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Author: Sharon Zhang

  • Most Voters Say Supreme Court Shouldn’t Bar EPA From Regulating Air Pollution

    A majority of voters are opposed to conservative efforts to bar the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from being able to regulate air pollution that is contributing to the climate crisis in the Supreme Court case West Virginia v. EPA, new polling finds.

    In a recent survey, Data for Progress and Evergreen Action found that, after hearing arguments for and against the idea, 62 percent of likely voters said that the EPA should be allowed to regulate air pollution, including 82 percent of Democrats.

    Meanwhile, the vast majority of those surveyed (84 percent) said that they are either very, somewhat or a little concerned that the Supreme Court could soon remove the federal government’s ability to regulate air pollution under the Clean Air Act. This includes 68 percent of Republicans, 87 percent of independents, and an overwhelming 97 percent of Democrats.

    The Supreme Court is expected to hand down a ruling as soon as this week regarding the West Virginia case, which could — depending on how the court’s supermajority of far right justices rules — severely limit the government’s ability to address the climate crisis and reach goals of cutting carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2030.

    On Monday, justices heard arguments for the case, which concerns the authority of the EPA to govern power plants under a Barack Obama-era climate regulation known as the Clean Power Plan. The plan was never put in place — it was repealed by the Trump administration before it could go into effect and hasn’t been reinstated by Joe Biden — meaning that the High Court is ruling on a challenge to regulation that effectively doesn’t exist.

    The Supreme Court is “looking to set a precedent for the future, essentially going outside of its jurisdiction to prevent future EPA rulemaking on power plant pollution,” Data for Progress wrote in its post about the polling. “This is a dangerous case that could gut some of the most impactful provisions of the Clean Air Act and permanently hamper the EPA’s ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector.”

    The plaintiffs are arguing that the Supreme Court should apply a doctrine favored by right-wing extremist Justice Brett Kavanaugh, known as the major questions doctrine, which limits agencies’ ability to regulate in areas of economic and political importance — essentially limiting the scope of the government overall.

    If the Supreme Court rules with West Virginia and fellow plaintiffs — who have many of the same political donors as those who were behind efforts to get five of the Republican justices confirmed — it could have far-reaching consequences beyond just the scope of regulating power plants.

    The ruling would mean, for instance, that the EPA would have to seek approval from Congress whenever it wanted to regulate a new air or water pollutant. It would also make it so that states wishing to allow a power producer to shift toward renewable energies would find their hands tied, as the EPA wouldn’t be allowed to force utilities to replace their fossil fuel energy sources in order to meet pollution standards.

    The relatively novel case implements restrictions that Republicans have been working toward for years — if not decades — to enhance their fossil fuel donors’ profits while accelerating the climate crisis.

    Climate advocates have raised the alarm about the case, which they say could not only hamper the country’s ability to curb its contribution to the climate crisis but also have severe consequences for public health.

    Advocates have also tied the motivation behind the case to fossil fuel interests. In a speech on the Senate floor last week, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) said that fossil fuel interests have been bankrolling efforts leading to this case, with the promise that they’d have a major “payday” when they finally succeed. Theories like the major questions doctrine were created in fossil fuel industry think tanks, which he called “factories where doctrines are crafted, reverse-engineered from the results the big donors want.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Maine Chipotle Workers File to Form Company’s First-Ever Union

    Workers at a Chipotle in Augusta, Maine, filed to form a union on Wednesday, hoping to become the first unionized workers at the food chain’s nearly 3,000 locations in the country.

    The workers, who have formed an independent union known as Workers United, turned in their union petition with union cards signed by a majority of the roughly 20 workers in the store, according to union organizers.

    Workers say that they face long hours and understaffing, leading to safety concerns. The union staged a two-day walkout last week to protest against unsafe working conditions after repeatedly being forced to open the store without proper staffing, putting the employees and the customers at risk, they said.

    When the store is understaffed — often with half of the amount of people that are required to meet demand — workers say that they’re unable to do things like food temperature checks or cleaning tables in the restaurant.

    “I care about these people more than anybody else,” employee Laramie Rohr told the Kennebec Journal. “I hope to improve working conditions, not have to have five people working 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a week, to have the ability to close when you need to for safety reasons. Because we don’t want to serve bad food. We’re proud of our food, we’re proud of our workplace, we’re proud of our coworkers.”

    Chipotle management says the fact that they responded with hiring initiatives after the walkout shows that the company is already capable of meeting employees’ concerns, but workers say that upper management has a pattern of not addressing workers’ needs, according to the Kennebec Journal.

    The workers delivered a letter to management on Wednesday informing them of their intent to unionize. “We’re hoping that by forming this union we can work with Chipotle to achieve the goals we have in common, such as safe and healthy food, and good atmosphere, and safe and happy crew members, and all of the other things that make Chipotle different,” workers said in a statement.

    “We are here to make things better by ensuring we have the tools and the support to meet Chipotle’s high standards while caring for ourselves, the crew that will come after us, and other food service workers who may see our efforts and feel empowered to stand up against the industry’s toxic culture,” they said.

    The independent nature of Chipotle United echoes the union campaign waged by Amazon workers, who have been organizing under the independent Amazon Labor Union. Although Chipotle workers have sought help from established unions like Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the Maine American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), they are forming a union independently.

    Chipotle workers in New York City have also been organizing a union effort, though they haven’t filed for a union petition yet. New York workers, organizing with SEIU Local 32 BJ, filed a labor complaint against the company earlier this year alleging that the company illegally retaliated against Brenda Garcia for her role as a union leader. The union also filed a complaint that the company has been surveilling and intimidating employees over the union.

    If Chipotle workers successfully unionize, their victory could spark a wave of unionizations in stores across the country — much like Starbucks workers, who have unionized over 160 locations just in the past roughly eight months.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Cori Bush Shares Her Experience With Gun Violence From an Abusive Partner

    On Tuesday night, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) shared a heart-wrenching story of her experience with gun violence in an abusive relationship, after the Senate passed a bipartisan gun bill that would place larger restrictions on the ability of convicted domestic abusers to obtain guns.

    “I was ~20 years old when I found myself in a relationship with an abusive partner,” Bush wrote at the beginning of a thread on Twitter. “I knew that he had guns. He kept one of them in the cabinet in the kitchen and another in between our pillows when we slept at night. I never believed he would actually fire at me. Until he did.”

    Bush continued, saying that her abuser became upset with her one day while she was cooking, and started hitting her. As she ran away, she wondered why he wasn’t chasing her until she heard gunshots, she said.

    “I did not know that they were aimed at me until they started whizzing past my head,” she wrote. “That moment. The horror of that moment stays with me. The moment when gun violence strikes is deeply traumatic and completely preventable.”

    The Missouri progressive concluded by praising senators for passing a bill that would close the so-called boyfriend loophole, which allows domestic abusers to buy a gun as long as they never lived with, were married to, or had a child with the person they abused.

    “Closing the boyfriend loophole could have saved me from a lethal environment,” she said. “As a survivor, I’m glad to see this provision included in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Closing the boyfriend loophole will save lives.”

    If passed into law, the bill will expand the definition of a domestic abuser to include people found guilty of domestic abuse who fall outside of those parameters, though it will still allow people convicted of abuse-related misdemeanors to buy a gun after five years, as long as they haven’t been convicted of any other violent crimes.

    Advocates against domestic violence have been working for years to close the boyfriend loophole, which disproportionately enables gun violence against women. Hundreds of women are murdered by their former or current partners each year, and 7 in 10 women who are killed by their partners were previously abused by that partner.

    The Senate bill, which passed 64 to 34 on Tuesday night, now goes to the House, where lawmakers are expected to pass it swiftly. The bill contains provisions that would ultimately limit the number of guns owned by the public, including expansions of background checks and restrictions on sales to people under 21.

    While measures like closing the boyfriend loophole have been celebrated, gun control advocates and progressive lawmakers have criticized the legislation for taking steps to increase criminalization through a provision meant to reduce gun trafficking, which opponents say would enhance the criminal legal system and put the enforcement mechanism into the hands of untrustworthy police departments.

    “If we’re talking about just using this as an excuse to dramatically increase an enforcement mechanism that we know is not capable, right now, of preventing mass shootings, then I’m not really interested in doing something for show for the American public,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said last week when an outline of the bill first came out.

    Advocates have also taken issue with several provisions in the bill that they say distract from the actual root causes of gun violence, including misogyny, far right ideologies and the multibillion dollar gun industry and their deep-pocketed lobbyists. Instead, they say, the bill helps to pin the U.S.’s gun violence epidemic on issues like mental health or the amount of doors in schools.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Bipartisan Group’s School Meal Plan Axes Funds That Have Fed Millions of Kids

    On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers announced that they have reached a consensus on a bill to extend the universal school meals program that’s helped keep millions of children fed throughout the pandemic — but the agreement removes the universal aspect of the program.

    Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan) and John Boozman (R-Arkansas) and Representatives Bobby Scott (D-Virginia) and Virginia Foxx (R-North Carolina) have unveiled the Keep Kids Fed Act, which would extend a supplemented school meal waiver program through the upcoming school year and provide 40 cents more in federal reimbursements for school lunches and 15 cents in reimbursements for breakfast.

    Lawmakers had rushed to reach an agreement with Republicans, who wanted to weaken the program, ostensibly because they were concerned about its cost. While the proposal comes just before the current waiver program is set to expire on June 30, it requires the federal school meal program to be restricted to families making under a certain salary range.

    Stabenow and Scott have acknowledged that the agreement is weaker than they originally wanted. Still, the lawmakers and advocates for the waiver program celebrated that they were able to reach an agreement with Republicans on the legislation at all, just nine days before the current program is set to expire.

    “While the country is on the road to recovery, many schools are still struggling with supply chain shortages and other increased costs that will make it more difficult to serve meals next year,” Scott said in a statement. “While this bill does not go as far as I would like in supporting our nation’s students, it is a meaningful step in the right direction.”

    In a press release on the bill, the Republicans in the group specifically praised the fact that the waivers would now reach fewer children than they have been in the past two years of the universal program. “This legislation will uphold our responsibility to taxpayers and abide by the principle that aid should be targeted and temporary while also helping students truly in need,” Foxx said. Boozman also celebrated the fact that the new bill will be “fully paid for.”

    While it’s true that the new proposal is cheaper — with a price tag of about $3 billion, while extending the universal program would have cost about $11 billion — commentators have pointed out that conservatives who handwring about the cost of feeding children often have no qualms about supporting the country’s annual injection into the massive Pentagon budget. This year, for instance, senators have stacked $45 billion on top of the already record-breaking defense budget on a bipartisan basis, bringing the total proposed budget to a whopping $847 billion for next year.

