Author: Sharon Zhang

February 23, 2022

Labor Board Formally Rejects Starbucks’s Tactic to Delay Union Elections

On Wednesday, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) rejected an argument that Starbucks has been employing in its union-busting campaign, setting a precedent against the use of the tactic in the future.

The company has repeatedly argued that union elections should happen on a regional basis, rather than store-by-store. Voting this way would dilute the union elections for the company, making it so that employees at other stores that aren’t in the midst of unionizing would also cast a vote; this would make it harder for Starbucks Workers United to reach workers that are casting a ballot. The company argues that union elections at individual stores affect other stores in the region, which can encompass a dozen locations or more.

Starbucks has made this argument in attempts to delay or stop elections during every election so far, and the NLRB has rejected it each time. However, this week’s decision will make it harder for the company to make the argument in the future, setting a binding precedent against its use.

In this case, Starbucks had said that the vote count in Mesa, Arizona, which was scheduled for last week, should be delayed in order to accommodate more stores’ votes – an argument that was already denied last month when the company tried to stop the election that was ongoing at the time.

The labor board said in its decision Wednesday that there are “no substantial issues warranting review” and that the board’s presumption that votes will be counted store-by-store is appropriate. The vote count for the Power and Baseline store has been scheduled for Friday afternoon, and the union is confident that it will be a “delayed victory” for the workers.

Starbucks used the same argument in its attempt to delay a vote count for three stores in Buffalo that was scheduled for Wednesday. The ballots have been impounded and the count has been delayed while the NLRB rules on that challenge by the company.

The union expressed frustration that the NLRB allowed the Buffalo vote to be postponed even though the labor board has continually ruled against the company’s voting argument.

Ian Hayes, an attorney for Starbucks Workers United, said that the company deliberately filed its challenge at the end of the eligible period to do so in order to have the votes impounded. Indeed, the company had pushed its petition to delay the Buffalo vote count so far back last week that it ended up missing the deadline for the filing by eight minutes.

“Starbucks will imply they had nothing to do with this further delay in the voting process by vaguely gesturing towards the legal process. That is a farce,” Hayes said in a statement. “This would not have happened without their strategic decision. This is exactly the result Starbucks wanted, and the NLRB handed it to them today.”

While the union is confident that the Mesa, Arizona, vote will succeed, workers and organizers noted that delaying the vote count was a tactic by the company to kill momentum. As the union campaign has grown stronger, the company has gotten bolder and bolder in its union-busting tactics.

Earlier this month, Starbucks fired seven union organizers in Memphis, Tennessee. Recently, it also fired a union organizer and member of the bargaining committee in Buffalo. While the union has said that the terminations in Memphis are illegal, however, labor laws only allow extremely light punishments for the company, meaning that the company could view it as worth the risk to break the law in order to union bust.

Despite the company’s anti-union tactics, the union effort grows larger nearly every day. Over the weekend, Starbucks Workers United reached a milestone of over 100 stores filing for representation, as the two unionized stores in Buffalo are in the midst of contract negotiations.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 23, 2022

Rashida Tlaib Will Give Progressive Speech Countering Biden’s State of the Union

Progressives are planning to counter President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on March 1 with a speech highlighting roadblocks caused by conservative Democrats and ways that the country can move forward in pursuing the Democratic agenda.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) will deliver the speech on behalf of the Working Families Party (WFP). She is expected to praise Biden but point out that progressives have been the staunchest defenders of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. She will also give sharp criticisms of Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress, who have blocked progress on issues like lowering the cost of prescription drugs, addressing the climate crisis and decreasing child poverty.

“The overarching goal for the Working Families Party and for the congresswoman is to recenter Build Back Better, is to remind our base and remind our folks on the Hill in Congress, that this is so much more than just the President’s legislative agenda,” Natalia Salgado, Director of Federal Affairs at WFP, told Truthout.

This will be the fifth time that WFP has countered the president’s State of the Union address with a progressive angle. Last April, the speech was delivered by Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York), who praised Biden but urged him to be bolder in pursuing an agenda centered on addressing the climate crisis and delivering racial justice.

This year’s speech comes at a critical time for the Democratic party. The 2022 midterm elections are shaping up to be tough for Democrats, and the clock is ticking for Biden to solidify climate action and other priorities before he could potentially lose the majority in Congress.

Tlaib is expected to emphasize that Democrats can do more to pass proposals like the Green New Deal and to address issues like gun violence – but it’s crucial for more progressives to be elected to office so that the passage of such bills isn’t obstructed by a vocal minority of conservative Democrats.

“We are in a moment of urgency. We are in a moment of crisis, and the corporate democratic wing of the party needs to be reminded that the American voters, the American electorate, voted for us to govern effectively,” Salgado said. “Nothing makes voters more likely to stay home than feeling like the people that they voted into office, that are part of a majority, are still not able to respond to them.”

Tlaib emphasized on Twitter that the speech is “about the people who are hurting without [Build Back Better].”

“Despite some sensational coverage, it’s simple: I’m giving a speech about supporting President Biden and his Build Back Better agenda for the people,” Tlaib wrote. “Look past the headlines and hear progressives’ vision for working with the President and Congress to deliver for our residents.”

Indeed, millions of families are struggling financially without measures that would have been implemented in the Build Back Better Act. Last week, research found that child poverty increased by 41 percent after the expanded child tax credit expired, pushing tens of millions of children back into poverty. The Build Back Better Act would have extended the expanded tax credit and Democrats have sought to make them permanent, but conservatives and Manchin roundly rejected those proposals.

It’s unclear what issues Biden will address in his speech. He is likely to highlight the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which was gutted by Republicans and conservative allies Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona). He may address the situation in Ukraine, as this week, he announced sanctions against Russia for moving troops into the country. He could also tout vaccine statistics as the country comes off of its worst COVID wave yet.

But the glaring failures of Biden’s first year in office may go unaddressed. After passing one stimulus bill, many other financial safety nets, like the eviction moratorium, stimulus payments and the student debt repayment pause are either gone or are set to expire. Meanwhile, the president has skirted questions on his failure to cancel student loans, even though he pledged to do so on the campaign trail.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 23, 2022

Republicans’ Response to Taxing the Rich? Tax the Poor.

In the new GOP platform for the midterm elections, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Florida) has laid out the Republican party’s response to Democrats’ rallying cry to tax the rich: slash funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and tax the poor.

“All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount,” reads Scott’s 11 point plan. “Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.”

While it’s true that about half of American households typically don’t pay income taxes, this is because their incomes aren’t high enough to pass the threshold for income tax liability; lower-income households also sometimes receive tax credits. Many low-income people still owe payroll taxes, however.

A new tax on the bottom half of income earners could have severely deleterious effects on the people already most in need of financial help, especially in a time when the wealth gap in the U.S. is multiplying. Such a measure would likely be extremely unpopular, and has already garnered criticism from top Democrats, who have pointed out that Republicans want to raise taxes on over half of Americans.

Scott denied on Fox News that his plan would implement new income taxes on over half of the country, despite the fact that this proposal is clearly outlined in his “Plan to Rescue America.” Other Republicans defended the 11-point plan. “He’s at least raising important questions over, ‘Should every American have some stake in the country?’” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

While he is advocating to raise taxes on lower-income families, Scott is also attempting to give the rich even more opportunities to dodge taxes. If Republicans retake power, the plan reads, “We will immediately cut the IRS funding and workforce by 50 percent.”

This would have an enormous impact on tax enforcement in the country. Republicans have already gutted the IRS over the years; in fact, the agency is so underfunded that it’s warned that this year’s tax season will be challenging because it is still catching up with last year’s tax filings.

As a result, the IRS hasn’t had the resources for years to go after wealthy tax dodgers, who can use sophisticated methods of tax dodging that are too complex for the agency to be able to track. Rather, with an insufficient budget and workforce, the IRS disproportionately audits low-income people who benefit from the Earned Income Tax Credit. Meanwhile, the nation’s wealthiest people get away with paying little to no federal income taxes at all, allowing them to continue to accumulate unfathomable amounts of wealth.

The plan gives no real reason for gutting the IRS, though Republicans often argue for less punitive regulations for corporations and the rich, while advocating for more regulations for the poor. Democrats have proposed increasing IRS funding, but Republicans shot down a plan to increase the agency’s funding in negotiations for last year’s infrastructure bill, as corporations lobbied hard against the proposal.

If implemented, the GOP’s plan would raise taxes on the poor while providing even more tax loopholes for the rich. It’s ironic that the GOP is arguing that this plan would ensure everyone in the U.S. has “skin in the game” in order to benefit from public services or contribute to society, when it is largely the wealthy who get undue tax breaks despite not needing the extra funds to survive.

Scott’s plan also includes numerous extremist proposals that could actively harm the government and the public. The plan contains attacks on transgender people, leftists, schools, people of color, and much more. As part of the political right wing’s fascist attacks on education, the plan would shutter the Department of Education entirely. It would also bar any increases to the debt ceiling. Republicans have advocated for such limits to demonstrate their so-called fiscal responsibility, despite the fact that not allowing raises to the debt ceiling could be calamitous.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 22, 2022

“Year of the Worker”: 2021 Saw Over 3 Million Strike Days With 140K Participants

Workers waged hundreds of work stoppages in 2021, marking millions of total “strike days” over the course of the year that saw a resurgence of the U.S. labor movement but a decline in overall union membership.

According to a new report by researchers at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, 140,000 workers went on strike or otherwise participated in a work stoppage last year in 265 strikes and lockouts. Together, the workers logged over 3.2 million strike days.

Pay was the most common reason for workers to go on strike, the data shows. Nearly 60,000 workers in 160 work stoppages were demanding better pay. Demands for better benefits like health care and retirement were also significant, with over a million strike days logged for each.

The data lends credence to the idea that 2021 was a major year for the labor movement, which advocates deemed the “year of the worker.” The year saw a flurry of labor activity among unionized and nonunionized workers even as overall union membership continued to decline in 2021. Major strikes involved workers at Kellogg, John Deere and Kaiser Permanente and graduate students at Columbia University, to name a few.

The research also corroborates evidence that 2021 did indeed experience “Striketober” – where the months of October and November saw an increase in the number of work stoppages, relative to the rest of the year.

