radiofree.asia

Author: Sharon Zhang

  • GOP Plan on Threatening Recession if They Can’t Cut Medicare, Social Security

    If Republicans take control of the House this fall, they plan on using debt limit talks — and the possibility of throwing the U.S. into default — if they don’t get their way on slashing government programs.

    According to a new interview with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California), the party is planning on using must-pass debt ceiling legislation to force through the GOP’s agenda.

    “You can’t just continue down the path to keep spending and adding to the debt,” McCarthy said in an interview with Punchbowl News, ignoring the fact that economists view national debt obligations as often signaling the health of the economy. “We’re not just going to keep lifting your credit card limit, right,” he continued. “And we should seriously sit together and [figure out] where can we eliminate some waste? Where can we make the economy grow stronger?”

    When McCarthy refers to eliminating so-called waste, it is likely that he is referring to, among other things, the GOP’s plans to cut Medicare and Social Security, two of the most popular and vital anti-poverty government programs in the U.S.

    Republicans have been attacking the programs over the past months. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) has threatened to put budgets up to congressional debate every year, which would almost definitely lead to cuts. Alarmingly, earlier this year, the Republican Study Committee, the largest Republican caucus in the House, put out a plan to raise the age at which people receive full benefits from both programs to 70, while implementing a rule that would raise the eligibility age over time.

    The debt ceiling is an effective bludgeon for Republicans to use for this purpose. The debt ceiling accounts for government funding to provide promised payments for programs like Medicare and Social Security, as well as military salaries and other “existing legal obligations,” according to the Treasury Department.

    Republicans had threatened to put the U.S. in default last September, after former President Donald Trump urged the party to do so. They appeared to be posing as deficit hawks — something they only do when a Democrat is in charge — while Democrats were debating the Build Back Better Act.

    If they pull a similar move in 2023, it could be similar to 2011, when the GOP manufactured a debt ceiling crisis that ultimately “led directly to the worst recovery following a recession since World War II,” according to the Economic Policy Institute.

    If the debt ceiling isn’t raised by fall of 2023, when the government is slated to run out of funding, the U.S. could find itself in a situation similar to last year, when it was at risk of defaulting on its loans. This could have triggered a global recession and would have disastrous short- and long-term consequences for the U.S., as the creditworthiness of the country would be ruined.

    In other words, Republicans appear to be willing to hold the U.S. and global economy on the brink of disaster in order to force Democrats to capitulate to their demands.

    This way, too, Republicans can blame whatever economic fallout will come with either a default, government shutdown or cuts to Medicare and Social Security on Democrats. By pursuing these cuts during a Democratic presidency, they can point fingers at President Joe Biden if they are pushed through — potentially providing the GOP with a weapon come the 2024 election.

    Republicans are laying out other plans for if they take the House, which polls say they are likely to do. GOP members of the House Education and Labor Committee have made a list of prominent labor officials like Labor Secretary Marty Walsh and National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo as well as Biden’s pro-worker task force to target with hearings and attacks if they take control of the House.

  • Biden to Vow to Make Codifying “Roe” First Priority If Democrats Win Congress

    President Joe Biden plans to vow that, if Democrats win big in the midterms, the first bill he will send to the next session of Congress will codify abortion rights afforded under Roe v. Wade, according to a Democratic official.

    Biden is scheduled Tuesday to speak before the Democratic National Committee, and plans to emphasize abortion rights as a top priority for the party. If Democrats keep control of the House and add two seats to Senate, then he will aim to sign the abortion rights bill into law around the 50th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court ruling in late January, according to the source familiar with his anticipated speech.

    The president is also expected to criticize Republicans in his speech, warning about their efforts to pass a nationwide abortion ban if they take control of Congress.

    A GOP takeover would have disastrous consequences for reproductive rights, potentially criminalizing huge swaths of abortion providers or patients and likely raising the maternal death rate.

    The speech is aimed at motivating voters passionate about abortion rights to cast a ballot in this year’s elections. Abortion bans are unpopular among the public, and polls have shown that voters rank abortion as a top issue in the election and say that it is a key issue driving them to vote.

    Democrats have honed in on campaigning around abortion rights in this election, promising voters to protect abortion rights federally and overrule states’ dangerous abortion bans if they win.

    Abortion advocates have criticized Democrats and Biden for campaigning on abortion rights, however, saying that they have not done enough with the power that they currently have to protect abortion seekers and other people impacted by bans. Some lawmakers have suggested, for instance, that Biden could declare a public health emergency over the abortion bans to free up resources and highlight the importance of the issue.

    Democrats have tried to pass legislation in recent months to create similar federal protections for abortion as Roe had previously afforded. In July, shortly after far right Supreme Court justices overturned Roe, the House passed a bill that would have protected abortion rights federally, known as the Women’s Health Protection Act.

    But Democrats’ efforts have been stymied by pro-filibuster conservative Democrats Senators Joe Manchin (West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona), who oppose the use of a filibuster carveout for abortion rights — an idea that Biden has endorsed. Congressional Republicans are uniformly opposed to codifying abortion rights.

    Without support from Congress, Biden has signed executive actions aimed at protecting people who travel across state lines to obtain an abortion and protect access to medications and potentially increasing access for those who need to travel out of state to get an abortion.

    So far, over a dozen states have banned or restricted abortions, with other bans pending court challenges or being considered by state legislatures.

    These bans have led to horrifying experiences for many people. Child incest victims have been forced to travel out of state for abortions. Other people have been denied necessary medications because they may cause birth defects or may contain abortifacients. Cancer patients, for instance, have been denied chemotherapy at least one state with an abortion ban, forcing pregnant patients to travel to a different state to obtain an abortion before starting cancer treatments.

  • Congressional Workers Get $10,000 Raises in First-Ever Union Contract

    Workers in Rep. Andy Levin’s (D-Michigan) office have reached a tentative agreement on the terms of Congress’s first-ever union contract, marking a major milestone for the congressional workers’ union that was announced just earlier this year.

    The contract would provide roughly $10,000 raises for workers, raising the average salary in the office for junior staffers to $76,000, the Congressional Workers Union said.

    “For the first time in the history of the U.S. Congress, congressional staffers sat at the bargaining and demanded higher pay from management,” the union wrote in a statement. “Workers walked into negotiations with equity top of mind, and walked away with a $10,000 raise and a meaningful end-of-the-year bonus.”

    The contract shows “the power of organizing and how life-changing joining a union can be,” the union said. “When workers and employers come together to negotiate in good faith, the result is a contract and a workplace that better serves everyone.”

    Levin’s office voted unanimously to unionize in September, becoming the first office in Congress to ever form a union. Since then, the offices of Representatives Ro Khanna (D-California), Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) and Melanie Stansbury (D-New Mexico) also voted to unionize, all with landslide victories.

    Six other offices, including those of Representatives Cori Bush (D-Missouri) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), have filed to unionize and are waiting on their elections.

    The pay bump for Levin’s workers will only last a couple of months, as Levin lost his primary after pro-Israel groups spent millions on the effort to defeat him. Levin is a strong supporter of the union effort, and was hand picked by union organizers to introduce the legislation allowing congressional workers to unionize earlier this year.

    “I think if we truly value having an effective workplace and an efficient workplace and a workplace that matches the amazing diversity of our country — racial, ethnic and also socioeconomic diversity — we need to give our workers the chance to organize and bargain,” Levin told Roll Call.

    “I really believe that we have launched a new era of labor relations and working conditions in Congress, where workers will have much more say in how things go,” Levin said.

    Congressional workers say that low pay is a major factor motivating them to unionize. Workers in Congress often have to work long hours and face grueling working conditions, only to make far less than would in a comparable private sector job. Conditions are especially bad for non-white workers, who make thousands less on average than their white counterparts on Capitol Hill and often describe facing racist abuse at work.

    Detractors of the union effort had claimed that congressional workers aren’t allowed to negotiate their salaries. Now, union advocates can point to an example that proves their opponents wrong.

    Government advocacy group Demand Progress said that the new contract will help take a step toward stemming the so-called brain drain of skilled congressional staffers leaving their jobs to take high paying consulting or lobbying jobs.

    “For decades, Hill staff have struggled to make ends meet with a median annual salary of $50,000 while their federal agency counterparts make roughly 20 percent more on average,” said Demand Progress Policy Advisor Taylor J. Swift in a statement. By contrast, Demand Progress pointed out, the starting salary for Capitol Police appears to start at over $73,000.

    “Today’s action will also go a long way toward slowing the revolving door and restoring the First Branch’s ability to recruit and retain staff who are committed to working in Congress for the long haul,” Swift said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Workers Sue Starbucks After Company Accused Them of Kidnapping Their Manager

    Starbucks workers have filed a lawsuit against the company, accusing the company of defamation for filing kidnapping and assault charges against workers earlier this year after they waged a labor protest — charges that the union said were totally false and were later dismissed by the police.

    In August, workers at a unionized store in Anderson, South Carolina, confronted their store manager with a letter containing a list of demands like fixing store equipment and wage increases. After calling corporate about the action, and obtaining explicit permission from the workers to leave, an audio recording showed, the manager exited the store and filed the charges with the police. The company also released a statement regarding the incident, the union says, and had suspended the workers.

    A TikTok posted by Starbucks Workers United shows the manager leaving the store freely, and police later determined that “none of the allegations” were true, the local police department said. But Starbucks Workers United says that the company and their manager have never retracted their allegations.

    Workers are seeking a defamation judgment against the company with compensatory and punitive damages, as well as an injunction against incidents of false accusations. They say that the company has caused them damage in “falsely stating or insinuating that they had engaged in criminal assault and kidnapping.”

    “It’s more apparent now than ever that Starbucks will go to any length to smear workers, even going as far as lying to the police and accusing us of crimes we did not commit,” Anderson worker Aneil Tripathi said in a statement. “They abused the law enforcement process to intimidate us and keep us terrified that a knock on the door would be the Anderson police coming to take us away.”

    “This case is about more than defamation; it’s about highlighting the disgusting, outright abuse Starbucks will level at their own workers,” Tripathi concluded. Tripathi was one of six Anderson workers who was fired last September after workers waged another labor protest.

    Workers also say that the company’s accusations caused them emotional distress.

    “This looming threat over our heads personally caused me so much anguish that I received extensive therapy and dealt with numerous breakdowns, desperate to find a way out, desperate to find stability,” Anderson worker Natalie Mann said. “There are no words to describe what it feels like when a multibillion dollar company attempts to muzzle your voice and break your spirit.”

    The company denies wrongdoing. “No Starbucks partner has been or will be disciplined for supporting or engaging in lawful union activity — but interest in a union does not exempt partners from following policies and procedures that apply to all partners,” the company said in a statement.

    This is the first lawsuit filed in Starbucks Workers United’s union campaign, which has seen astonishing success and been met with fierce opposition from the company. It is not the first legal complaint that has been filed against the company; labor officials have found numerous accounts of illegal union busting by the company.