    Meanwhile, schools and local groups say that a reduction in funding for their meal programs will be devastating to their ability to ensure that children are fed. This impact could be felt widely across the country, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that 90 percent of school nutrition programs are currently receiving funds from the universal meals program.

    Placing income limits on the program could block millions of children from being able to access meals. About 30 million children are currently receiving meals under the program, while only 20 million children were on federal meal assistance before the pandemic. Many of the 10 million children who started receiving free meals when the pandemic began are from families who were above the income threshold for the program but still struggling to put food on the table — a problem that has been exacerbated by high inflation rates in recent months.

    Activists and progressives have long advocated for universal free meals for children. Without means testing, families won’t be forced to jump through hoops in order to receive the meal benefits, and stigma against kids who benefit from free meals could be reduced. Meanwhile, doing reimbursements rather than reducing the cost of the meal upfront could negatively impact families who can’t afford the meals to begin with, compounding problems with school lunch debt.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 70 Percent of Voters Want to Ban Congress From Trading Stocks

    New polling finds that the vast majority of likely voters believes that members of Congress should be banned from trading stocks as legislation to implement such a ban has stalled in Congress.

    About 70 percent of likely voters say that they support efforts to ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks, while 68 percent believe that lawmakers’ spouses should also be banned from the practice, the poll by Data for Progress finds, as first reported by Insider.

    About half of the poll’s respondents said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supports a stock trading ban, with 50 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of Democrats in agreement. The poll was done on behalf of progressive anti-corruption group Stand Up America.

    These findings are consistent with January polling from Data for Progress, in which 67 percent of respondents supported the ban, including a majority of Democratic, Republican and independent likely voters. Numerous polls conducted over the past year have similarly found that most Americans across the political spectrum agree that members of Congress should be barred from buying and selling stocks.

    “Very little unifies the American public these days, but widespread national outrage at public corruption … comes close,” Brett Edkins, Stand Up America’s managing director for policy and political affairs, told Insider. “It’s an issue of democracy and fairness, and whether our representatives are working for us or for their bank accounts.”

    The polling comes amid frustration that, despite momentum behind the idea earlier this year, negotiations over stock trading bans have been stalled indefinitely, while dozens of members of Congress continue to violate the current, relatively lax laws that were previously established by the STOCK Act. Although the STOCK Act is meant to prevent insider trading and increase transparency, members of Congress regularly violate reporting laws because the punishment for doing so is essentially a slap on the wrist.

    Earlier this year, lawmakers introduced several bills that would ban members of Congress — and, in some cases, certain members of their families — from being able to trade individual stocks while members are in office.

    The proposals varied in strictness, ranging from full divestment of individual stocks, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) suggested; or allowing members to continue owning stocks as long as they are put in a blind trust, as Senators Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) and Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) put forth.

    But, as of April, congressional Democrats hadn’t been able to meet an agreement over whether or not lawmakers should be allowed to put the stocks in a blind trust. Some anti-corruption groups have advised against the blind trust route, as lawmakers may still be regulating companies that they know are a major part of their stock portfolios, even if they aren’t able to see their portfolios in real time.

    Democrats were also torn on whether or not lawmakers’ spouses or families should be included in the ban. Those who support including spouses in the ban sometimes point to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-California) husband, who owns millions of dollars in stocks and who beats the market at such a rate that other stock traders often mirror his stock trades in their own portfolios — perhaps because he knows more about regulations or market patterns due to his relationship with his wife.

    In fact, it’s possible that Pelosi has been a major player in keeping legislation implementing a ban from coming to a vote. “I think that they’re trying to run out the clock,” Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Virginia), a cosponsor of one of the stock trading bans introduced in Congress, told Insider in late May.

    The legislation is “100 percent being stonewalled by anyone who has the ability to move it forward,” she said. While Spanberger didn’t name Pelosi directly, the speaker, who exercises control over what bills come to a vote in the House and when, has voiced opposition to the ban before.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Warren Unveils Bill to Ban Sales of Health Data With “Roe” Overturn Looming

    As the country braces for the likely criminalization of abortion seekers by Republicans, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) has introduced a bill that would ban data firms from selling sensitive data that could endanger abortion patients.

    The Health and Location Data Protection Act would ban data firms from selling individuals’ health and location data, which Warren and fellow bill introducers say endangers not only the safety of abortion clinic visitors but also the safety of all Americans who may be unwittingly subject to surveillance. The Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general and people whose data has been sold would be able to sue firms if they’re found to be in violation of the law.

    The bill, which is cosponsored by fellow Democrats like Senators Ron Wyden (Oregon) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), would be among the strictest regulations on consumer data collection and sales — an industry estimated to be worth $200 billion.

    “Data brokers profit from the location data of millions of people, posing serious risks to Americans everywhere by selling their most private information,” Warren said in a statement. “With this extremist Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe v. Wade and states seeking to criminalize essential health care, it is more crucial than ever for Congress to protect consumers’ sensitive data.”

    In May, Warren sent letters to two data firms, SafeGraph and Placer.ai, which have sold information about where and when people visited reproductive care facilities like Planned Parenthood. This data included their movements before and after the visit and how long they were at the clinic, which could be used to expose whether a person got an abortion. Facebook has also sold personal data about abortion seekers.

    Anti-abortionists have already been using location data to harass clinic patients. But with the likely overturn of Roe, abortion seekers and providers could be at higher risk under extremist laws that allow people to collect a bounty if they expose providers or that criminalize people who travel out of state to get an abortion in a state where the procedure is legal.

    Experts have warned that health data collected from period tracking apps could also put people at risk, as the apps can tell when a period is late and a person could be pregnant. Such data isn’t protected under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), experts say, as long as the app is free to use.

    Data and privacy experts have endorsed the bill, emphasizing that the largely unregulated data sale industry poses risks to everyone.

    “Health and location data are incredibly sensitive and can be used for a range of harms, from profiling and exploiting consumers to spying on citizens without warrants to carrying out stalking and violence,” Justin Sherman, research lead of Duke University’s Data Brokerage Project, said in a statement. “Companies should not be allowed to freely buy and sell Americans’ health and location data, on the open market, with virtually no restrictions.”

    Indeed, sale of location data has been used to facilitate anti-Muslim, anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant crusades – in 2020, for instance, the Wall Street Journal found that government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security has been using location data collected from millions of cell phones in order to find and arrest undocumented immigrants.

  • Democrats Introduce Bill to Slash $100 Billion From Pentagon Budget

    While the defense budget continues its decades-long upward spiral, Democrats in the House are waging a push to do something unprecedented: take billions from the defense budget and redirect the money to social spending.

    On Monday, Representatives Barbara Lee (D-California) and Mark Pocan (D-Wisconsin) introduced a bill that would cut $100 billion from the defense budget — which, for this year, was a towering $782 billion. This would likely be the largest year-over-year budget cut that the Pentagon has ever seen.

    The bill would direct the Department of Defense budget for fiscal year 2023 to be calculated by subtracting $100 billion from the amount appropriated for the defense budget for 2022. While this would still be a massive budget of around $680 billion, it would be a major first step toward progressives’ longtime goal of slashing the defense budget to an amount comparable to that of other countries — or nixing it altogether.

    “For far too long, this country has put profits ahead of its people. Nowhere is that more apparent than in our Pentagon topline budget,” Lee said in a statement. “It is time that we realign our priorities to reflect the urgent needs of communities across this country that are healing from a pandemic, ongoing economic insecurity, and an international energy crisis — none of which will be resolved through greater military spending.”

    While the Democrats are trying to cut the defense budget, President Joe Biden is requesting even more than Congress appropriated for the Pentagon in 2022. Biden has requested $813 billion for defense for fiscal year 2023, including $770 billion for the Pentagon. If Congress approves the budget, it would be the largest ever defense budget in the country’s history.

    Biden’s 2022 request for the military was already sky-high when compared to his spending requests for other priorities; the request made up 50 percent of the entire discretionary budget, with spending for the environment, education, housing, health and other priorities making up the other half. Meanwhile, the $813 billion Biden has requested for 2023 is higher than Donald Trump ever requested during his time in office.

    “The Pentagon’s budget continues to grow year after year, even as our forever wars have finally wound down,” Pocan said in a statement. “The United States spends more on defense than the next nine countries combined and cutting it by $100 billion will still keep the United States safe at the top spot. The amount of money the defense industry convinces Congress to spend each year doesn’t protect us from real threats like climate change, pandemics, or cyber-attacks. It only lines contractors’ pockets.”

    Lee and Pocan, who founded the Defense Spending Reduction Caucus, have waged pushes before to cut defense spending. The past two years in a row, the two have sent letters asking for cuts to the defense budget in order to prioritize public spending.

    The bill has the support of multiple progressive and human rights organizations, including Public Citizen, the National Priorities Project and the Project on Government Oversight.

    “The Pentagon budget is racing toward $1 trillion annually, while free school lunch programs for 10 million children are set to expire in a few weeks,” Public Citizen President Robert Weissman said in a statement. “We’re told there’s not money to feed the hungry, care for the sick, cut child poverty or protect the planet, even while Congress throws hundreds and hundreds of billions at a Pentagon that can’t even pass an audit.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ocasio-Cortez Raises Concern Over Criminalization Provisions in Senate Gun Bill

    After a bipartisan group of senators announced that they’ve reached a consensus on a framework for a gun reform bill on Sunday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) voiced her concern over proposals in the bill to increase gun-related criminalization.

    Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview with CNN on Sunday that, while the senators have yet to draft the bill text, she has doubts that the bill will be efficacious due to its focus on increasing criminal punishment. “I am disappointed to hear a focus on increased criminalization and juvenile criminalization instead of having the focus on guns,” she said, adding that, “the background checks provision is encouraging.”

    The New York progressive went on to say that she’s hesitant to vote for a bill that would act as yet another reason to increase police budgets and bolster the criminal legal system.

    “If we’re talking about just using this as an excuse to dramatically increase an enforcement mechanism that we know is not capable, right now, of preventing mass shootings, then I’m not really interested in doing something for show for the American public,” she said.

    Prison and police abolitionists argue that gun control legislation aimed at creating more gun-related criminalization not only doesn’t work, but also disproportionately targets Black, Latinx and other marginalized communities, which are already victims of over-policing. Gun safety advocates say that the bipartisan bill would enable guns to keep flowing freely and the gun industry to keep profiting off of the resulting violence, therefore failing to address the root of the problem.

    Senators announced over the weekend that they’ve reached an agreement on a bill that would, among other things, create new federal offenses for gun trafficking in the wake of deadly mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas; Buffalo, New York; and beyond.