According to Eli Friedman, Cornell labor professor and report co-author, part of the motivation for conducting the research is to present more comprehensive data than that of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which doesn’t record strikes involving fewer than 1,000 workers thanks to Ronald Reagan-era budget cuts. This means that the BLS data only records a small fraction of the total work stoppages. Though it has not yet put out a report for this year, the agency appears to have only logged 13 work stoppages in 2021 according to its monthly data.

Because this is the first year that researchers have put together more comprehensive data, there’s no baseline from recent years with which to compare last year’s data. Compared to the BLS data analysis report from the late 1970s, however, 2021’s work stoppages are only a fraction of what they used to be; in 1979, BLS recorded nearly 5,000 work stoppages, with the median stoppage lasting about a month.

The labor movement appears to be on the rise again after many years of relative dormancy, however, and Friedman says that strikes in 2021 may have been inspired by the labor movement in 2018 and 2019, which saw an increase in strikes. Those strikes may have “captured the imagination” of the labor movement, Friedman told Truthout.

According to the research, the fact that nearly a third of work stoppages were waged by nonunion workers last year could be a sign that workers are ready for unrest. As last year’s so-called great resignation demonstrated, many labor protests are individualized, but “more collective forms of response are still in the arsenal,” Friedman said.

Major union campaigns are also evidence that the labor movement is growing stronger, with Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon workers’ campaign making waves last year and Starbucks workers’ union drive growing larger and larger nearly every day.

Without institutional action like passing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act) or other mass forms of action, however, there is little chance that the labor movement can break through and start to rebuild to levels seen in the 20th century.

“The Democratic Party, despite moving to the left in some ways, is not making laborers or a reform of labor institutions a priority,” Friedman said. “And so there’s a question: ‘At what point does this bottom-up pressure of work unrest create enough pressure on the political system to create some kind of legal and institutional reforms?’, which I think pretty much everyone recognizes will be necessary to reverse the decline in unionization.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 22, 2022

Over 100 Starbucks Locations Have Filed for Unionization

On Monday, Starbucks Workers United announced that they had officially surpassed 100 locations filing for union representation, marking a milestone despite the company stepping up its union-busting efforts.

“It’s official – we reached the 100 store mark,” the union tweeted. “103 stores (to be exact) have filed petitions with the NLRB to join the Starbucks Workers United movement!”

New filings at three stores in Virginia and one store in Wisconsin pushed the count over 100, and across 26 states. Two stores have successfully unionized so far, and thousands of workers are in the middle of organizing campaigns at their stores.

According to the union, the number of stores filing for unionization has doubled over just the past three weeks; at the end of January, roughly 50 stores had filed for unionization.

“Make no mistake, we have momentum,” Lynne Fox, international president of Workers United, said in a statement. “I would welcome a conversation with [Starbucks CEO] Kevin Johnson anytime. Labor relations should be collaborative, not adversarial. There is no success without worker voices.”

The company has been increasingly hostile toward the union movement, making more desperate moves as the union movement grows. Earlier this month, the company fired seven workers in a unionizing store in Memphis, Tennessee. The fired workers comprised the store’s entire organizing committee.

Recently, the company fired a leading organizer in Buffalo, New York, where the unionization campaign started. Former Starbucks worker Cassie Fleischer was a member of the union’s bargaining committee, which is currently in negotiations with the company for the unionized Buffalo stores’ first contracts.

“As a leader in the union’s organizing and negotiations committees, and having helped organize the strike over covid-19 safety, I know something has changed,” Fleischer wrote on Facebook. “This is not the company I signed on to in 2017, and this just further proves that we need a union in our stores.”

It is illegal for a company to retaliate against workers who are exercising their right to form a union. However, unfair labor practice cases can take years for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to process. Further, if the company is found to have violated the law by firing an organizing employee for no good reason, there is essentially no punishment for the company, which would only be required to rehire the employee and pay the wages for the time lost – or what would be the regular cost of operation for the company if they hadn’t fired the employee.

Last week, the company also attempted to delay a vote count for a unionizing store in Mesa, Arizona, repeating its argument that union elections shouldn’t be held on a store-by-store basis. The NLRB ruled against the company, this time because the company submitted its argument to delay the vote count too late. It’s a narrow win for the union, which is confident that the store will unionize.

“This is incredibly disappointing for us, but we know that this is just a delayed victory,” said Michelle Hejduk, shift supervisor at the organizing Mesa store, in a press conference.

The company has tried to argue against store-by-store elections before in its attempts to delay or stop elections in Mesa and Buffalo, but the NLRB has ruled against them each time.

These tactics are on top of the other union-busting moves that the company has waged within organizing stores. In Mesa, workers said that the company added five managers and many employees to the store when their union campaign started. And workers across the country have reported that the company is holding mandatory meetings and one-on-one confrontations with organizing stores in attempts to intimidate them against organizing.

The company is also attempting to leverage the contract negotiations in Buffalo against unionizing stores. It has been telling organizing employees to wait for the results of the negotiations before voting for a union – while likely knowing full well that it would drag out negotiations for years if needed.

Employees, meanwhile, are begging Starbucks to stop its union-busting campaign and return to its roots as a supposedly progressive company.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 22, 2022

Ocasio-Cortez Calls Out Tucker Carlson for His Dangerous “Libelous Harassment”

On Saturday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) called out Fox News host Tucker Carlson for his role in spreading what the lawmaker says is dangerous “libelous harassment” on his show.

“I genuinely want to know why Tucker Carlson is allowed/paid to engage in clear, targeted, libelous harassment that endangers people and drives so many violent threats that people have to fundraise for their own safety,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.

“It’s not within the realm of political commentary, and it’s not just me,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “He regularly targets people that do not have access to resources for protection. Once he gets to fantasizing about ‘booty calls’ of women on national TV I cease to see the political value outside of incitement.”

Ocasio-Cortez is frequently a target of far right figures like Carlson, who again attacked her on Friday by referring to her as a “rich, entitled white lady” and saying that it’s incorrect to refer to her as a woman of color. Ocasio-Cortez identifies as Puerto Rican and Latina, and on Friday she responded to Carlson’s comment on Twitter by referring to him as a pendejo — a Spanish insult that means “idiot.”

Carlson also aired a video from 2018 that Ocasio-Cortez posted to social media saying that the video was “an invitation to a booty call.” Ocasio-Cortez said that the video was sexual harassment and called him a “creep.”

Ocasio-Cortez has previously called out right-wing figures for strange sexual fixations with her and other young women after the right posted pictures of Ocasio-Cortez and her boyfriend. “It’s starting to get old ignoring the very obvious, strange, and deranged sexual frustrations that underpin the Republican fixation on me, women, and LGBT+ people in general,” she wrote in December.

Carlson does indeed have a long history of inciting violence or harassment toward figures that he disagrees with, often on the left. In a particularly high profile instance last year, he harassed New York Times culture reporter Taylor Lorenz in two broadcasts, calling her a “deeply unhappy narcissist” after Lorenz pleaded on Twitter for harassment against women online to stop.

Carlson repeated Lorenz’s full name repeatedly, unleashing a wave of harassment on Lorenz; after Carlson’s attacks, Lorenz posted a screenshot of an email she received threatening her saying that this type of harassment “destroy[s] lives.” Carlson’s show is the top-watched cable news show.

Carlson’s harassment of Lorenz is a pattern for him. The Fox host often harasses journalists; in 2020, Carlson named two Maine journalists after the New York Times began writing a story about him. One of the journalists was doxxed, leading someone to try to break into his house about an hour after Carlson named him on air. He said he and his family received thousands of abusive and threatening emails from the segment.

People who have been guests on the show have also experienced harassment from his extremist right-wing audience. The guests who have been harassed are typically liberal or left leaning.

Right-wing harassment in general seems to be on the rise. Earlier this month, a Texas nature reserve called the National Butterfly Center ended up having to close down because of harassment, stemming from conspiracy theories about the facility and its employees. The center has been in a lawsuit with the Trump administration after the administration began destroying trees and other plants on the facility’s land without seeking permission.

Meanwhile, over the weekend, one person was killed and five people were wounded while participating in a racial justice protest for Amir Locke in Portland, Oregon. Researchers have identified the alleged shooter as an extremist right winger who would often talk about killing anti-fascists and people on the left.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 18, 2022

Apple Store Employees Are Reportedly Unionizing

Employees at at least eight Apple Stores in the U.S. are in various stages of unionizing efforts, according to new reporting by The Washington Post.

According to anonymous sources, including at least one organizer, two stores are prepared to file a petition for unionization with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and have contacted major unions, while six other stores are in more nascent stages of organizing, The Washington Post found.

The organizing efforts are inspired by Starbucks Workers United’s extraordinary campaign in which nearly 100 stores across the country have filed for unionization over just the past few months. Apple Store workers say that their wages aren’t rising with the rate of inflation and that the company hasn’t been giving them an equal share of the record-breaking profits that the employees have helped create with sales and repairs.

According to financial filings, over a third of the company’s $366 billion in total revenue in 2021 was made from its website or within retail stores. The company has over 270 retail locations in the U.S. and employs more than 65,000 retail workers.

Within the last few months of 2021, the company marked a 20 percent increase in profits, despite losing billions to chip and other supply shortages in the fall. The tech behemoth grows its worth nearly every year, and last month, the company became the first in the world to be worth over $3 trillion.

But retail employees say that they aren’t seeing this growth in their paychecks. They can make between $17 and $30 an hour, depending on their location and position, plus stocks. The low end of that range, about $35,000 a year, is just over a living wage for a full time worker with no children in a place with a cheaper cost of living like central Ohio; that wage is no longer viable to live off of if a worker has a child, according to MIT’s living wage calculator.

“I have a lot of co-workers and friends who I genuinely love and they do not make enough to get by,” an organizer told The Washington Post. “They’re struggling and they’re hurting and we work for a company that has the resources to make sure that they’re taken care of.”

Workers also say that wages haven’t kept up with inflation in recent years – meaning that employees could effectively be getting pay cuts as inflation rises.

Meanwhile, CEO Tim Cook received nearly $100 million in compensation last year, while the company spent $85.8 billion on buybacks.