    The union has filed hundreds of unfair labor practice complaints over Starbucks’s anti-union tactics. These include moves like keeping lists of pro-union workers to discipline, firing dozens of union organizers across the country and denying workers new wage raises and benefits — all tactics that the union says are meant to stifle the union movement.

  • Flow of Dark Money Has Led to Record Amount of Outside Spending This Election

    Twelve years after the Supreme Court decided to allow corporations and the wealthy to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections, outside groups have broken their record for the highest amount ever spent on a midterm election — with weeks to go until Election Day.

    According to OpenSecrets, outside groups have spent more on this election cycle than they ever have in a midterm, breaking the previous record set in the last midterm election in 2018. As of Friday, outside spending — the vast majority of which comes from dark money groups — reached roughly $1.34 billion, topping 2018’s record of $1.32 billion.

    As OpenSecrets notes, there were still 25 days until the election on Friday, meaning that the amount of spending is set to rise precipitously as Election Day approaches. If it continues at this pace, in fact, outside spending could even surpass the amount of money spent by outside groups in 2020, even though presidential election cycles typically see far more spending than midterm elections do.

    Republican-aligned groups have been the largest spenders this cycle so far, the report finds. The GOP’s Senate Leadership Fund and the Congressional Leadership Fund, which support Republicans’ Senate and House races, respectively, have collectively spent $259 million so far. This is far more than the amount that the Democrats’ two main congressional funds have spent, at about $107 million.

    Senate races in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin have seen the most outside spending, with tens of millions of dollars being poured into each race. These races are particularly important, as control of even one extra seat for Republicans would give the party the majority in the chamber. Democrats are currently projected to keep control of the Senate, FiveThirtyEight finds.

    Outside spending, or spending that comes from groups that aren’t officially affiliated with particular candidates, has sharply risen in every election cycle since the Supreme Court handed down Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission in 2010. That decision has been criticized as one of the largest drivers of the growing amount of influence that corporations and the wealthy can have over elections — influence that is often completely anonymous.

    While both major parties benefit from dark money and outside spending, progressive and leftist candidates are often targeted by these groups. Progressive candidates either stand up against the deep-pocketed interests who fund outside groups or will outright refuse to take money from dark money groups in order to signal their loyalties to voters.

    The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), for instance, has been a major force against progressive candidates across the country, spending millions on attacking candidates like Summer Lee in Pennsylvania and Nida Allam in North Carolina this election cycle.

    Democrats have been working to make political spending more transparent. Last month, Democratic senators tried to pass a bill that would have required the identity of dark money donors that give $10,000 or more in an election cycle to be disclosed, hoping to either dissuade donors from exercising such large influence or to expose their identities to voters. The bill failed 49 to 49, with Republicans uniformly opposed.

    The Democrats’ For the People Act, which passed the House last year, would have implemented this disclosure requirement and had a section dedicated to undoing some of the effects that Citizens United has had on the political system, like creating a public financing system that would give the working class a chance to contribute financially to candidates they favor. But the For the People Act is opposed by Republicans and conservative Democrats in the Senate.

  • 70 Percent of Republicans Running for Congress Doubt 2020 Election Result

    The vast majority of Republicans running for Congress or in major statewide races believe — at least to some extent — former President Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, representing an alarming “new normal” for the party, a New York Times report finds.

    Out of more than 550 candidates analyzed, more than 370 GOP candidates for Congress, governor, secretary of state or state attorney general doubt or outright deny the results of the 2020 election, according to the report. This represents about two-thirds of these Republican candidates and about 70 percent of those running for Congress specifically — people who could soon be put in positions of great influence over the way elections are conducted and results are tallied.

    According to The New York Times, voters in every state will see at least one candidate who has questioned the results of the 2020 election on the ballot. Hundreds of these candidates are projected to win their races, the report finds.

    That this sentiment is so widespread across the party — despite and perhaps because of the fact that there is a mountain of evidence disproving Trump’s election lies — is an alarming indication that the baseline of truth has shifted among the GOP. It could also shape elections to come, as the Republican Party has waged a nationwide effort to destabilize elections and make it easier for their candidates to win or outright steal them.

    Such candidates “are the new normal of the Republican Party,” the New York Times wrote. “These candidates represent a sentiment that is spreading in the Republican Party, rupturing a bedrock principle of democracy: that voters decide elections and candidates accept results.”

    This is a more dire outlook on the proportion of election deniers in the GOP than has previously been found. Similar analyses from The Washington Post and FiveThirtyEight have also found that there is a large proportion of GOP candidates who question or deny the election results. But those analyses didn’t find as large a number of election deniers, nor did they appear to have done as comprehensive an analysis of candidates’ speeches, social media posts, fundraising emails, interviews, and other campaign materials to find evidence of their denial.

    The number of GOP candidates who have questioned the 2020 election results has grown over time, the publication found. Of the candidates who were public figures on or before January 6, 2021, when the election results were certified by Congress and Trump militants broke into the Capitol, only 74 publicly agreed with Trump’s Big Lie. Over the past couple of years, however, more and more candidates have embraced the conspiracy.

    This indicates that many of these candidates likely view fealty to Trump as a winning strategy — or perhaps that they fear being isolated by the party if they choose to stand in line with reality.

    Republicans have coordinated effective campaigns to shun those who denounce Trump; they successfully primaried Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), one of Trump’s loudest Republican detractors in Congress, for instance, and are seeking to replace her with Trump-backed, anti-environmentalist candidate Harriet Hageman this fall.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A Wealth Tax on the 0.25 Percent Could Fund Biden’s Entire Student Debt Plan

    If a modest 2 percent wealth tax on a fraction of the richest households in the U.S. was in place this year, it would have raised enough funds to pay for the next three decades of President Joe Biden’s student debt cancellation plan, new data shows.

    A report released by the Institute on Taxation and Policy (ITEP) on Thursday finds that a nationwide 2 percent wealth tax on households worth over $30 million, or the top 0.25 percent of households, would have raised nearly $415 billion this year alone.

    This could pay for a wide swath of important federal programs, including Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 of debt for certain borrowers, which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated earlier this year will cost $400 billion over the next 30 years.

    The wealth tax could also serve as a way to close the gap between the richest and poorest portions of the public — both by potentially uplifting middle- and low-income families and by cutting into wealth hoarded by the wealthiest Americans.

    The wealth gap is growing with next to no regulation in place to control it. In its report, ITEP found that over one out of every four dollars of wealth in the U.S. is held by households with a net worth of over $30 million, with an estimated collective $26 trillion in wealth this year.

    This is an exceedingly small number of households to own this amount of money. By contrast, according to the Federal Reserve, the bottom 50 percent of Americans own only $4.41 trillion, or about 3 percent of wealth in the U.S.

    “Economic inequality in the U.S. is large, growing and highly unpopular,” ITEP wrote. “Excessive concentration of wealth runs counter to our national aspiration for genuine equality of opportunity, and it saps the vitality of our democracy through the consolidation of power and influence.”

    ITEP also found that the wealthiest households are concentrated in certain parts of the country; over 21 percent of households worth over $30 million are based in New York, with California, Florida and Texas next at around 10 percent each.

    In order to begin reducing wealth inequality, ITEP recommends that lawmakers consider implementing an ongoing or one time tax on unrealized capital gains, which account for an estimated over 40 percent of wealth owned by households worth over $30 million.

    Depending on the details of such a tax, ITEP finds that it could raise between $529 billion and $3.9 trillion if implemented on households with over $10 million in wealth.

    Progressive lawmakers and advocates have long advocated for a wealth tax, maintaining that it is unethical to allow people to become billionaires or hoard millions of dollars of wealth while other Americans experience homelessness, starve, or are forced to ration medications to survive. Indeed, despite billionaires’ massive wealth, they are often able to exploit the current tax code to pay even lower tax rates than the average American — allowing them to hoard yet more wealth.

    Democrats have pushed for a wealth tax in recent years. Last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) introduced a bill that would implement a 2 percent wealth tax on wealth over $50 million, bumped up to 3 percent on wealth over $1 billion.

    And, in his 2023 budget, President Joe Biden proposed the inclusion of a minimum 20 percent tax on income of households worth over $100 million. Though not quite a wealth tax, it would slightly retool what the government views as income to include unrealized capital gains, a step toward what progressives have called for.

    The idea of a wealth tax is popular. A Data for Progress survey conducted earlier this year found that Warren’s proposal is supported by 68 percent of likely voters, including 81 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Republicans.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 7 in 10 Voters Support White House Move to Consider Decriminalizing Marijuana

    New polling finds strong support among voters for President Joe Biden’s federal moves on marijuana last week, including his decision to pardon those with certain marijuana convictions and his statement that he will consider decriminalizing the drug on the federal level.

    A poll conducted by Morning Consult/Politico after Biden’s announcement on Thursday found that nearly 7 in 10 voters — 69 percent — support Biden’s move to ask his administration to consider federal decriminalization of marijuana, with only 18 percent saying they oppose the move and 43 percent saying they “strongly” approve.

    The poll also found that voters support Biden’s decision to pardon about 6,500 people of their federal convictions for simple marijuana possession. Sixty-five percent of respondents said that they agreed with the action, which advocates say could help people who have faced such convictions with things like getting a job or renting or buying a house. This polling lines up with other recent polling from Ipsos that also found majority support for the decriminalization moves and pardons.

    The strong support for Biden to consider decriminalizing the drug is an indication that following through on the action would be a politically savvy move at a crucial time for the president. With the midterm elections coming soon, decriminalization could provide Democrats with a much-needed boost.

    Marijuana is currently classified as a Schedule I drug, which means that violations of federal laws over possessing or selling the drug can come with some of the harshest drug-related punishments. Federal descheduling, or decriminalizing, of the drug, is a step short of legalization — but it could make it so that its use and possession comes with minimal to no penalties if caught, putting it in a similar legal class to alcohol.

    Advocates have long called for descheduling the drug, saying that marijuana doesn’t clinically align with many other Schedule I drugs like heroin and that descheduling it would be a step toward ending the country’s racist failed war on drugs, which Biden had a major hand in manufacturing.

    Though advocates praised Biden for his moves on Thursday, they say he could do much more in this realm, including expunging the charges he pardoned from people’s records and widening the scope of the pardons or expungements.

    Advocates and progressive lawmakers have also called for Biden to throw his weight behind legalizing the drug.

    Polls have consistently found that marijuana legalization is popular — and that legalization could drive people out to vote. Another Morning Consult/Politico poll published last week found that 60 percent of all voters support nationwide marijuana legalization, including 71 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of independents. Republicans were split on the issue, with 47 percent supporting it and 41 percent against it.