    The bill would create stricter background checks for people between the ages of 18 and 21 who are attempting to buy a gun, and would close the “boyfriend loophole” by restricting people convicted of domestic violence against a romantic partner, whether in a married relationship or not, from buying a gun. It would also give funds to mental health services and school safety programs.

    The bill has been the subject of widespread criticism from gun safety advocates, who have pointed out that it largely focuses on issues like mental health or the number of doors in schools — issues that the National Rifle Association has claimed are the causes of mass shootings in order to distract from calls to restrict the gun supply and the deep-pocketed gun lobby.

    Notably, the bill does not include a provision favored by Democrats to raise the minimum age for buying semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21; the vast majority of guns used in mass shootings are purchased legally, and the 18-year-old gunmen in both the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings legally purchased semiautomatic rifles shortly before carrying out the massacres.

    Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that any proposals to increase police forces in localities like Uvalde following mass shootings are ineffectual in decreasing gun violence. Indeed, though there were 60 police officers at the scene in Uvalde, officers waited over an hour to intervene to stop the shooter — all while tackling, pepper spraying and tazing the distraught parents waiting outside the school, who were begging them to save their children.

    “Even the police department from the Buffalo mass shooting came and testified before the House Oversight Committee, and they said, ‘more of us is not going to help,’” Ocasio-Cortez said. “At the end of the day, what we need to address in mass shootings is the widespread availability of guns.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • AOC Calls Out GOP for Downplaying January 6 After Seeking Pardons for Attack

    On Thursday night, during the January 6 select committee’s first primetime hearing on the Republican-led attack on the U.S. Capitol building, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) took to social media to call out Republican lawmakers for attempting to downplay the violence of the attempted coup.

    As the committee played video after video of the attack, showcasing not only the harrowing evidence of the brutality of the Donald Trump militants who breached the Capitol but also the violent intentions of Republican leaders like Trump himself, Republicans downplayed the attack online. “All. Old. News,” the Twitter account for House Judiciary Republicans wrote.

    Ocasio-Cortez shot back, saying: “Oh, so if it’s old news surely you wouldn’t mind reminding us which of your members sought pardons after the attack … So who were they?”

    “Was it [Rep. Andrew] Clyde? [Rep. Paul] Gosar? [Rep. Matt] Gaetz? [Rep. Jim] Jordan? [Rep. Lauren] Boebert? [Rep. Majorie Taylor] Greene? Others?” she said. “Please remind us, [House Republicans,] which of your current sitting members sought pardons after the attack? In addition to [Rep. Scott Perry] of course.”

    On Thursday night, vice chairwoman of the January 6 committee Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) revealed that Perry was one of the Republican representatives who contacted the White House in the weeks after the attack in order to seek a presidential pardon from Trump for his role in the rally that led up to the breach of the Capitol building. Perry, a Republican from Pennsylvania, has denied the allegation.

    However, the revelation has prompted renewed scrutiny of what Republican lawmakers did to aid the attempted coup, as the fact that Perry and several other unnamed GOP members had sought pardons suggests that they were afraid they’d be convicted for their roles in the future.

    Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, who reportedly spoke to Trump on the phone as militants were storming the Capitol, also downplayed the violence, saying, “When’s the primetime hearing on record crime in Democrat-run cities?”

    “According to CBS News, out of the Top 10 deadliest cities in America, seven of them are in Republican-run states,” Ocasio-Cortez replied. “Now, follow-up question: were you one of the members who sought a pardon after Jan 6th? I didn’t.”

    Ocasio-Cortez also reminded followers that, after she shared her close-call experience with the attackers, major conservative figures like Boebert, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) mocked her fear during the attack.

    “There was (and continues to be) a widespread GOP campaign to downplay the scale of this attack,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in an Instagram story on Thursday as she showed a portion of the attack’s footage. “Does this look like a small localized attack to you? They were EVERYWHERE. The screams were everywhere. If you were anywhere within this area, would you have been scared?”

    The scope of the violence was one of the revelations that was unveiled by the committee on Thursday; testimony from White House officials has confirmed that Trump wanted to stoke this violence and keep it going. As the mob chanted “hang Mike Pence,” Trump said that the supporters “perhaps have the right idea,” and that Pence “deserves it,” Cheney said of the witness testimony.

    Later in the night, the committee revealed that a member of the far right militia Proud Boys said that membership of the group tripled after Trump remarked in a presidential debate months before the attack that the group should “stand back and stand by.” The Proud Boys played a key role in the attempted coup, acting as part of the armed muscle that mobbed the Capitol that day.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Wants to Up Social Security Benefit by $2,400 a Year by Taxing the Rich

    A new bill introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) would increase Social Security payments annually by “scrapping the cap” on the amount that the wealthiest Americans pay into the program.

    The bill would increase Social Security payments by $2,400 a year and would fully fund the program until 2096, or the next 75 years — far past the current estimated insolvency date of roughly 2033, thanks to Republican refusal to raise taxes to fund the program.

    The bill would eliminate the income cap on Social Security taxes in order to ensure that people with high incomes contribute the same portion of their incomes to the program as the rest of the country; currently, the income cap for Social Security payments is $147,000, meaning that people making $1 million in income a year stop paying into Social Security by the end of February.

    As a result, while those with an income lower than $147,000 are paying 12.4 percent of their incomes into the program each year, the wealthy pay a far smaller proportion of their incomes in Social Security taxes. This income cap, Sanders said, is “absur[d]” and “grossly unfai[r].”

    Sanders introduced the Social Security Expansion Act alongside fellow Expand Social Security Caucus co-chair Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and seven other Democratic senators, as well as Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) in the House. The bill also has the support of 50 organizations, including major labor unions like the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).

    In a Budget Committee hearing on the program on Thursday, Sanders said that Social Security is something that Americans often take for granted — which makes fully funding the program to ensure that younger generations can enjoy its benefits in several decades all the more critical. At the same time, Sanders pointed out, the current program payments are too small for some seniors to live on, meaning that many seniors are putting off or giving up retirement in order to survive.

    Despite the “important success” of the program that has drastically reduced the number of seniors living in poverty in the U.S., Sanders said, “tens of millions of senior citizens are still struggling today to make ends meet and many older workers are scared to death — literally frightened to death — that they will never be able to retire with any shred of dignity.”

    The senator cited data showing that 12 percent of seniors are struggling to live off of incomes of less than $10,000 a year, while 55 percent are living off of incomes of less than $25,000 a year. At the same time, half of Americans 55 and older have no retirement savings, meaning that many rely largely on Social Security payments in order to survive — payments of, on average, about $1,500 a month.

    “Our job, in my view, is not to cut Social Security, is not to raise the retirement age, as many of my Republican colleagues would have us do,” Sanders said. “Our job is to expand Social Security so that everyone in America can retire with the dignity that he or she deserves and that every person in this country with a disability can retire with the security they need.”

    Sanders emphasized that the bill is also about leveling the playing field. “At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, at a time when billionaires pay an effective tax rate lower than the average working person, at a time when the very richest people in this country are becoming much richer,” he said, “this legislation demands that the wealthiest people in this country start paying their fair share of taxes.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • House GOP Unites Against Condemning White Supremacy Behind Buffalo Shooting

    Every Republican in the House voted against a measure passed on Wednesday that condemns the recent mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, and denounces the white supremacist theory that supposedly motivated the shooter.

    Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s (D-New York) measure, which passed 218 to 205 largely by party lines, explicitly condemns the “Great Replacement” theory — a bunk white supremacist and far right conspiracy theory that global elites are implementing a plan to saturate traditionally white countries with a majority of people of color.

    The conspiracy theory, which has taken hold among right-wingers across the world, was allegedly the inspiration behind the shooting. The Buffalo mass shooter killed 10 people and injured three people; out of the 13 who were shot, 11 were Black.

    “It takes two things to kill multiple people whom you don’t even know. It takes hate, and evil in someone’s heart, and a weapon of mass destruction,” Bowman said in a press conference for the resolution. Congress “need[s] to fight against hate in all of its forms to truly build a multiracial Democracy,” he said.

    “The ‘Great Replacement’ theory believes that only white people are responsible for progress in our society, and that the growth of a multiracial and multi-religious society is a threat to white people’s existence and the health of our nation,” Bowman continued. “This has spread and infected the minds of so many.”

    The procedural measure, which had 147 cosponsors in the House, was voted on before debate on Democrats’ bill to raise the age limit for purchasing semiautomatic guns and restrict the amount of ammunition that can be bought at once.

    While it’s common for the minority party to vote against the majority party’s procedural measures, the move also highlights Republicans’ recalcitrance to condemn white supremacy as the party hurtles further to the right. Indeed, after the shooting, Republican leaders refused to condemn the hateful theory which has been openly embraced by far right politicians in the party; Fox News further amplified the lie on the network in the days following the shooting.

    Though the theory has garnered national attention due to the recent shooting in Buffalo, it’s been at least partially responsible for several mass shootings and hate rallies over the past years; the shooter who killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, named his manifesto after the theory, and referenced it multiple times.

    In a broader sense, white supremacy, which Republicans also refuse to condemn, has been at the roots of other recent mass shootings, including the 2015 massacre of worshipers at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

    Instead, Republicans now seem more open than ever to embracing murder and violence when it’s done in the name of dangerous far right ideologies. In the past years, Republicans have made an idol out of Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three people at a protest against police brutality in 2020, killing two of them. Rittenhouse has cavorted with far right militia members and has displayed white nationalist hand signals — and, when he was acquitted of murder charges after a biased trial, Republicans showered the killer with praise.

  • Trump ICE Officials Thought Immigrant Kids Were Reunited With Parents Too Soon

    Newly uncovered emails show that immigration officials under the Trump administration thought that immigrant families that were being separated at the border were being reunited too quickly, seemingly exposing that officials fully intended on using family separation as a means of punishing immigrants.

    The emails, turned over as part of a lawsuit brought by families who are suing the government for their pain and suffering, show that immigration officials thought it was bad optics for families to be reunited quickly after being separated.

    “Bottom line, our concern is that the adults that were separated from their children… will be returned to the [U.S. Border Patrol] immediately after the guilty plea is accepted by the Court,” wrote then-top Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official Matthew Albence in May of 2018, just after the family separation policy went into effect across the southern border.

    Albence raised concerns about the implementation of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of separating families, which caused massive and widespread suffering to the thousands of families who were separated, some of whom are still separated to this day.