Employees say that while they may make more than other retail employees – many of whom aren’t being paid livable wages – they bring in a massive amount of value for the hugely profitable company, which is clearly benefiting. Workers told The Washington Post that their “knowledge and passion for the products help drive sales and that they should share more fully in the company’s success,” the publication wrote.

Organizers are anticipating union busting from the company, however, as managers have already begun pulling employees aside to tell them anti-union propaganda, claiming that Apple will be forced to take away benefits if employees unionize. Managers are also eavesdropping on workers, organizers said; unionizing workers have taken to using Android phones and other less-detectable methods of communication to organize.

Previous reporting has found that Apple employees often find themselves siloed when they face problems at work. The Verge reported in December that employees say they’re overworked and don’t have anywhere to turn when they’re facing problems like a missed paycheck or a poor manager. “Corporate makes decisions based on what they think will work in the stores without talking to people who work in the stores,” one employee told The Verge. Retail employees are treated as an “afterthought,” the publication reported.

One employee, Mark Calivas, faced so many problems at his job at the Apple Southpoint store in Durham, North Carolina, that he died by suicide after working in the store for about eight years, The Verge reported. His best friend told the publication that “it was Apple” that did it, after the store got a manager that bullied and intimidated Calivas and HR was unresponsive to the issue.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 18, 2022

Sanders Calls to Cancel All Student Debt After Biden Axes $415 Millions’ Worth

After the Biden administration canceled $415 million of student debt for victims of for-profit colleges, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) called for all student debt to be canceled, a move that could relieve tens of millions of borrowers of what is often a huge financial burden.

On Wednesday, the Education Department announced that it was canceling debt for students who were misled by for-profit colleges like DeVry University. The agency has been fielding complaints from borrowers and has found that the institution made “widespread substantial misrepresentations about its job placement rates.”

Advocates and lawmakers lauded the decision, but pointed out that there is still more to be done if the administration is to substantially address the student loan crisis.

“Good,” Sanders wrote on Twitter. “Now cancel the remaining $1,883,214,046,704 for 44,984,000 other Americans who are still drowning in student debt.”

A mass nixing of student loans for victims of for-profit colleges has been years in the making; during the Trump administration, judges ordered the Education Department to cancel student loans for for-profit college victims, but former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos refused to do so.

In a press release announcing the cancellation this week, the agency said that it has so far canceled about $2 billion for about 107,000 borrowers under this program. Overall, Joe Biden has canceled over $13 billion of student loans as of January.

As Sanders pointed out, however, this is a miniscule amount of money when compared to the amount of student debt that is currently held by borrowers across the country.

According to Federal Reserve data, borrowers held a collective roughly $1.75 trillion in student loan debt as of December, a record amount. Other estimates from the Student Debt Crisis Center peg the amount a bit higher, at about $1.88 trillion as of Friday.

Either way, the number is astronomically high compared to the amount that Biden has canceled so far – $13 billion is less than 1 percent of the total amount of student debt weighing on borrowers. It’s also a far cry from the up to $10,000 of debt that the president promised to cancel for every borrower while on the campaign trail.

Indeed, Biden has been dragging his feet on the issue of student debt, even though Democratic and progressive lawmakers have been pushing him to take action on the issue for over a year. In public, he has dodged questions about his failure to cancel debt so far, while the White House has said that it considers restarting student loans after the pandemic-related repayment freeze a “high priority.”

The White House’s sluggishness on the issue and its purposeful obfuscation of Biden’s legal authority to cancel student loans have led debt advocates to cast doubt on whether or not Biden actually wants to address the crisis, despite its huge impact on the economy.

Debt activists are planning a day of action in April to urge Biden to cancel student debt before loan payments are slated to restart in May, which a survey last year found would cause major financial distress for thousands, if not millions, of borrowers.

Economic issues aside, proposals to cancel student debt are popular among voters – which is critical as the country approaches midterm elections that could lead to Democrats losing control of Congress. Recent polling from Data for Progress found that 63 percent of likely voters say that the federal government should eliminate some student debt for borrowers, with a whopping 88 percent of Democrats in agreement on the issue.

In an interview this week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) pointed out that canceling debt would be a “keystone action” for Biden to take ahead of the election this fall, especially as the rest of Democrats’ agenda is stalled in the Senate thanks to conservative Democrats.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 17, 2022

January 6 Committee Is Considering Subpoenaing Ivanka Trump

The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack is considering issuing Ivanka Trump a subpoena to compel her to cooperate with their investigation into former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

An anonymous source told The Guardian that the committee is discussing the matter, but wants to give her a reasonable amount of time to respond to a request they made for her testimony last month.

If the committee follows through, Ivanka Trump would be the first member of the former president’s family to be forced to testify against him. She would also be among the highest ranking members of Trump’s circle to be subpoenaed by the committee so far.

In January, the committee requested Ivanka Trump’s testimony because of her apparent inside knowledge of the plot to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election. The commission also sought information on Trump’s actions and mindset as the Capitol attack was unfolding, as Ivanka Trump was close to the president on January 6 and the days leading up to the attack.

The commission is specifically interested in exploring the White House’s delay in calling in the National Guard to help abate the attack as Capitol Police failed to hold pro-Trump militants back. According to the letter requesting Ivanka Trump’s testimony from committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi), there is evidence that Trump may have been purposely delaying the National Guard.

According to previous testimonies, White House staff requested that Ivanka Trump talk to the president to get him to intervene and stop the attack as it was unfolding.

Though she hasn’t explicitly rejected the request, a spokesperson for Ivanka Trump has deflected inquiries about any potential appearance, saying that she didn’t speak at the rally that took place shortly before the attack – something that the committee never called into question. After the request, Trump said that it was “very unfair” for the commission to ask for his daughter’s testimony.

Considering that even members of the administration who have been subpoenaed have attempted to dodge the legal mandate to appear before the committee, it’s unlikely that Ivanka Trump would voluntarily choose to appear.

However, the threat of legal action may compel Ivanka Trump and others to comply. Under a subpoena issued last year, former chief of staff Mark Meadows is complying with the committee; he started cooperating shortly after top Trump ally Steve Bannon was indicted and held in contempt of Congress for refusing the committee’s subpoena.

The Trump family has faced increased legal scrutiny in recent weeks. On Thursday, a New York judge ruled that Trump, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. must answer questions under oath about Trump’s business practices. The order is part of an ongoing investigation into Trump’s business by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who has accused the business of continually using fraudulent practices to make the business appear more successful than it is.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 17, 2022

Miami Police Gave Out Fliers With Website Selling Trump Merch at Traffic Stops

Police have been handing out department-made fliers advertising a website selling Donald Trump merch to drivers at traffic stops in Miami-Dade County, the Miami Herald recently reported.

The fliers included a link to a website — miami-dadeclerk.com — where people with traffic citations can pay off fines or register for driving school. But the first instance of the link on the flier was missing a hyphen, even though the correct link was included later in the flier.

People who visited the incorrect link were redirected to an online store with Amazon links. The page, at findsale.com, advertised items including pro-Trump flags with sayings like “Let’s Go Brandon” and “Hillary Belongs in Prison, Joe Belongs in a Nursing Home.”

Also for sale was a 97-minute film called Trump 2024: The World After Trump, which features far right figures like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and PragerU founder Dennis Prager. The film bills itself as exposing the “aggressive movement to transform America, strip away its freedoms and Judeo-Christian values.”

It’s unclear why the link, which now redirects to a Florida judicial commission website, originally redirected to the website with the Trump merchandise. The Washington Post found that the non-hyphenated site is hosted by Epik, which also hosts far right websites like Gab and Parler, which were kicked off of other hosting services for platforming hate speech and violence.

Greetings, Miami Beach Twitter: Were you stopped by Miami Beach police and issued one of these fliers on how to resolve a minor citation online? Would like to hear from you. pic.twitter.com/HbD3xZciq0

— Doug Hanks (@doug_hanks) February 15, 2022

Miami Beach police spokesperson Ernesto Rodriguez told the Miami Herald that the incorrect link was a typo and that police are launching an inquiry into the incident. According to Rodriguez, the department had received copies of the flier with the correct links from the county, but it “produced its own version of the notices and the error was inserted at some point during the printing process.”

One state judge, Judge Steve Leifman, said that it was “disgusting” to see government sources directing people toward political merchandise.

It’s possible that the website redirect was an unfortunate coincidence; the police union defended officers handing out the fliers, saying that officers didn’t check the links to make sure they were correct.

In recent years, however, police have become increasingly vocal in their support of right-wing political candidates and far right extremism. For instance, officials are currently investigating dozens of off-duty police officers who participated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021.; Capitol Police officers who were supposed to be holding the crowd back were also allegedly involved in helping the crowd enter the building to interrupt the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

A leak of member rolls from the far right militia Oath Keepers last year contained names of active police officers in major cities, and research has shown that domestic terrorist plots and attacks committed by law enforcement personnel and active duty or reserve military figures have increased over the past few years in particular.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 17, 2022

Sanders Rips Into Billionaires for Creating “Oligarchic” Society in US

On Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) gave a powerful speech on the Senate floor, excoriating billionaires and CEOs for accumulating unfathomable amounts of wealth while millions of Americans struggle to get by.

Since the start of the pandemic, millions of Americans have struggled economically, gotten ill or died – but for billionaires, “this moment has never been better,” Sanders said. Because of their rapid accumulation of wealth, the country is moving toward becoming an oligarchy.

“In the 1950s, when I was growing up, CEOs did very, very well. They made 20 times more than their average worker. Well, if you are a CEO, the good news is those days are long gone, when you only made 20 times more than your average workers,” Sanders said. “Today, as I am sure the CEOs of this country know, they are now making 350 times more than what the average worker in America makes. Three hundred and fifty times more. Talk about greed.”

While grocers like Kroger and oil and gas companies like Shell, BP and Exxon Mobil have jacked up prices for consumers, they’re also making record profits and spending billions on stock buybacks, Sanders pointed out. And as the U.S. pays the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs, the CEOs of the top eight pharmaceutical companies were paid over $350 million in compensation in 2020, he went on.

Meanwhile, Wall Street has a huge influence over the economy of the country. Finance giants BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street manage over $21 trillion in assets – which is larger than the GDP of the U.S., the largest economy in the world.

CEOs and billionaires currently own a larger portion of the wealth in the U.S. than at any other point in history, Sanders pointed out.