    The House has continually passed bills to legalize marijuana nationwide, but the issue is a nonstarter in the Senate, where some conservative Democrats and Republicans oppose the idea.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Apple Is Withholding New Benefits From Its Only Unionized Store

    Apple is planning to withhold its new benefits from its only unionized store in Maryland, new reporting finds, just as another location is set to vote on unionizing.

    According to Bloomberg, the company is planning to roll out new benefits, including more funding for tuition assistance, new health care benefits in certain states and a membership to online course platform Coursera. The benefits are intended to be a response to economic and pandemic-related pressures facing workers.

    While it appears that non-unionized stores will be able to access the benefits, workers at the unionized store in Baltimore-area Towson, Maryland, were informed that they will not receive them, Bloomberg reported.

    Workers voted to unionize in June, becoming the first Apple retail store to ever unionize. They did so despite a fierce anti-union campaign from the company, in which the company sent managers to hold anti-union meetings with workers, and told them that benefits, like one employee’s immigration assistance, could be taken away if the store unionized.

    The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers’ Coalition of Organized Retail Employees (IAM CORE), which represents the workers, expressed their frustration with the company in a statement on Wednesday.

    “Despite the news from Apple today, our goal is still the same. We are urging Apple to negotiate in good faith so we can reach an agreement over the next few weeks,” the union said. “The IAM CORE negotiating committee is dedicated to securing a deal that gives our IAM CORE members the proper respect and dignity at work and sets the standard in the tech industry.”

    Withholding benefits from unionized employees is a common tactic of anti-union employers. Earlier this year, Starbucks announced that it would be raising its wages to a minimum of $15 an hour, or giving a 3 percent raise, whichever is higher — but only for nonunionized stores. The company has since announced similar new benefits that union members will not be able to access.

    Both Apple and Starbucks say they are withholding the additional benefits because labor laws forbid companies from making unilateral changes to things like wages or benefits during a union campaign.

    But the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has previously determined that withholding benefits in a way that seems to be purposefully aimed at discouraging unionizing is actually a violation of federal labor laws. In August, the NLRB found that Starbucks’s move to withhold wage raises was illegal, ruling that the company should provide back payment and that the raise should be applied to unionized workers.

    Apple’s move comes as another store is slated to vote on unionizing this week. A location in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, will have a union election on Thursday and Friday in which it will decide whether or not to join the Communications Workers of America. The workers are confident that the vote will be successful, saying that about 70 percent of eligible employees signed up for union cards when they filed for a union election.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Lowe’s Workers in New Orleans Petition to Form Company’s First-Ever Union

    Lowe’s workers in New Orleans have filed a petition to unionize, seeking to become the first unionized location of the home improvement company’s 1,723 U.S. stores.

    According to the filing posted by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the union would cover 172 workers at the store, including sales associates and those on fulfillment, merchandising and receiving duties.

    Workers are unionizing under the name Lowe’s Workers United, according to the filing. It’s unclear if this is an independent union or if it is affiliated with an established labor union. If it is independent, the Lowe’s workers will join a growing number of workers who have successfully unionized at companies like Amazon or Trader Joe’s under an independent effort.

    The company already appears to have hired union-busting lawyers from law firm Barnes & Thornburg, who are listed as legal counsel for the company on the union filing.

    Indeed, the company has had a history of opposing unions; a training video made by the company that has circulated the internet for a number of years contains multiple anti-union talking points and encourages managers to call an internal “labor hotline” if there is unionizing activity among the employees.

    If the company doesn’t voluntarily recognize the union, which it is reasonable to assume it will not, at least 30 percent of eligible workers must sign a union card in order to qualify for a union election conducted through the NLRB.

    Data shows that workers at Lowe’s Home Improvement stores are often paid low wages. According to the Economic Policy Institute, about half of Lowe’s workers are paid less than $15 an hour. Other research has found that, in 2020, the median salary for full time retail workers at the chain was a mere $24,000, or only about $11.50 an hour.

    The minimum wage in New Orleans is $13.25 an hour. A living wage for New Orleans — even for a single adult with no children — is $16.32 an hour, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator.

    The salaries of the unionizing Lowe’s workers are unclear. However, Lowe’s was among the companies that spent more on stock buybacks than on worker raises in 2021, spending $13 billion on buybacks.

    The filing comes on the heels of a recently announced union drive at another home improvement equipment store. Last month, workers for a Home Depot in Philadelphia filed to unionize under an independent union named Home Depot Workers United. If workers are successful in their union election, slated for November 2 and 5, they will become the first to form a union within the company.

    Vince Quiles, one of the lead organizers in the Home Depot effort, expressed solidarity with the Lowe’s workers in a tweet on Thursday.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Workers Make $1.3 Million More Through Their Careers When They’re in a Union

    As a union wave grips workers across the U.S. seeking more control over their working conditions and wages, new research illustrates the vast material benefits waiting in store for workers if they unionize their workplaces.

    A new study published in Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations Review finds that workers who are in a union throughout their careers make $1.3 million more than workers who were never in a union; union members typically make $3.37 million in lifetime earnings, versus $2.08 million for nonunion workers – an increase of over 60 percent.

    This wage increase comes despite the fact that unionized workers also retire earlier than their nonunionized counterparts, the study authors found. Further, union benefits don’t remain flat, but rather grow the longer a worker remains in a union, the study found.

    This is a remarkable increase in lifetime wages, and represents a higher lifetime wage increase than that earned by workers with a college degree, who earn between $650,000 and $900,000 more in their lifetimes, previous research has demonstrated.

    The researchers tracked earnings of men whose careers roughly spanned the 1960s through the 1970s to their retirements. While other research has long shown that union members make more than their nonunion counterparts at single points in time, the study authors say examining lifetime earnings can provide a more comprehensive picture of how union membership affects wages.

    The study authors, University of Minnesota sociology professor Tom VanHeuvelen and social inequality researcher and Columbia University fellow Zach Parolin, say that the decline in unionization that the U.S. has seen over the past decades has had a sizable effect on the workforce and wages, which have remained stagnant. Indeed, union membership has fallen to historic lows in recent decades, while income inequality has accelerated.

    The study shows “the sizable consequences of deunionization that have been playing out over the past half-century,” VanHeuvelen told Truthout via email. In the article, VanHeuvelen and Parolin write that declining union rates are “central” to growing rates of income inequality.

    He added that the research shows that unionization can be a powerful economic tool for this generation of workers. “For the cohort of men who we tracked across their careers, there was a second pathway of upward economic attainment via a unionized career that provided a boost to lifetime earnings equivalent to a college degree, but this alternative pathway has largely been lost,” he said.

    The research at least in part rebuts anti-union arguments often presented by union-busting employers. Employers frequently use the cost of union dues – typically a small portion, about 1 to 2 percent of a workers’ pay – to discourage workers from unionizing. The research demonstrates that the pay premium that workers get once they unionize and stay in a union can far outweigh the amount that a worker would pay to a union – even before nonmonetary benefits like health insurance, paid leave and improved working conditions that can come with unionization are taken into account.

    Unionization has been surging across the country over the past year. Recently released data from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) shows that, in Fiscal Year 2022, union filings rose by over 50 percent over the previous year. Labor experts say that workers are exercising their power as the country sees growing wage inequality, stagnant worker wages and, in some cases, declining working conditions since the pandemic.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • California Amazon Workers File to Join Amazon Labor Union

    Amazon workers at a warehouse in Moreno Valley, California, have filed to join Amazon Labor Union (ALU), the independent union behind the first ever successful unionization at an Amazon warehouse earlier this year.

    Workers had announced their union drive last month, writing in a GoFundMe appeal earlier this year that workers at the facility are “overlooked, overworked and underpaid.” If successful, they will be the second or third Amazon warehouse to unionize. They are also the first Amazon workers in California to seek a union election.

    The bargaining unit for the warehouse, known as ONT8, would cover about 800 workers, according to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). It’s unclear how many workers have signed union cards; at least 30 percent of eligible workers need to sign in order to qualify for a union election.

    ALU president Chris Smalls celebrated the news on Tuesday. “BIG NEWS,” he wrote on Twitter. “[C]ongratulations to the courageous worker leaders to put in that work daily on the ground.”

    Union organizers have said that unionization will provide workers the opportunity to have more say over their working conditions and compensation. “We’re just trying to do right by our workers,” Nannette Plascencia, a leader in the union movement at ONT8, told the Los Angeles Times.

    Smalls has likened the spread of ALU’s union movement to that of Starbucks workers, who have now unionized over 230 stores in just about a year after launching their union movement.

    “Today, we’re bicoastal,” Smalls said when the California workers announced their union effort last month. “This is something that’s really going to continue to grow, just like Starbucks.”

    The Amazon workers also join a growing union movement in the U.S. in general. Union filings grew by 53 percent in Fiscal Year 2022 over the previous year, according to data released by the NLRB last week. This data confirms, as labor advocates have observed, the staggering growth of the union movement over the last year, which has seen union filings and wins from workers at nationally known companies like Apple, Trader Joe’s and Home Depot.

    Amazon has maintained that it prefers workers not to unionize. The company has spent millions of dollars on its anti-union efforts, firing union organizers and calling the police on union organizers handing out union literature outside company warehouses.

    The filing comes as workers in Albany, New York, are beginning to vote in their union election on Wednesday, seeking to join the ALU. The unit would cover about 400 workers in the warehouse.

    Albany workers had filed to unionize in August, citing low wages and safety concerns – the latter of which became an especially pronounced issue last week, when three Amazon warehouses, including the unionizing Albany warehouse and the unionized warehouse in Staten Island, caught fire.

    Workers staged a work stoppage in Staten Island when a trash compactor caught fire and refused to return to work while they could still smell smoke in the warehouse. In response, the company suspended dozens of workers who had participated in the stoppage.

    ALU denounced the company’s response to the work stoppage. “Amazon’s response to our genuine concerns has been despicable and full of lies,” the union wrote. “At this time, management is circulating that as many as 80 workers who were involved in the work stoppage were suspended. That is not, as their PR team claims, a ‘handful.’”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Report: Thousands of Federal Officials Have Owned Stock in Companies They Govern

    Thousands of federal officials in the executive branch over the last two presidential administrations have disclosed trading stocks in companies that their agencies oversee, representing thousands of potential conflicts of interest, a new investigation finds.

    The Wall Street Journal analyzed over 31,000 financial disclosure forms dated between 2016 and 2021, which included information on over 315,000 trades in stocks, bonds and funds by officials and their immediate families. These documents showed that over 2,600 senior officials across 50 federal agencies have disclosed owning stock in companies that have lobbied the agency that they work in. This represents more than one in five senior federal executive branch officials, the report found.

    These trades represent many potential conflicts of interest — and explicit conflicts of interest that agency officials seem to have simply swept aside and “waived the rules” for, the report says. These stock holdings reveal that not only do officials have personal financial interest in companies they are responsible for regulating, but also that they may be trading stocks at seemingly opportune times.

