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Author: Sharon Zhang

  • 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.

  • NLRB: Starbucks Must Recognize Union in Store After Violating Law Over 200 Times

    In a rare decision, a labor official has filed an order to force Starbucks to recognize a union in the first store to lose its union election, potentially undoing one of the company’s only wins in the roughly nine months of its workers’ union campaign.

    Linda Leslie, Buffalo-based regional director of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), argued that a union at the Camp Road location in Buffalo should be recognized and that the company should begin the bargaining process with the store’s workers, just as it has in unionized locations. Leslie is seeking a bargaining order, an uncommon move that the board only uses in the most egregious cases of union busting.

    A bargaining order is one of the most forceful moves that the NLRB can take against an anti-union company, and stands in stark contrast to the otherwise weak remedies that the board has the option to pursue. The fact that the NLRB is seeking such a rare order is a show of the ferocity and recklessness with which Starbucks has been responding to the workers’ union campaign.

    The filing states that “serious and substantial” misconduct “is such that there is only a slight possibility of traditional remedies erasing [the violations’] effects and conducting a fair election. Therefore, on balance, the employees’ sentiments regarding representation, having been expressed through authorization cards, would be protected better by issuance of a bargaining order for the Camp Road store.”

    Indeed, workers said that the order could give them the union they had originally wanted. “When we filed for an election last fall, we had 85 percent support in our store,” said Williams Westlake, a Camp Road barista, in a statement. “Starbucks, in their pursuit of making sure not a single one of their 9000 locations would exercise its right to unionize, destroyed the democratic process.”

    If a judge agrees to the order at a hearing on July 11, in which the labor official lists over 200 violations of labor laws, it would be a huge win for the union. Camp Road was one of the first three stores to have its election ballots counted in December. For months after the store lost its union election, it was the only loss for Starbucks Workers United; even now, with over 80 unionized stores and over 250 union filings, only roughly 10 other stores have voted against unionizing.

    According to the order request, the company has retaliated against pro-union workers and organizers by banning workers from stores, cutting hours, issuing warnings and firing pro-union workers. The company denies all of the allegations in the filing.

    Pro-union workers celebrated the filing, saying that they hope it will provide much-needed relief after the company’s harsh union busting.

    “The NLRB choosing to pursue a bargaining order at Camp Road is nothing short of exceptional. The partners at this location have been subjected to some of the most aggressive union-busting seen in recent years,” said Gianna Reeve, a shift supervisor in the Camp Road store. “This is the first step for partners at my store to finally receive justice for what they have gone through.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Labor Officials Find Amazon Threatened Pro-Union Workers With Wage Cuts

    Labor officials have found merit in claims that Amazon illegally threatened workers during a warehouse’s union drive in Staten Island, New York, confirming allegations that the company made threats to withhold benefits from union workers during captive audience meetings.

    As first reported by Bloomberg, National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) officials informed Amazon Labor Union (ALU) of its findings after the union brought a slew of illegal union-busting claims to labor officials. The NLRB is prepared to issue a formal complaint about the alleged violations unless the company settles, a spokesperson said on Thursday. Complaints from labor prosecutors are submitted to agency judges.

    The agency’s Brooklyn-based regional director found that Amazon had illegally threatened to withhold benefits and cut workers’ wages to the local minimum wage during mandatory anti-union meetings prior to the vote at the company’s JFK8 warehouse, which voted to form the company’s first-ever union last month.

    Labor officials also found that the company implied that workers’ grievances with their working conditions could be resolved if they voted against unionizing, according to labor reporter Steven Greenhouse.

    Amazon told workers that it may take years for the company to agree to a contract with unionized workers — or that they may never get a contract at all, despite the company’s federal mandate to bargain for a contract with workers. Although contract negotiations are currently underway, the company additionally threatened that workers would not see improvements to their working conditions, the NLRB spokesperson said.

    It is illegal for companies to threaten to withhold benefits or wage raises from workers if they vote for a union. The company, which has filed to challenge New York workers’ union victory, has denied wrongdoing.

    Earlier this month, the NLRB found that the captive audience meetings held by the company during the JFK8 union drive were illegal, and officials said they’d issue a complaint if the company doesn’t agree to a settlement. Meanwhile, NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo has been leading the agency in a recent push to declare all mandatory anti-union meetings “inherently” illegal.

    These findings are just the latest in a pile of allegations from the labor board that Amazon has engaged in illegal conduct throughout recent union drives. In January, the labor board filed a complaint against the company, accusing Amazon of illegally surveilling and threatening workers during the JFK8 drive.

    “We just hope that Amazon is held accountable,” Amazon Labor Union president Christian Smalls said at the time. “We hope that other union-busters as well learn their lesson and that workers are encouraged to speak up.”

    Amazon has faced increased scrutiny from politicians over its union-busting moves in recent weeks. Recently, President Joe Biden and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh met with Smalls and union organizers from Starbucks in support of their efforts in the face of aggressive anti-union campaigns. “Chris Smalls is making good trouble and helping inspire a new movement of labor organizing across the country,” the president wrote on Twitter after the meeting.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • AOC Says Bipartisan Bill to Grant Puerto Rico Self-Determination Is “Un Milagro”

    A bipartisan group of lawmakers led by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) unveiled a bill on Thursday that would carve a path for Puerto Rico to determine its own territorial status.

    The bill was negotiated on by lawmakers with opposing views on how the colonized territory should be designated. Known as the Puerto Rico Status Act, the latest draft of the bill would authorize a new plebiscite with federal oversight to give Puerto Ricans the choice between pre-defined statuses of statehood, independence, or sovereignty in free association with the U.S. It is the first bill proposing a binding plebiscite that would not present the option of keeping the island as a U.S. territory.

    The legislation is the result of months of negotiations between differing factions on the territory, including pro-statehood politicians like Rep. Darren Soto (R-Florida), Rep. Jenniffer González-Colón (R), who represents Puerto Rico as a non-voting member, and Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi; as well as self-determination advocates like Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Nydia Velázquez (D-New York).

    “Let me tell you what this bill is about. Does the United States want to be a colonial power? I hope the answer to that is ‘no.’ Emphatic no,” Hoyer said in a press conference presenting the bill. “That is not a political issue. That is a principle issue. That’s an issue of what our country is about. We believe in self-determination.”

    Under its current status as a territory, Puerto Rico has been increasingly exploited by rich statesiders seeking to use it essentially as a tax haven — a situation that has been exacerbated by politicians who local residents say are corrupt. Residents face one of the most harsh and violent police forces under U.S. jurisdiction, and local activists say that a recently implemented debt restructuring plan to lift the territory out of bankruptcy was crafted to benefit wealthy elites.

    Puerto Ricans have held uprisings against colonialist politicians and exploitation, but have faced fierce resistance from police forces and other forms of repression that have sought to quash these movements. “Self-determination, as well as political and social progress in Puerto Rico, has been stalled by the systematic use of repression in Puerto Rico,” wrote Marisol LeBrón and Mari Mari Narváez for Truthout in 2019. “Communities and populations that rarely receive decent basic services from the state more often experience mano dura, or iron-fisted treatment.”

    In years past, the island has held nonbinding resolutions that were set up to be biased toward statehood. In 2017, a vote showed that, with 23 percent turnout, 97 percent of voters supposedly favored statehood — a vote that was so skewed that the Justice Department wouldn’t validate its results. Puerto Rican advocacy groups say that pro-statehood figures like Pierluisi cherry-pick statistics in favor of statehood while not allowing residents to have a real say in the matter.

    Ocasio-Cortez praised the bill, calling it “truly historic” and “un milagro,” or a miracle. “There was a lot of skepticism at first if [a consensus bill] was ever going to happen, because it has not been resolved for over a hundred years,” she said. Last year, Velázquez and Ocasio-Cortez introduced a bill, similar to the current proposal, which would have created a status convention made up of delegates from Puerto Rico that would have decided on a new status for the island.

    Pierluisi and González-Colón also praised the bill, saying that they were confident that it would lead to statehood if passed.

    “The people of Puerto Rico have voted for Statehood on multiple occasions and Congress has never expressed itself to resolve the status,” González-Colón said in a statement. “This is the first time that we have a binding plebiscite with only non-territorial options: Statehood, Independence and Sovereignty in Free Association with the United States and in this way honors the mandate of the people in favor of statehood, providing a mechanism to achieve it.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 26 of America’s Richest Billionaires Paid 4.8 Percent Tax Rate in Recent Years

    A new analysis of leaked Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents shows that some of the U.S.’s wealthiest people have paid a disproportionately low federal income tax rate in recent years.

    In an analysis released Thursday, Americans for Tax Fairness found that, in relation to their wealth, 26 of the nation’s richest billionaires paid an average effective federal income tax rate of just 4.8 percent between 2013 and 2018. Collectively, they paid just $24 billion in taxes — a miniscule amount compared to an immense growth of $500 billion in their wealth over those six years.

    The report demonstrates the vast disparities between the tax code for the rich and for regular Americans.

    Billionaires are able to dodge taxes on a large portion of their wealth due to tax laws allowing them to accrue wealth largely tax-free through investments and other sources. The taxes they did pay are on their relatively low taxable incomes — which Americans for Tax Fairness calculates in this case to be $132.2 billion, or only about a fourth of their wealth gain.

    By comparison, a Tax Foundation analysis found that, as a whole, Americans paid an average tax rate of 13.3 percent in 2018.

    “This revelation underscores the need to tax billionaires and other ultra-wealthy Americans more effectively, as proposed in plans from President Biden and Congressional Democrats,” according to the report.

    A handful of these billionaires paid an effective tax rate of about 2 percent or less, including some of the world’s richest people. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, currently the world’s second and 15th richest people, respectively, paid an effective federal tax rate of 1.1 percent. Conservative bankrollers Charles and David Koch paid only 1.3 and 1.4 percent, respectively. The world’s fifth richest person, Warren Buffett, paid a diminutive 0.1 percent in income taxes.