“We hear a lot of talk about transfer of wealth – ‘oh my god, we can’t tax the rich and transfer wealth. Terrible, terrible,’” he said, mocking lawmakers who refuse to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy. “But there has been, over the last many decades, a huge transfer of wealth. The only problem is, it’s gone in the wrong direction – from working families to the top 1 percent.”

The concentration of wealth in the United States is extreme. The top 1 percent of wealthiest Americans own more wealth than the bottom 92 percent of earners, Sanders said, while the two richest people in the U.S. – Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk – own more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of the population. Indeed, a report in January found that while millions of people have died due to COVID, the 20 richest men in the world have doubled their wealth during the pandemic.

The Vermont senator sarcastically suggested that the Senate should recognize billionaires in the same way that it recognizes football players like Tom Brady or Olympic athletes for their achievements. “Maybe the time is approaching when we should offer a unanimous resolution congratulating the billionaire class for their enormous success in moving this country into the oligarchic form of society that they have long desired,” he said.

The lawmaker concluded by saying that Congress should start voting on individual issues that are popular among the American people, like lower prescription drug prices, expanding Medicare to include dental, vision and hearing, or putting taxes on corporations and the wealthy so they pay their “fair share.”

“The time is long, long, long overdue for Congress to start addressing the needs of the American people,” he said. “Maybe, just maybe, we should do what the American people want, and not what wealthy campaign contributors want.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 16, 2022

Biden Is Reportedly Requesting Over $770 Billion for Defense for 2023

President Joe Biden is expected to request Congress to allocate over $770,000,000,000 for defense for fiscal year 2023, according to anonymous sources, as first reported by Reuters.

This would be at least $17 billion higher than the defense budget requested by the Biden administration for 2022, which was already colossal. Biden’s request is also much higher than the $740 billion that Trump requested for 2021 and the $639 billion that Trump requested for 2018 during his first year in office.

Officials are still negotiating the final amount, the sources said, meaning that the budget could end up changing in the coming months. The budget for the Pentagon is roughly in line with what Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has requested, and the overall budget would be used for salaries, nuclear weapons programs, tanks and Lockheed Martin’s F-35 aircraft.

Defense contractors Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics Corp. and others would also benefit greatly, Reuters reported.

Though $770 billion is already sky-high, the budget may end up being even higher by the time it gets passed by Congress later in the year, one source said. Indeed, in 2021, Congress ended up adding several billion more on top of Biden’s request for fiscal year 2022, bringing the total to a whopping $778 billion.

While the defense budget balloons, the rest of Biden’s agenda has died in the Senate due to the concerns of so-called budget hawks saying that $350 billion a year for crucial social spending to save many lower- and middle- income Americans from financial ruin, as progressives had suggested in the Build Back Better Act, is too expensive.

Provisions to address actual national threats like the climate crisis have also been put on the backburner, with billions of dollars for renewable technologies and other measures put in limbo thanks to conservative Democrats’ rejection of the Build Back Better Act.

Hundreds of billions of dollars of the reportedly proposed budget will go to the Pentagon, which has never once passed an audit and has a history of losing track of hundreds of millions of dollars. The country is currently not officially engaged in any wars, though rampant U.S. militarism still continues throughout the world. Meanwhile, a huge portion of the budget will also likely end up in the hands of private defense contractors, who in turn make billions in profits each year.

In the 20 years following 9/11, the U.S. has spent $21 trillion on militarization at home and abroad.

$21 trillion could have funded nationwide renewables, millions of jobs, erased student debt, and more—but instead, just caused suffering around the world.

No one wins in war.

— Institute for Policy Studies (@IPS_DC) February 16, 2022

The news comes just after the Biden administration announced, in the wake of the U.S.’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, that it is freezing $7 billion of the country’s frozen reserves that are held in U.S. banks and redistributing half of them to 9/11 victims rather than giving them to Afghan families in need. The U.S. has had a direct role in humanitarian crises in Afghanistan, and the decision was condemned by advocacy groups. None of the planners or 9/11 hijackers were Afghan; and progressives, like Rep. Ilhan Omar, have noted that “Even if this weren’t the case, punishing millions of starving people] for these crimes is unconscionable.”

“This decision is short sighted, cruel, and will serve to worsen a catastrophe in progress, affecting millions of Afghans, many of whom are on the verge of starvation,” Afghans For A Better Tomorrow said. “Let us be clear: all of the $7.1 billion in reserves belongs, rightfully, to the people of Afghanistan and ought to be used to allow the Central Bank of Afghanistan (or Da Afghanistan Bank, DAB) to perform its basic functions.”

News of the potential budget request also comes as the escalating Ukraine-Russia conflict remains unresolved. On Tuesday, Biden said that he plans to approach the situation with diplomacy, but also said that the U.S. is “ready to respond decisively” in the event of an attack. Public intellectual Noam Chomsky has observed that the U.S. has already been “vigorously fanning the flames” of conflict.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 16, 2022

Unionizing REI Workers Launch Petition to Combat Company’s Intimidation Campaign

Unionizing REI workers in Manhattan have launched a petition requesting that the outdoor equipment company stop its union busting campaign.

REI retail workers in SoHo filed to unionize last month after the company refused to voluntarily recognize the union. Even though the company consistently touts its supposed progressive values and cooperative working environment, the company has pulled out intimidation tactics and other anti-union moves in recent weeks.

In the petition, REI Union SoHo says that their employer has been forcing workers to attend anti-union meetings with company executives as well as one-on-one meetings with management. Management has posted “an excessive amount” of anti-union flyers to crowd out the union’s flyers, and has evidently suspended promotion opportunities, according to the union.

“Despite all of these scare tactics, we are more united than ever in our belief that a union is the best way forward for all of us,” the workers wrote to REI CEO Eric Artz. “We, the workers of REI Union SoHo, deserve a free and fair union election. We are calling on REI to immediately halt all union-busting practices, and to remain neutral as workers vote on union representation.”

The workers have filed for representation with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). If they are successful, the REI workers will form the company’s first union.

Though the company touts that it’s a “Co-Op” between workers and customers, employees say management often doesn’t hold true to its purported values.

Workers say that they need union representation due to unsafe working conditions during the pandemic and “a tangible shift in the culture at work that doesn’t seem to align with the values that brought most of us here,” organizer Graham Gale said in a statement last month.

Much like Starbucks organizers have done, REI Union SoHo has quoted the company’s own supposed values against it as executives attempt to union bust.

“We believe a union will benefit us for several familiar reasons. First, *we go further together*. To us, that means employees need a seat at the table to collaboratively develop our agreements with you,” the workers wrote in a Twitter thread last month. “We know that with a union, we’ll all be able to *hold ourselves to a higher standard* by continuing to set an example for the rest of the retail industry as a company that respects the voices of its staff at all levels.”

“Frankly, we love REI,” the workers said. “Collectively, we have decided that a union is the best way to guarantee that REI continues to be a workplace we love.”

Progressive customers have been frustrated with the company’s union busting — frustration that intensified last week when the company released a 25-minute podcast on its anti-union website in which Artz co-opted the language of Indigenous and LGBTQ social movements to argue against unionization. Like many union busters before him, Artz insists that the company is pro-union — just not for its own employees.

Similarly to Starbucks’s anti-union website, REI’s site is chock full of misinformation about unions and contains vague threats about how any union contract resulting from negotiations might end up cutting hours or benefits for employees – which would likely only happen because the company didn’t offer a fair contract.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 16, 2022

Eight GOP Senators Write Letter Complaining About No-Fly List for Anti-Maskers

A group of eight GOP senators are opposing the creation of a federal no-fly list for “unruly passengers” because it would affect those opposed to mask mandates.

The Republicans wrote a letter to the Justice Department this week citing their “strong opposition” to putting passengers convicted of unruly behavior on an aircraft on a federal no-fly list. “Creating a federal ‘no-fly’ list for unruly passengers who are skeptical of this mandate would seemingly equate them to terrorists who seek to actively take the lives of Americans and perpetrate attacks on the homeland,” the lawmakers wrote.

The number of reports of unruly passengers has multiplied during the pandemic, often creating unsafe conditions for travelers and airline employees. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, the vast majority of these reports in 2021 were mask-related incidents. Of 5,981 reports, 4,290 of them were mask-related — likely due to passengers who refused to wear a mask on a flight.

Signatories of the letter included Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Marco Rubio (R-Florida) and Rick Scott (R-Florida).

Delta requested the creation of a federal no-fly list earlier this month to help send a message to anti-mask passengers, potentially preventing future incidents of disruptive behaviors or assaults. Airlines already maintain their own no-fly lists; Delta CEO Ed Bastian says that the company’s list has 1,900 people on it.

Last week, anti-mask passengers caused the diversion of two American Airline flights, and a Delta passenger had to be physically restrained after attempting to open the emergency door while in flight, endangering the lives of everyone on board. The unruly passenger said he tried to open the door to provoke other passengers to film him spouting his views on COVID vaccines.

A survey released by the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA in July of last year found that 85 percent of flight attendants had dealt with unruly passengers in 2021, with more than half experiencing at least five incidents. One in five flight attendants had experienced a “physical incident.”

The flight attendant’s union has also called for putting such passengers on a federal no-fly list because passengers could simply book a flight on a different airline after being banned. The union criticized the Republicans’ letter.

“Get serious. Homeland security is homeland security. Our flights are under attack by a small number of people and it has to stop,” said Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, in a statement.

“We’ve been punched, kicked, spit on, and sexually assaulted. This puts everyone at risk and disrupts the safety of flight, which is never acceptable and every single one of the Senators who signed this letter knows full well what is at stake if we leave a gap in aviation safety and security. It is irresponsible and political brinkmanship that will put our economic security at risk right along with our lives.”

However, human rights groups have raised legitimate concerns about the creation of such lists, as they have historically led to racial profiling and religious discrimination with the supposed goal of preventing terrorism. During the Obama administration, over 47,000 people were on the terrorist no-fly list, despite that many added to government watchlists had “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” Moreover, the list was secretive, meaning that citizens wouldn’t even know they were on the list until they were prevented from flying.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 15, 2022

Companies Who Stopped Donations After January 6 Used Lobbyists to Give Instead

After 147 Republican lawmakers voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, major corporations like Amazon and Google pledged to stop donating to election objectors or stop political giving altogether. New reporting from Politico finds that many of these companies technically kept their promises – because they dispatched their lobbyists to make donations for them instead.