    Nearly one in three Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials have reported owning investments in companies lobbying the agency, holding up to $2 million in shares in fossil fuel companies on average yearly between 2016 and 2021. Donald Trump official Michael Molina, for instance, a senior adviser to the deputy EPA administrator, had owned oil and gas stocks that could have benefited from Trump’s policies favoring fossil fuel companies.

    In another potential conflict of interest, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official Malcolm Bertoni owned a number of stocks in food and drug companies that he said the agency gave him permission to own — despite those companies being on the agency’s no-buy list. And Defense Secretary office officials collectively owned between $1.2 and $3.4 million in defense contractors or defense companies on average in the studied years.

    The timing of these trades is suspect, potentially suggesting insider trading. The report found that more than 60 officials had traded stocks in companies just before their agencies announced actions against them. One Defense Department official, Greg Zacharias, had bought stock in Lockheed Martin five times just before the Pentagon awarded it a new $1 billion contract.

    It’s possible that many of these trades were legal, even if there are conflicts of interest. While officials aren’t allowed to do work that could affect their personal finances, laws around trading are regularly unenforced — and the laws are often weak enough that officials can work around them.

    Many of these potentially conflicted trades “clearly violate the spirit behind the law, which is to maintain the public’s confidence in the integrity of the government,” ethics lawyer and former general counsel for the U.S. Office of Government Ethics Don Fox told The Wall Street Journal.

    The report comes at a time when government officials’ ability to trade stocks is under scrutiny. Democrats and Republicans have been pushing for a ban on Congress members’ ability to trade stocks for months, and many of the officials whose stock trades were analyzed by the report may be banned from trading stocks under Democrats’ latest bill, introduced by Democratic leaders late last month.

    Ethics experts say high level lawmakers and officials should indeed be banned from trading stocks, not only to prevent potential conflicts of interest but also to restore public trust in government agencies and decision making. But advocates for a stock ban say that the issue of banning executive and judiciary branch officials from trading stocks should be brought to a separate vote, rather than included in the same proposal for members of Congress, noting that Democratic leaders included a vast range of officials in their bill in order to garner opposition from Republicans and potentially doom its passage.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Officials Propose Reclassifying Uber, Lyft Gig Workers as Employees

    On Tuesday, the Department of Labor (DOL) announced the proposal of a rule that could pave the way for millions of workers in the gig economy to be classified as employees in a significant win for labor advocates who have been fighting for better standards for gig workers for years.

    The new rule will allow millions of people working for companies like Uber and Lyft — along with those working in construction, janitorial services, home care, and more — to be classified as employees if they are “economically dependent” on their work for the company. While it isn’t a binding law, which would likely have to be issued by Congress, the guidance will likely be used by judges and employers to determine worker classification.

    In announcing the rule, labor officials rescinded a Donald Trump-era rule that expanded the pool of workers who could be classified as contractors or freelancers; the rule had allowed employers to deny those workers benefits that are required by the federal government, like a guaranteed minimum wage rate, overtime pay, the right to unionize, and more.

    “While independent contractors have an important role in our economy, we have seen in many cases that employers misclassify their employees as independent contractors, particularly among our nation’s most vulnerable workers,” Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh said in a statement. “Misclassification deprives workers of their federal labor protections, including their right to be paid their full, legally earned wages.”

    Labor unions and progressive economists have long advocated against conditions in the gig economy, saying that gig companies not only exploit workers, but also threaten to erode or have already eroded working conditions for workers across the economy.

    A 2020 survey of gig workers found that about 1 in 7 such workers make an hourly rate less than the federal minimum wage of merely $7.25 an hour. They are also more susceptible to wage theft: over 60 percent of respondents reported losing earnings due to an inability to clock in or out, compared with about 20 percent of service sector employees.

    “This is a long-awaited determination that will empower essential workers to assert their basic wage and hour, health and safety, and compensation rights,” Patricia Campos-Medina, who directs the Worker Institute at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, told The Washington Post. “All workers are entitled to these rights, but employers easily avoid them by making arbitrary decisions on independent contractor rules.”

    Corporations in the gig economy have saddled their business models on paying their workers as little as possible, with companies like Amazon and DoorDash going as far as to steal workers’ tips. These corporations are desperate to keep the status quo for gig workers; in California, gig companies spent over $200 million on their campaign to pass Prop 22 in 2020, a ruling that allowed them to keep workers from accessing employee benefits.

    The new rule is a major blow to such companies; officials at some such corporations have estimated that reclassification could raise their labor costs by 20 or 30 percent, and Uber, Lyft and DoorDash have taken hits to their share prices as a result of the announcement.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ron Johnson Suggests That Federal Minimum Wage Should Be Eliminated

    Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) has suggested that he believes the federal minimum wage should be eliminated, and that the “marketplace” should be in charge of setting wages instead — a move that would send U.S. wage policy back to pre-World War II, when the federal minimum wage was first created.

    In a debate with Democratic U.S. Senate candidate and Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes on Friday, Johnson claimed that raising the minimum wage would eliminate jobs — which economists have said is not true — and misleadingly compared the policy to “price fixing,” an anticompetitive practice typically done by corporations in coordination to raise prices of goods.

    “I really don’t like the federal government getting involved in doing price fixing in anything and that includes wages,” he said.

    He went on to claim that eliminating the minimum wage would create more competition and potentially higher wages, a statement that is patently false.

    “If you have a strong economy which we had under the previous administration you had plenty of jobs and you had rising wages. I think something like $2,000 to $4,000 a year is what the average family increased their wage by,” he said. “So, that’s the best thing is have the marketplace take care of it rather than government set a minimum wage that then starts eliminating jobs.”

    Johnson’s statements were misleading or false on numerous counts.

    Eliminating the minimum wage — which was created in 1938 to protect workers and stabilize the economy — would allow corporations to pay workers extremely low wages. Corporations would almost certainly take advantage of this lack of regulation to disastrous effect for workers across the country. Even though the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 is not considered a competitive wage by any means in today’s job market, there are still hundreds of thousands of workers who are making such a wage, which is well under a living wage in every state in the U.S.

    Notably, one in seven gig workers, or people working for companies like Uber and DoorDash, are making less than the federal minimum wage, the Economic Policy Institute found earlier this year. Corporations are allowed to exploit the fact that such workers aren’t classified as employees in order to not guarantee a minimum wage or provide benefits. The fact that these jobs exist and are still staffed is evidence that Johnson’s bad faith claim that wages would rise if there were fewer wage regulations is blatantly untrue.

    Corporations may threaten to eliminate jobs as a political tactic if they are forced to wage raises, but economists resoundingly say that raising the minimum wage does not eliminate jobs in itself. Real world examples also show the same thing. In California, for instance, the minimum wage for businesses with more than 25 employees increased to $15 an hour this year. At the same time, the state has been posting some of the strongest job growth numbers in the wake of the pandemic job downturn of 2020.

    And, while wages did grow under President Donald Trump, as Johnson said, their rate of growth was slower than it typically is; a 2020 study found that, in Wisconsin, wages only rose 6 percent during Trump’s first three years in office, compared to a 7.1 percent raise during President Barack Obama’s first three years in office. When inflation is taken into account, wages have remained stagnant for decades, while CEO pay has grown by nearly 1,500 percent since the late 1970s.

    Barnes slammed Johnson for his attack on the minimum wage. “Ron Johnson — a multimillionaire who literally complained about only doubling his wealth as our Senator — said last night there should be NO federal limit on how low your wages can go,” Barnes wrote on Twitter on Saturday.

    The federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised in 13 years. Accounting for inflation, the current $7.25 rate is the equivalent of $5.27 in July of 2009, when the rate was set — even lower than the rate of $6.55, which was the minimum wage before 2009. In sharp contrast to Johnson, Barnes says he supports raising the federal minimum wage to $15, a threshold that labor advocates have long called for.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Union Filings Grew By 53 Percent This Fiscal Year, Marking Growing Union Wave

    New data from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) shows that union filings rose dramatically over the past year, hitting a six-year high and increasing by more than 50 percent over the year before.

    In Fiscal Year 2022, which lasted between October 2021 and September 2022, union petition filings with the NLRB rose by 53 percent over Fiscal Year 2021. In total, workers filed 2,510 union petitions in the most recent fiscal year — the highest number of filings since Fiscal Year 2016.

    The data is a show of the strong growth of the labor movement in just the past year, which has seen both the success of groundbreaking union campaigns from Starbucks and Amazon workers and also the spread of such campaigns to workers for other household name companies like Trader Joe’s, Apple and, most recently, Home Depot. Labor advocates say that workers have been more empowered amidst growing wealth inequality and runaway capitalism that has led to eroding pay and working conditions.

    The NLRB reported that unfair labor practice filings, or accusations of illegal labor conduct, were also up in the most recent fiscal year. Such charges increased by 19 percent in Fiscal Year 2022, with nearly 18,000 charges filed.

    Parties on either side of a labor dispute — employers or workers — can file unfair labor practice charges, but the increase could perhaps indicate an increase in workers’ willingness to stand up to illegal labor practices or union busting. In many cases, like that of Starbucks Workers United’s campaign, the vast majority of the unfair labor practice filings come from the union rather than the employer.

    In all, the NLRB noted that total case intake, including union petitions and unfair labor practice filings, increased by 23 percent in Fiscal Year 2022 — the largest single-year percentage increase since Fiscal Year 1959.

    Though NLRB staff have made significant progress efficiency-wise, the increase in filings is further evidence that the agency is in dire need of a funding boost, the labor board said.

    The NLRB has received the same budget of $274 million for nine years. With inflation, that means that the agency has actually received a 25 percent budget cut since Fiscal Year 2014, it noted. This has led to a corresponding loss of 39 percent of staffing at the agency and 50 percent of its field office staff.

    “Our field staff has done a tremendous job handling a historic surge in union election petitions and unfair labor practice charges, but this situation is unsustainable,” NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo said in a statement. “We need Congress to provide increased funding so we can hire the staff we need and provide necessary resources to conduct hearings and elections, investigate charges, settle and litigate meritorious cases, and obtain full and prompt remedies for workers whose rights are violated.”

    In his budget request for 2023, President Joe Biden asked for a 16 percent boost in the agency’s budget. The House included this boost in their 2023 appropriations budget draft — but although agency and labor advocates have lauded the increase, they say it is still not enough to handle the current caseload and respond to the resurgence of the labor movement.

    Democrats had urged Congress to instead boost the agency’s budget to $368 million, which they say would better meet the agency’s needs. Congress has yet to come to an agreement on full year appropriations for Fiscal Year 2023.

    “[W]ith 60 million non-union workers saying they would join a union if given the chance (including nearly 75 percent of young workers age 18-24), we only expect union election petitions to further increase,” Democrats wrote in a letter in April. “With this skyrocketing workload, the NLRB is now responsible for far more workers than a decade ago yet has been denied the funding to meet these statutory requirements.”