    Elon Musk, now the world’s richest man, according to Forbes, paid a tax rate of only 2.1 percent between 2013 and 2018 — which may have set the stage for his wealth to increase exponentially over the following years.

    “As long as we fail to tax their main source of income — the growth in their fortunes — many billionaires will continue to live largely tax-free lives,” said Americans for Tax Fairness Executive Director Frank Clemente. “Teachers, plumbers, firefighters and other working Americans can already pay higher tax rates than billionaires — and that’s just counting the small part of billionaire income that is now taxed. When you include their untaxed wealth growth in the calculation, many billionaires pay almost nothing.”

    Thursday’s report echoes previous findings that the richest Americans pay lower tax rates than the average American. Last year, a White House analysis estimated that the nation’s richest 400 families paid an income tax rate of just 8.2 percent over 2010 and 2018, largely because of the flexibility allowed to the wealthy in reporting their incomes and “preferred rates” for the types of taxes they pay, like taxes on stock sales.

    The wealthy often use incredibly complex ways to manage and store their wealth, making it difficult for IRS auditors to ensure that they’re taxed correctly. According to a Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday, a lack of IRS funding and complex audits of those with incomes of $200,000 and more are causing audits to go down overall, opening up avenues for the wealthy to dodge taxes even further.

    Some Democratic lawmakers have introduced measures to combat the growing wealth gap in the country; earlier this year, President Joe Biden requested in his 2023 budget proposal that Congress pass a “Billionaire Minimum Income Tax” of 20 percent to capture not only salaries but also unrealized gains from assets like stocks.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Nearly All House Republicans Vote Against Bill to Alleviate Baby Food Shortage

    Nearly all House Republicans voted against a bill to provide funding to address the baby food shortage and prevent future such crises despite the GOP’s complaints over the past weeks about the White House’s approach to the issue.

    The Infant Formula Supplemental Appropriations Act, which passed the House 231 to 192 on Wednesday, would provide $28 million in emergency funds to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in order to alleviate the current shortage and prevent future shortages. All 192 “no” votes came from Republicans, with only 12 members of the party voting with Democrats to pass the bill. House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut), who introduced the bill, said that the funds are necessary to address the problem.

    “This bill takes important steps to restore supply in a safe and secure manner. Additionally, with these funds, FDA will be able to help to prevent this issue from occurring again,” DeLauro said in a statement. “While we know we have more work to do to get to the bottom of serious safety concerns at an Abbott facility and the FDA’s failure to address them with any sense of urgency, this bill is the first step to help restock shelves and end this shortage.”

    The Senate will take up the legislation soon, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) said, adding that “We hope no one will block it. It is such an immediate need.”

    The House also passed a bill on Wednesday that would expand the types of baby formula that can be purchased by people who benefit from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or the WIC program, which benefits low-income families. Only nine Republicans voted against this proposal, all of them extremist right-wing lawmakers.

    Republicans opposed to the FDA funding claim that it wouldn’t address the shortage and that it politicizes the issue. The bill “does nothing – I repeat, nothing – to put more formula on store shelves or hold Biden’s FDA accountable for ignoring this crisis,” Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pennsylvania) said on the House floor ahead of the vote.

    The FDA has indeed faced scrutiny over its delay in investigating a major recall that contributed to the crisis — but commissioner Robert Califf says that the FDA’s shortcomings in the crisis are largely due to a lack of funding and resources. DeLauro also emphasized the need to build up the FDA’s infrastructure in order to fix the problem. “FDA does not have the adequate inspection force to be able to do that and to do it in a timely way,” she said.

    Despite their complaints, however, Republicans have offered little other than criticism in response to the problem. They have spent the last weeks criticizing the Biden administration for the problem, waging racist and xenophobic criticisms for unverified reports of baby food being offered in facilities located at the southern border. GOP lawmakers also held a press conference to criticize Biden for the issue while offering few solutions.

    While Biden has faced legitimate criticism for not acting to address the shortage sooner, Republicans’ dismissal of steps taken by Democrats boost supply shows, perhaps, their drive to politicize the issue. Indeed, their own party may be partially at fault for the issue, as a trade deal that President Donald Trump approved in his last year of Congress imposes high tariffs and fees on baby formula imports — mechanisms that were enough to lead the U.S. to import zero tons of baby formula from Canada in 2021.

    The monopolization of the baby food market may also be to blame, as progressive lawmakers pointed out in a letter this week. Four companies control nearly 90 percent of the U.S. baby food market, with Abbott Nutrition, which recently issued a large recall of formula products, controlling about 20 percent of it.

    Supply chain issues also factor into current shortages, and Democratic lawmakers are also scrutinizing financial activities and safety violations by Abbott in helping to cause shortages.

    On Wednesday, the president invoked the Defense Production Act to ramp up domestic manufacturing to increase supply. In an attempt to speed up imports of formula, Biden also directed his administration to begin using commercial aircraft to transport FDA-approved formula to the U.S. from overseas.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Warren Calls Out Tech Firms for Selling Abortion Clinic Patients’ Location Data

    Fourteen Senate Democrats sent a letter to tech firms Wednesday demanding answers to reports about the collection and sale of location data of people who have visited abortion clinics.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) led the lawmakers in writing letters to the two firms, expressing concerns about the data as Roe v. Wade faces being overturned by the Supreme Court. If Roe is struck down, over half of states are likely to ban abortion by automatic trigger laws or new legislation.

    “Especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, your company’s sale of such data — to virtually anyone with a credit card — poses serious dangers for all women seeking access to abortion services,” read the letter addressed to SafeGraph, using “women” as shorthand for abortion seekers, who also include trans and nonbinary people.

    The letter was signed by Democratic lawmakers such as Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Cory Booker (D-New Jersey).

    Earlier this month, Motherboard reported that data firm SafeGraph is selling information about the whereabouts of people who have visited abortion clinics such as Planned Parenthood, including their movement after the visit and how long they stay at the clinic. The publication also found that Placer.ai offered data for sale showing the approximate location of where Planned Parenthood clinic visitors live; it removed the listing for such data after reporters contacted the company for comment.

    Anti-abortion groups have been harassing, attacking and murdering abortion clinic employees, escorts and patients for years. With abortion rights under threat, clinics are prepared for more vicious attacks, especially as far right Republicans seek to place bounties on people involved in reproductive care.

    Such hate groups have already used location data in order to show patients anti-abortion messaging on their phones while they are sitting in Planned Parenthood clinics. Other data, like search engine history for abortion pills, can be tied to personal information like Google accounts. The data also provides access to information on a person’s finances and political views, and emails they send and receive. In a post-Roe world, even data from period tracker apps could be weaponized by anti-abortionists to prosecute someone whose data suggests they may have gotten an abortion.

    Access to the type of data offered by SafeGraph and Placer.ai only puts patients and providers at even more risk, the lawmakers said. “It is difficult to overstate the dangers of SafeGraph’s unsavory business practices,” they wrote.

    SafeGraph has defended its sales of the data, saying that it’s “anonymized,” but the lawmakers said that that defense demonstrates a misunderstanding of the root of the problem.

    “[A]s experts have repeatedly warned, it can be ‘trivially easy’ to link someone’s location data with their real-world identities, especially when datasets are limited to only ‘four or five’ devices in a location,” the lawmakers said. “SafeGraph’s sale of this data presents an ongoing threat to women who have sought abortions and who may seek them in the future.”

    The letters’ signatories asked the companies to provide details about the type of data that it sells about abortion clinic visitors and to pledge to stop selling such data altogether. The letters are part of Democrats’ attempts to protect abortion rights and abortion seekers ahead of the likely end of Roe.

    “Democrats need to use every tool possible to defend Americans’ right to an abortion and protect women’s health,” Warren said in a statement. “With an extremist Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe, I’m calling out data-broker companies for their disturbing practices of selling and transferring the personal information of women visiting abortion clinics, including their cell-phone location data.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 7 in 10 Young Voters Support Canceling Student Debt, Poll Finds

    New polling finds that a comfortable majority of young likely voters say that some or all student debt should be canceled, adding to a small mountain of polls conducted in recent months that nearly uniformly show that the issue is popular among Americans.

    The Student Borrower Protection Center/Data for Progress polling, released Wednesday, finds majority support for the issue among several groups. Overall, 71 percent of voters aged 18 to 34 support canceling some amount of student debt for all borrowers; even among those who have no student debt, 66 percent still favor cancellation, while a commanding 81 percent of those with debt agree.

    Debt cancellation is popular across the political spectrum, the poll finds. Among young voters, 56 percent of Republicans, 66 percent of independents and 84 percent of Democrats say that some or all student debt should be forgiven.

    Once considered a fringe idea, the poll also finds that a plurality of young Democratic voters (45 percent) and young voters with student debt (43 percent) say that all student loans should be canceled.

    President Joe Biden is in the midst of crafting a plan to cancel some amount of student loan debt as the burden of student debt repayment has skyrocketed over the past decades, threatening the health of the U.S. economy and especially weighing down low-income borrowers.

    Progressive lawmakers have urged Biden to cancel some, if not all, student debt for all borrowers, but his administration is reportedly considering a targeted plan that officials say would make the endeavor logistically difficult. Debt cancellation advocates and political analysts further say that placing income caps on debt cancellation would be politically unpopular, and that the program should be broad.

    “Younger voters put Joe Biden in the White House on the promise of broad relief from the crushing burden of student debt,” Student Borrower Protection Center Executive Director Mike Pierce said in a statement. “As the country recovers from a devastating pandemic and economic crisis, younger voters across the political spectrum are clear in their expectations for the Biden-Harris administration: building back better means canceling student debt for all borrowers.”

    The recent poll is just one of a slew of recent polls from different sources that have had similar findings: most Americans agree that the federal government should cancel some amount of student debt.

    A poll of people aged 18 to 29 by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics found in April that 59 percent of respondents support some form of debt forgiveness, while 27 percent said that the government should provide some form of repayment aid.