Lobbyists for Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta (formerly known as Facebook), Allstate, Toyota, Nike, Dow Chemical Company, and more publicly announced that they would stop donating to election objectors or that they would review their donation policies after some Republican lawmakers voted not to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election, following months of former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the election had been stolen from him.

But since corporations benefit greatly from giving to politicians who in turn back policies like keeping corporate taxes low, they used their lobbyists to get around these pledges; individual lobbyists can make personal donations on behalf of companies without being officially affiliated with the companies in campaign filings.

Overall, staff from at least 13 companies with donation pledges gave to election objectors in 2021, Politico found, totalling over $28,000.

Some of the Republicans who received those donations are set to take on leadership positions if their party takes back the House in the midterm elections this year, meaning that the donations could end up playing a role in shaping legislation that will be considered in Congress over the next few years.

According to Politico’s analysis, lobbyists for Microsoft gave the most among major tech companies; corporate vice president of U.S. government affairs Fred Humphries gave $2,500 to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) and $1,000 to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). Microsoft Congressional Affairs director Allison Halataei, meanwhile, gave $1,000 to Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah).

In spite of those donations – or perhaps because they thought the donations would ultimately fly under the radar – Microsoft reiterated its pledge to stop all political donations in 2022.

Overall, lobbyists for tech companies gave over $16,000 in donations to 11 different Republicans, Politico found, even as they stuck by their pledges in the public eye.

“It clearly is a workaround,” government ethics expert for Public Citizen Craig Holman told Politico. “If a company is serious about not giving a campaign contribution to insurrectionists, then they can’t allow people who are in senior executive positions who represent the company to make those same contributions. And that would include the CEO as well as the lobbyists of the company.”

While it appears that some companies are trying to conceal donations to election objectors, many others broke their pledges outright last year. Companies including General Motors, Lockheed Martin, UPS, Duke Energy, and more broke their pledges and gave thousands to objectors. Some of these broken pledges are especially egregious – Toyota, for instance, gave $55,000 in the first seven months of 2021 alone.

Popular Information has reported that company pledges against political donations have been largely successful – corporate PAC donations to election objectors are down about 60 percent in comparison to the last election cycle.

However, many companies may have simply shifted their donations onto lobbyists, meaning that it’s difficult to know exactly how these pledges have changed the donation landscape – and it’s possible that they’ve even pushed an already opaque election finance system even further into the dark.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 15, 2022

Ocasio-Cortez Says Canceling Student Debt Should Be Top Priority for Biden

In a new interview, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said that President Joe Biden’s top priority should be to use his executive powers to cancel student debt as the rest of his agenda is stalled in the Senate.

Speaking with The New Yorker, Ocasio-Cortez said that canceling student debt would be a “keystone action” for the administration, both politically and economically, and that Biden should be bolder in exercising his executive authority.

When asked what Biden should do first in response to the Senate gridlock brought on by conservative Democrats, she said, “One of the single most impactful things President Biden can do is pursue student loan cancellation. It’s entirely within his power.”

Ocasio-Cortez emphasized that student debt cancellation would help huge swaths of the country, and warned that Biden could risk losing key voters if he refuses to take action.

“This really isn’t a conversation about providing relief to a small, niche group of people,” she said. “And I can’t underscore how much the hesitancy of the Biden Administration to pursue student loan cancellation has demoralized a very critical voting block that the President, the House, and the Senate need in order to have any chance at preserving any of our majority.”

Later in the interview, Ocasio-Cortez warned that current political infighting and obstruction could cost the country its democracy within the next decade. “My concern is that we’re getting into analysis paralysis, and we don’t have much time. We should really not take this present political moment for granted, and do everything that we can,” she said.

On the campaign trail, Biden pledged to cancel up to $10,000 of student debt per borrower. But his administration has been dragging its feet on the issue even though legal experts say that Biden has the authority to relieve student loans. This has greatly frustrated Democratic lawmakers and debt activists, who have speculated that Biden simply doesn’t want to cancel student debt, despite the vast popularity of the idea among his party.

Prominent members of Congress, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), have been campaigning for student loan cancellation under Biden for over a year now. Rallying with activists, Schumer said last week that he was confident the push will eventually be successful.

Proposals to cancel student debt are popular among the electorate. Recent polling from Data for Progress found that 63 percent of likely voters across all parties support canceling all or some student debt for borrowers. Democrats are especially in favor of the idea, with a whopping 88 percent of respondents saying that they favor canceling debt.

Further, 38 percent of Democratic voters said that the federal government should eliminate all student debt for every borrower, a measure that goes further than the $10,000 or even $50,000 in debt cancellation that some Democrats have proposed. Cancellation of student debt across the board has been championed by debt activists and more radical lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).

Cancel it. Every penny. https://t.co/oiwPxi9xRO

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) February 15, 2022

With student loan payments resuming in May, student debt activists are planning a day of action in April to urge Biden to “pick up the pen” and cancel student debt.

“All President Biden has to do to cancel student debt is sign an executive order,” said Debt Collective co-founder Astra Taylor in a statement. “He made a promise on the campaign trail and debtors are going to make sure he keeps it. Turning student debt payments on in the middle of a public health emergency and an election year would be both cruel and politically suicidal and debtors won’t stand for it.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 15, 2022

Sen. Rick Scott Blocks Vote on USPS Reform Bill Alleviating Billions in Debt

Republican Sen. Rick Scott (Florida) shot down Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-New York) attempt to bring a bipartisan bill to alleviate billions of dollars of debt for the United States Postal Service (USPS) to a swift vote on Monday.

The Postal Service Reform Act, which the House passed last week, gives the USPS’s finances much-needed reforms, forgiving $57 billion of its over $200 billion in liabilities. Critically, the bill gets rid of a requirement that the agency pre-pay Medicare costs for employees decades before they retire, which has kept the agency in debt for many years.

Schumer requested that the Senate bring the legislation to the floor via unanimous consent to make a small revision to correct a clerical error in the bill. Scott’s objection to the procedure will cause delays, which is “regrettable,” Schumer said.

“Even though this will delay the bill, we will pass it. We will have to just go through this elaborate process, the old fashioned and often discredited rules of the Senate that the senator from Florida’s employing,” Schumer said. “But we will pass this bill because America needs it.”

Because Scott blocked unanimous consent to fix the error, the bill could be delayed for another few weeks. As the Washington Post’s Jacob Bogage pointed out, the easiest path for the bill would be to send it back to the House to fix the error and then send it back to the Senate. But this would prolong the process to at least March.

Scott claimed that he supports the bill, but that he thinks it should undergo a slower process through the Senate. In a press release on Monday, however, he said that he believes the provision to help dig the USPS out of debt would supposedly harm Medicare – although no other agency is required to pay Medicare decades in advance like the USPS is.

In reality, Scott is likely trying to keep the Postal Service in debt as a means of advancing the larger conservative goal of defunding the agency and perhaps eventually privatizing it. GOP lawmakers have also attacked and attempted to delegitimize the USPS for years to throw doubt on the mail-in voting system, which Republicans claim helps Democrats win elections. Indeed, ahead of the 2020 election, Scott introduced legislation that would have effectively invalidated a huge portion of mail-in votes in future elections.

However, Scott’s delay may end up frustrating both Republicans and Democrats alike. The bill passed the House on a widely bipartisan basis, with a 342 to 92 vote margin. GOP members view the legislation as an endorsement of conservative Postmaster Louis DeJoy’s 10-year plan to slow service and increase costs for the agency, which has garnered fierce opposition from Democrats and the public.

Still, the bill’s reforms are vital for the long-term health of the agency, Democrats have said. Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-New York), who introduced the bill, praised its passage in the House last week. “These reforms ensure the Postal Service continues as an independently operated organization that Americans can continue to rely on for the years to come,” she said.

The bill has the support of at least 14 Republican senators, meaning that it likely has enough votes in the Senate to pass when it eventually comes to a vote.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 14, 2022

Tesla May Pay $0 in Federal Taxes This Year, According to Its Financial Filings

Tesla will likely owe $0 in federal income taxes this year, despite reporting billions of dollars of profits to its shareholders for 2021, according to recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.

As first reported by CNN, Tesla has said that its U.S. operations lost $130 million pre-taxes – meaning that the company will likely be able to avoid paying federal income taxes on its record profits of $5.5 billion that it reported to shareholders for 2021.

The company, which is valued at over $900 billion, claimed that its profits came from overseas, even though 45 percent of its revenue last year came from sales in the U.S.

It’s unclear whether the vast majority of the company’s profits actually came from overseas, as the company reported. Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), says that Tesla is too young and hasn’t turned a profit for long enough to be able to tell whether or not the company is structured in a way that enables it to exploit offshore tax loopholes, as many corporations do.

However, parts of the company’s structure – like its three subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands – are “a definite eyebrow raiser from a tax avoidance perspective,” Gardner told Truthout. “It suggests to me that the company might be trying to shift its income offshore.”

It’s possible that the reason why the company is claiming that overseas profits are much more of a boon than U.S. profits is because it’s true; the company did indeed make a large portion of its profits from China last year. But Tesla could also be making this claim falsely because it gives the company the ability to shift those profits overseas, where they may be subject to lower tax rates.

“That’s a completely plausible alternative reason why they’d say, ‘we’ll never turn a profit in the U.S.’” Gardner said. “But the quiet part of that statement – ‘we’ll never turn a profit in the U.S.’ – is ‘because we know we’re always going to shift our profits somewhere else.’”

Purposefully structuring its finances and corporation in this way would make Tesla’s filings similar to that of the “dozens of other companies that I’ve seen making similar disclosures with a similarly suspicious allocation of income between the US and every other nation,” Gardner said. However, Gardner also emphasized that there’s no way to know whether Tesla is doing this for sure without getting further confirmation from its tax filings or other details.

Exploiting overseas tax loopholes in order to dodge taxes is an incredibly common practice among U.S. corporations. According to a 2014 report, the U.S. loses out on $90 billion a year in income taxes as a result of these loopholes.