    Other reports have also noted the growth of the union movement in the past year. According to data from Cornell University’s Labor Action Tracker, the amount of labor strikes held by workers between January and September of this year has already outnumbered the amount of strikes in all of 2021. With an active “Striketober” in store, the number of strikes held this year is on track to far surpass last year’s strike activity.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders: Biden’s Marijuana Pardons Are Good — Legalization Would Be Even Better

    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has called for marijuana to be legalized in the wake of President Joe Biden’s surprise announcement that his administration will be pardoning thousands of simple federal marijuana possession charges and considering moving to decriminalize cannabis at the federal level, known as descheduling the drug.

    While Biden’s move is laudable, it’s not enough to deliver justice to people who have long suffered under marijuana convictions, Sanders said.

    “I have long believed that marijuana should be legalized and those arrested for possession should be pardoned and have their records expunged,” he said shortly after Biden’s announcement. “The President’s executive action today is an important step forward, but much more needs to be done.”

    Sanders’s tweet was part of a flood of calls from progressive and Democratic lawmakers and 2022 candidates for federal marijuana legalization, which they say is overdue to begin undoing the decades of harm that harsh marijuana prohibition has unleashed on Black and Brown communities in particular.

    “Pardoning people convicted on simple marijuana possession charges & calling for marijuana to be reclassified is welcome news and long overdue,” Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) wrote. “Next, we must deschedule marijuana completely.”

    “Legalize it,” she added.

    While the Congressional Progressive Caucus didn’t explicitly call for legalization, it did highlight legislation passed by the House earlier this year to federally legalize marijuana, deschedule the drug under federal law, and establish a process to expunge marijuana-related convictions.

    Drug law reform advocates have also called for marijuana to be legalized, for marijuana charges to be expunged and for the drug to be descheduled in wake of the announcement.

    “There is no reason that people should be saddled with a criminal record — preventing them from obtaining employment, housing, and countless other opportunities — for something that is already legal in 19 states and D.C. and decriminalized in 31 states,” Drug Policy Alliance Executive Director Kassandra Frederique said in a statement. “We, however, hope that the Biden Administration will go further and fully deschedule marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), rather than initiate a process that could lead to rescheduling.”

    Calling vast marijuana criminalization a “failed approach,” Biden announced on Thursday that he will be pardoning people convicted on simple federal marijuana possession charges, which will affect about 6,500 people, none of whom are currently imprisoned.

    A pardon, which prevents people from facing further punishments for their charges, doesn’t go as far as expungement, which would seal the charges from being publicly viewable. Advocates say expungement is necessary because people with drug charges are often denied basic needs like housing or face discrimination in job hiring.

    Biden is also asking the Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and Attorney General Merrick Garland to begin the process of potentially descheduling marijuana. Currently, marijuana is classified as a Schedule I drug, the category that carries the worst penalties for selling and using the drug.

    Democrats, abolitionists and drug legalization advocates have long advocated for descheduling marijuana as a step toward ending the failed war on drugs — and its corresponding war on the communities it has ravaged.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump Erased Millions of Possible PPP Fraud Flags in Last Days in Office

    An explosive new investigation of data from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) finds that, in Donald Trump’s final days in office, his administration rushed to eliminate oversight for loans which were flagged for potential fraud or further investigation — and wiped flags from nearly every one of the largest PPP loans.

    As the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) revealed in a report published Wednesday, over the course of several weeks before President Joe Biden was inaugurated, the Trump administration went on a spree of eliminating flags on PPP loans, the majority of which went directly to personally enriching the richest Americans. Officials in the Small Business Administration (SBA) eliminated 2.7 million flags between December 2020 and January 2021, as the administration was in its lame duck period.

    Special preference was given to the largest loans, which often also went to the largest corporations. On January 16, 2021, four days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump’s SBA wiped 99 percent of special review flags, which were given out to every loan above $2 million for separate investigatory purposes.

    If the Trump administration did, indeed, go on a spree to mass-clear potential fraud flags before Trump left office, it is no surprise that it appeared to have favored the very largest loan recipients. Trump continually gave huge financial favors to large corporations during his time in office — and though most large corporations were exempt from receiving PPP loans, some large corporations managed to skirt the rules and receive loans anyway.

    Out of the $800 billion given out in the program, flagged loans accounted for at least $189 billion. Because the vast majority of PPP loans — 95 percent — have been forgiven, it’s likely that many of these loans that had previously been flagged have been forgiven entirely.

    Not all flagged loans were necessarily fraudulent; many of them had flags indicating clear reasons that the recipient may have submitted a fraudulent application or should at least have been investigated as such. The most common flag, applied to over 785,000 loans, showed that the businesses didn’t exist before February 2020 and were therefore ineligible.

    It’s unclear how many loans went to businesses for their intended purpose of saving small businesses from pandemic impacts. But a report done earlier this year estimated that only between about a quarter and a third of PPP loans went to saving workers’ jobs. The rest — about 66 to 77 percent — went to business owners and people like shareholders.

    Many loans went directly to the rich. Several billionaires or companies owned by billionaires received loans, like Republican fundraiser Joe Farrell or Kanye West’s apparel company, valued at $3 billion.

    One loan, POGO found, went to a hotel owned by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican who is the richest man in the state and a former billionaire. The loan was worth $8.9 million and appeared to have been flagged eight times by the SBA. Another loan with nine flags, worth over $5 million, appears to belong to a Kentucky hospitality corporation whose annual revenue of $850 million would likely make it too large to receive a PPP loan.

    Other loans, which are very often forgiven, went to politicians or their campaigns — including several far right politicians who have spent the last months spouting diatribes about how people buried in student debt aren’t “deserving” of debt relief. People like Representatives Majorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) Mike Kelly (R-Pennsylvania) and Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) had hundreds of thousands of PPP loans forgiven.

    In a previous investigation in 2020, POGO found that there were at least 113 loan recipients, making up hundreds of millions of PPP loans, who political contributions worth about $11 million immediately after receiving the loan.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Nearly 300 Republican Midterm Candidates Embrace Trump’s Big Lie, Analysis Finds

    A majority of Republican midterm candidates running for major state or federal office don’t fully accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, a new analysis finds.

    According to The Washington Post, 299 candidates running for House, Senate, or key state offices of the governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state or attorney general have either denied or publicly questioned the results of the election that unequivocally saw Joe Biden elected as president. This represents a majority of all candidates running for such positions, all of which oversee some portion of election administration.

    Such candidates are on the ballot in almost every state in the country. All but two states, Rhode Island and North Dakota, have candidates who fully or partially deny the election result. In four states, Republican voters have nominated an election denier for every race examined by the publication.

    The majority — 174 — of these candidates are running in safe elections, while 51 are running in tight races. This means that it’s possible they view election denial as a strategy that could win them votes — or, potentially, that they’re planning to deny the results of their own elections if voters reject them.

    When surveyed for a separate Washington Post analysis last month, 12 of 19 Republican candidates in close gubernatorial or U.S. Senate races refused to say if they would accept the outcome of their election. All 19 Democrats running against them, on the other hand, said they would accept the results whether or not they won.

    The report lines up with an ongoing analysis by FiveThirtyEight, which finds that there are 263 GOP candidates for the same offices, excluding the lieutenant governor, who either fully or partially deny the election result. This means that election deniers or doubters are on the ballot for 60 percent of Americans this fall, according to the analysis.

    FiveThirtyEight also found that election deniers and doubters outnumber the candidates who don’t lie about the result of the election; there are 256 candidates who refuse to accept the result and only 158 who do.

    That election deniers make up such a large proportion of the Republican Party and its candidates is an alarming show of the right’s open embrace of fascism and anti-democratic principles, experts say.

    “Election denialism is a form of corruption,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, New York University historian and fascism expert, told The Washington Post. “The party has now institutionalized this form of lying, this form of rejection of results. So it’s institutionalized illegal activity. These politicians are essentially conspiring to make party dogma the idea that it’s possible to reject certified results.”

    If these election deniers take office, it could have dire consequences.

    Electing such people into office could accelerate the U.S.’s path into fascism, putting the power of election administration into the hands of people who may use it to install whichever political leaders they prefer; an election-denying secretary of state, for instance, could refuse to certify election results they don’t favor. An influx of election deniers in Congress, meanwhile, means that there could be more lawmakers who vote to overturn the result of the 2024 presidential election if Donald Trump or another far right Republican doesn’t win.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Calls for End to Military Aid to Saudi Arabia Amid OPEC Production Slash

    After Saudi-led international oil cartel Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, announced on Wednesday that it will be conducting its largest slash to oil production since 2020, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) expressed outrage and called for the U.S. to end military aid to Saudi Arabia altogether.

    Sanders said that OPEC’s motivation is clear: to raise gas prices at a time when the oil and gas industry is already making record profits due to high gas prices and industry market manipulation.

    “OPEC’s decision to cutback on production is a blatant attempt to increase gas prices at the pump that cannot stand,” Sanders wrote. “We must end OPEC’s illegal price-fixing cartel, eliminate military assistance to Saudi Arabia, and move aggressively to renewable energy.”

    Other Democratic lawmakers have also called for an end to military assistance to Saudi Arabia, with a group of Democrats introducing legislation to mandate the withdrawal of troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in response to the move. Progressives have previously advocated for ending military support to dangerous petrostate Saudi Arabia over the country’s devastating war on Yemen.

    Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) echoed Sanders in agreeing that OPEC’s move is yet another reason for the U.S. to transition to renewable energy and lessen its dependence on fossil fuels. He announced that he is reintroducing legislation to initiate talks with OPEC and non-OPEC allies, known together as OPEC+, in order to “hold OPEC and its allies accountable for colluding to hike energy prices on working families.”

    Climate advocates have expressed alarm that OPEC can exercise such unchecked power over the global economy, which is on the brink of a recession, while also maintaining fossil fuel’s controlling grip over the energy market.

    “Right now we are witnessing how our near-total reliance on fossil fuels has allowed the world to be so easily manipulated by a handful of dangerous and greedy leaders,” Stop The Oil Profiteering spokesperson Cassidy DiPaola told Truthout. “OPEC has some of the worst human rights and environmental records in the world, and it comes as no surprise that they are using their power to fix prices and fleece consumers.”

    Though reducing oil production is an ultimate goal of the climate movement, as long as OPEC’s move doesn’t come with a corresponding increase in renewable energies, it only serves to further entrench the fossil fuel industry by pumping its profits, advocates say. Over the past years, climate advocates have called for a managed decline of the oil industry — including reducing production while drastically boosting energy efficiency and renewable energies — rather than simply squeezing the supply of the energy market, as OPEC is doing.

    “We cannot allow our energy to be controlled by a cartel of oil producing states,” DiPaola continued. “It is time for a swift and just transition to renewable energy that will provide the world with the energy freedom we need and deserve.”