    Also last month, a Morning Consult/Politico poll found that 64 percent of respondents support the idea, following a December Morning Consult poll that had similar results. A February poll from Navigator Research found that 63 percent of respondents back debt forgiveness, with the strongest support coming from Black respondents at 87 percent; another poll from the same month found that 63 percent of likely voters support the idea. Polls from last year also show the idea’s favorability.

    Further, data shows that action on the issue could help drive young people to vote for Democrats this fall. About 59 percent of young voters in key battleground states like Georgia and Pennsylvania say they would favor voting for a Democrat over a Republican if Biden canceled some amount of student debt.

  • Progressives Say Abbott’s “Near Monopoly” Laid Groundwork for Baby Food Shortage

    In a push to urge President Joe Biden to take executive action to ease the nationwide baby food shortage, progressive lawmakers are saying that manufacturer Abbott Nutrition should face particular scrutiny for its role in causing the problem.

    Representatives Jamaal Bowman (D-New York), Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts), Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and Grace Meng (D-New York) sent a letter to Biden urging him to “do everything within your executive authority, across all federal agencies,” to ease the shortage. They say that the president can use the Defense Production Act and powers given to him through the COVID-19 emergency declaration to ease what the lawmakers deem a “crisis.”

    “What’s good for our babies is good for our nation, and we must utilize every tool to respond to this crisis expeditiously and comprehensively with the expectation of never allowing it to repeat,” they write. “No corner of the nation is exempt from the infant formula shortage. We write on behalf of our constituents who have shared heartbreaking experiences of driving multiple hours in hopes of finding a store with baby formula in stock, oftentimes only to be met with empty shelves or rising prices.”

    The lawmakers call out Abbott Nutrition, which accounts for about 20 percent of the infant formula market, for its role in the shortage. Abbott and three other manufacturers control nearly 90 percent of the U.S. market. In recent years, the company has also had several recalls on its formula because of contamination with harmful bacteria. Federal officials have linked two infant deaths and several hospitalizations to the contaminated formula, though Abbott denies the correlation.

    “The harm this corporate greed and industry oligopoly have caused cannot be overstated,” the letter says. “In the same month that health hazards were identified and ignored at Abbott Nutrition’s facility, their sales grew, despite pandemic woes. Abbott Nutrition’s near monopoly has made the American public all the more vulnerable to the harmful consequences of pandemic profiteering.”

    There may be weight behind the lawmakers’ assertions. Sen. Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) is launching an investigation into Abbott Laboratories’ tax rates and stock buybacks, saying that the company’s profit-seeking may have directly caused or exacerbated the shortage.

    The lawmakers conclude by saying that the industry should be examined by federal officials in order to identify problem areas and form a regulatory framework to prevent such a shortage from ever happening again. “In the wealthiest nation in the world, a formula shortage is a form of violence that should be absolutely inconceivable,” they say.

    The way that the baby food market is structured may also be to blame for the shortage. Since just a few manufacturers control so much of the market, recalls have an outsized effect on supply. The virtual monopolies’ grip on the market also helps to further concentrate their power, raising potential antitrust concerns, the American Prospect reports.

    Officials within the Biden administration also acknowledge Abbott’s role in the shortage. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has placed much of the blame on Abbott. “Fundamentally, we are here because a company was not able to guarantee that its plant was safe,” he said on CBS on Sunday, referring to an Abbott plant in Michigan that was shut down by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) earlier this year. “And that plant has shut down.”

    On Monday, the company reached an agreement with the FDA to reopen the plant in hopes of easing the shortage, under the condition that the company correct its previous sanitation issues. Still, it may be weeks or months before production from the reinstated plant has an effect on the supply of baby formula, and it likely will be longer still before supplies return to normal levels.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Progressive Charles Booker Wins Primary to Challenge Rand Paul in November

    Former Kentucky Rep. Charles Booker overwhelmingly won the state’s U.S. Senate Democratic primary on Tuesday, taking the progressive candidate one step closer to his goal of unseating far right Republican Sen. Rand Paul in November.

    With about 97 percent of votes counted as of Wednesday morning, Booker has won over 73 percent of the votes in the state, beating out the next most popular candidate, Joshua Blanton, by over 60 points. Booker, a Black racial justice activist, ran on a platform of connecting the “hood to the holler” – in other words, connecting the state’s urban and rural residents in unity.

    “The commonwealth of Kentucky has never had a Black person to be the top of the ticket, to be a major party nominee for U.S. Senate,” Booker said in his acceptance speech on Tuesday night. “If anybody tells you change is not possible, if anybody tells you that ceilings can’t break, tell them, ‘look at Kentucky.’”

    Paul won the Republican nomination by a landslide, with over 86 percent of votes on Wednesday morning.

    Polling has found that Paul has a strong chance of winning over Booker in the red state this fall; a Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy poll from earlier this year found that 55 percent of those polled said they’d vote for the incumbent, while 39 percent said they’d vote for Booker. A far right politician, COVID denier and supporter of Donald Trump’s attempted coup, Paul has been a U.S. senator since 2011, largely representing a capitalist libertarian viewpoint.

    Booker ran on a progressive platform, supporting proposals like Medicare for All and calling for a Green New Deal. He has said that Kentucky voters have been inspired by racial justice movements in recent years and that there are opportunities to unite Kentuckians, regardless of race or residence, behind common goals.

    Major unions and progressive organizations have endorsed Booker; when Booker ran to oust Sen. Mitch McConnell in 2020, he gathered endorsements from popular progressive lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York).

    Democrats have historically had a hard time winning against Republicans in Kentucky. The last time the state had a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate was in 1999, over 20 years ago.

    In 2020, Amy McGrath – an establishment-backed Democrat who spent millions to defeat Booker in the primary – roundly lost to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has been in office since 1985. McConnell won by nearly 20 points, despite the nearly $91 million spent on the race by McGrath’s campaign.

    At the time, political reporters and progressives said that Booker could have won against McConnell, had the Democratic party establishment not lined up behind McGrath, who the Louisville Courier-Journal editorial board called “unimaginative and uninspiring” in their endorsement of Booker. Considering that Booker lost by only about 3 points to McGrath in that election despite having been outraised 50-to-1 in campaign funds was a show of the progressive appetite among Kentucky voters, analysts said.

    This time around, as of the end of April, Paul has over $8 million on hand going into the general election campaign, while Booker has only around $470,000, according to OpenSecrets. The race will be closely watched. While Booker faces long odds, a triumph over Paul would be a huge win for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Officials Raise Concern Over Biden’s Plan to Limit Student Loan Cancellation

    As the Biden administration crafts a plan to cancel some amount of student debt, administration officials are reportedly raising concerns that adding income caps to the plan could be incredibly logistically complicated, risking the efficacy of the entire plan.

    As Politico reports, officials in President Joe Biden’s Education Department are saying in private conversations that it would be extremely difficult for the agency to implement the administration’s tentative plan to limit student loan forgiveness by income. The agency simply doesn’t have income information for the vast majority of student loan borrowers, sources told Politico.

    If the Biden administration were to place some form of means testing on the plan, the Education Department would be forced to require borrowers to provide proof of their income in some kind of application process. The added step could make it hard to implement the program before the November midterm elections, if it could be done in that timeline at all.

    An Education Department spokesperson said that the agency is assessing options for “broad debt cancellation.” The White House has yet to finalize its plan.

    Earlier this month, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that Biden is considering limiting debt cancellation to borrowers making less than $125,000 a year. The cap is meant to preempt arguments from conservatives that only the wealthy would benefit from student loan forgiveness, even though those arguments have already been debunked; earlier this month, a report found that student loan forgiveness would be progressive, meaning that the poorest borrowers would benefit the most.

    News of the income cap sparked frustration among progressives and debt advocates, who have been warning about this exact scenario; they say that applying means testing to the debt forgiveness would not only be unpopular among borrowers, but would also place unnecessary hurdles to the program that could limit access for those who need it most. Advocates for debt forgiveness were already frustrated that Biden will likely only cancel a small portion of the roughly $1.9 trillion in student loans owed by borrowers.

    “The simplest way to implement student debt cancellation is to make it fully automatic and universal,” Braxton Brewington, Debt Collective spokesperson, said in a statement. “Forcing millions to apply for their rightfully owed cancellation will exclude the exact borrowers a targeted approach claims to help. If Biden needs reminding that burying borrowers and the Education Department in paperwork is wildly ineffective, he can look no further than the 99 percent denial rate of current programs like Public Service Loan Forgiveness,” or the PSLF program.

    Indeed, the PSLF program is supposed to allow public service workers like teachers to apply for student loan forgiveness after a decade on the job. But the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in 2019 that the program is completely burdened by its eligibility requirements, leading it to reject nearly every application it receives. Melissa Emrey-Arras, who led work on the GAO report, called it a “bureaucratic nightmare.”

    If broader student loan cancellation were implemented in a similar way, it could backfire on the Democratic Party, which is eager to win over voters before the midterms. The majority of Americans support some form of student loan forgiveness, and polls have found that student loan forgiveness could help drive people who are likely to vote Democrat to the polls in the fall. A means tested program, meanwhile, could make the idea less popular.

    “The landmines on this are everywhere,” Bryce McKibben, former policy adviser to Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee member Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), told Politico. “Their options are: an income cap and political train wreck — or no income cap and broader, automatic-based relief for everyone. There’s not a lot in between.”

    Progressive Representatives Mondaire Jones (D-New York) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) also told the publication that the cancellation should be broad and “reach as many people as possible,” as Pressley said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Manchin and Sinema “Sabotaged” Their Own Party’s Agenda, Sanders Says

    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) called out conservative Democrats Senators Joe Manchin (West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona) for “sabotag[ing]” their own party’s agenda last year.

    “It should not be a head scratcher. You’ve got two members of the Senate, Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema, who have sabotaged what the president has been fighting for,” Sanders said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

    Sanders was the driving force behind Democrats’ infrastructure and social spending bill last year, which was originally proposed by President Joe Biden and crafted as part of his “Build Back Better” agenda.