Progressive lawmakers say that the fact that a corporate giant like Tesla can avoid paying federal taxes domestically is a reason to reform the U.S. tax code. “Tesla and other giant corporations have long used scams and loopholes to help them get out of paying taxes — that has to stop,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) told CNN. “Democrats are working to end Republican tax cuts for corporations shifting profits and jobs overseas.”

Tesla joins a number of other huge corporations that will be able to dodge taxes this year despite posting sky-high profits. In a report published last week, Gardner wrote that Amazon will only pay an effective tax rate of 6.1 percent for 2021, essentially dodging $5.2 billion in federal income taxes.

Tesla’s filings come as the company is facing a lawsuit filed by the state of California. The state alleges that workers at the company’s California manufacturing plant face rampant racism at work.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 14, 2022

Starbucks Launches Propaganda-Filled Anti-Union Website

As more and more Starbucks locations file for unionization each week, the company has launched a new anti-union website full of misinformation and propaganda against unionization.

“We are one Starbucks” reads the top of the website’s landing page. Throughout the website, the company brags about its supposed progressive values and about its treatment of employees – who the company calls “partners” – and encourages workers to do their own research on unionization. Then, on pages entitled “frequently asked questions,” “10 things to know about a union,” and others, the company parrots anti-union talking points that union-busting companies frequently use to discourage organizing efforts.

The website claims that Starbucks is encouraging workers to vote “no” on the union because a union would drive a wedge between management and employees – something that organizers say the company has already done on its own by not listening to partners when they bring up concerns about the workplace. The company also uses the website to defend their decision to hire at least 30 union-busting lawyers to combat the union drive, saying that they want to do everything legally.

The website even claims that the company is “meeting and exceeding all COVID safety measures,” even though unionizing stores across the country have almost uniformly said that the company has failed to provide a safe working environment in regards to COVID-19.

The website comes as workers are filing for unionization at a rapid rate. More than 80 stores have filed to unionize so far, and the company appears to have become increasingly desperate to bust the union efforts. Last week, it fired seven workers in a unionizing store in Memphis, Tennessee; Starbucks Workers United says that these workers represented the entirety of the store’s organizing committee.

In what appears to be an attempt to vilify organizing workers, the company poses and answers a supposedly “frequently asked question” on the website: “What can I do if another partner won’t leave me alone about supporting a union?” It answers the question by saying that pro-union workers can sometimes “be annoying” in discussing unionization, and encourages workers to talk to management or call a company hotline to talk about an organizer or otherwise.

Under a section called “How Voting Works,” an employee named Tatiana says in a video that a union would compromise workers’ voices in the workplace – which is the antithesis of what unions typically set out to do. “Do you wish to continue to have your voice used independently? Or do you want your voice to be represented by a union?” asks Tatiana. The video is filmed in front of the Delaware and Chippewa store in Buffalo, New York, which filed for unionization in late January.

The video then directs workers on how to mail in their ballots for their union election. “Vote no if you want to continue your direct relationship with Starbucks and pay no dues to the union. Vote yes if you want to pay dues and have a union represent you,” Tatiana narrates before checking “no” on the sample ballot.

The company also paints the union as revenue-seeking, emphasizing in the “frequently asked questions” section of the website that a union would collect dues. This, and saying that the union would take away workers’ voices, is a classic union-busting technique.

These messages are just two of the anti-union claims that the company spouts on the website; workers say that the company has been pushing similar talking points on employees in unionizing stores. Starbucks has been waging a brash anti-union campaign for months, holding mandatory anti-union meetings with employees and attempting to interfere with union elections.

The company is currently in the process of starting its first contract negotiations with its Genesee Street and Elmwood stores, two unionized locations in Buffalo, New York, where workers anticipate a tough fight ahead. Starbucks is using the contract negotiation as leverage, telling workers at non-unionized stores to wait for a finalized contract before deciding to vote on the union – a process which the company could drag out for years.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 14, 2022

Abortions in Texas Fell 60 Percent in First Month of Ban, New Data Shows

Texas’s abortion rate fell by 60 percent in the month after the state’s abortion ban was enacted, according to data released last week by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.

In August of 2021, providers reported performing about 5,404 induced terminations, or abortions, for Texas residents in the state. After the ban went into effect on the 1st of September, effectively nullifying Roe v. Wade in Texas, providers reported performing only 2,197 abortions that month – about a 60 percent reduction from August’s rate.

September’s rate is also a sharp reduction from the same time the previous year; in September of 2020, providers reported performing 4,511 abortions, or about two times the number of abortions done in September 2021. This is about on par with what researchers found in October of last year.

The agency says that it will be releasing more data from 2021 on a monthly basis, though the numbers may not be uniform because enforcement of the ban has wavered; after it went into effect in September, the policy was struck down by courts and reinstated. However, the policy is likely to stick around indefinitely for now.

Texas’s abortion ban, which was passed by Republican lawmakers last year, is the most restrictive abortion law in effect in the country. The law bans abortion after cardiac activity can be detected, about six weeks into a pregnancy; this time frame has no scientific basis and is so early on in the pregancy that most people don’t even know they’re pregnant. The law doesn’t provide exceptions for cases of rape or incest.

The law is especially cruel because it places the onus of enforcement on private individuals rather than the state, allowing private citizens to sue medical providers that violate the law for $10,000 or more. This essentially dispatches anti-abortion vigilantes to hunt down anyone who has helped an individual get an abortion, including abortion providers or even Uber drivers.

Abortion providers say that the law has cast a widespread chilling effect on medical professionals in the state. One Texas provider told The Lily, for instance, that he used to perform up to 30 abortions a day – but now that the ban is in place, he only performs two or three abortions a day.

Instead, patients have had to travel out of state in order to obtain the procedure. Planned Parenthood centers in surrounding states saw a 1,082 percent increase in patients with Texas zip codes in September of 2021 over the previous two years.

Because providers in the states immediately surrounding Texas, like Oklahoma and Louisiana, have been heavily booked as a result of the ban, Texas residents have had to travel even further to have the procedure done.

In November, the Guttmacher Institute found that Texans have traveled to Illinois, Ohio, Washington, Maryland and other states in order to obtain abortions. A clinic in Tennessee, which is nearly a thousand miles away from Texas, said that it saw double the amount of patients from Texas in September than it did in all of 2020.

Not only is this a potentially expensive trip for patients, it can also be an especially dangerous trip during the pandemic. People who are pregnant or who have recently been pregnant are at a higher risk of getting severe illness from COVID-19.

Such trips may become far more common if the Supreme Court decides to overturn Roe v. Wade this year, as the Court’s conservative justices seem poised to do. According to the Guttmacher Institute, about 26 states are likely or certain to ban abortion as soon as Roe is no longer in effect. This means that the average American would have to travel 250 miles round trip to access their nearest abortion provider.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 11, 2022

California Sues Tesla Over Alleged Rampant Racism Against Black Employees

The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing is suing auto manufacturer Tesla in light of reports from Black employees at the company’s California manufacturing plant that they have faced rampant racism at work.

According to the lawsuit, Tesla has segregated the manufacturing floor, relegating Black workers to areas that employees call “porch monkey stations,” “the slave ship,” and “the plantation.” Black workers are continually denied promotions and training, and are the only workers who have had to do work like scrubbing floors on their hands and knees, the suit says.

Fellow workers often hurl racial slurs at Black employees, and managers say the n-word constantly, the lawsuit claims. At least one worker has reported hearing racial slurs as often as 50 to 100 times a day, according to the filing.

Even in the bathroom, Black workers face racism, the lawsuit alleges. Racist graffiti like “hang [n-word],” “all monkeys work outside,” swastikas and KKK symbols have been carved into the walls, where they allegedly remained for months before the company finally cleaned them up.

“These numerous complaints by Black and/or African American workers about racial harassment, racial discrimination, and retaliation lodged over a span of almost a decade have been futile,” the lawsuit reads. “Tesla has continued to deflect and evade responsibility. While it claims to not tolerate racial harassment or discrimination at its factories, Tesla’s investigations of complaints are not compliant with law.”

The agency’s director, Kevin Kish, told the Los Angeles Times that this is the largest racial discrimination lawsuit ever brought by the state. The agency has been investigating the company for three years.

The company has responded to the lawsuit by saying that the allegations happened only over the course of a few years and that the agency has investigated and dismissed discrimination cases at the company before – a claim that the agency has denied. Tesla has also said that it plans on requesting a pause in the case.

The agency said in its lawsuit that the discrimination started as early as 2012, only a year after the plant opened, and still continues today.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is allegedly aware of these issues, but has been dismissive of them. In an email sent to workers in 2017, The New York Times found that Musk warned workers against “being a huge jerk” to “less represented” workers, but emphasized that the workers facing abuse should be forgiving.

“[I]f someone is a jerk to you, but sincerely apologizes, it is important to be thick-skinned and accept that apology,” Musk reportedly wrote.

None of the company’s executives are Black, according to the lawsuit. Instead, while Black people are overrepresented in the company’s contracted workforce, they are “severely under-represented” as managers, senior officials and other higher paying, more influential roles.

When workers speak up about facing racism and harassment, they are often subject to “retaliatory harassment, undesirable assignments, and/or termination, especially since [Tesla’s] human resource personnel charged with addressing the complaints were allegedly close to the harassers,” according to the lawsuit.

An anonymous Tesla worker told More Perfect Union last year that they faced repeated harassment from a coworker, who announced in front of a production line of 50 workers that she was going to beat them up in the parking lot; later on, the human resources department told the worker that they were at fault for the incident.

The department didn’t investigate the alleged harassment, the worker said – and when the department asked the majority-white witnesses what had happened, white employees sided with the alleged harasser.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 11, 2022

Labor Caucus Calls for Passage of PRO Act to Stop Starbucks’s Union Busting

The Congressional Labor Caucus has called on the Senate to pass a sweeping bill that would strengthen U.S. labor laws in response to Starbucks’s increasingly brazen union-busting tactics over the past weeks.

The House representatives are demanding the passage of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, a bill championed by the labor movement that would make it easier for workers to organize and form unions.

“We have had it with corporate spokespeople and lobbyists saying they’re pro-worker when asking for meetings on Capitol Hill, while at the same time using every trick in the book to stop unionizing efforts cold in their tracks,” the caucus said in a statement. “Workers have the right to organize – it’s time they had a level playing field to do so.”