    Democrats reacted with frustration on Wednesday after OPEC announced it will soon be cutting production by 2 million barrels a day, which will likely cause oil prices to skyrocket. Oil barrel prices have been steadily declining over the past months, as the global economy teeters on a global recession, causing a corresponding decline in gas prices at the pump.

    President Joe Biden’s approval rating — an important harbinger of how well Democrats will fare in this year’s midterm elections — has been trending strongly with gas prices over the course of his presidency, and this announcement may reverse the current trend of rising approval for the president.

    The Biden administration has been considering a gas export ban as the midterms approach in hopes of helping to nudge gas prices even further down, a move that climate and environmental groups have called for in response to the OPEC announcement.

    “It is no surprise that the international oil cartel is seeking to maintain high prices. Political leaders here at home must understand that the solution is not to increase drilling. Corporations are exporting record quantities of gasoline, and making record-setting profits as a result,” Food and Water Watch policy director Mitch Jones said in a statement on Wednesday. “It’s time to take real action to rein in this outrageous corporate profiteering. That should start with Congress passing a ban on gasoline exports.”

    Oil trade groups like the American Petroleum Institute have voiced opposition to the move — likely because it could cut into their ability to price gouge, as lawmakers and climate advocates have accused oil companies of doing. Indeed, experts say that the practice of exporting oil has massively increased the U.S.’s reliance on foreign energy sources and gives fossil fuel companies the opportunity to use exports as a means to reduce domestic supply and increase prices for consumers.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Starbucks Union Organizer Says He Was Fired for Wearing Suicide Awareness Pin

    A Starbucks union organizer in Buffalo says that he was fired by the company for refusing to remove a mental health awareness pin that he was wearing to honor a coworker who died earlier this year.

    As reported by Bloomberg, Starbucks fired prominent union organizer and barista Will Westlake on Tuesday. Westlake worked at one of the stores that had originally petitioned to unionize last year, kicking off what would become a historic union drive.

    The company said that he was being fired for “refusal to abide by the dress-code policy” and attendance issues. Westlake says that he has been sent home dozens of times by management after refusing to remove the pin depicting interlocked fingers with the text “You are not alone” and a URL for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP).

    According to Westlake, he and his coworkers began wearing suicide prevention pins in honor of a coworker who died by suicide earlier this year. Management repeatedly told workers to remove the pins and eventually implemented a new policy barring such pins. But although other coworkers stopped wearing their pins, Westlake continued to wear his.

    On Twitter on Tuesday, Westlake walked through the company’s alleged actions surrounding his coworker’s death, demonstrating, if true, the cruelty with which the company treats its employees.

    Westlake says that, shortly before his coworker’s death, the company retaliated against her for being an original signer on the letter announcing their union effort, blocking her transfer to a store close to her college. The company then sent five managers to her funeral, Westlake wrote, and forced her coworkers to go back to work directly after the funeral.

    “When I first decided that I was going to keep wearing the [ASFP] pin, I truly thought that the company would back down. That they would see what the workers were going through, having to engage in psychological warfare over a union campaign because the company was being cruel,” Westlake wrote.

    “Today I was fired, the company refused to see that firing someone for expressing solidarity with suicide prevention is wrong,” he continued. “I hadn’t been allowed to work a shift at my store for nearly 4 months. Every shift for 4 months I was sent home for wearing a suicide awareness pin.”

    The union has filed an unfair labor practice complaint over Westlake’s termination, saying that the move is retaliation for being a union activist. It is illegal for employers to retaliate against workers for wearing union regalia or for participating in union organizing. The company maintains that it does not retaliate against workers for union activity.

    A former labor board official told Bloomberg that the pin could be seen as a symbol of unity among unionizing workers, who are often made to feel isolated by anti-union tactics. President Joe Biden’s labor board has continually ruled in favor of workers’ ability to wear union insignia at work.

    “An argument could be made that this button is symbolic of solidarity with folks that are burdened with these kinds of psychological pressures as a result of a hostile work environment that the union is trying to fight against,” former National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) chair Mark Pearce said.

    The union says that the company has continually relied on retaliatory tactics to suppress worker organizing, including firing over 120 union activists in workers’ union campaign so far. Starbucks has also permanently closed several stores where union activity has taken hold, withheld benefits and wage raises from workers, and more. There are currently over 320 pending unfair labor practice charges against the company, according to the union.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders, Warren Slam Starbucks for “Unethical and Unlawful” Union Busting

    Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) have condemned Starbucks for its ruthless campaign to stymie the growing union effort in its retail stores across the country and are asking the company to answer for its “unethical and unlawful” union-busting tactics.

    In a letter sent to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and Board of Directors Chair Mellody Hobson on Tuesday, the lawmakers expressed concern over the seemingly endless anti-union tactics that the company has been using as workers have waged a historic union campaign over the past year. They demanded that the company put an end to its union busting and allow workers to unionize freely.

    Lawmakers highlighted several union-busting tactics that have been used by the company, which they say appear to be in direct violation of federal labor laws. On top of the company’s continual efforts to intimidate and coerce unionizing employees, the letter points out that Starbucks has withheld a wage increase and benefits for trans health care, abortion travel, student loan repayment and better sick leave accrual from union members, moves which “appear to be illegal under the plain text of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).”

    Indeed, National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) officials have said that Starbucks’s withholding of wage and benefits increases are illegal. The board is scheduled to attempt to prosecute the company for these actions at the end of this month — but, even if the board is able to force the company to face legal consequences for its actions, labor laws are notoriously weak and would not necessarily dissuade the company from union busting.

    “We are deeply troubled by Starbucks’s anti-union campaign, including the ongoing and illegal weaponization of benefits against unionizing workers, and the company’s brazen efforts to flout the NLRA,” the lawmakers wrote. “We urge you to immediately end these tactics and recognize and bargain in good faith with unionized workers.”

    The letter, also signed by Senators Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), concludes by demanding that the company provide information on how managers have been instructed to respond to the union and which benefits have been rolled out to non-union stores.

    Lawmakers also demanded that Starbucks disclose how much the company has spent on its union-busting campaign. It is typical for companies to spend millions on expensive anti-union lawyers in efforts to dissuade workers from unionizing.

    Starbucks’s anti-union campaign doesn’t appear to be slowing down. According to the union, Starbucks Workers United, the company closed yet another unionized location this week, this time in Colorado Springs, Colorado. This is the ninth unionized or unionizing store that’s been permanently closed in recent months, the union says, in what it calls “clear retaliation” for unionizing efforts.

    The company has also fired over 110 union organizers in recent months, according to the union, and has been delaying bargaining with its over 220 unionized stores. After months of the union pressuring the company to set bargaining dates, the company announced last month that it would finally begin the bargaining process — despite some stores having won their union elections almost a year ago now.

    Starbucks has faced pressure from progressive lawmakers to end their union-busting practices before. In March, Sanders sent a letter to Schultz urging him to “do the right thing” and allow workers at the company to unionize. The Vermont independent has continually supported unionizing Starbucks workers throughout their campaign, visiting Boston workers as they held the longest strike in Starbucks’s history and rallying with workers, encouraging them to continue holding the torch for the burgeoning labor movement.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Amazon Suspends at Least 50 Workers In Response to Protest Over Warehouse Fire

    Amazon has suspended 50 workers in Staten Island, New York, after workers at the only unionized Amazon warehouse in the U.S. waged a work stoppage in protest of being forced to work after a fire broke out in a compactor in the warehouse.

    According to the union, per The Washington Post, the company has suspended 10 union leaders and another 40 workers who participated in the work stoppage. The suspensions, which the company says will be paid, will last until an investigation is conducted into the protest.

    Over 650 night shift workers stopped working on Monday in protest of unsafe working conditions, saying they could still smell smoke and had difficulty breathing in the warehouse, according to Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which workers at the warehouse voted to join earlier this year. Even after one worker went to the hospital, management threatened workers with termination if they didn’t return to work, union officials said.

    “Amazon associates at JFK8 had our lives placed at risk yesterday, and this isn’t the first time. Yesterday’s safety and health risk, a fire, is but one example of why we voted to form a union, so we can have a real voice on crucial issues which impact all associates every day,” the union wrote in a statement following the suspensions, demanding that the company recognize and begin bargaining with ALU.

    The union says that workers had demanded to see the fire department report or information on what was happening with the fire, but were stonewalled by the company. ALU plans on filing an unfair labor practice charge over the suspensions.

    “We will not tolerate any unsafe workplace and we will not tolerate intimidation,” the union said, ending with a call for the company to “STOP STALLING AND START NEGOTIATING!”

    Amazon has yet to recognize the union, and has tried to challenge the results of the election. Last month, a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) official recommended that the company’s objections be “rejected in their entirety,” a recommendation that the board is likely to follow.

    The company said in a statement on Monday that day shift workers had been sent home and that the fire department had certified that the building was safe to work in before night shift workers reported to work. The union says that the company’s claims about the incident are false.

    “It’s a shame that due to Amazon’s lack of safety protocols, workers had to take a stand, because they were not feeling as though the company took [the fire] as seriously as they should have,” ALU President Christian Smalls told The Washington Post.

    The suspensions come just over a week before workers near Albany, New York, are slated to vote on joining ALU.

    The union and organizing workers have continually raised concerns about Amazon’s safety protocols. Amazon went through a similar incident in March, when the unionizing warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, filled with a smoky, mysterious gas. Workers continued working as the gas disseminated on the warehouse floor, with no word from management, and evacuated by word of mouth as emergency vehicles arrived on the scene. The gas was later determined to be vaporized oil from a malfunctioning compressor.

    Amazon warehouses are disproportionately dangerous when compared to other warehouses in the U.S. Last year, nearly 50 percent of warehouse injuries occurred at an Amazon warehouse, despite the company only employing about 33 percent of warehouse workers nationwide.

    In a report released after a tornado ripped through an Amazon warehouse in Illinois last year, federal workplace safety officials determined that the company technically meets legal safety requirements, but at a bare minimum level. Progressive lawmakers and union organizers have demanded that the company increase its safety standards and put workers’ safety first, rather than strict quotas.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Warren: Student Debt Relief Lawsuit Shows GOP Prioritizes Profit Over People

    Student debt forgiveness advocate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) criticized Republicans on Monday for the party’s lawsuit to stop millions of debtors from receiving what they say is direly needed student loan forgiveness.

    Even if it fails, the lawsuit exposes the loyalties of the Republican Party, the senator said. “Republican officials are so angry about [President Joe Biden] helping working people that they’re suing to stop student debt cancellation,” Warren wrote on Twitter. “It won’t work, but it shows their priorities: putting the profits of corporate loan servicers over relief for working-class & middle-class Americans.”

