’ ability to serve in public office considering their connections to the attack, noting that such investigations could potentially result in their removal.

    As the letter points out, text and email evidence has established that Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist and member of the Library of Congress Trust Fund board, was embedded within Donald Trump’s movement to overturn the results of the 2020 election. She used her connections within high levels of government to urge officials in multiple states to go against the will of voters and declare victory for Trump, and was in contact with people within the Trump administration about the scheme.

    Her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has refused to recuse himself from matters relating to the attack and the election that may come before the Supreme Court. The justice has participated in several cases involving the attack, including perhaps most controversially when he was the sole justice to vote against allowing Trump White House records to be turned over to the January 6 committee.

    “It is critical that those responsible for the attack on the Capitol be held accountable and that the integrity of the Supreme Court not be tainted by conflicts of interest,” Bookbinder wrote. “The Judiciary Committees have responsibility for the oversight of our judiciary and law enforcement agencies, and investigating Ginni Thomas’s conduct and Justice Thomas’s failure to recuse is an essential exercise of that oversight responsibility.”

    Ginni Thomas has said that she and her husband don’t discuss politics at home, likely to protect him from facing scrutiny as calls for his impeachment reached a high over the summer.

    But even if this was true, the very fact that Ginni Thomas is so ingrained within the movement to overturn the 2020 election erodes public confidence in the Supreme Court, CREW contends. The group calls for Congress to consider passing a bill to bind Supreme Court justices to a code of ethics, as lawmakers like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) introduced earlier this year.

    “It is hard to conceive of anything more damaging to public trust in the Court than the spouse of someone deeply involved in efforts to overturn an election ruling on criminal and civil matters stemming from those efforts,” the letter reads.

  • Starbucks Union Celebrates as Last of 7 Fired Memphis Organizers Is Reinstated

    The union behind Starbucks workers’ remarkably successful union drive is celebrating as a group of seven workers known as the “Memphis Seven” have been reinstated after the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that they were illegally fired by the company.

    According to Starbucks Workers United, the workers have all returned to their jobs at the now-unionized store as of Saturday, a “triumphant” win for the union, it said.

    In February, Starbucks fired a group of workers at a unionizing store in Memphis, Tennessee, who the union said made up nearly the entirety of the organizing committee at the store. In a press release this week, the union said that the firings were the company’s response to the workers’ organizing efforts.

    “Once Starbucks found out who these partners were, in relation to the organizing effort, Starbucks executed a typical pattern — sudden corrective-action-investigations, issuing threats, making false accusations, sudden enforcement of policy, and separation from the company,” the union wrote.

    Labor officials found that the workers’ firing constituted illegal union busting this spring, and a judge ordered the company to reinstate the workers in August, finding “reasonable cause” in labor officials’ findings. NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo hailed the ruling, saying, “Starbucks, and other employers, should take note that the NLRB will continue to vigorously protect workers’ right to organize without interference from their employer.”

    The company has continually denied any wrongdoing.

    The once-fired workers have vowed to keep fighting for the union and for the dozens of other union organizers that the company has fired in recent months. According to the union, the company has fired at least 130 other pro-union workers so far.

    The win for Starbucks Workers United comes as their campaign, which has resulted in over 250 unionized stores up until this point, is potentially entering a new phase — one in which union filings are slowing down and legal filings and first union contracts are yet to be sorted out. Indeed, as The New York Times notes, while stores were once filing to unionize at a breakneck pace of over two stores a day, filings slowed to under 10 in August.

    At the same time, workers are now getting a chance to negotiate with the company to form their first union contracts. Though employers are under a legal obligation to negotiate with a union once it’s formed, Starbucks has been delaying the process, with only three stores having had first bargaining sessions up until Monday.

    Starting this week, workers at a handful of stores will be sitting down to bargain with the company; at least two dozen stores have set bargaining dates in the next six weeks. The union has said that workers will be seeking several demands, including non-interference by the company in future union elections, guarantees on the amount of hours that workers are scheduled for, an establishment of a labor committee in each store, and more.

    Considering it took a pressure campaign from workers to get bargaining dates on the calendar, workers are not expecting the company to make concessions easily.

    Indeed, workers who had their first bargaining sessions scheduled for Monday have already reported that company representatives have been late and have left bargaining sessions after just minutes. In Buffalo, in negotiations for the first store to ever unionize, the company refused to bargain after a few workers elected to join the session virtually.

  • 86 Percent of GOP 2022 Senate Race TV Ad Budget Has Come From Dark Money Groups

    Campaign spending from outside groups has hit a new high this election cycle, and a new analysis shows that Republicans running for key Senate seats have been a major beneficiary of this dark money infusion.

    According to NPR, dark money groups have spent $1 billion on supporting Republican candidates this election cycle, with outside groups and campaigns spending over $1.6 billion overall on Senate candidates in a dozen races analyzed by the publication. The vast majority of this money is being spent on battleground races in states like Georgia, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

    This has been a huge boon to Republicans. The report finds that outside money has made up a staggering 86 percent of the GOP’s TV ad budget so far, compared to 55 percent for Democrats. This is an indication that Republican candidates desperately need this dark money cache to be competitive, the analysis says, since outside groups are charged more to run ads than campaigns are.

    “Put simply: If it weren’t for these outside groups, Republican candidates would be swamped on the airwaves,” the report reads. “[T]he inability for Republican campaigns to keep pace with Democrats has meant these GOP outside groups have had to make up a lot of ground, spending more for less.”

    This spending comes as outside spending on elections is on the rise. According to OpenSecrets, as of mid-October, outside spending hit $1.3 billion in this election cycle — a record high for a midterm election.

    Republican groups are the biggest spenders, with the GOP’s two largest congressional funds spending a collective $315 million with weeks to go until the election. By contrast, the Democrats’ corresponding congressional funds have spent about $168 million so far — only a little over half of the Republican PACs’ spending.

    Progressives and government watchdog groups have long maintained that dark money spending is a danger to U.S. democracy. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission in 2010, dark money groups are able to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections, essentially only bound by the amount of money that billionaires and corporations are willing to spend on influencing politics.

    Dark money groups aren’t required to disclose their donors, meaning that this political spending is often completely anonymous — thanks in part to Republicans, who voted against a bill last month that would have required dark money groups to disclose the identities of those who give $10,000 or more.

    The battle over the Senate is key for both major parties this election. In order to win control of the Senate, Republicans will need to pick up two more seats over the 50 seats they control, which they are not favored to do.

    Polls have found that Democrats are slightly favored to win control of the Senate. Democrats have been aiming to add two seats to their Senate majority in order to circumvent filibuster holdouts Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) to protect abortion and voting rights, among other things.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.