The House passed the legislation last March, but due to uniform opposition from the GOP and several Democratic holdouts in the Senate, including Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona), it currently stands little chance of passing into law.

Lawmakers in favor of the PRO Act have lamented the weak state of the country’s labor laws.

“There hasn’t been any real meaningful change in labor law in over half a century,” Labor Caucus Co-Chair Rep. Donald Norcross (D-New Jersey) told Truthout. When it comes to union-busting moves like Starbucks’s mass firing of what the union says was the entire organizing team at a Memphis store, “there is no real recourse in terms of punitive damages,” he went on.

Starbucks Workers United has filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over the terminations, calling the firings the company’s “most blatant act of union-busting yet.” Norcross called the company’s move an “amateur error,” especially considering that the company has been working with at least 30 lawyers from one of the country’s most notorious union-busting law firms.

“It’s ridiculous. You know, you’re paying eight bucks for a cup of coffee. The CEO made $20 million last year and [the company] won’t even talk to them about organizing to give their employees a voice,” Norcross said. “Stupid is probably the nicest thing I can say about Starbucks right now.”

But even if the NLRB finds that Starbucks violated federal labor laws mandating that companies can’t retaliate against workers for organizing, the punishment for the $100 billion company would be little more than a slap on the wrist. The only liability for Starbucks would be that they would have to give the fired workers back pay, which is no more than the usual cost of operations.

The PRO Act would implement harsher penalties for companies that violate labor laws and would place further restrictions on the actions that companies can take to union bust. Many of its provisions would directly make Starbucks workers’ union campaign easier – among other things, the bill would outlaw captive anti-union meetings, which Starbucks has been conducting in stores across the country.

Despite the current state of labor laws, however, the company’s attempts to break up organizing efforts may still backfire. The firing is “more empowering than anything for those workers,” Norcross said.

Indeed, the day after the terminations, workers in Oklahoma City said in their union campaign announcement letter to CEO Kevin Johnson that the firings only added fuel to the fire of their movement.

“This termination was blatant retaliation, and while it was meant to discourage the formation of the committee we are announcing today, it has only emboldened us and highlighted the need for this union even more,” the workers wrote. Several stores have filed to unionize since the termination, bringing the current total to about 80 locations.

The more attention the union campaign gets, the more support it seems to pick up. On Thursday, four New York City area stores filed to unionize – and with their campaign announcements, 76 New York lawmakers, including members of Congress like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D), signed a letter to Johnson asking the company to adhere to non-interference principles laid out by the union.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 10, 2022

Black Congresswomen Urge Biden to Pick Civil Rights Champion for Supreme Court

A group of Black women in Congress led by Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) sent a letter to President Joe Biden on Thursday, applauding his pledge to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court and urging him to choose someone with a strong civil rights record.

“The nomination of a Black woman is not mere symbolism; it is an essential step for our country’s promise of justice for all,” the group wrote. “It is therefore of utmost importance that the Administration appoints a Black woman with a strong track record of advancing civil and constitutionally protected rights and whose work has shown dedication to affirming the rights of our country’s most marginalized communities.”

As the lawmakers pointed out, there are zero Black women in the Senate, where the nominee will be considered. If Biden holds to his promise and a Black woman is confirmed by the chamber, she will be the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court. She would also be the sixth woman to serve as a justice in the court’s history.

“History shows that the appointment of a Black justice with a strong record of affirming constitutional rights is crucial in confronting this country’s racial, civil rights, and democratic crises,” the lawmakers wrote. “As we approach this historic appointment to the Supreme Court, during a time of similarly long standing and unprecedented crises, the American people will be well served with the appointment of a Black woman to the bench who has an equally powerful record of advancing civil rights.”

The lawmakers cited cases that have been transformative for civil rights, like Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. They also cited Shelley v. Kraemer, in which justices ruled that it is unconstitutional to prevent someone from owning property in certain covenants based on their race.

Black scholars have also spoken out about this issue, pointing out that representation has its limits if the person who is nominated isn’t willing to fight for the people that they represent. Progressive lawmakers have called for a nominee who is committed to advancing issues of justice.

“Of course, there is just an absolute abundance of legal genius, and Black women legal genius in this country, so I also think we need to make sure that the nominee is also advancing the administration’s values,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) recently told The Independent. “That they’re pro-labor, that they will be a champion for voting rights and for protection of people’s ability to vote and also organize their workplace, among many other things.”

Progressives have been wary of some of Biden’s picks so far, citing their previous rulings on issues like climate, labor and the criminal legal system.

Labor groups have raised concerns about one of Biden’s leading picks, Judge J. Michelle Childs, because she has a history as a management-side lawyer, working on behalf of employers who were facing allegations of racism or union busting. As a district court judge, Childs has ruled against incarcerated people who alleged that they were facing abusive conditions; some of those rulings were so punitive that they were eventually overturned.

Instead, progressive advocates have said that someone like Appeals Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would be a strong choice; as Truthout previously reported, if appointed, she would be the only Supreme Court justice to have represented criminal defendants since Thurgood Marshall, who retired from the Court in 1991.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 10, 2022

Pharma-Funded Republican Blocks Sanders’s Demand for Vote on Drug Price Bill

On Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) demanded on the Senate floor that the chamber immediately take up debate on his and Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s (D-Minnesota) new bill to lower prescription drug prices – but the effort was blocked by a pharmaceutical industry-backed Republican senator.

Sanders and Klobuchar asked for unanimous consent for the Senate to debate and vote on the Cutting Medicare Prescription Drug Prices in Half Act, which would allow Medicare to access the same low drug prices that are enjoyed by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

This would save some Medicare recipients hundreds or thousands of dollars monthly, depending on their medical needs. According to a Government Accountability Office report from 2020, Veterans Affairs’s prices are 49 percent lower for name brand drugs and 68 percent lower for generic drugs.

“For decades, literally decades – 20, 30, 40 years – members of both political parties have come to the floor of the Senate, come to the floor of the House, and they have bemoaned the high cost of prescription drugs in this country,” Sanders said in an impassioned speech on the House floor. “For decades now, members of Congress have been talking about lowering the cost of prescription drugs. And for decades they have failed to deliver. Talk, talk, talk. Nothing happens.”

Growing wealth inequality during the pandemic – which has now killed over 900,000 Americans – has demonstrated the urgency of making prescription drugs more accessible, Sanders continued. He also pointed out that rising prices for essentials like prescription drugs, which cost more in the U.S. than in any other country, are making it harder for lower- and middle-income families to survive.

“During this pandemic alone, just the last few years, the billionaire class saw an increase in their wealth by some $2 trillion,” he said. “While at the same time, thousands of workers died as they went to their jobs. They didn’t have a choice about it. They went to work, and they died.”

Republican Sen. Mike Crapo (Idaho) blocked the effort, complaining that it would add “more bureaucracy.” Over the past election cycle, Crapo has received nearly $300,000 from the pharmaceutical industry.

Democrats and progressives have been aggressively pursuing legislation to lower prescription drug prices. Sanders fought for months to include drug price reforms in the Build Back Better Act, making calls and introducing bills to move the issue along.

Eventually, the prescription drug pricing plans were watered down, thanks to opposition from pharmaceutical industry allies like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona), along with a group of conservative Democrats in the House whose top donors are the pharmaceutical and health care industry.

Then – after a pharma-funded group hosted Democratic staffers at a retreat in November – the Build Back Better Act died an unceremonious death after months were wasted on negotiations.

Though prescription drug pricing proposals face opposition from pharma-funded lawmakers from both sides of the aisle, polls find that such bills are overwhelmingly popular with the American public. In October, a CBS News poll found that 88 percent of Americans support lowering prescription drug prices using federal funding.

This is likely because millions of Americans can’t afford to buy drugs that have been prescribed to them. In a Gallup poll from last year, about 10 percent of adults living in low-income households reported skipping pills in order to save money.

Not only are drug prices higher in the U.S. than in other countries, the problem has also been worsening over time. This year, pharmaceutical companies raised drug prices by an average of 6.6 percent, hiking costs for 866 drugs.

Part of the reason why it’s so difficult to move drug pricing reform through Congress is because the pharmaceutical industry is perhaps the single most powerful industry in politics. Last year, it spent nearly $353 million on lobbying, the most of any industry. This is nearly double the amount spent by the electronics manufacturing and equipment industry, which spent the second-most on lobbying in 2021, shelling out a total of $185 million.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 10, 2022

Warren, Jayapal Introduce Bill Banning Members of Congress From Trading Stock

On Wednesday, a bipartisan, bicameral group of legislators introduced a bill that would ban members of Congress and their spouses from owning and trading stocks.

The Bipartisan Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act is the first bipartisan stock trading ban to be introduced in the Senate. The bill was introduced by Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Steve Daines (R-Montana) and Representatives Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and Matt Rosendale (R-Montana). Two Senate Republicans have also cosponsored the bill.

The proposal goes further than previous bills, forcing members of Congress and their spouses to divest from all stocks other than widely held, diversified investment funds like mutual funds. Such investments could still be traded as long as there are no conflicts of interest. If members are found violating the law, they would be fined up to $50,000 per infraction.

This legislation goes a step further than the bill introduced by Senators Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) and Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) last month, which bans stock trading for lawmakers and their families but allows them to retain ownership of their stock portfolios as long as they are put in a blind trust while lawmakers are in office. If a lawmaker is familiar with their portfolio, in other words, they could still influence their stocks even if they aren’t in direct control of them.

The bipartisan bill’s sponsors emphasized that the proposal is a critical measure to increase transparency and trust in Congress.

“No one should ever have to wonder whether their Member of Congress is working for the public interest or their own financial interest,” Warren said.

Jayapal said that the bill could reduce corruption in the legislative branch. “Members of Congress were elected to serve the people, not their personal financial interests. But as long as members and spouses are allowed to hold and trade stocks, we keep the door open to corruption – and that cannot stand,” she said. “It’s good policy, and it’s simply the right thing to do.”

The Project On Government Oversight (POGO), a government watchdog, praised the bill, noting that stock trading within Congress is an ethical concern. “Capitalizing on their privileged positions and their access to nonpublic information through inappropriate stock trading is one glaring example of this problem,” said Danielle Brian, POGO’s executive director.