    “This will result in a situation in which the parents are back in the exact same facility as their children — possibly in a matter of hours — who have yet to be placed into [Office of Refugee Resettlement] custody,” Albence continued. He then proposed to then-acting ICE director Tom Homan that border officials move migrant children to a separate facility “at an accelerated pace” and move their parents to adult-only facilities to ensure separation, while using cruel language to refer to the asylum seekers.

    “The traditional [border patrol] approach of washing their hands of the aliens once they are done with them is not going to work in this situation,” he wrote. Other officials backed up his concerns.

    Weeks later, on May 26, Albence said that allowing families to be reunited quickly “obviously undermines the entire effort and the Dept is going to look completely ridiculous if we go through the effort of prosecuting only to send them to a [Family Residential Center] and out the door,” referring to ICE’s concentration camps at the border.

    The Trump administration had denied that the family separation was an intentional part of the “zero tolerance” policy. But lawyers for the families say the emails make it clear that the separations were intentional — and that ultimately, the policy was designed to cause further suffering to families, even if they weren’t being pursued for having broken the law. Notably, the policy failed at its supposed (and violent) aim of deterring border crossings, further confirming the senseless inhumanity of the family separations.

    “Although the government told the public that family separation was merely a byproduct of a ‘prosecution’ policy, in fact it implemented a far broader policy of separating all families apprehended at the border regardless of whether the parents were prosecuted or even referred for prosecution,” lawyers representing the asylum seekers wrote in a court filing this week.

    If the intent of immigration officials at the time was to make families suffer, it worked. Parents have shared stories of their experiences being separated from their children, recounting suffering that goes beyond what the government should be allowed to inflict, advocates say.

    “I cried every day. I asked God, ‘What’s going to happen to me? What’s going to happen to my family?’” Fernando Arredondo, one of the parents involved in the current lawsuits against the Biden administration, recently told CBS. Arredondo came to the U.S. after his 17-year-old son was killed in Guatemala, their country of origin, and was separated from his 12-year-old daughter Andrea in 2018 and eventually deported. He was allowed to come back to the U.S. and reunite with his wife and other daughters in 2020.

    Though the Biden administration claims to have stopped enforcing the policy, reporting finds that it is still ongoing — and families’ requests for relief in their lawsuits against the Justice Department have faced resistance from the Biden administration, despite the president’s promises on the campaign trail to provide justice to asylum seekers.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 25 Senate Democrats Urge Biden to Use Executive Power to Protect Abortion Access

    Senate Democrats are demanding that President Joe Biden immediately craft and sign an executive order to protect access to reproductive health care, including abortions, as conservatives across the country escalate their attacks on reproductive rights.

    In a letter sent to Biden on Tuesday, a group of Democrats led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) highlighted steps that the president has the authority to take in order to protect abortion rights — moves that they say are only starting points for the federal government to combat the likely impending overturn of Roe v. Wade and the restrictions on health care like birth control that could come with it.

    “We write to urge you to immediately issue an executive order directing the federal government to develop a national plan to defend Americans’ fundamental reproductive rights, including their right to an abortion,” the lawmakers said. “[A]s President of the United States, you have the unique power to marshal the resources of the entire federal government to respond.”

    Lawmakers outlined six steps that the federal government can take, including increasing access to abortion medications and undertaking a review to determine whether or not abortion care and other reproductive services could be conducted on federal property.

    They urged Biden to direct agencies to explore resources like vouchers for those who have to travel out of state to obtain an abortion, enforce federal programs like Medicaid to cover abortion and other family care services, and clarify laws surrounding abortion seekers’ privacy when it comes to data collection technology and sales.

    Biden should also create a new office for an ombudsman at the Department of Health and Human Services to collect and disseminate information to the public about how they can access reproductive care clinics and abortion funds, they said.

    The letter was signed by 25 senators, including Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts), among others.

    While the lawmakers praised the Biden administration for launching a “whole-of-government response” to Texas’s dangerous abortion ban, “the dramatic escalation of attacks on abortion access — spearheaded by right-wing justices, lawmakers, and activists — demands comprehensive and creative strategies from every corner of the federal government,” they wrote.

    Indeed, abortion rights activists say that Biden could be doing more to protect abortion access; in addition to taking moves like the ones the Democrats have suggested, they say, he could also have the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lift restrictions on abortion pills so that they can be obtained by mail and prescribed via a telemedicine appointment. Activists have also been frustrated by Biden’s relative silence on abortion in his time in office.

    Biden has said that executive guidance, if it ever comes, would be ready to launch as soon as the Supreme Court officially rules against Roe v. Wade, as a draft decision that was leaked last month indicated they are planning to do. But reporting has found that White House officials think they may be limited in their options when it comes to protecting abortion care, and they fear that any potential executive orders would be challenged by Republican lawmakers and get tied up in court.

    The lawmakers argue that using executive authority on reproductive rights could send a message to right wing detractors and those who support abortion rights.

    “As extremist judges and Republican politicians intensify their efforts to strip Americans of their basic reproductive freedoms, you can demonstrate to the country and women everywhere that you will do everything in your power to fight back,” they wrote. (The population of people who can become pregnant and seek an abortion is not limited to just women but also includes people of other genders.)

    The House recently passed a bill that would enshrine abortion rights into federal law and override state abortion bans, but the bill was blocked in the Senate, failing to overcome a filibuster with all 50 Republicans and conservative Democrat Joe Manchin (West Virginia) voting against it.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ithaca Starbucks Workers Call for Local Boycott After Company Closes Union Store

    Workers are calling for a local boycott of Starbucks in Ithaca, New York, after the company announced that it would be closing a recently unionized store in a major escalation of its anti-union campaign.

    On Friday, Starbucks informed workers at the College Avenue store in Ithaca that it would be closing the store permanently on June 10, only a week from the notification date. In early April, the store became the third unionized location in Ithaca after workers voted 19 to 1 to unionize; as a result, Ithaca became the first city where all Starbucks locations are fully unionized.

    Workers plan to rally on Wednesday to combat what Starbucks Workers United says is “clear retaliation for the first city in the US to unionize every Starbucks store in the city.”

    The store closing comes after workers went on strike in mid-April to protest a safety issue over a grease trap that had overflowed. Workers said they arrived at work in the morning to a grease trap filled with maggot- and oil-laden wastewater, but were told by management that the store wouldn’t be closing due to the issue. The workers unanimously agreed to go on strike that day.

    In Starbucks’s announcement of the closure to the workers, the company claimed that it was closing the store because of the grease trap. Workers were told that the company would “bargain in good faith” when it comes to whether or not they would be able to keep their jobs, they said.

    According to More Perfect Union, the closure announcement didn’t first come from the company but instead came from notorious union-busting firm Littler Mendelson. Littler’s Alan I. Model, who handles negotiations with the union on behalf of the company, sent an email to a worker in the union saying that the store would be shutting down.

    “We went on strike over our broken grease trap (which has been an issue for years) and now they’re claiming that our store needs to close permanently because of it,” Nadia Vitek, an Ithaca Starbucks worker, said in a statement on Saturday. “Seems like blatant and illegal retaliation for one of the most profitable and militant union stores in Ithaca. Assuming we’ll be transferred to other stores in Ithaca, our hour cuts are going to be even worse — they’ll do anything for us to quit.”

    Workers have filed a complaint against the company over the closure, seeking an injunction to keep the store open. “It is a clear attempt to scare workers across the country by retaliating against its own employees,” Starbucks Workers United wrote in the filing.

    The company is increasingly desperate to stop workers’ union efforts as its stock plummets and Starbucks Workers United scores new unions at an astonishing pace. Just on Tuesday, the union won elections in 12 stores, bringing the total number of unionized locations to 135.

    Although the company has been escalating its anti-union campaign, these efforts appear to be backfiring; workers voted on Tuesday to unionize a store in Memphis, Tennessee, where the company fired seven union organizers earlier this year. Not only did that move fail to stop a union from forming at the store, but the company is also facing a legal challenge from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which has filed for an injunction to force the company to reinstate the workers.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 85 Percent of Voters Want Congress to Pass the Equal Rights Amendment

    Fifty years after the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was initially passed in Congress, an overwhelming majority of likely voters want the provision aimed at guaranteeing equal rights for all genders to go into effect.

    Recent polling from Data for Progress finds that 85 percent of likely voters support Congress passing the ERA to give it a second chance at being adopted as a constitutional amendment. Support for the amendment is bipartisan, with 93 percent of Democrats and 79 percent of both independents and Republicans agreeing that the provision should be passed.

    Poll respondents further said that they would favor politicians who support the ERA. Fifty-seven percent of likely voters said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supported the ERA’s passage, including 75 percent of Democrats.

    Passing the ERA again is one of the pathways that lawmakers can take in order to have the ERA officially adopted as an amendment to the Constitution. In order to have an amendment adopted, two-thirds of states, or 38 states, must ratify the measure. That threshold was passed in 2020, when Virginia became the 38th state to do so. But the Trump administration blocked the ERA’s adoption, saying that the seven-year deadline that was set in 1972 to have states ratify the measure had passed.

    Though the ERA has obtained new relevance with recent ratifications in Virginia, Nevada and Illinois, voters say that they know little about the measure, the Data for Progress polling found. Only 23 percent of likely voters said they’ve heard “a lot” about the issue, while 53 percent said they’ve only heard “a little” and 24 percent said they’ve heard nothing at all.

    Advocates of the proposal say that it is more important than ever for the Constitution to explicitly state that women and other people across the gender spectrum are equal to men, and to affirm that gender-based discrimination is unconstitutional. Though there are landmark Supreme Court rulings that have created protections against sex discrimination, adoption of the amendment is especially timely due to the increasingly extremist right-wing Supreme Court, advocates say.

    Women’s suffrage advocates first drafted the ERA in 1923 and fought for its passage in Congress for decades. When the ERA was finally passed in 1972, 30 states ratified the measure in the following year — but anti-feminist anti-LGBTQ activist Phyllis Schlafly waged a campaign against its adoption, saying that it would lead to equal rights for gay and trans people. Her campaign was successful, and support for the amendment rapidly eroded, especially among Republicans.

    Currently, dark money groups like Concerned Women for America (CWA) and Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) are using similar anti-LGBTQ scare tactics in order to fight the ERA, feeding into the right wing’s growing misogyny and escalating attacks on the LGBTQ community.

    Congress has other options for ERA adoption other than passing a new measure. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, Congress has the power to lift the deadline it originally set for states to ratify the ERA. And though five states have voted to overturn their previous ratifications of the amendment, Congress could overrule those decisions and consider the ERA ratified in those states anyway. But these methods could prove difficult to pass due to the Senate filibuster and likely Republican opposition.