    Originally pitched at $6 trillion by Sanders, the bill was negotiated down to $3.5 trillion and, later, $1.75 trillion — Manchin’s benchmark for the cost of the bill. Then, after Manchin and Sinema forced the White House to capitulate to nearly all of their demands for the bill, including carving climate provisions out of the proposal, Manchin killed it altogether after wasting months on negotiations.

    Manchin later suggested that he never planned on negotiating in good faith with fellow Democrats on the bill, who he said were “way far apart” from him on popular issues like lowering drug prices. Sinema, who famously dodges talking to the media and her constituents, provided few details on her opposition to the bill.

    “You’ve got 48 members of the Senate who wanted to go forward with an agenda that helped working families, that was prepared to take on the wealthy and the powerful. You had a president who wanted to do that. You’ve got two people who prevented us from doing that,” Sanders said. “You have a better word than ‘sabotage’? That’s fine, but I think that’s the right word.”

    The Vermont senator said that Sinema and Manchin’s constituents deserve an explanation for why the two conservatives “don’t have the guts” to take on the pharmaceutical, insurance or fossil fuel industries. Earlier this year, Sanders said that the Senate should break up the proposal and vote on it in pieces in order to get a public record of senators’ positions on every one of the bill’s issues.

    “We have got to have the guts to go forward with an agenda that shows the American people what we’re trying to do,” Sanders concluded. “You’re going to have no Republicans supporting us — let the American people see the difference between those who are fighting for working families and those who are not.”

    During the interview, the senator also called for the filibuster to be abolished so that abortion rights protections can be passed. “I mean, people cannot believe that you have a Supreme Court and Republicans who are prepared to overturn 50 years of precedent,” he said. “So I think what we should do is on this bill: end the filibuster, do everything that we can to get 50 votes on the strongest possible bill” to protect abortion access.

    Last week, the Senate failed to pass a bill that would federally protect abortion access if the Supreme Court follows through on overturning Roe v. Wade. Manchin joined all 50 Republicans in voting against the bill, leading Sanders to question whether the West Virginia lawmaker is a Democrat at all.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trader Joe’s Workers Announce New Union Effort in Letter to CEO

    Trader Joe’s workers in Massachusetts are forming their own union in order to combat what they describe as a toxic work culture cultivated by the supposedly progressive company.

    Workers at a Trader Joe’s location in Hadley, Massachusetts, sent a letter to CEO Dan Bane on Saturday announcing their intent to unionize and calling on the company to refrain from interfering with the union drive. They say that, despite the company’s image as an employee-friendly workplace, workers have been facing deteriorating working conditions and decreasing benefits over the past years.

    “Two years ago, in March of 2020, you mailed a letter to our homes. In this letter, you argued against unionization, asserting that unions were attempting to “drive discontent,” the workers wrote. “Since that letter arrived in our mailboxes, Trader Joe’s has continued to slash our benefits as our wages stagnate and our safety concerns go unaddressed. We’ve come to the conclusion that, in fact, a union is the only way to protect and improve our pay and benefits.”

    The workers say that they’re organizing “[Amazon Labor Union] style,” meaning that they’re aiming to form their own independent union without support from a major labor group to take on the multi-billion dollar company. Labor experts say that the independence of Amazon Labor Union may have been crucial to its success in unionizing an Amazon warehouse in New York.

    In interviews with More Perfect Union, the workers described a work culture that has increasingly treated workers as disposable.

    “The customers really, really have this idea that Trader Joe’s is this amazing place to work and they take such good care of us because that used to be true,” Sarah Yosef, who has worked for Trader Joe’s for over 18 years, told More Perfect Union. “I think everything that we’re asking for is what Trader Joe’s is pretending to give us.”

    Indeed, Trader Joe’s has projected an image of itself as a liberal company that treats its workers well. But workers say that this image is just a front. After employee Maeg Yosef came back from pandemic leave, “it felt like they weren’t even pretending to care anymore,” they told More Perfect Union.

    One Massachusetts worker, Woody Hoagland, said that he had his health care benefits slashed when he got cancer. “Survived cancer in 2019 and part of that journey was having to fight for my health care from the company,” Hoagland said. “I know that they didn’t want to see me dead from cancer, but they also didn’t want to pay any more than they had to. And as soon as they were able to remove me from their health insurance they did.”

    Workers say that they’re aiming to form a more inclusive workplace in which they feel like they have a say in safety concerns and wages.

    If they are successful, they would become the first unionized Trader Joe’s in the U.S. But they aren’t the first Trader Joe’s workers to try to unionize. As the pandemic arose in 2020, a group of workers known as the Trader Joe’s Union Coalition circulated a petition asking the company to continue its hazard pay policy after it cut its nationwide hazard pay after just a few months.

    The workers aimed to unionize their stores, but the company came down hard on the union drive. In March of last year, Bane sent a letter to all employees saying that unionization is “a distraction.” The company also hired anti-union lawyers from notorious union-busting firm Littler Mendelson in order to quash the union effort.

    After the company settled one unfair labor practice charge and fired several workers over 2020 and 2021, the union drives appeared to have fizzled out; the last time that the Trader Joe’s Union Coalition tweeted was in July of last year.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Activists Have Gathered Enough Signatures to Put $18 Wage on California Ballot

    California voters will likely soon get a chance to vote on raising the state’s minimum wage to $18 an hour, as proponents of the proposal have gathered enough signatures for the measure to appear on the ballot this November.

    On Thursday, the Living Wage Act announced that the group has begun submitting the signatures it’s gathered in support of the initiative to the California Secretary of State. The initiative has gathered over 1 million signatures, far past the roughly 620,000 signatures needed to qualify to appear on the ballot. The group behind the Living Wage Act says that labor unions and advocates played a huge role in helping gather signatures for the initiative.

    Currently, the state minimum wage for employers with 26 employees or more is $15 an hour, and $14 an hour for employers with 25 employees or fewer. The state is set to raise the minimum wage for all employers to $15.50 in January of 2023.

    If approved by voters, the new ballot initiative would continue increasing the minimum wage incrementally from there, until it reaches $18 an hour statewide in 2026.

    California has one of the highest state minimum wages in the country, rivaled only by Massachusetts, Washington and Washington, D.C. However, advocates say that $15 an hour is not enough to live off of in the state.

    “California voters have been clear: people working full time should be able to afford life’s basic needs,” said Joe Sanberg, an investor and anti-poverty advocate who is sponsoring the initiative, in a statement. “Californians simply cannot afford to support a family on the current minimum wage — which amounts to just $31,200 a year for someone working full-time. Raising the minimum wage in the Golden State is a moral imperative.”

    When the initiative started in December, a living wage for a single adult with no children in California was $18.66 an hour. But now, with inflation skyrocketing, even $18 an hour may not be enough for workers in the state. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator, a living wage for an adult with no children in California is now estimated to be $21.82 an hour. That number skyrockets if the worker has children.

    An $18 minimum wage is still an ambitious goal. Legislators in Hawaii have passed a $18 minimum wage measure, but few other states have set their minimum wage above $15. Further, 15 states don’t even have a state minimum wage higher than $7.25 an hour, which has been the federal minimum wage since 2009.

    Polls show that the appetite in some states for a higher minimum wage is strong, however. According to polling from Tulchin Research, 76 percent of Californians likely to vote in November’s general election say that they support raising the minimum wage. Other recent polling by Data for Progress finds that a majority of likely New York voters support raising the minimum wage to at least $20 an hour, with a third of respondents saying that they think it should be at least $25.

    If the initiative in California passes, it could be a signal that voters are ready to change the goalposts on the initiative for a $15 federal minimum wage. Workers have been waging the Fight for $15 for a decade now; with inflation, what was $15 then would only be worth $11.94 now. Economists say that a $15 federal minimum wage would still be a huge boon to many hourly workers — but, if the minimum wage had risen with productivity, it would actually be $31.67 an hour today.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “Pro-Life” Republicans Complain Biden Isn’t Starving Babies at the Border

    In a layered display of cruelty, Republican lawmakers and conservative talking heads are complaining that the Biden administration appears to have sent baby formula to the southern border in order to ensure that children who are being imprisoned in detention centers by the U.S. government are able to eat.

    Using the current baby formula shortage as a political bludgeon, prominent Republican lawmakers are saying that it’s “reckless” for the administration to be providing formula for asylum seekers and migrant children, claiming that President Joe Biden is putting “America last” by choosing not to withhold formula from babies at the border — language that echoes the rhetoric of former President Donald Trump.

    Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Florida) was the first to allege that the border had baby formula in stock, tweeting that a border patrol agent sent her a photo of a shelf of baby food between two shelves of snacks for older children. She also tweeted a photo that supposedly depicts a store near her home with baby food stocked on otherwise empty shelves. There is currently no proof that the photo of the baby formula was actually taken at a border facility.

    “The first photo is from this morning at the Ursula Processing Center at the U.S. border. Shelves and pallets packed with baby formula,” Cammack wrote. “The second is from a shelf right here at home. Formula is scarce. This is what America last looks like.”

    Soon after, several Republicans began tweeting and speaking out about the issue, essentially implying that Biden shouldn’t give border facilities baby formula and that he should instead allow babies at the border to starve. Babies at the border already face inhumane conditions and are sometimes separated from their parents; others are under the care of parents who have undergone traumatic conditions that have stopped their bodies from producing breast milk.

    These same Republicans claim to be “pro-life” in their crusade to end abortion and to criminalize people who get abortions, including those who are at risk of dying due to pregnancy.

    In a press conference on Thursday, Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Florida) blamed Biden for the baby formula shortage while also perpetuating racist stigma about drug use. “In Joe Biden’s America, it seems like it’s easier to get a crack pipe in a government funded smoking kit than it is to find baby formula,” he said.