    On Thursday, six Republican-led states filed a lawsuit in a Missouri federal court seeking to stop Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 of publicly-held student debt for Pell Grant recipients and $10,000 for others making less than $125,000 a year. The Republicans argue, among other things, that loan servicers like MOHELA — Missouri’s student loan servicer and one of the largest student loan servicers in the U.S. — would be hurt by the plan.

    Another lawsuit, filed by a lawyer for libertarian law firm Pacific Legal Foundation, argued that the plan trampled on the lawyer’s freedoms because it would force him to pay state taxes on the cancellation amount. This lawsuit was swiftly denied by a federal judge after the Biden administration said that officials will simply add an option to opt out of forgiveness if one chooses to do so.

    There has been much scrutiny from conservatives and corporate media over the debt cancellation plan’s cost and its effect on things like luring low-income people into the military, along with spurious concerns about its fairness and its potential effects on the economy and inflation. Nearly all of these arguments have been repeatedly debunked or rebuffed by student debt cancellation advocates over the past years, but Republicans insist on making them anyway.

    In response to such arguments, progressive lawmakers like Warren and debt activists have leveraged conservatives’ hypocrisy on economic issues against them. Donald Trump and Republicans’ 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, for instance, cost the government $2 trillion in lost tax revenue after the party slashed tax rates for corporations and the rich. This amount of money, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) pointed out in August, could have paid for not only Biden’s plan but also the entirety of student loan debt in the U.S., which the Federal Reserve estimates to be about $1.7 trillion.

    The fact that conservatives complain about the cost of the cancellation but don’t complain about moves like the tax cuts, which have only further concentrated wealth at the very top of U.S. society, perhaps exposes Republicans’ real motivations: to maintain their ability to use debt as a form of political and social control.

    That would explain why Republicans complained after the conservative-led Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated the debt forgiveness plan would cost $400 billion — while conveniently not mentioning that that estimate would play out over the next 30 years — but stay mum about things like the military budget, which costs nearly twice as much yearly.

    By fighting against student debt forgiveness, Republicans can also garner the favor of corporate lobbyists. Student loan servicers have spent millions on lobbying efforts over the past two years, pushing politicians to oppose the student loan payment pause and likely also arguing against cancellation. Servicers are contracted by the federal government to manage student loans, and are then allowed to collect a fee on the loans they administer.

    This lobbying appears to pay off in spades for servicers, which make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits each year with student loans and other services.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • CEO Pay Has Grown By 1,460 Percent Since 1978, as Workers’ Wages Stagnate

    While workers’ wages have stagnated in comparison to productivity over the past four decades, CEO pay in the U.S. has skyrocketed at a rate far outpacing the growth of the economy and productivity, a new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) finds.

    According to research released by EPI on Tuesday, CEO pay has skyrocketed by a staggering 1,460 percent since 1978. This has far outpaced the growth of the economy and even the pay of the top 0.1 percent, EPI finds, with the S&P stock market growing by 1,063 percent in the same time and the earnings of the top 0.1 percent growing 385 percent between 1978 and 2020.

    By contrast, worker pay has remained relatively unchanged since 1978, rising by a mere 18.1 percent over the past 43 years, EPI finds. As a result, the gap between CEO pay and typical worker pay has grown significantly. While CEOs at the top 350 U.S. firms had an estimated average pay of $27.8 million in 2021, the average worker at the same firms made $70,400, the report shows. This is a ratio of about 400 to 1 in 2021 — itself a major multiplication of 1965’s ratio of 20 to 1 and 1978’s ratio of about 30 to 1.

    The pandemic in particular accelerated the growth in CEO pay. While millions of people were laid off or furloughed and frontline workers risked their lives to keep basic services running between 2019 and 2021, CEO pay jumped by 30.3 percent. Among workers who were still employed, meanwhile, wages rose by only 3.9 percent.

    EPI’s data doesn’t even include the pay of CEO Elon Musk, who has been one of the pandemic’s biggest winners. Researchers specifically chose to exclude Musk and Tesla from their analysis because, if his realized salary, including stock sales, had been included, his pay would have been almost 1,000 times that of the average CEO of a large company. This would have boosted the average CEO pay increase between 2020 and 2021 by over 300 percent.

    The trend of growing wage inequality doesn’t appear to be stopping any time soon. The gap between worker and CEO pay has been growing since the late 1970s, around the time the U.S. pivoted into a cruel neoliberalism imposed by leaders like President Ronald Reagan that has been responsible for growing economic inequality ever since.

    Indeed, in the face of the current economic crisis and suppressed wages for workers, conservative Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is making moves to “get wages down” — while saying nothing of skyrocketing CEO pay.

    High CEO pay ratios aren’t a simple symbolic issue, the report says, but rather an issue that affects workers and the economy. Income growth of executives is the largest driving force behind the growing gap between the top 0.1 percent and top 1 percent and the rest of the public, which further concentrates the power of the very richest people in the U.S.

    As EPI notes, it doesn’t have to be this way. “Exorbitant CEO pay is a contributor to rising inequality that we could restrain without doing any damage to the wider economy,” EPI economists Josh Bivens and Jori Kandra write. “CEOs are getting ever-higher pay over time because of their power to set pay and because so much of their pay (more than 80 percent) is stock-related. They are not getting higher pay because they are becoming more productive or more skilled than other workers, or because of a shortage of excellent CEO candidates.”

    EPI recommends that Congress implement policies to reign in CEO wealth, like setting a higher corporate tax rate for corporations with large CEO pay ratios and setting higher marginal tax rates for the richest Americans.

    With fierce opposition to such proposals from rich lobbyists and conservatives in Congress, however, workers appear to be taking matters of stagnant wages and poor working conditions into their own hands. The labor movement has been experiencing a resurgence in response to runaway capitalism exacerbated by the pandemic, and workers are increasingly rising up against the enormous greed that corporations have proudly displayed in recent years.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ilhan Omar and Ro Khanna’s Offices Overwhelmingly Vote to Unionize

    Two more congressional offices have voted to unionize in landslide wins, becoming the second and third congressional offices to ever form a union, the Congressional Workers Union (CWU) announced on Friday.

    The offices of Representatives Ro Khanna (D-California) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) voted last week to join CWU, with a 9 to 1 vote and 21 to 0 vote, respectively. The union has won all of its elections so far, with several more in the pipeline; last week, the union announced that staffers in Rep. Andy Levin’s (D-Michigan) office had voted unanimously to form congressional staffers’ first-ever union.

    “We are witnessing a moment right now on Capitol Hill and in the labor movement that will go down in history,” the union wrote in a statement. “Dozens of workers are making meaningful change in the congressional workplace by speaking up and demanding that our nation’s lawmakers provide them a democratic workplace with a seat at the table.”

    The movement appears to be spreading. The offices of Representatives Dina Titus (D-Nevada) and Sean Casten (D-Illinois) filed union petitions recently, joining the offices of Representatives Cori Bush (Missouri), Chuy García (Illinois), Ted Lieu (California), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York) and Melanie Stansbury (New Mexico) in petitioning to unionize.

    The new filings bring the total number of offices that have filed to unionize to 10. Union organizers say that staffers in other offices have expressed an interest in unionizing. Workers say that a union is needed in Congress in order to raise pay, address racial pay gaps and improve working conditions, which staffers say can be long and grueling.

    Khanna and Omar have celebrated their offices’ victories.

    “Unions are the bedrock of the middle class. The labor movement helped get us the 40 hour work week, the weekend, and child labor laws,” Omar said in a statement. “It is long past time the United States Congress became a unionized workplace, and that includes my own staff. I am proud of all the people on my team who have played a leading role in the staff unionization effort. Solidarity forever.”

    Workers in Omar’s office, including CWU President Phillip Bennett, said in an interview with Teen Vogue that they hope the union — formed in an office led by a pro-union boss — can help pave a path for other staffers in non-progressive offices to unionize.

    Staffers for other representatives “can go back to their offices and say, ‘Look, it’s not just the Squad, right? We have other members that are part of this as well,’” said union member and Omar staffer Jacklyn Rogers. “We’re just helping pave the way.”

    Working conditions for congressional staffers on Capitol Hill are notoriously bad. Workers have had to take second jobs in order to survive, and research found about one in eight D.C.-based staffers didn’t make a living wage in 2020. This has led to a so-called brain drain from Congress, where workers with high levels of political working experience are poached by private sector employers, who often pay far better wages. Meanwhile, staffers often report facing racist or homophobic harassment in the halls of Congress.

    House staffers were afforded the right to form a union earlier this year, when the House passed a resolution sponsored by Levin that activated congressional union provisions in decades-old legislation.

  • Every Single Florida House Republican Voted Against Disaster Relief Funding

    Just days after Category 4 Hurricane Ian devastated Florida, killing at least 88 people and leveling and flooding thousands of buildings, nearly every Florida Republican in U.S. Congress voted against a bill containing billions in funding for disaster relief that officials could have accessed to begin recovery after the storm.

    Last week, Congress passed a stopgap government funding bill that contained $18.8 billion in Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds to account for climate crisis-fueled, worsening natural disasters that Florida officials could use to speed recovery from Ian, according to the Daily Beast. The bill provided FEMA with a year’s worth of disaster funds, rather than just the next few months’ worth.

    The bill passed despite widespread opposition from Republicans and the Floridians in the caucus. All 16 Republican House representatives from the state voted against the bill on Friday, including the two Republicans who represent constituents in Lee County, where much of the hurricane’s destruction was felt. In all, 201 Republicans voted against the bill to keep the government funded through December, while only 10 voted for it.

    Floridian Republicans in the Senate weren’t on board with the bill either. Sen. Rick Scott voted “no” on the bill, while Sen. Marco Rubio wasn’t present for the vote on Thursday. Rubio said in interviews later that he didn’t vote for the bill because it contained “a bunch of things” unrelated to disaster relief, like additional funding for Ukraine, low-income heating assistance, and relief for Jackson, Mississippi, which is recovering from a historic water crisis.

    Despite this, however, the two senators sent a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee last week asking for a “robust and timely federal response” to the hurricane. “Hurricane Ian will be remembered and studied as one of the most devastating hurricanes to hit the United States,” they wrote.

    The government funding bill ultimately passed 72 to 23 in the Senate and 230 to 201 in the House, averting a government shutdown that would have happened at the end of the week.

    Even if the FEMA relief funds hadn’t been included in the bill, a government shutdown could have hampered FEMA’s ability to respond to the disaster. In the past, when the government has shut down due to lawmakers’ failure to pass a funding bill, FEMA has historically furloughed thousands of staff.

    Democrats castigated Florida Republicans for refusing to support the funding, pointing out their hypocrisy in asking for emergency funding but still voting against or abstaining from voting for the bill.

    “The same week that Hurricane Ian brought so much chaos and destruction to Florida, not a single Florida [U.S. House] Republican cared enough to vote in favor of Hurricane relief for the people in their own state hit hardest by the storm,” said Florida Democratic Party Chair Manny Diaz, per the Tallahassee Democrat. “That is a level of callous indifference and political opportunism that boggles the mind.”