    In fact, three Republican senators recently went as far as to ask then-U.S. Archivist David Ferriero to commit to not adopting the amendment as Democrats waged a new push for its adoption; last year, every Republican in the House voted against a measure to remove the ERA’s deadline, and the proposal was never brought to a vote in the Senate.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • DeSantis’s Next Move in War Against Trans Kids Is Banning Gender Affirming Care

    Far right Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration is moving to ban transgender youth and Medicaid recipients from accessing gender affirming care in Florida in an extreme escalation of Republicans’ war on transgender people.

    On Thursday, state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo sent a letter to the governing body that oversees doctors in Florida, requesting that it “establish a standard of care” that would implement anti-trans guidelines issued by state health officials earlier this year. The guidelines, which were nonbinding when they were first released, say that, despite the findings of major medical, psychiatric and pediatric groups, transgender children should not be able to access potentially life-saving gender affirming care — and that they should even be barred from “social” transitions like changing their hairstyles or pronouns.

    On the same day, the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) issued a report arguing that Medicaid should be banned from covering trans-related health care for children and adults alike, including treatments like puberty blockers, hormone treatments and gender affirming surgeries. Both the letter and the report allow DeSantis to implement the bans quickly without the support of the state legislature.

    These moves are an alarming escalation of Desantis’s attacks on transgender people in Florida — which now directly affect both children and adults’ access to health care. LGBTQ advocates say that the development makes it even more clear that actions like barring transgender children from participating in sports were never about sports, but about waging an all-out war on transgender people and their right to exist in society.

    “The new right wing angle of attack is that NO trans people should have access to hormone replacement therapy because it’s ‘experimental.’ Trans people have literally taken cross-sex hormones since at least 1918,” wrote Ari Drennen, the LGBTQ program director for Media Matters for America. “Governor DeSantis’ move is illegal, dangerous and based on lies.” Drennen also pointed out that many cisgender people regularly take hormones for health reasons, but face no pushback from Republicans.

    Indeed, gender affirming care is well-established within medical and psychiatric communities to be life-saving for trans people. While trans youth and adults experience high rates of depression and suicidal ideation, studies have found that gender affirming care has positive effects on trans kids’ mental health — effects that last well into adulthood.

    In his letter, Ladapo politicized the issue, claiming without evidence that medical professionals who support trans people’s right to gender affirming care are only doing so based on their political preferences. Ladapo, a DeSantis appointee, is also an anti-vaxxer.

    “The current standards set by numerous professional organizations appear to follow a preferred political ideology instead of the highest level of generally accepted medical science,” he wrote.

    LGBTQ activists say that it’s actually the April health department guidelines, prepared in part by Ladapo, that are a nakedly partisan move; such actions only serve to advance Republicans’ culture war and to normalize denying the public their bodily autonomy — in the form of restricting gender affirming care, abortion rights, contraception access, and more.

    After the guidelines were released, 300 medical professionals in Florida wrote an op-ed to express their firm opposition to the instructions, which they said were based on cherry-picked data and distorted recommendations from medical groups. “[T]he Florida Department of Health cites a selective and non-representative sample of small studies and reviews, editorials, opinion pieces and commentary to support several of their substantial claims,” they wrote in the Tampa Bay Times. “When citing high-quality studies, they make conclusions that are not supported by the authors of the articles.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Progressive Jamie McLeod-Skinner Triumphs Over Big Pharma Ally Kurt Schrader

    Progressive candidate Jamie McLeod-Skinner has won the Democratic primary in Oregon’s fifth district, ousting conservative Democrat Rep. Kurt Schrader, who worked with fellow conservatives in the party to undermine Democrats’ agenda last year.

    With over 80 percent of votes counted, numerous outlets, including The Associated Press, have called the race for McLeod-Skinner, making her the Democratic House candidate in the blue-leaning district that includes southern Portland suburbs and Salem. With about 57 percent of the vote, the progressive won by a nearly 15-point margin over Schrader, who she’s previously dubbed as the “[Sen.] Joe Manchin of the House.”

    “Our battle to take on corruption so that Congress works for working people — not big corporations — is just getting started,” McLeod-Skinner said when the AP called the race last week. “When they see me in the halls of Congress, they will see you.”

    The primary was conducted on May 17, but the results have been slow to roll in due to issues with barcodes on the ballots which prohibited them from being counted by a machine.

    McLeod-Skinner’s win is a major victory for progressive organizations and lawmakers who backed her, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and the Working Families Party, as well as several major labor unions.

    McLeod-Skinner “took on one of the ringleaders of the organized effort to destroy the Build Back Better [Act] and with it child care, elder care, affordable housing, and a plan for a livable planet,” the Working Families Party wrote in celebration of her win.

    Indeed, McLeod-Skinner’s win is a rebuke to Schrader’s conservatism and his open allyship with Big Pharma, which rallied behind him in the primary race; with the help of the industry, Schrader’s campaign spent over $3.4 million to fend off McLeod-Skinner, or at least three times the amount that McLeod-Skinner’s campaign spent.

    During negotiations for the Build Back Better Act last year, Schrader handed the pharmaceutical industry a huge win when he joined two other Democrats in opposing Democrats’ plan to implement a measure to allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices — despite the vast popularity of the measure among voters. Then, after successfully watering down the plan, Schrader helped to separate the Build Back Better Act from the bipartisan infrastructure bill, essentially killing the Build Back Better Act altogether.

    Schrader likely knew that his vote against drug price reforms would look bad to voters; in April, he claimed that he actually supports the Medicare plan. “I’m making a real difference for their owners too — taking on drug companies to lower insulin costs, making sure Medicare can negotiate lower drug prices, expanding Pell grants and career and technical education,” he said in a misleading 30-second ad. “And I’m leading the fight to get big money out of politics.”

    But, as McLeod-Skinner has pointed out, Schrader has stood in the way of Democrats on the drug pricing plan and more, “help[ing] to create the situation that Democrats are in now,” she told CNN.

    Schrader has taken other steps that stand in stark contrast to the majority of the party’s agenda that likely hurt his campaign; last year, he voted against the American Rescue Plan stimulus bill, saying that he objected to the provision to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. He also said that President Donald Trump’s second impeachment was akin to a “lynching,” which he later apologized for after facing backlash.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Leaked Tapes Reveal GOP’s Plan to Train Right-Wing Operatives to Be Poll Workers

    The Republican Party is hatching a plan to infiltrate polling places using GOP-trained operatives and to create an “army” of right-wing lawyers in order to make it easier for the party to challenge and overturn election results, newly leaked video recordings reveal.

    According to an outline of the plan by a Michigan-based Republican National Committee (RNC) staffer, the party is hoping to create an online database to help build a network of Republican-friendly lawyers and poll workers that can work in tandem to challenge election results at polling places in Democratic-majority locations, Politico reports. By installing trained GOP operatives as poll workers, the party can get more access to ballots and power to overturn elections, party members say.

    “Being a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than [as] a poll challenger,” Michigan RNC election director Matthew Seifried said in a recorded meeting with GOP activists last November. Ensuring that GOP operatives take on roles as official poll workers is key to the plan, he said.

    The party has been crafting this plan for months, according to Politico, which obtained tapes recorded between the summer of 2021 and May of this year. An RNC spokesperson told the publication that the goal is to “even [the] playing field” in traditionally Democratic-leaning areas — all while the Republican Party works to erode voting rights and potentially overturn election results entirely.

    The plan is an extension of the party’s goal of biasing elections toward Republicans after Donald Trump lied about the 2020 presidential election being affected by widespread voter fraud — even as Republican voters move on from the 2020 election. If successful, it would operate at a less visible and less transparent level than moves like voter suppression bills, which state legislators have been passing en masse.

    In order to win those legal battles, party operatives say, Republicans will have to amass a huge number of sympathetic lawyers. “It’s going to be an army” of lawyers to back up the poll workers, Seifried said at a training session in October, appearing to acknowledge that the party will have to go through extralegal or otherwise legally intricate means to obtain the results Republicans want. “We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?”

    Most states have requirements for the partisan makeup of poll workers to be balanced in hopes of protecting elections from bias. But Republicans have been attacking elections at every level, working to pass legislation to bias election officials toward the right while waging loud and violent attacks on poll workers. This could have a chilling effect on Democratic poll workers’ ability to help run elections — indeed, in some places, it has already led to the ousting of Democratic election officials.

    If the party successfully recruits poll workers to contest votes, and those contests work, it could essentially lead to bottom-up local coups at a scale that may be difficult for Democrats to combat.

    Republicans have already reached their recruiting goal for the plan, with over 5,600 people having signed up to be poll workers since the winter. Sefried has submitted 850 of these people to Detroit election officials. Conservative activists have also been holding trainings in multiple states, meeting with activists in hopes of compiling a list of district attorneys who would be sympathetic to Republican election challenges.

    “Remember, guys, we’re trying to build out a nationwide district attorney network. Your local district attorney, as we always say, is more powerful than your congressman,” said Tim Griffin, legal counsel to the Amistad Project, which Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani once identified as a “partner” to Trump’s lawsuits over the 2020 election, in a training. “They’re the ones that can seat a grand jury. They’re the ones that can start an investigation, issue subpoenas, make sure that records are retained, etc.”

    Republicans have also been using other covert strategies to win votes. As the American Prospect reports, the RNC has been setting up local centers aimed at swaying poor and non-white voters — groups that the Democratic Party establishment often take for granted — toward Republicans, even as politicians in the party embrace violent white supremacist ideologies.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Corporate Pride Sponsors Have Given Over $1.5 Million to Anti-LGBTQ Politicians

    While corporations post rainbows on social media to showcase their supposed support for the LGBTQ community during Pride month, many of these companies are quietly donating tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to politicians who are pushing for anti-LGBTQ legislation, a new analysis shows.

    According to Data for Progress, dozens of companies that sponsor Pride celebrations across six major cities in the U.S. or that have signed pledges to support the LGBTQ community have collectively donated over $1.5 million to anti-LGBTQ politicians across six states. Fortune 500 companies have spent more than $2.8 million overall on anti-LGBTQ campaign donations.

    The analysis highlights offenders that are sponsoring Pride festivities in Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and San Francisco.

    The biggest donor among the group of sponsors is Toyota, which has donated $601,500 to anti-LGBTQ politicians since 2019. Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott alone has received $400,000 from the company within the last few years — even while Abbott has worked to erode rights for the community and is currently one of the leaders of a nationwide conservative campaign to attack transgender children and thus threaten their lives.

    AT&T is also among the lead donors to anti-LGBTQ campaigns, the analysis shows, even though the company is a Pride sponsor. The company has donated nearly $300,000 to a wide range of right-wing politicians, much of which has also gone toward Abbott’s campaign.