    Waltz’s statement references a long-debunked claim that the Biden administration has been giving out drug paraphernalia for free — which is false, although harm reduction groups do give out drugs and drug-related items in order to help drug users access these items in a safe environment that could help lead them to services like medical and addiction treatment.

    Meanwhile, in a joint statement with National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said, “While mothers and fathers stare at empty grocery store shelves in a panic, the Biden Administration is happy to provide baby formula to illegal immigrants coming across our southern border.” Lawmakers like Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) also joined in on the racism and xenophobia.

    “Rather than having the state of Texas help mothers, Governor Abbot [sic] apparently thinks Biden should starve babies locked in Border Patrol detention centers,” wrote senior policy counsel for the American Immigration Council Aaron Reichlin-Melnick on Thursday. “And to be clear, the amount of baby formula used at the border is infinitesimal compared to the national demand.”

    Indeed, the photo that launched the deluge of conservative complaints appears to show that border officials supposedly have at least 2,016 units of baby formula. But previous similar recalls of baby formula have affected millions of units, while manufacturers rake in billions of dollars from the U.S. infant formula market each year.

    A report from last month found that about 43 percent of formulas are currently out of stock across the country as a result of recalls and supply chain problems. A Trump-era trade agreement currently limits imports of baby food from Canada, one of the U.S.’s most prominent trading partners. Republicans are on the attack about the issue, saying that the Biden administration should have had a plan to address the shortage.

    The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is planning to announce increases in imports from other countries in order to address the issue, and the White House is in talks with manufacturers and grocers about increasing access to formula. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has said that the administration is exploring all options to increase production, including invoking the Defense Production Act.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Introduces Medicare for All as Solution to “Dysfunctional” Health System

    For the first time since 2019, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) reintroduced his proposal to establish Medicare for All in the U.S., the only wealthy country in the world without universal health care.

    Sanders introduced the legislation with 14 cosponsors on Thursday “to guarantee health care in the United States as a fundamental human right to all,” according to his press release. The Medicare for All Act of 2022 would establish a universal health care system over the next four years, gradually broadening the existing Medicare system until all medical benefit areas and all members of the public are covered.

    Under the proposal, any member of the public can access whichever health care provider or health facility they want, without worrying about whether or not their care is covered. It would also allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices to lower costs for the government and individuals.

    The bill’s introduction came as the Senate Budget Committee, of which Sanders is the chair, held a hearing on the subject on Thursday. The aim of the hearing, entitled “Medicare for All: Protecting Health, Saving Lives, Saving Money,” is to examine the benefits of Medicare for All both for public health and for the economy – and the benefits, Sanders says, would be vast.

    Medicare for All has been kicked around as a concept in the U.S. since as early as the 1960s, when Medicare was originally established. Though lawmakers and activists have advocated for it for decades, Sanders brought the concept into the mainstream during his 2016 presidential run. In the years since, it has become a rallying cry for progressive activists and lawmakers.

    In his opening statement on Thursday, Sanders emphasized that he believes the debate over Medicare for All isn’t really about the merits or demerits of the system, but rather a struggle between the wants and needs of the American people versus the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

    “Let’s be clear about something – and this is maybe the most important point that I want to make – the current debate that we’re having on health care and Medicare for all really has nothing to do with health care. Because, in my view, this dysfunctional health care system cannot be rationally defended,” he said.

    “What this debate has everything to do with is the unquestionable greed of the health care industry and their desire to maintain a system which fails the average American but which makes the industry huge profits year after year after year,” he continued.

    Ultimately, since the health care industry operates as a for-profit enterprise, it will always put profits before the health of its customers, Sanders emphasized. He pointed out that, while millions of Americans lost health insurance or struggled to pay for needed medications or visits during the pandemic, insurers raked in hundreds of billions of dollars. Meanwhile, compensation for executives at insurance companies shot up 31 percent between 2019 and 2020.

    “The debate we’re having is whether we have a health care system which provides quality care to all in a cost effective way, or whether we have a system which makes the drug companies and insurance companies and their executives very, very wealthy,” he said.

    Sanders pointed out that corporations’ lobbying campaign against Medicare for All echoes the original lobbying campaign against Medicare, one of the most popular federal programs in the U.S. Health care lobbyists have spent billions of dollars over the past decades on ads and campaign contributions, in part to fight Medicare for All. Similarly to attacks on Medicare before it was established, Medicare for All has also been attacked by fear mongering right-wingers as “socialist.”

    Americans spend trillions of dollars per year on health care, yet experience worse health outcomes than people in countries with universal health care, while insurers and lobbyists take that money and spend it on lobbying to keep the system the way it is, the lawmaker said.

    Though Medicare for All would be expensive to implement, the conservative Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has found that it would save Americans billions of dollars each year, making it less expensive than the current system – with the added benefit that Americans would no longer have to deal with piles of bills and the tedious bureaucracy of private insurers.

    “This is an issue not just of health care. This is an issue about what kind of nation we are,” Sanders said. “It’s an issue of whether we’re going to turn our backs on 60,000 people a year who die because they cannot get the health care that they need, turn our backs on the fact that we live shorter than some people in other countries, turn our backs [on the fact] that we are spending twice as much per capita as the people in other nations.”

    “This is an issue that has to be dealt with. Medicare for All will become the law of the land – if not now, then in the future,” Sanders concluded. “Because this is what the American people want.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Asks Why Manchin’s a Democrat After His “No” Vote on Abortion Bill

    After every Republican in the Senate and conservative Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin (West Virginia) voted against a bill to guarantee abortion access in the U.S. on Wednesday night, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) questioned why Manchin caucuses with Democrats at all.

    Though the bill didn’t have a chance of passing without filibuster abolition or reform, Senate leaders hoped to get lawmakers’ votes opposing abortion access on the public record. All 49 other Democrats in the Senate voted for the bill, which would have allowed health care providers to conduct abortions “prior to fetal viability” or if the parent’s or fetus’s health is at risk. It would also explicitly ban states from prohibiting access to such services, with the goal of essentially codifying Roe v. Wade into law.

    In a tweet clearly aimed at Manchin, Sanders wrote: “If you can’t stand up for a woman’s right to choose, for voting rights, for an economy that works for all, why are you caucusing with the Senate Democrats? We need a Democratic Majority where all members believe in economic, racial, social and environmental justice.”

    Manchin announced his opposition to the bill ahead of the vote on Wednesday afternoon, claiming that he wouldn’t vote for it because “it expands abortion,” he told reporters. His statements echo that of Senate Republicans, who say that they oppose the bill because it overrules state laws and doesn’t carve out exceptions for Catholic hospitals to refuse to provide abortions.

    Moderate Republicans and Manchin claim that they’re generally opposed to abortion bans – yet their opposition to the scope of the bill shows that they want at least some restrictions to remain. Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) have introduced a competing bill that they say would only codify Roe – but the law has a loophole that would still allow restrictions on abortions, like the Mississippi law barring abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, or about eight weeks earlier than the time frame protected under Roe.

    With the Supreme Court ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade in the works, the bill’s passage is more urgent than ever to protect families and save countless lives by guaranteeing abortion access at the federal level. Many Democratic lawmakers swiftly jumped to action after the Supreme Court draft opinion was leaked last week, joining pro-abortion protesters and warning that overturning Roe would be a major step on the far right’s path to restricting a variety of other rights.

    The exceptions were Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona). Shortly after the leaked draft opinion became public, Manchin and Sinema announced that they would not support efforts to reform or abolish the filibuster in order to protect abortion rights – essentially making it impossible to codify the abortion protections in Roe. Manchin has previously described himself as “pro-life.”

    With Manchin’s relentless obstruction of nearly every Democratic priority over the course of Joe Biden’s presidency, many political commentators and frustrated Democratic lawmakers have questioned why the conservative even considers himself a part of the Democratic party.

    According to a recently released excerpt from an upcoming book, This Will Not Pass, Manchin has joked around with Republican colleagues that he should change parties. He has repeatedly insisted that he is a Democrat, but his opposition to virtually every Democratic proposal and the major financial support he receives from right-wing sources have caused his allegiances to frequently be called into question.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Amazon’s “Inadequate” Safety Rules Put Thousands at Risk, AOC and Warren Say

    Investigations into Amazon’s safety procedures surrounding the tornado that caused the deaths of six workers in a warehouse in Illinois last year have demonstrated that the company’s safety rules are “wholly inadequate,” Democratic lawmakers say.

    On Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Cori Bush (D-Missouri) sent a letter to Amazon’s chairman Jeff Bezos and CEO Andy Jassy criticizing the company for doing the “bare minimum” to protect its workers from danger.

    The letter comes after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) found in an investigation, released late last month, that the company’s safety protocols met minimum legal requirements but were still lacking in several key areas that could have helped the employees be more prepared in the event of a natural disaster.

    “Although Amazon told us in its January 3, 2022 response that ‘safety is our top priority,’ the OSHA findings revealed glaring gaps in Amazon’s safety procedures, including flawed safety training, inadequate emergency procedures, and the inability of Amazon managers to follow the procedures that were in place,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter.

    The lawmakers further went on to say that the company needs to update its safety protocols to better protect its nearly 1 million warehouse workers across the country. “These findings reveal a wholly inadequate safety culture at Amazon, which potentially contributed to the death of six workers and, if not addressed, will continue to put thousands more workers across the country at risk.”

    Wednesday’s letter follows up on a note that Amazon sent in January in response to the lawmakers’ first letter to the company, shortly after six workers were killed when a tornado caused an Amazon warehouse to collapse in Edwardsville, Illinois. Workers said that the company’s policy disallowing workers from having their phones at work and the company’s lack of comprehensive disaster safety training may have contributed to the deaths.

    In the company’s response to the lawmakers, Amazon Vice President of Public Policy Brian Huseman provided some details about the warehouse and boasted that the company spent $300 million on safety matters in 2021. Huseman also said that the company was conducting an internal investigation into the incident.