    Rep. Val Demings, a Democrat who is challenging Rubio in the 2022 election, wrote on Twitter on Sunday, “In the United States Senate, I’ll never put partisan politics over delivering disaster relief for Floridians.”

    Congressional Republicans have come under fire in the past decade for voting against disaster relief in the wake of a hurricane. In 2012, for instance, dozens of Republicans voted against relief for Hurricane Sandy, including Florida’s far right Ron DeSantis, then a representative in the House.

    In fact, opposing disaster relief funding appears to be supported by a large portion of the Republican caucus. As the Daily Beast notes, the largest internal GOP conference group, the Republican Study Committee, proposes slashing federal disaster relief funding in its latest annual budget proposal.

  • 205 Republicans Vote Against Bill to Expand School Mental Health Services

    On Thursday, the House passed a bill aimed at expanding access to mental health services in schools that garnered only one Republican vote, despite the party’s ceaseless scapegoating of mental illness for issues in the U.S.

    The Mental Health Matters Act passed 220 to 205 on a largely party line vote, with all 205 “no” votes coming from Republicans. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (Pennsylvania) cast the sole Republican “yes” vote.

    The bill, introduced by Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (D-California) and supported by the White House, would provide grants for schools to hire more mental health experts and grow their mental health services, especially schools in areas with high need. It would also provide mental health protections to adults with private health insurance and children and staff in Head Start programs, which are aimed at serving low-income children from birth to age 5.

    “Educators have been forced to play an outsized role in supporting and responding to students’ mental health needs, leading to increased depression and trauma among educators, their students, and the families and the community,” DeSaulnier said on the need for his bill, per The Hill. “However, our schools do not have the specialized staff necessary to respond to the increased prevalence and complexity of students’ mental health needs.”

    Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-North Carolina) took issue with a portion of the bill that punishes employers when employees are denied mental health and substance use benefits and said that the “country would be better off without” the bill.

    Experts have said that children’s mental health is in crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a toll on children’s mental health, whether through trauma, loss, or otherwise, leading to a corresponding rise in mental health crises among children, research finds. Pediatric mental health professionals say that legislation aimed at permanently increasing resources for children’s mental health is sorely needed.

    Democrats condemned Republicans for voting against the bill. “This afternoon we voted to create more mental health services in schools and 99.5 percent of republicans voted no and told kids to go to hell,” Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr (D-New Jersey) wrote on Twitter.

    Others pointed out that Republicans have spent months, if not years, scapegoating mental health issues as a catch-all for problems like mass shootings — which, in reality, are often spurred by far right radicalization and white supremacist ideology. Indeed, Republicans often dig up supposed concerns about mental health in order to distract from other issues.

    After the elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, Republicans and the far right scrambled to spread disinformation online about the shooter, pinning the problem on groups they wished to demonize — including trans people, those with mental illnesses and the Democratic Party.

    “Well, it’s just tragic what happened down there. We learn something new every day about how can we improve,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) said on Fox News after the shooting. He said that there should be a funding influx for “focusing on mental health” in response to the shooting. McCarthy voted against the bill on Thursday.

    In reality, Republicans who speak out in favor of mental health funding in response to horrifying mass shootings are likely readying for coming attempts to curtail gun ownership, curb the power of the gun lobby, and, in the case of Uvalde, scrutinize the police for their failure to prevent or act on the shooting.

    In other words, political commentators have noted, mental health issues act as a shiny object for Republicans to wave around, a political convenience that allows the party to continue expanding and perpetuating the roots of violence and antipathy.

    For instance, Republicans have repeatedly suggested that school shutdowns and remote learning were the real plague on children’s mental health during the pandemic. But the deaths of teachers and caregivers that likely would have resulted from hasty school reopenings would almost certainly have had an equal if not larger toll on children’s mental health.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Disapproval of the Supreme Court Is at a Record High, Polling Finds

    Following the overturn of Roe v. Wade by far right extremists on the Supreme Court this summer, new polling finds that trust in the federal judicial branch, which includes the High Court, is at its lowest level in at least 40 years.

    According to a Gallup poll published on Thursday, only 47 percent of Americans say they have a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the federal judicial branch. This is down 20 points from 2020, and is the lowest amount of confidence that Gallup has recorded since it began measuring confidence in the federal judicial branch in 1972 (though there appears to be a gap between the late ‘70s and ‘90s in which the pollster didn’t measure this particular indicator).

    Much of this distrust appears to come from disapproval of the Supreme Court. The poll found that disapproval of the Court is at a record high of 58 percent, while approval is tied with its record low of 40 percent, last seen in 2021.

    The disapproval seems to stem directly from the Court’s decision to overturn federal abortion protections in the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling it handed down in June.

    Forty-two percent of Americans — also a record high, according to Gallup — think that the Supreme Court is too conservative. For the first time in Gallup’s nearly 30-year history polling this question, the proportion of people who think the Supreme Court is too partisan has exceeded the amount of people who say that the justices’ ideological leanings are “just right.”

    The polling follows other findings from Gallup published last month, which demonstrate that approval of the Supreme Court among Democrats has also hit an all-time low at a mere 13 percent.

    Gallup’s findings demonstrate the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the decades-old precedent set by Roe establishing the right for pregnant people to decide what to do with their own bodies.

    That the decision has hurt the public’s view of the Court is no surprise considering that other polls have found that most Americans think that abortion should be legal in most or all cases — and that the consequences of revoking such a right are dire and life-threatening for many.

    Only three months after the Dobbs decision was handed down, abortion bans have already impacted people across the country. Children, sometimes victims of rape or incest, have been rejected for an abortion or have had to travel across state lines for the procedure. Meanwhile, people wishing to get medications for reasons other than an abortion have reported being rejected or having to leap through hoops to get their medication, even if the medication is crucial to keeping them alive.

    Previous polls have found that the public is eager for Democrats to act to protect abortion rights. Last month, Pew Research Center found that abortion is now a top priority for registered voters in this fall’s midterm elections.

    The Supreme Court also handed down a number of other right-wing decisions in this past session that may be driving distrust in the institution, including limiting federal regulators’ jurisdiction over the climate crisis, striking down a New York law regulating concealed gun carry, threatening Native sovereignty, and more.

    The Court’s next session, which starts next week, has the potential to be even more consequential and could threaten the fabric of U.S. democracy, judicial analysis warns. The justices are set to hear Moore v. Harper; their decision in this case could completely undermine voting rights by clearing a path for politicians to nearly unilaterally draw gerrymandered district maps. The Court’s ruling in another upcoming case, Merrill v. Milligan, could potentially allow politicians to draw racially gerrymandered maps that discriminate against Black and Brown voters.

    Other cases that the High Court has chosen to hear this session could result in the weakening of the government’s ability to protect the environment, the end of affirmative action and the weakening or end of a law that prevents Native children from being forcibly taken away from their families and tribes.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Activists Condemn GOP States’ “Sham” Lawsuit Over Student Debt Forgiveness

    Six Republican-led states filed a lawsuit on Thursday aiming to stop tens of millions of student loan borrowers from receiving relief from President Joe Biden’s debt forgiveness plan in one of Republicans’ first legal challenges to the plan.

    Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina are suing the Education Department, saying that the plan is too broad and “inherently unfair.” The lawsuit, filed in a Missouri federal court, argues that the plan is not “tailored to address the effects of the pandemic” on borrowers. They argue that loan servicers would also be hurt by the plan, especially MOHELA, Missouri’s student loan servicer and one of the largest student loan servicers in the U.S.

    If successful, the suit could halt the plan that would grant up to $20,000 of debt relief to Pell Grant recipients and $10,000 for others making less than $125,000 a year.

    This lawsuit was expected. Republicans have been warning of their plans to challenge the student debt relief plan, saying that it’s too expensive or that it overreaches the president’s power.

    Proponents of student debt forgiveness say, however, that Republicans’ true motives are to keep the middle and lower classes poor or in debt; after all, Republican lawmakers have openly admitted that they oppose the debt forgiveness plan because it would reduce the military’s ability to recruit poor people who couldn’t otherwise afford higher education.

    Advocates say that the GOP’s complaints over the cost of the plan are frivolous. Right-wingers have been citing the conservative-led Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate released earlier this week that the plan would cost $400 billion. But they often neglect to mention that the cost would be spread out over the next 30 years and is barely over half of what the U.S. spends on the Pentagon yearly — a cost that Republicans almost never complain about.

    The calculation for what revenue student loans may provide for the government may also be overblown; a July report from the Government Accountability Office found that, despite previous estimates, federal student loan borrowing actually costs the government billions of dollars, in part because many borrowers simply can’t afford to pay their loans back.

    “Corrupt politicians are doing the student loan industry’s dirty work. A judge will quickly dispose of this sham lawsuit, but we won’t forget,” the Student Borrower Protection Center said on Thursday. “Banks and student lenders — especially MOHELA — want to profit by trapping families in debt. We will hold them accountable.”

    “Republicans want to keep you in debt for the rest of your life and take away student debt cancellation,” wrote the Debt Collective on Thursday, in response to the lawsuit. “It is an interesting strategy to adopt before the midterms.”

    Indeed, polls have found that the student debt plan is popular. Polls have found that a majority of Americans support the plan and that nearly half of voters say they’re more likely to vote this fall because of the plan that’s likely helped to boost Biden’s approval rating.

    This is at least the second lawsuit filed over the plan. Earlier this week, a lawyer for a libertarian law firm, the Pacific Legal Foundation, filed a suit arguing that it would cause him harm because he would be forced to pay state taxes on the cancellation. In a legal filing in response to the lawsuit, Biden administration officials simply said that the lawsuit’s argument is moot because the forgiveness plan gives borrowers an option to opt out of the relief.

    In an op-ed published Wednesday, The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman wrote that the attempt to stop student debt forgiveness is “upside-down class war” — a war waged by upper class and elite Republicans against middle- and low-income, Black and Latinx and young people to take away a rare bit of relief given to them by a political system that is designed to sap wealth away from everyday people to fund the 1 percent.

    Though the legal challenges to the plan are only in their beginning phrases, the Biden administration already appears to be caving to them.

    Reports noted on Thursday that the Department of Education has covertly changed the terms of the forgiveness plan to exclude the roughly 4 million borrowers who have privately held student loans, including those with Perkins loans and Federal Family Education Loans (FFEL), despite the fact that earlier iterations of the plan included such borrowers. Legal experts say that the Education Department appears to have made this change in bracing for legal challenges to the plan.

    “FFEL lenders have shown their true colors,” the Student Borrower Protection Center wrote on Thursday. “Instead of working in the interest of student loan borrowers — their customers — these lenders are holding hostage relief from millions in order to keep making a buck off of suffering.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.