    Both Toyota and AT&T have their headquarters in Texas, and have received huge tax incentives for operating in the state. Comcast, another Pride sponsor which has business operations in Texas, has also given tens of thousands of dollars to Abbott, and over $120,000 in donations to anti-LGBTQ politicians in total.

    While these companies purport to be good allies to the LGBTQ community with public-facing entities like their rainbow-colored logos and Pride-themed products, they are fighting to keep politicians in office who will ensure that their corporate tax rates remain low, actively bolstering anti-LGBTQ hate campaigns across the country.

    Donating to politicians who cosponsor or introduce anti-LGBTQ legislation is an unpopular practice, Data for Progress finds. According to a recent poll, about 54 percent of likely voters disapprove of corporations donating to such causes, while only 36 percent of voters approve; when voters are informed that companies like Disney, Walgreens and Lowe’s are giving to anti-LGBTQ politicians, the companies’ favorability among the poll respondents dropped by up to 37 points.

    It’s unlikely that most consumers are aware of these practices, however, meaning that corporations’ bottom lines are likely unaffected by their hypocrisy on LGBTQ rights and other issues. Many corporations that vowed to protect voting rights in wake of the January 6 Capitol attack later donated to Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election, for example.

    Over the past years, LGBTQ activists have been fighting to keep corporations out of Pride altogether, saying that “support” from companies only serves to boost their public image while obscuring the purpose of Pride celebrations, which were borne out of radical grassroots movements and uprisings.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Starbucks Union Scores First Unanimous Win in the South

    Starbucks workers have voted unanimously to unionize at a South Carolina store, marking the union’s second win in the least unionized state in the country.

    The Starbucks location in Anderson, South Carolina, voted 18 to 0 to unionize, marking the union’s first unanimous win in the South, according to Starbucks Workers United. The store was the third to file for a union petition in the state, citing grievances regarding pay and poor working conditions.

    “[A]s it stands currently, corporate is severely out of touch with what goes on inside our cafe,” the workers wrote in their letter to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announcing their union effort in March. “Every opportunity for improvement is met with pushback by corporate as the [company] seeks profit over ethics.”

    The union’s victory is especially remarkable in South Carolina, the state with the lowest union density in the U.S., at only 1.7 percent unionized in 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The overall union membership rate across the country last year was already low, at just 10.3 percent.

    Just last week, the union won its first store in South Carolina in Greenville, which voted 8 to 1 for the union. Greenville has been described in previous decades as one of the “most relentlessly anti-union cities in the nation,” John Logan noted for Truthout. The state has a history of deep-rooted anti-union sentiment and so-called right-to-work laws that make it harder for unions to organize and represent workers.

    The win is another in a small mountain of victories; on Friday, the union hit a milestone of 100 unionized stores, with over 270 union filings and more filings coming nearly every day. Only 13 stores have lost their elections, including six stores in the South — meaning that the union’s success rate is nearly 90 percent. This is a remarkable rate for a union comprised largely of young organizers who labor experts say are boldly breaking the rules of traditional labor organizing.

    As workers have formed unions, they’re also organizing protests across the country, including a protest last week at another South Carolina location that’s in the midst of a union drive.

    On Tuesday, workers at the Cleveland Circle location in Boston began a one-day strike in order to protest what they say are dire infrastructure issues at their store. In a letter to management, the workers noted that management had instructed them to continue working as water pooled on the floor due to large water leaks in the ceiling that continued for hours. The store recently voted to unionize.

    These leaks, which workers say happen every time it rains, posed hazards to workers, who were at risk of slipping and falling as they worked, they wrote. Further, when the store closed due to the leak, workers were left in the dark as to whether they would get hazard pay for the hours they missed that day.

    “Lack of communication and guidance from upper management, especially under these conditions, is unacceptable,” the workers said. They plan to return to work after the strike concludes at 9 pm on Monday, on the condition that the company fixes the hazards that have been causing safety problems in the store.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Georgia GOP Candidate Got 3 Percent of Vote But Still Won’t Concede After a Week

    It’s been a week since incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp won the Republican gubernatorial primary in Georgia with a commanding 74 percent of the vote — but Donald Trump loyalist Kandiss Taylor, who finished in third place, still hasn’t formally conceded.

    Taylor, a far right Christian nationalist who ran on a conspiracy theory-ridden platform challenging the so-called “Luciferian Cabal” of supposed elites in the government, received only 3.4 percent of the votes, losing to Kemp by an over 70-point margin and trailing behind runner-up David Perdue by over 18 points.

    The race had been called for Kemp on the night of the primary last Tuesday. Perdue was the Trump-endorsed candidate and the only Republican gubernatorial candidate who stood any chance of unseating Kemp in this year’s race. He called Kemp to concede last Tuesday night as official sources called the race.

    In statements days after the race was called, Taylor said that she would never concede the race and claimed that it was “rigged” against her without evidence. “We have a national data team working on the 2022 primary election fraud. More will be forthcoming,” spokesperson Christi Maude told The Daily Beast. “Dr. Kandiss Taylor does not concede.” (Taylor tweeted on Monday that she was “wrong” and that her opponents “were not too scared to cheat,” but it’s unclear if this was meant as a concession.)

    Taylor also said in a press release that the incumbent GOP governor, secretary of state and attorney general, as well as voting rights activist and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, have waged a “corrupt, organized, [and] willful assault” on elections. Notably, Abrams has not served as a lawmaker for five years. The incumbent Republicans had refused to overturn the state’s election results for Trump in 2020, but still supported the passage of their party’s sweeping voter suppression laws in the state.

    During her campaign, Taylor embedded herself with some of the most extreme Trump allies that have peddled the former president’s “Big Lie,” rallying with people like MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and QAnon supporter Lauren Witzke. She has said that, if elected, she would make it so that corrupt state officials would be subject to “death by firing squad” if they aren’t loyal enough to the GOP.

    Her “Jesus Guns Babies” campaign slogan was the subject of much ridicule, and a major plank of her platform was to demolish a set of large rock slabs in northern Georgia that she claims are a symbol of Satanism; though her platform may seem nonsensical, her rhetoric has clear ties to a dangerous far right Christian nationalist ideology that’s surging among Republican candidates across the country.

    Taylor’s refusal to concede is likely influenced by Trump’s refusal to ever formally concede the 2020 presidential election, though he and his team have since acknowledged the loss in vague terms. That’s opened the door for Republicans like Taylor to still maintain that Trump won the election, regardless of the reality that President Joe Biden won the election and has been serving as president for over a year now.

    Indeed, over the past years, Trump has popularized a strategy among Republicans of not conceding a race, even when the loss is to another member of the party. Though not conceding doesn’t carry official consequences — in this case, Kemp will go on to face Abrams on the ballot this fall — the strategy is part of the right’s overall plan to delegitimize the election process in the U.S.

  • States Have Passed 9 Bills Making It Easier for Elections to Be Tampered With

    As Democrats’ efforts to prevent voter suppression and election tampering bills have stalled in Congress, state lawmakers are still quietly passing bills to make it easier to intimidate and criminalize voters and election officials, a new report reveals.

    In a report released last week, the Brennan Center for Justice states that, in roughly the first four months of 2022, six states have passed nine election interference laws — laws that have opened the door for partisan actors to tamper with elections and election results. Such bills have been passed in Alabama, Arizona, Flor­ida, Geor­gia, Kentucky and Oklahoma; Georgia Republicans are responsible for four of the bills.

    Three Georgia bills have made it easier for partisan forces to be appointed to or control election boards in Miller, Montgomery and Dawson counties, all counties that heavily favored Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

    Georgia and Florida lawmakers have also passed a particularly extreme set of bills that grant new powers to police forces, ostensibly to enforce election laws — though, in reality, these laws will likely disproportionately target and disenfranchise already marginalized voters.

    The Georgia bill gives the Georgia Bureau of Investigation the ability to launch a criminal probe into supposed election fraud allegations without support from another agency. Florida’s law, first proposed by far right Gov. Ron DeSantis, creates a 25-person election crimes office, which experts say will serve only to suppress voters.

    Meanwhile, Alabama, Kentucky and Oklahoma have created laws that criminalize actions that an election official would normally take to run elections smoothly; typical moves like accepting private funding in order to help with logistics like ballot sorting or registering Native American people to vote are now outlawed.

    Arizona has also made it a felony offense for an election official to fail to comply with a new complex and racist law to verify a potential voters’ citizenship status.

    Overall in the 2022 legislative session, the report finds, lawmakers have introduced at least 148 election interference bills, even as federal lawmakers have largely moved on from efforts to prevent GOP lawmakers from passing bills to skew elections in their favor. Lawmakers in 39 states have also considered at least 393 voter suppression bills in this year’s legislative session.

    On the other hand, however, lawmakers in 44 states and Washington, D.C. have introduced hundreds of bills aimed at expanding voting access so far in 2022.

    States have also enacted voter suppression laws this year. Arizona and Mississippi have created new proof of citizenship laws that would restrict voting access, while lawmakers in at least five other states have passed restrictive bills that have either been vetoed or are waiting for action from the states’ governors.

  • Trump’s “Big Lie” Lost Big in Georgia on Tuesday

    Donald Trump lost big in Georgia on Tuesday as primary voters rejected three Republican candidates endorsed by Trump in favor of Republicans who refused to perpetuate the former president’s “Big Lie” about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

    Incumbents Gov. Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Attorney General Chris Carr won their primary elections decisively, with about 74 percent, 52 percent and 74 percent of the vote, respectively. All three candidates are rank-and-file Republicans — with the major distinguishing feature that none of them acquiesced to Trump’s demands to overturn President Joe Biden’s Georgia win in November 2020.

    The three politicians had drawn particular ire from Trump, who blamed them for his loss — though Georgia’s 16 electoral votes still wouldn’t have been enough to hand him the election. Still, Trump sought to exercise his influence in the state and, like members of his party have done, to oust politicians who wouldn’t stand by him as he attempted to overthrow the government over his 2020 election loss.

    Georgia Republican voters’ decision to send the incumbent politicians to the general election is a sign that Trump’s influence may be waning among his base. While his endorsees have been triumphing in some elections, the Georgia losses are a major blow to his grip on his followers — or at least a blow to his strategy of directing all of the party’s attention toward the 2020 election.

    Raffensperger’s win over Rep. Jody Hice (R-Texas) was a particularly surprising result. Raffensperger was on the receiving end of Trump’s infamous call demanding that Georgia election officials find him more votes to win the election. The secretary of state rejected Trump’s demands, and an internal GOP poll found that he would lose handily because of it. Hice, on the other hand, was hand-picked by the former president to oust Raffensperger.