    But while Amazon has promised to become “Earth’s Safest Place to Work,” reports have found that its warehouses are actually uniquely dangerous places to work in. Last month, a report by the Strategic Organizing Center found that the company’s injury rate increased between 2020 and 2021 and that nearly half of the workplace injuries in the entire U.S. warehouse sector last year happened at Amazon facilities. Amazon employs only about a third of warehouse workers in the country.

    According to the lawmakers’ latest letter, Amazon’s response appeared to have stretched the truth on how managers responded to the tornado. While Amazon claimed that managers “immediately implemented the facility’s emergency action plan for a tornado” when the warning was received, the lawmakers note that OSHA’s findings contradict that account of events.

    OSHA found that managers couldn’t implement the plan because the megaphone meant to be used for an emergency was “locked in a cage and not accessible.” Managers instead had to communicate verbally with employees, leading to a “chaotic emergency situation.”

    “The OSHA inspection and your response to our letter indicate that Amazon will do only the bare minimum – and sometimes less than that – to keep its workers safe,” Warren, Ocasio-Cortez and Bush wrote. They urge the company to comply with a House Committee on Oversight and Reform request for documents in its investigation into the company’s safety practices.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Warren Unveils New Bill Binding Supreme Court Judges to Ethics Code

    As public trust in the Supreme Court rapidly erodes, Democrats in Congress are working to tighten ethics laws around federal courts and increase transparency in order to combat corruption and increase accountability in the U.S. court system.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) introduced a bill on Tuesday that would ban federal judges from trading individual stocks to avoid conflicts of interest and tighten restrictions on gifts they can receive and privately funded events they can attend.

    The Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act contains several provisions aimed specifically at the Supreme Court. It would create a binding requirement for judges in the Supreme Court to adhere to the court’s Code of Conduct. The Supreme Court is the only court in the country that isn’t bound by the ethics guidelines, and court watchdogs say that all nine judges are culpable of some kind of oversight.

    “At a time when public trust in the Supreme Court has collapsed to historic lows, it’s critical that we enact legislation to reform this broken system,” Warren said in a statement. “From banning federal judges from owning individual stocks to overhauling the broken judicial recusal process, my bill would help root out corruption and restore public trust in the federal judiciary – something that Chief Justice [John] Roberts has simply failed to do.”

    Under the bill, Supreme Court judges would have to issue a written recusal decision when a litigant requests recusal, and the Judicial Conference, which oversees federal courts, would have to issue advisory opinions on recusal. These provisions could work to ensure that judges on the High Court are held to higher account when they don’t recuse themselves from cases in which they may hold personal biases or conflicts of interest.

    This provision is especially relevant in current applications toward Judge Clarence Thomas, who has been under increased scrutiny due to his wife’s role in the far right’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Warren and Jayapal have previously requested that Thomas be recused from cases relating to the January 6 attempted coup or cases otherwise relating to that election.

    Six senators and 13 House representatives have cosponsored the legislation, which lawmakers say is overdue and could be crucial in eliminating ethics concerns and boosting public confidence in the court system.

    The bill would also improve disclosure requirements regarding case assignments and bar courts from sealing case records relating to public health or safety.

    “The American people have lost faith in the federal judiciary,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), in a statement. CREW is among a host of progressive and watchdog organizations that have endorsed the legislation. “The Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act goes a long way to fixing that, taking immediate steps to end financial conflicts of interest and overhauling the Supreme Court’s broken judicial recusal regime. Democracy simply does not work when a judicial system is viewed with suspicion. It is past time for Congress to act to rebuild trust in our judicial system and make clear that judges are not above the law.”

    Warren and Jayapal’s proposal comes at a time in which public trust in the Supreme Court is falling. Last year, the Supreme Court’s public approval rating sank below 50 percent, according to Gallup polling. This trust has been especially eroded in recent months – a new poll released Tuesday by Yahoo News/YouGov finds that 53 percent of Americans have little to no confidence in the Supreme Court. This stands in sharp contrast to a September 2020 poll, taken just after Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, in which only 30 percent of voters said they didn’t have much trust in the court.

    In the intervening time between the 2020 poll and the most recent poll, Republicans gained a supermajority in the Supreme Court. Since then, they have taken increasingly radical steps, including potentially overturning Roe v. Wade, as a leaked draft opinion from the Court appears to suggest that the conservative judges are poised to do.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Labor Board: Starbucks Must Reinstate 7 Workers the Company Fired in Memphis

    In a potential major win for unionizing workers, Starbucks may soon face legal consequences for the high-profile termination of seven employees in Memphis, Tennessee, who were in the midst of unionizing their store.

    On Tuesday, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed an injunction in federal court against the company arguing that it must face consequences for firing the employees, dubbed the Memphis Seven by the union, in retaliation for their union activity. Five of the terminated workers made up nearly the entirety of the organizing committee at the store.

    The petition, filed by the NLRB’s New Orleans Regional Director Kathleen McKinney, says that prior to being fired, the workers faced a variety of unlawful anti-union actions from the company, including coercion, surveillance and unequal treatment of known pro-union employees. The company had disciplined the employee who first started the union campaign at the store and took steps to prevent customers from voicing their support for the union campaign.

    McKinney asked the court to order Starbucks to reinstate the workers and immediately cease other unfair labor practices that it’s carrying out in the store.

    “Given Starbucks’ egregious conduct interfering with the federally protected rights of its employees, we are asking the Court to swiftly grant the injunction,” McKinney said. “Without immediate interim relief from this Court, Starbucks could irreparably harm the campaign in Memphis, and send a chilling message to its employees across the country that they too will suffer the same fate as the terminated Memphis employees if they dare to exercise their right to engage in protected activities.”

    The Memphis Seven were among the first employees that the company fired in its union busting drive. At the time, in February, the union called the move the “most blatant act of union-busting yet,” and said that the company was frivolously citing supposed internal policies in their reasons for firing the employees. Since then, the company has fired many more pro-union employees.

    It is illegal for employers to retaliate against employees for organizing a union, which the NLRB has found that Starbucks has done dozens of times in its anti-union campaign that spans across the country. Starbucks has denied the labor board’s allegations that the firings crossed legal boundaries.

    This is the second injunction that the labor board has filed against Starbucks. Last month, the NLRB petitioned to have three fired pro-union workers in Phoenix, Arizona, to be reinstated and their internal records expunged. If the judge grants that injunction, the company will also have to have a high-level executive read the court order in front of employees with a member of the labor board present, or have a labor board official read it before employees in the presence of a company executive.

    On the same day that the latest injunction was filed, 14 Senate Democrats and progressives sent a letter to CEO Howard Schultz asking him to immediately cease union-busting efforts and voluntarily recognize stores that have filed for union elections. So far, workers have filed over 250 union petitions to join Starbucks Workers United, which has successfully unionized over 60 stores so far.

    The lawmakers, led by Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), asked Schultz to begin pursuing a nationwide plan to allow Starbucks workers to seek union representation. “[W]e are deeply troubled by reports that, on the heels of the stock buyback announcement, Starbucks has taken steps to undermine nation-wide, worker-led union campaigns,” the letter reads. The letter was signed by Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), among others.

    “[B]y offering to increase benefits for your workers, Starbucks is doing what the union campaigns have said all along: Starbucks can and should provide better working conditions and benefits for its workers,” the letter writers continue, referring to a recent announcement that the company is only raising wages for stores that aren’t unionizing or already unionized. “It is unfortunate that Starbucks has chosen to do this now seemingly to interfere with the union campaigns, since such action would constitute impermissible interference in a union organizing drive.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In Historic Vote, Congressional Staffers Win Right to Unionize

    The House voted on Tuesday night to allow its staffers to form unions, a major win for congressional staffers who have been organizing for over a year in order to gain power over what they say are often abusive working conditions.

    The resolution, introduced by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), passed along with a slate of other measures in a party line vote of 217 to 202. Since the resolution doesn’t need the approval of the Senate to go into effect, House staffers will now be allowed to file petitions to form unions on an office-by-office basis.

    The Congressional Workers Union celebrated the win as “a historic moment.” “Tonight is a reminder of the power of collective action and what the freedom to form a union truly means – democracy not just in our elections, but in our workplaces too,” the union said in a statement. “To our fellow congressional workers: today belongs to us. Tomorrow, we continue the fight – solidarity forever and onwards!”

    Congressional staffers wishing to unionize can now go through a similar process to that of unionizing workers across the country, with legal protections against retaliation that they didn’t have before. Thirty percent of staffers in an office can file a petition for a union election with the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights in order to go through an election.

    The union will allow the workers to negotiate provisions like promotions and working conditions – but workers are limited by congressional rules in their ability to negotiate things like health care and retirement benefits. Staffers, especially those who are nonwhite, say that they face long hours and abusive bosses in Congress with no accountability while having little to no opportunity for recourse.

    Crucially, workers will also be able to negotiate wages, which staffers hope will help to combat “brain drain” from Congress and open the door for people from poor and nonwhite backgrounds to be able to take jobs in Congress. There are still limits on wage raises, however, as members of congress get a certain allowance for their office each year – an allowance that members have said before is inadequate to pay their workers better wages.

    Last week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) announced that the House would, for the first time, establish a minimum pay rate for congressional staffers. While the new minimum annual pay of $45,000 will likely be a raise for many workers, it is certainly not a living wage for a single adult without children in Washington, D.C. according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology living wage calculator.

    In a speech on the House floor ahead of the vote, Levin emphasized that passing his resolution would help congressional workers to access the same protections under labor laws as other workers across the country. “The power of workers to unite and demand fair wages, better benefits and safer working conditions was central to the creation of the American middle class, and it’s central right now for working families simply trying to get by,” Levin said in a speech on the House floor ahead of the vote.

    “For months now, our workers have been organizing in the shadows because they lack the legal protections to come forward,” he continued. “The least we can do is honor and respect their effort to organize in Congress, giving them the long overdue right to find their collective voice.”