    “The people of Georgia must replace the [Republicans In Name Only] and weak Republicans who made it all possible,” Trump said at a Georgia rally last year, speaking about Raffensperger. “In particular, your incompetent and strange — eh, there’s something wrong with this guy — your Secretary of State Raffensperger.”

    Congressional Republicans’ and other GOP members’ continued obsession with so-called RINOs over the past year makes Trump’s loss even more of a blow; experts say that the loss shows that messaging about the 2020 election just isn’t energizing Republican voters anymore, and that attacks from Trump aren’t enough to sink a candidate.

    To be clear, Raffensperger is far from a friend to voting rights. He has taken moves that would impede upon voting rights in the past, including forming a group to root out and criminalize absentee ballot-related voting fraud and allying with conservative voter suppression group True the Vote. Kemp, who signed Georgia Republicans’ sweeping voter suppression bill after the election, and Carr, who supported the law, aren’t civil rights heroes either.

    Wins for Carr, who faced Trump’s pick John Gordon, and Kemp, who beat Trump-recruited David Perdue, are less surprising to election experts, but still a show of voters’ priorities. Even as they sought to make it easier for their party to openly bias or even overturn election results in the future, both politicians had rejected Trump’s coup attempts.

    “[E]verybody and their dog down in Georgia knows exactly what this means: total, abject humiliation for the former president,” wrote Truthout’s William Rivers Pitt on Monday, before the primary. “If it happens like it seems it will, this one will leave a big, broad mark.”

    Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Stacey Abrams won her uncontested primary election for governor. Abrams, a longtime voting rights advocate, stands in sharp contrast to the Republican candidates. Though she lost to Kemp in her 2018 gubernatorial campaign, the run launched her to Democratic fame, granting her national name recognition — and, perhaps, a better chance at breaking Republicans’ nearly decade-long grip on the governor’s office.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • AOC Tells Boebert to “Just Quit” After Tweet Rejecting Solutions to Gun Violence

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) castigated far right Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert (Colorado) on Wednesday after Boebert took to Twitter to preemptively reject any legislative attempts at reducing gun violence that will emerge from Congress after Tuesday’s horrific shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

    As Democrats in Congress began discussing legislation to address the epidemic of mass shootings in the U.S., begging their colleagues to put partisan politics aside, Boebert dismissed the issue offhand. “You cannot legislate away evil,” she wrote, implying that the root of gun violence could never be addressed despite the fact that many other countries have largely been able to eliminate or greatly reduce gun violence through legislation.

    Ocasio-Cortez responded by saying that Boebert should resign from Congress. “Why even be in Congress if you don’t believe in doing your job?” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “Just quit and let someone who actually gives a damn do it instead of acting like a useless piece of furniture when babies are shot with AR15s that we let teen boys impulse buy before they can legally have a beer.”

    Boebert has staked her entire political career on her militant support of guns and the far right. She owns a restaurant named Shooters Grill in her home state of Colorado, where employees carry guns while serving customers, amid walls with mounted guns as decoration. She has rallied against gun legislation in the past — and, in March of 2021, her campaign sent out a pro-gun fundraising email just two hours after a gunman killed 10 people at a grocery store in Boulder.

    The Colorado lawmaker also has deep ties to right-wing, Neo-Nazi-affiliated militias that often show up armed to left-wing protests or launch extremist hate protests of their own. Many of these groups are united in their extremist views on gun ownership and they and their ideologies are responsible for hundreds of murders over the past decades.

    Ocasio-Cortez has called for an end to the “idolatry of violence” perpetuated by supposedly “pro-life” conservatives, who parrot racist slogans like “all lives matter” while dismissing repeated politically-motivated gun violence, which overwhelmingly comes from extremist right wingers.

    Meanwhile, Republican members of Congress posted exceedingly cynical and untrue statements about the shooting less than 24 hours after it happened, in attempts to exploit the massacre to fuel their culture war and further anti-trans and anti-immigrant legislation that is getting people killed.

    Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) tweeted that he and his wife are “fervently lifting up in prayer” his constituents and the families of those who were killed in the shooting, thanking “heroic law enforcement” officers — despite early evidence showing that police failed to stop the gunman, exchanging gunfire with him before he entered the school where he shot and killed 21 people, including 19 children.

    The New York progressive also dug into Cruz on Tuesday. “Aren’t you slated to headline a speaking gig for the NRA in three days — in Houston, no less?” she said. “You can do more than pray. Faith without works is dead.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • AOC Rebukes Democrats for Support of Pro-NRA, Anti-Abortion Henry Cuellar

    As Rep. Henry Cuellar, a conservative Democrat from Texas, declared victory in a race that was otherwise deemed too close to call, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) rebuked top Democrats for supporting the candidate over progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros.

    Cuellar claimed he won with a margin of 177 votes around midnight on Tuesday, but no major news organizations have called the race yet. The race is close enough for Cisneros to request a recount, and there are still mail-in ballots that haven’t been counted.

    Though Cuellar has won over Cisneros before in 2020, Cuellar’s campaign is weaker this time around. He is the only anti-abortion Democrat in the House, and his house and office were raided in January as part of a federal investigation potentially involving questions over his ties with Azerbaijan, though he has denied the link. He is also the only Democrat in the House with an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association (NRA).

    “On the day of a mass shooting and weeks after news of Roe, Democratic Party leadership rallied for a pro-NRA, anti-choice incumbent under investigation in a close primary. Robocalls, fundraisers, all of it,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a Twitter thread on Tuesday night, referencing the devastating school shooting in Texas. “Accountability isn’t partisan. This was an utter failure of leadership.”

    Ocasio-Cortez continued, saying that “Congress should not be an incumbent protection racket,” and that “those who fail their communities deserve to lose.” She said that, if Cuellar does eventually win in a close race, “leadership’s decision to go to the mat for a pro-NRA incumbent will be the reason why.”

    Although Cuellar stood in stark opposition to abortion access — one of voters’ top priorities in this fall’s midterm elections — he still had the unflinching support of top Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (California), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (Maryland) and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (South Carolina).

    “The last time leadership waded in to save [Cuellar], he thanked them by obstructing the party’s signature legislation, paving the way for the child tax credit to collapse and imperiling millions while taking a victory lap for it,” Ocasio-Cortez concluded, referring to Cuellar’s efforts to block Democrats’ Build Back Better Act last year. “We can’t afford to reward such acts. We can do better.”

    Unlike many Democrats, the Texas representative also holds anti-immigration stances; in an interview with Fox News in April, he complained that the White House was “listening to immigration activists” on the issue of repealing Title 42, a Trump-era order that both Biden and Trump have invoked to deport around 2 million asylum seekers under the pretext of protecting public health. Cuellar’s conservatism led Cisneros, an immigration lawyer, to label him as the “[Sen.] Joe Manchin of the House” on the campaign trail.

    Democrats also demonstrated their support for the conservative wing of their party in a similar race in Oregon, in which President Joe Biden endorsed conservative Democrat Rep. Kurt Schrader, who worked to destroy Biden’s agenda in Congress last year.

    Cisneros, by contrast, ran on a strictly pro-abortion platform with support for key progressive issues like Medicare for All. Top progressives in Congress like Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) broke with the party to endorse Cisneros.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Jamie McLeod-Skinner Is on the Verge of Ousting Blue Dog Kurt Schrader in Oregon

    Blue Dog conservative Democrat Rep. Kurt Schrader appears to be on the verge of losing his primary in Oregon to progressive challenger Jamie McLeod-Skinner after spending much of the last year voting to block much of his party’s agenda.

    With about 77 percent of votes counted in Oregon’s fifth district, McLeod-Skinner has 59.3 percent of the votes, according to tallies available at the time of this reporting. Schrader is trailing behind by nearly 19 points, with 40.7 percent. The race was called for McLeod-Skinner by Cook Political’s House editor Dave Wasserman on Twitter on Tuesday morning, but has yet to be called by other sources.

    The district, which encompasses suburbs south of Portland and Salem in the northwest region of the state, typically leans blue. Schrader has held his seat since 2009. The primary election was held on May 17, but the results have been delayed due to an issue with barcodes on the ballots, leading to a longer process of ballot counting.

    McLeod-Skinner, a rancher and Jefferson County education board member, ran on a progressive platform supporting policies like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal and raising the federal minimum wage. During the campaign, she continually highlighted key differences between her and Schrader, such as McLeod-Skinner’s support of stronger regulations on the pharmaceutical industry and her refusal to accept corporate PAC donations.

    Indeed, if McLeod-Skinner’s win over Schrader is certified, it will be seen as a rebuke of the conservative politics that Schrader embodied during his time in office. His cozy relationship with Big Pharma’s highly funded lobbying efforts likely played a major role in his opposition to the Democrats’ plan to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

    In September, Schrader was one of three Democrats who joined Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, essentially killing the proposal. Schrader, worth roughly $8 million, is the son of a pharmaceutical industry executive, and his top donors over his seven-term tenure are the pharmaceutical and health industries, according to OpenSecrets.

    Schrader also played a major role in obstructing Democrats’ agenda over the past year. During last year’s debacle over the Build Back Better Act, which contained crucial provisions to address social inequities, the climate crisis, and more, Schrader allied with a group of conservative Democratic House members in obstructing the bill.

    Deemed as the “Unbreakable Nine” by dark money organization No Labels, the nine Democrats urged and ultimately succeeded in getting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) to separate the Build Back Better bill from the supposedly bipartisan infrastructure bill. The separation opened the door for Senators Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) and Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) to kill the Build Back Better Act entirely. The death of the bill was a major blow to Democrats, who have passed very few major bills in their time controlling Congress and the White House due in part to conservative Democrats’ obstruction.

    Schrader also had to apologize in January of last year after he compared Donald Trump’s second impeachment hearing to a “lynching” — a strange and racist remark which caused his spokesperson to resign.

    McLeod-Skinner has dubbed Schrader the “Joe Manchin of the House,” and he has earned so much ire of his fellow party members that local Democrats bucked the tradition of endorsing the incumbent candidate and backed McLeod-Skinner instead. The challenger has also gathered endorsements from progressive organizations like local Sunrise Movement chapters and the Working Families Party, as well as several major labor unions.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Senators Urge FTC to Protect Abortion Clinic Patients’ Data From Being Sold

    Sixteen Senators have sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking the agency to protect abortion clinic patients’ data from being sold after revelations that at least two companies had been doing so.

    In the letter, first reported by Refinery29, the lawmakers asked FTC Chair Lina Khan to detail what the agency is doing to prevent data firms from putting abortion seekers at risk with their location data.