    While Republicans didn’t speak against the measure on the House floor, not a single GOP member voted to pass it. Daniel Schuman, policy director for Demand Progress, argues that Republicans have still been waging anti-worker campaigns, however, by delegitimizing government work in part to keep staffer salaries low, the New York Times reports.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “Health Care Is a Human Right”: Sanders Schedules Hearing on Medicare for All

    The Senate Budget Committee will hold a hearing on Thursday to examine the economic and social benefits of implementing Medicare for All to combat the current health care crisis, Chairman Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) announced on Monday.

    The COVID pandemic, which has claimed over 1 million lives in the U.S. so far, has highlighted the inequities in the U.S. health care system — which were already vast before the pandemic, Sanders wrote in a press release. The senator’s plea, which he has been making for years, is a familiar one: now, more than ever, the U.S. must catch up to every other wealthy country in the world and implement universal health care.

    “Estimates show that nearly 27 million Americans and their families lost their health care coverage when they lost their jobs due to COVID-19,” Sanders said in a tweet on Tuesday. “Let me be clear: health care is a human right, not a job benefit. Yes. It’s time for Medicare for All.”

    The hearing, entitled “Medicare for All: Protecting Health, Saving Lives, Saving Money,” will feature testimony from health and policy experts, as well as testimony from the director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which has previously analyzed how a single-payer health care system would impact the U.S. budget.

    As Sanders pointed out, the U.S. spends twice as much per capita on health care as the average wealthy country, but has the lowest life expectancy and fewer physician visits than in most other wealthy countries, according to The Commonwealth Fund. Over a quarter of the entire U.S. adult population is not insured or is underinsured because of the country’s highly exclusive private health care system; as a result, tens of thousands of Americans die each year because they either put off or don’t seek medical care when they need it, the press release says.

    These inequities have been made starker by the pandemic. As tens of millions of families lost health insurance due to pandemic-related layoffs, unequal access to health insurance created large disparities in health outcomes between people who are insured and people who are uninsured.

    Implementing Medicare for All would be immensely beneficial for health outcomes and equity in the U.S., the press release goes on — and it would also come with economic benefits.

    “[E]stimates show that Medicare for All could save 68,000 lives per year, and numerous studies find that Medicare for All saves the American people and the U.S. health care system billions of dollars a year,” the press release says.

    “According to the Congressional Budget Office, Medicare for All would save $650 billion each year, improve the economy, and eliminate all out-of-pocket health care costs,” the press release continues. “Even a study done by the right-wing Mercatus Center estimated that Medicare for All would save more than $2 trillion over a decade.”

    In March, Sanders vowed that he would soon reintroduce his Medicare for All bill, which he has reintroduced several times over the past decade or so.

    Lawmakers in the House have also been advocating for the proposal, and progressive representatives held the first pandemic-era hearing on the topic in March. Earlier this year, Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s (D-Washington) version of the bill gained a record 121 cosponsors in the House — far short of the roughly 218 votes needed to pass the House, but a sign that the idea is gaining momentum among the Democratic caucus.

    The measure is popular among the public. According to a poll from Morning Consult/Politico last year, 55 percent of Americans support Medicare for All, while only 32 percent oppose it; a poll in 2020 by The Hill/HarrisX found that 69 percent of voters support Medicare for All.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Congressional Staff Say “Cruel Ironies” of Their Jobs Make the Case for Unions

    Congressional staffers are in dire need of unionization to combat long hours, low pay and abusive working conditions, members of the Congressional Workers Union recently argued in a new op-ed.

    While congressional staffers work to secure better working conditions for the public, they face the same conditions they’re seeking to end, two Democratic staffers argued in an op-ed for The New Republic. On behalf of the 12-person organizing committee, which has been organizing for over a year, the staffers urged Congress to pass Rep. Andy Levin’s (D-Michigan) resolution, which would unlock a provision in a decades-old law that would allow staffers to form unions on an office-by-office basis.

    The op-ed comes ahead of a crucial vote for the union, which is scheduled for Tuesday evening. Last month, the union had urged Democratic leaders to schedule a vote on the measure, which currently has strong support among the Democratic caucus with 165 cosponsors. The union is made up entirely of Democratic staffers.

    “The cruel ironies of our jobs in Congress are hard to swallow,” wrote the workers, whose names were kept anonymous to avoid potential retaliation from their bosses.

    “We advocate for livable wages while qualifying for food stamps due to low pay. We write speeches condemning corporations’ failure to protect against sexual harassment in the workplace, even as we too, lack sufficient recourse,” they continued. “We assure our constituents they’re being represented, even if we are the only person of color in the room. We fight for working families while questioning whether we can financially survive another year in public service.”

    Low salaries mean that the offices only hire candidates who can afford to live in D.C.; as a result, opportunities often go to white people from privileged backgrounds.

    “In 2020, 89 percent of top Senate aides and 81 percent of top House aides were white,” the op-ed went on. “If Congress is advised by workers far whiter and wealthier than the communities we represent, how can we ever hope to achieve our promise of equal justice under the law?”

    Low wages are also causing a “brain drain” from Congress, as well-qualified staffers are taking better paying jobs in the private sector, often as lobbyists. “Collective bargaining will help Congress retain the talent it needs to serve the American people,” the staffers said.

    The writers then asked lawmakers if they would live up to the principles they claim to uphold for the public by voting to pass the resolution. Last year, every Democrat but one, Rep. Henry Cuellar (Texas), voted for the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would make it far easier for workers across the country to form unions.

    The staffers also detailed facing “abusive bosses” and working 60 to 70 hour weeks while having no room for recourse or seeking accountability. The abusive conditions became especially clear after the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, which triggered psychological fallout among staffers — as one staffer told Roll Call last year, “When I see those members in the hallway or the basement, I think to myself that they wouldn’t care if I was dead.”

    It’s unclear if Democrats will vote to pass the resolution, which was amended and approved by the House Administration Committee earlier this year. When workers first announced their union in February, many Democratic lawmakers voiced their support for the effort, including Pelosi and figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) — but conservative Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) essentially announced his opposition to the drive, and it’s unclear if there are lawmakers in the House that share Manchin’s anti-union opinion.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Says Democrats Must End Filibuster to Protect Abortion Access

    As Senate leaders prepare a vote on Democrats’ bill to protect abortion rights on the federal level, senators like Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) are calling on lawmakers to end the filibuster so that the bill can be passed.

    On Monday, Sanders pointed out that Republicans have manipulated the filibuster in the past in order to advance anti-Democratic causes.

    “If Republicans can end the filibuster to install right wing judges nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote in order to overturn Roe v. Wade, Democrats can and must end the filibuster to keep abortion legal,” Sanders said in a tweet.

    Shortly after Donald Trump took office in 2017, Republicans took advantage of their slim majority to change Senate rules in order to allow right-wing Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch to be confirmed with a simple majority vote of 51 votes. The move capped off 10 months of obstruction by the GOP, led by then-Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), to block President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nomination, Merrick Garland.

    At the time, Republicans claimed that they were acting to protect the public’s interests by not allowing a nominee to go through during an election year, even though Obama’s nomination took place nine months before the election. But that argument was shown to be completely disingenuous when they rammed through the nomination of far right Justice Amy Coney Barrett just weeks after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died; Barrett was sworn in only five days before the 2020 presidential election.

    Progressive lawmakers and advocates have been calling for an end to the filibuster for years, saying that it’s the largest obstacle to progress on vital climate and social issues. Indeed, the filibuster will spell the death of the abortion rights bill that House Democrats passed last September.

    Still, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) has scheduled a vote on the bill this week, saying that the vote will force Republicans — and certain Democrats — to have their votes to deny Americans abortion access on the public record.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) also recently called for an end to the filibuster in order to pass the abortion bill. In an interview with Teen Vogue last week, Warren said that she plans to fight to end the filibuster even if conservative Democrats like Senators Joe Manchin (West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona) say they won’t allow it.

    “We may not end the filibuster in the next hour and a half, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight to do exactly that. To make change takes not only passion, but persistence. We gotta turn the heat up under it, and keep it up. Those who don’t want to make change count on the fact that people get tired,” Warren said. “Over Roe v. Wade, we don’t have the luxury of getting tired. So if we want to make real change, we’ve got to push [to end the filibuster].”

    Abortion rights advocates say that President Joe Biden should step in as a leader of the party to whip obstructionists like Manchin and Sinema in line.

    Both Manchin and Sinema have said that they oppose changing filibuster rules in order to protect abortion access, arguing that the filibuster protects reproductive rights, even though the opposite is true right now. Even if filibuster rules were changed, Manchin has described himself as “pro-life” — or more accurately, anti-abortion — meaning that it’s possible that he would vote against passing the bill anyway.

    If Manchin votes “no” on the bill this week, it could further fuel criticisms and frustrations against the conservative lawmaker, who has spent nearly the entirety of Biden’s time in office blocking the Democratic agenda.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • After “Roe” Leak, Clarence Thomas Moaned That Supreme Court Is Being “Bullied”

    As pro-abortion activists took to the streets to protest the leaked Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last week, Justice Clarence Thomas stated that Americans should learn to accept outcomes they don’t want.

    Speaking at a judicial conference on Friday, Thomas said that the public is “becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes” and moaned that Americans aren’t “living with the outcomes we don’t like.” He did not speak directly about the leaked opinion, but did refer to recent “unfortunate events.”

    He went on to assert that the judicial system “can’t be an institution that can be bullied into giving you just the outcomes you want,” implying that those disquieted attitudes toward institutions “bod[e] ill for a free society.” Young people are especially guilty of disrespecting government institutions like courts, he said.

    Thomas’s comments sparked ire among abortion rights supporters, who pointed out the glaring hypocrisy of telling people to simply live with decisions made by 9 unelected judges with lifetime appointments who are not subject to any oversight. As political commentators pointed out, Republican attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election are a prime example of people not being able to live with an outcome they don’t like — but Thomas has yet to condemn the anti-democratic campaign and coup attempt, perhaps because of his wife Ginni Thomas’s involvement in those events.

    Others pointed out that the Supreme Court justice has been a staunch supporter of overturning previous court precedents and has spent decades trying to force the Supreme Court to be more conservative in its work. The Supreme Court is supposed to be impartial in political matters, but recent years have revealed the political motivations especially driving the right wing justices on the bench.

    “The irony is so thick you wonder if it’s maybe a Clarence Thomas impersonator. Among other things, this is a guy who spent his lifetime trying to take a battering ram to all the Supreme Court major precedents,” said former U.S. attorney Harry Litman on MSNBC on Saturday.

    In response to the comment that the Court is being “bullied,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-California) wrote, “Justice Clarence Thomas is wrong, again. Governments are bullying [people] into having government-mandated pregnancies, under threat of jail. Multiple Supreme Court Justices lied during their confirmation process about their view of [Roe v. Wade] and stare decisis,” a legal term referring to adhering to precedent. “Those are the facts,” Lieu concluded.

    It’s unclear what exactly Thomas was referring to in regards to the Court being “bullied.” It’s concerning that he was potentially referring to pro-abortion protesters who surrounded the Supreme Court last week demanding that justices not overturn Roe. The First Amendment to the Constitution protects the right to free speech and protest, but Thomas apparently thinks that instutions shouldn’t be subjected to hearing the opinions of the public in this way. Public figures regularly face protests, often at their homes; over the weekend, pro-abortion demonstrators marched to Supreme Court Justice’s homes to voice their dissatisfaction with the Roe draft.

    Though moderates and conservatives took issue with this form of protest, it is actually abortion clinics and patients who often face real threats from political opponents and are in far more danger than being “bullied,” as Lieu pointed out. Abortion clinics have begun doubling down on security tactics in order to combat an anticipated rise in attacks anti-abortionists; such figures have killed workers and bombed and set fire to clinics that provide abortions and other reproductive services.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Poll: Most Americans Want Congress to Pass a Bill to Protect Abortion Rights

    Not only do most Americans want the Supreme Court to uphold Roe v. Wade, but they also want Congress to pass a federal law to guarantee that abortion will remain legal, new polling finds.

    The CBS News/YouGov poll of 2,088 adult U.S. residents found that 58 percent of poll respondents want Congress to pass a bill legalizing abortion nationwide, versus 42 percent who would oppose such a bill. Eighty-seven percent of Democrats polled were in favor of the legislation.

    The findings also corroborate previous polling revealing that most Americans don’t want the Supreme Court to overturn Roe, as it appears poised to do following the leak of a draft opinion last week. Sixty-four percent of respondents in the CBS/YouGov poll said that they favored keeping Roe, including 90 percent of Democrats.

    Respondents also generally understood that, if Roe is overturned, people of color and poor people would have a harder time having access to abortions, while wealthy people’s access would largely remain unchanged. Trans people, who already face hurdles to obtain health care, would also have a harder time accessing abortion services if Roe protections were gone.

    Many Democrats in Congress are working on enshrining abortion rights into law, but there’s little chance that they’ll succeed. After the Supreme Court upheld Texas’s abortion law, which effectively banned the vast majority of abortions, the House of Representatives passed a bill largely along party lines to allow health providers to provide abortions “prior to fetal viability” or if the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant person’s health. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) was the lone Democrat who voted against the bill.

    Passing the Senate will be a hurdle for Democrats — one that is likely impassable. Last week, about 30 Democrats gathered on the steps of the Capitol to announce their support for abortion access and vow to protect it. However, an abortion rights bill will not be able to pass the filibuster threshold of 60 votes, with Republicans in favor of implementing even harsher abortion restrictions nationwide.

    Further, even if Democrats eliminated the filibuster for this purpose, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) is a staunch opponent of abortion rights, meaning that the party wouldn’t have enough internal support for the cause.

    Some abortion rights advocates point out that this last-minute scramble to enshrine abortion rights into law is a display of the Democratic Party’s weakness, as Democrats have had decades to pass legislation to guarantee abortion rights but have failed to do so.

    Indeed, even as the public is in an uproar about the attack on abortion rights, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and other top Democrats have remained quiet about her endorsement of Cuellar, the only anti-abortion Democrat in the House. The Texas representative is facing a primary battle in his home state from Jessica Cisneros, a progressive pro-abortion candidate who’s been endorsed by high-profile lawmakers on the left like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York).

    “Time and time again, we have seen Democrats use abortion rights as a campaign issue and fail to deliver on their promises to protect and expand our right to reproductive freedom,” Analilia Mejia, co-executive director or the Center for Popular Democracy, told NPR. “We deserve leadership that represents the vast majority of Americans who believe abortion should be accessible and affordable to all who require this critical health care.”

    Abortion rights advocates have also been calling on President Joe Biden to come out with a hard stance on the issue. Last week, Biden broke his silence on abortion rights to oppose the Supreme Court draft opinion but has declined to say whether he supports eliminating the filibuster for this cause.

  • Starbucks Hit With Lawsuit From Labor Board Over Anti-Union Employee Guidelines

    In a new lawsuit against Starbucks, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is alleging that a number of the company’s employee guidelines are in violation of labor laws.

    As first reported by More Perfect Union, the lawsuit, issued on Wednesday, takes issue with 19 sections of the company’s “Partner Guide,” which the NLRB argues are “overly-broad and discriminatory” against workers’ rights.

    Among the guidelines in violation of national labor laws allowing employees to freely form unions is the company’s dress code, which disallows workers from wearing clothing or even pins that display union symbols, according to the labor board. The company also places several restrictions on workers’ speech in violation of the law, the NLRB says, including banning workers from recording their working conditions through photo, video or audio mediums.

    The handbook’s restrictions preventing workers from participating in unsanctioned interviews or generally discussing their working conditions are also an intrusion on their labor rights, the labor board finds. Altogether, the NLRB alleges that the rules all act in the service of “interfering with, restraining, and coercing employees” from exercising their right to form a union.

    The agency has given Starbucks until May 18 to respond to the lawsuit before the scheduled court hearing on June 14. It is the largest legal effort so far by the NLRB to intervene in the company’s union-busting practices.

    Over the past months, the NLRB has filed several charges against the company, alleging that the company has repeatedly violated labor laws in its treatment of its employees. Last month, labor board prosecutors found that the company illegally fired seven union organizers in Memphis, Tennessee; the workers made up nearly the entirety of that store’s union organizing group.

    The NLRB has made similar charges over the company’s dismissal of pro-union employees in Phoenix, Arizona, and last month filed a lawsuit against the company for doing so. The agency says that the terminations of Laila Dalton, Tyler Gillette and Alyssa Sanchez amounted to illegal retaliation against the employees for unionizing.

    If that injunction is successful, Starbucks will have to face legal consequences, including having to post and read aloud the court order against them in stores and reinstating the fired employees.

    The company may also find itself in legal trouble for a new policy it announced earlier this week. Workers will soon see a wage raise to $15 an hour or a 3 percent increase, whichever is higher, Starbucks announced – but the higher wages won’t apply to unionized stores or stores currently in the middle of a union campaign.

    Starbucks Workers United has filed charges against the move, saying that it’s clearly an attempt to discourage workers from forming unions.

    “We have filed charges against Howard Schultz’s threats that union stores won’t receive these benefits. That’s not how labor law works and Starbucks knows it,” the union said. A unionized Buffalo store went on strike on Friday to protest the change.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The House Will Vote Next Week on Allowing Its Staffers to Unionize

    House leadership has scheduled a vote for a resolution that would allow House staffers to unionize, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) announced on Friday. The announcement comes three months after congressional workers first announced that they were unionizing.

    Rep. Andy Levin’s (D-Michigan) resolution, introduced shortly after workers brought their union efforts public in February, would give workers the green light to start unionizing office-by-office. Some Democrats, including Pelosi, have voiced their support for the effort, but it’s as yet unclear whether it will have enough votes to pass.

    In reaction to the news of the upcoming vote, the Congressional Workers Union (CWU) pressured lawmakers to approve the resolution. “Next week, the credibility of lawmakers will be put to the test. Will our bosses finally lead by example?” the union said in a statement. “With this vote, every member of Congress will have the opportunity to grant their own workers the right to organize and bargain collectively, free from retaliation.”

    “We welcome and look forward to the vote, and we expect that every member who has stood up for workers’ rights will vote for our right to form a union,” the union continued. “If Democrats are For the People, we are people too.”

    Levin celebrated the news. “I’m excited that my resolution to grant House staffers the right to unionize and bargain collectively will be considered on the House Floor next week,” he said. “Congressional staff have waited long enough. Let’s go!”

    CWU has been organizing for over a year. Last month, they sent a letter urging Pelosi to schedule a vote on the resolution, saying that staffers have waited long enough to be allowed to unionize. (The legislation that sets the groundwork for staffers’ unions passed nearly three decades ago, but was never implemented.)

    The union says that workers often face abusive conditions at work, as they’re expected to work long hours and for low pay. Conditions are especially bad for non-white staffers, who say that they feel as though there’s no room for advancement for them. Non-white people are already in the minority among congressional staff, which is largely white, and non-white staffers have reported experiencing racism at work.

    In a first, Pelosi also announced that she is now setting a minimum pay for House staffers. Starting September 1, the pay floor will be set at $45,000. This is slightly lower than the Washington, D.C. living wage of around $49,000 for a single adult without children, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator, but still higher than the $30,000 that some staffers are reportedly making.

    “With a competitive minimum salary, the House will better be able to retain and recruit excellent, diverse talent. Doing so will open the doors to public service for those who may not have been able to afford to do so in the past,” Pelosi said in a press release. “This is also an issue of fairness, as many of the youngest staffers working the longest hours often earn the lowest salaries.”

    Staff turnover is incredibly high on Capitol Hill, and it reached a new high last year. With low pay and long hours, there is a high incidence of so-called brain drain among congressional staff – often highly qualified individuals – with many leaving for private sector jobs with higher pay.