    “In light of reports that the Supreme Court is set to overrule Roe vs. Wade, we are concerned about the privacy of women making decisions that should be between them, their families, and their doctors as they have for nearly five decades,” the lawmakers wrote, using the term “women” instead of more accurate language that includes trans men and nonbinary people. “Banning and criminalizing abortion in parts of our country could create added risks to those seeking family planning services in states where abortions remain legal.”

    Recent reporting has found that two data firms, SafeGraph and Placer.ai, are sellling abortion clinic patients’ location data, including where patients live, how long they stayed at the clinic and where they may have gone before and after the visit.

    Motherboard found that they were able to access such data using simple searches on the companies’ websites, meaning that the data is easily accessible by anti-abortion hate groups, who have used such data before to target abortion seekers. The publication was able to buy data from SafeGraph showing locations of people who had visited over 600 Planned Parenthood clinics for only $160 — mere pennies for anti-abortion groups with millions of dollars in funding, some of which comes from conservative benefactors like the Koch family.

    With laws like Texas’s abortion ban, which essentially authorizes citizens to become bounty hunters, and with 26 states poised to ban abortion if Roe is overturned, the data could be used to harangue abortion seekers and providers, or even people who visit a clinic like Planned Parenthood that provides abortions along with other reproductive health services.

    Anti-abortion vigilantes have waged attacks on abortion clinics for years, and clinics are bracing themselves for a rise in violence and harassment if the Roe overturn is officially issued.

    Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) led the letter effort, with signatures from prominent progressives like Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).

    “As reproductive rights are under attack across the country, we must do everything possible to protect the safety and privacy of women accessing the healthcare they need,” Klobuchar told Refinery29 in a statement. “Personal decisions such as those about contraceptives or abortion should remain between a woman and her doctor, not some data company that is willing to share location tracking information to the highest bidder.”

    The lawmakers asked the FTC if it is making moves to allow people to remove their data if it is being sold online and if the agency is planning on taking more general moves to “mitigate harms posed by mobile phone apps that are developed to collect and sell location data.”

    Indeed, outside of data specifically related to abortions, hate groups are using data to target marginalized groups. Motherboard reported last year that the people behind the Catholic Substack newsletter The Pillar used location data tied to LGBTQ dating app Grindr in order to track and identify a priest who was using its services, which ultimately led to his resignation.

    The FTC has announced measures it will be taking to protect data, especially that of children, from being sold online, but has yet to speak about abortion-related data.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Top Michigan GOP Governor Hopefuls Could Be Disqualified Over Forged Signatures

    Five Republican candidates for governor in Michigan could be disqualified after the state’s election board found evidence of thousands of forged signatures in the politicians’ petitions for ballot access.

    In a report issued on Monday, the Michigan Bureau of Elections found that petition circulators had submitted at least 68,000 forged signatures across 10 sets of candidates, including James Craig and Perry Johnson, the two top Republicans candidates who are hoping to challenge Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer this fall.

    Craig, a former Detroit Police Chief, had only submitted 10,192 valid signatures alongside 11,113 forged signatures, while Johnson submitted 9,393 invalid signatures with 13,800 valid ones, the bureau reported. After the invalid signatures were removed, both candidates failed to meet the 15,000 signature threshold to qualify for the ballot. The deadline to submit petitions was in late April.

    Three other Republican candidates fell short of the threshold to qualify for the ballot, with each candidate submitting over 10,000 invalid signatures, the agency found. Errors included petition sheets with multiple signatures sharing a distinctive handwriting style, consistent errors or misspellings on the same sheet, and signatures from people who aren’t registered to vote or from voters who had died months or years ago.

    The bureau’s findings will now go to the Board of State Canvassers, a bipartisan group made up of two Republicans and two Democrats, with a Republican as the chair of the group and a Democrat as vice chair. The group is scheduled to meet on Thursday.

    If the board upholds the bureau’s findings, it would result in a major shake up for the Republican primary for the governor’s seat, which is scheduled for August. With half of the 10 gubernatorial candidates disqualified, a new leading candidate could be DeVos family- and Donald Trump-backed Tudor Dixon, who has denied the results of the 2020 presidential election.

    The fact that Republican candidates would be disqualified due to election-related fraud is ironic considering that the GOP has spent years crowing about Democrats committing election fraud in the 2020 election on a broad scale — claims that have been found to be untrue in every U.S. state. In fact, it is high-ranking Republicans who have been found to have committed voter fraud to elect Trump.

    The Michigan bureau said that this amount of forged signatures in one election cycle is potentially unprecedented. “Although it is typical for staff to encounter some signatures of dubious authenticity scattered within nominating petitions, the Bureau is unaware of another election cycle in which this many circulators submitted such a substantial volume of fraudulent petition sheets consisting of invalid signatures, nor an instance in which it affected as many candidate petitions as at present,” according to the report.

    At least one candidate, Johnson, says their team is planning to challenge the bureau’s findings. The report stated that it’s unlikely that candidates were aware of the high amount of signature forgeries.

    The investigation into the signatures was started after citizens and the state Democratic Party had submitted complaints last month about the signatures.

    “The extensive evidence of fraud and forgery found throughout the nominating petitions submitted by James Craig, Tudor Dixon, and Perry Johnson indicate not only that their irresponsible campaigns are grossly negligent, but that they are not capable of being accountable leaders,” state Democratic Party Chair Lavora Barnes said in a statement. The challenge to Dixon was ultimately found invalid by the bureau.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Lockheed Martin Gave Over $250k to Politicians as They Discussed Ukraine Bills

    As lawmakers in Congress debated billions of dollars’ worth of aid to Ukraine, including military aid, major defense contractor Lockheed Martin was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on campaign donations, new disclosures show.

    As reported by Insider, Lockheed Martin’s PAC spent $256,000 in April on donations to members of Congress, a gubernatorial campaign and PACs of both major parties. The company made 147 donations in total to the campaigns of federal lawmakers, including donations to five members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and 27 members of the House Armed Services Committee, both of which oversee military and defense spending.

    Members of those committees who got donations from the company include conservative Democratic Senators Mark Kelly (Arizona) and Joe Manchin (West Virginia). House Armed Services Committee chair Rep. Adam Smith (D-Washington) also received a donation from the PAC. Congress discussed over 10 different bills related to Ukraine aid in April.

    According to Insider, the donations and the number of lawmakers represent an unusually large amount of political spending for the company over the past few years. This indicates that Lockheed Martin’s PAC specifically timed the donations in order to coincide with negotiations on aid to Ukraine.

    Defense contractors stood to benefit greatly from those bills, and have already seen their stocks rise precipitously since the Russian forces first invaded the country in late February.

    Last month, lawmakers were discussing a bill that would provide Ukraine about $40 billion in aid. The bill, passed by Congress last week, provides $6 billion for Ukrainian military forces, nearly $4 billion to U.S. forces in the region, and $8.7 billion to the Pentagon to replace weapons that it has given Ukraine. About $1.1 billion goes toward weapons production in the U.S.

    Those weapons include Javelin anti-tank and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles made by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon in a joint $309 million contract with the U.S. government — meaning that, even in just one contract, Lockheed Martin’s hundreds of thousands of dollars of donations has paid off handsomely.

    It’s unclear how much Lockheed Martin will get from the spending, though experts say that more than half of foreign military spending typically goes toward defense contractors. These contractors have a strong grip on lawmakers; earlier this month, President Joe Biden visited a Lockheed Martin Javelin manufacturing facility in a display of the strong relationship between the company and federal lawmakers.

    Lockheed Martin is the top defense contractor for the U.S., receiving tens of millions of dollars from the Department of Defense and appropriations bills each year, which helps pad their profits. The company is also a top contributor to lawmakers like Smith, who in turn vote against cuts to defense spending.

    Lawmakers also have stock in defense contractors including Lockheed Martin, despite the fact that they rule on bills that have a direct impact on the company’s profits.

  • Texas GOP Sets Sights on Banning Companies From Helping Workers Get Abortions

    A group of Republican state lawmakers in Texas are threatening to ban companies from doing business in the state if they help their employees obtain an abortion in a state where the procedure is legal if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.

    According to the Texas Tribune, at least 14 Republican state representatives have pledged to introduce a ban that would stop companies from being able to offer their employees abortion-related health care. Pre-Roe legislation that was never repealed would allow any shareholders of a public company to go after corporate executives for criminal prosecution, according to the lawmakers.

    The threat is the latest in Texas Republicans’ quest to place a wide-ranging chilling effect on abortion and to vastly increase criminalization of the procedure. The move is yet another show of the Republican Party’s willingness to take extreme measures to restrict and legislate the population’s bodily autonomy, even if it means contradicting their reputation as the pro-business party or even risking corporations backing out of the state.

    The plan was first announced via a letter to Lyft CEO Logan Green that lawmakers sent last week, led by state Rep. Briscoe Cain. The letter was in response to an announcement from Green that Lyft would provide its Texas- and Oklahoma-based drivers compensation for legal fees if they were sued for aiding someone in getting an abortion. The company also vowed to cover travel costs for abortion seekers within the company that have a health care plan, in order to combat undue costs under “these cruel laws.”

    “The state of Texas will take swift and decisive action if you do not immediately rescind your recently announced policy to pay for the travel expenses of women who abort their unborn children,” lawmakers wrote in the letter.

    The extent of lawmakers’ overall support for the legislation is currently unclear. But with a Republican trifecta in the state, and with many extremist right-wing legislators in office, the legislation could pass and make it even harder for people to access abortion care. In emails with the Texas Tribune, Cain appeared to be confident that the bill would get support among the party.

    Other companies, including Texas-based ones, have also announced plans to provide abortion aid to their employees in recent weeks, as the country is facing a likely overturn of Roe v. Wade. Corporations offering these benefits have likely calculated that paying for abortion care is cheaper than paying for a pregnancy and parental leave; people who plan on becoming pregnant are often discriminated against by employers.

    With many major corporations — including Amazon, Citigroup, Apple, and Starbucks — announcing plans to help employees receive aid to pursue an abortion in another state, the bill could have a vastly negative effect on the state’s economy and employment.

    Even if there are economic consequences for Republicans’ far right laws, however, the party seems increasingly willing to feud with corporations in order to get their way, threatening to withdraw companies’ government support and to boycott if corporations don’t fall in line.

    GOP lawmakers in Florida recently waged a battle with Disney over the company’s extremely tepid and largely symbolic opposition of Republicans’ homophobic and transphobic “Don’t Say Gay” bill to ban teachers from discussing sexual orientation or gender in classrooms. Florida Republicans passed a measure revoking Disney’s special tax status last month in response — a move that Democrats said would cost taxpayers billions of dollars.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.