Warren has previously introduced legislation that would also bar top federal officials like judges from trading stocks, but currently, bans on stock trading for members of Congress have the most momentum. Congress has had its fair share of stock trading scandals in the past few years, and reporting has found that members of Congress regularly violate existing stock transparency laws.

With rare bipartisan support in the House and the Senate, and support from the leaders of both chambers, the bill or legislation like it may have a shot at being passed. On Wednesday, Pelosi instructed members of Congress to draft a bill for the ban that she would bring to a vote soon.

Still, the legislation could face a few hurdles. The idea appears to have the support of most Democrats and some Republicans in the House, but Senate Republicans are split on the matter. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) has said that he hasn’t decided either way on the issue, though far right Republican firebrands like Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) have signaled their support for a ban. The bill would need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster in the Senate.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 9, 2022

House Passes Overhaul of Postal Service Budget, Relieves Billions in Debt

On Tuesday, the House passed a bill that relieves tens of billions of dollars of debt for the United States Postal Service (USPS), a financial burden that agency advocates and leaders say has been preventing the agency from operating efficiently for years.

The legislation relieves the agency of $57 billion of its financial liabilities, brought on largely by a requirement imposed in 2006 that the postal service pre-pay Medicare costs for employees decades before they retire. The bill also gets rid of that mandate, which will save the agency an estimated $50 billion more over the next 10 years.

Legislators say that the bill will be transformative for the agency, which has been struggling under debts that have ballooned to over $200 billion in the past decades. USPS leaders have been asking for a change for years, saying that the agency’s financial burdens are barring it from modernizing and making necessary overhauls to its services.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) has said that the Senate will take up the bill before the end of week.

The bill passed on a bipartisan basis, 342 to 92, with all Democrats voting yes. Democrats have said that the bill has the ability to revitalize the Postal Service, which is crucial for mailing things like ballots and medications.

“Today’s historic bipartisan vote brings us one step closer to finally putting the Postal Service on a sound financial footing so it can continue serving all Americans for years to come,” Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-New York), who introduced the bill, said in a statement. “These reforms ensure the Postal Service continues as an independently operated organization that Americans can continue to rely on for the years to come.”

The bill contains transparency measures mandating that the agency create an online dashboard that allows customers to see service performance data. It also requires the agency to deliver mail and packages at least six days a week.

Republicans voted for the bill because they view it as an endorsement of GOP Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and his plans for the agency. DeJoy has incorporated the bill into his 10-year plan for the Postal Service, which has been the subject of widespread derision for its initiatives to slow deliveries while raising prices. The plan took effect last September.

“The Postal Service Reform Act is about the only thing we agree with Louis DeJoy on,” Porter McConnell, campaign director for Take on Wall Street and co-founder of the Save the Post Office Coalition, said in a statement. “Now it’s time for the Senate to pass the bill and send it to the president’s desk.”

Democrats originally wanted to include additional provisions in the bill, like electric vehicle funding and mail-in voting protections. They also wanted to restrict the ability of the postmaster general and the Postal Board to participate in political campaign activities, which has been the subject of scrutiny after reporting revealed that a number of board members have ties to the Republican Party establishment.

The bill was shaved down in negotiations with Republicans, DeJoy and the postal unions, as reforms like voting rights protections would have stood little chance of getting enough Republican approval to pass the Senate.

The USPS recently faced pushback from the Biden administration for its plan to spend billions of dollars on a gas-powered mail fleet despite the White House’s push to electrify the fleet instead. Under the new plan, only 10 percent of the fleet would be electric; the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has pointed out that mail trucks are especially harmful for the climate and local air quality because of how much gas they require to operate.

DeJoy has also faced a years-long campaign to oust him from the agency, with critics citing his complicity in Donald Trump’s plan to invalidate the 2020 election. However, the Postal Board currently doesn’t have the votes to get rid of him, and two of Joe Biden’s Democratic nominations, who could flip the board in favor of replacing DeJoy, are still waiting to be confirmed by the Senate.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 9, 2022

Levin Files Legislation to Approve Congress Workers’ Union With 130 Cosponsors

On Wednesday, Rep. Andy Levin (D-Michigan) filed a resolution that would give the green light to congressional workers seeking to form a union.

The legislation implements existing policies that allow unionization among congressional staffers but that aren’t activated until they’re approved by Congress. If the resolution passes, House staffers will be able to begin petitioning for and forming unions.

“In recent weeks, congressional staff have shared bravely their workplace experiences, good and bad, clearly illustrating their need for the protected right to organize,” Levin said on Wednesday. “Today is about a simple proposition – that congressional staff must enjoy the same fundamental rights of freedom of association at work, to organize and bargain collectively for better conditions, that all workers deserve.”

The resolution has 130 cosponsors, including members of the progressive “squad” like Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) Cori Bush (D-Missouri) and Jamaal Bowman (D-New York). If it is passed, workers will have to unionize office-by-office.

Congressional workers have been organizing for over a year, according to the Congressional Workers Union. The movement recently gained steam when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) spoke out in favor of the organizing workers. Press Secretary Jen Psaki has also said that President Joe Biden supports the union push.

The Congressional Workers Union celebrated Levin’s resolution, adding that it’s time for members of Congress to live up to their professed ideals when it comes to unions and organizing.

“While we welcome the outpouring of support from lawmakers in the days since our organizing launch, we as staff remain exposed to retaliation for our organizing efforts and will remain exposed until the House passes the Resolution,” the workers said in a statement. According to Insider, the organizing workers are all Democrats.

“We urge House leadership, who has voiced support for the union effort, to bring it to the floor for a vote at the earliest opportunity,” they continued. “Now is the time to demonstrate your commitment to all workers – including your own – through action. The world is watching.”

Congressional workers face low wages and poor working conditions that have led to a “brain drain” in Congress, the organizing workers noted. Talented staffers will often go to lobbying firms or take private sector jobs with better pay. As long as staffers’ working conditions remain the same and they are denied a voice in the workplace, the organizers said, they will be unable to serve lawmakers’ constituents to the best of their abilities.

The workers’ effort has garnered support from influential labor leaders like President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA Sara Nelson and American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) President Elizabeth H. Shuler, among others.

Pelosi has yet to say when she will bring the legislation to a vote. During a press conference on Wednesday, she said that House Administration Committee Chair Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-California) should review the legislation. Lofgren has previously voiced support for the union push.

Senate staffers will face a tougher road to unionization, however. In order for Senate workers to unionize, the chamber will have to pass its own resolution allowing offices to form a union.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) is supportive of the union effort. But the resolution would likely have to pass the 60-vote filibuster threshold to be approved, and Republicans, along with conservative Democrat Joe Manchin (West Virginia), have already thrown cold water on the union push.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 9, 2022

Starbucks Fires Seven Union Organizers in Memphis, Sparking Outrage

On Tuesday, Starbucks fired seven workers at a store in Memphis, Tennessee, that recently filed for unionization. The terminated workers make up almost the entirety of the store’s organizing committee, according to the union.

The company claims that it fired workers for violating several safety and security policies. But workers at the Poplar and Highland store say that many of the policies have never been enforced and that their supposed violations aren’t fireable offenses. Workers also pointed out that it’s ironic for Starbucks to claim to be concerned about worker safety when the company’s refusal to address safety concerns is one of the primary reasons why workers have been organizing.

Starbucks Workers United has filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), saying that the firings are retaliation for the workers’ unionizing efforts and are therefore illegal. Labor law prohibits companies from retaliating against workers for exercising their right to organize.

“I was fired by Starbucks today for ‘policies’ that I’ve never heard of before and that I’ve never been written-up about before,” Nikki Taylor, a shift supervisor at Poplar and Highland, said in a statement. “This is a clear attempt by Starbucks to retaliate against those of us who are leading the union effort at our store and scare other partners.”

The union called the firings the company’s “most blatant act of union-busting yet.” According to the union, the company is retaliating against workers who invited media into the store to conduct interviews after hours. In response, management pulled workers off the floor and called them in on their days off to have one-on-one meetings – meetings that union organizers say were meant to pressure workers against unionizing.

“Starbucks is using policies that have never been enforced, such as going behind a counter when a partner is not officially working, to fire workers,” the union said. “Starbucks chose to selectively enforce policies that have not previously been consistently enforced as a subterfuge to fire union leaders.”

The workers that were fired made up about 35 percent of the workers in the store, according to Starbucks Workers United. The company has disputed that it fired workers for talking to the media.

Amy Holden, a former manager of Poplar and Highland, told More Perfect Union that the terminations are “definitely union-busting.” “We do not move straight to termination for anything that is not considered egregious,” Holden said. Instead, for smaller policy violations, managers talk to employees to correct the action.

At least one of the policies that the company cited to fire employees was not a Starbucks policy at all, according to Holden. Employees were fired for entering the back room while they were off the clock – but Holden says employees are allowed to access the room even after clocking out so that they can request time off, access pay stubs or retrieve items they’ve left behind.

EXCLUSIVE: The former manager of the Memphis Starbucks where 7 pro-union workers were fired today says that the terminations violated Starbucks protocol.

Starbucks’ reasons for firing the workers do not hold up to scrutiny, she explains.

“This is definitely union-busting.” pic.twitter.com/ViokbcBsWS

— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) February 8, 2022

Poplar and Highland workers filed a petition for a union election last month. If the NLRB confirms that the policies that workers were fired for aren’t normally enforced or don’t typically lead to terminations, the company may be in legal trouble.

According to workers, the company has been waging a fierce anti-union campaign, pulling out classic union-busting tactics like sending managers to stores to surveil and intimidate employees. The company is also leveraging ongoing contract negotiations with the first two unionized stores, Elmwood and Genesee Street in Buffalo, New York, in order to discourage workers from voting for the union.

As HuffPost found, the company has hired at least 30 lawyers from notorious union-busting firm Littler Mendelson in order to disrupt the union campaign; companies will often spend tens of thousands of dollars, if not millions, to disrupt union drives rather than offer workers higher wages or better working conditions. So far, 68 Starbucks stores have filed to unionize, with more filings coming in every week.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 8, 2022

Ohio Supreme Court Rejects Republican-Drawn Congressional Maps — Again

On Monday night, the Ohio Supreme Court threw out Republican-drawn congressional maps after justices ruled GOP maps unconstitutionally gerrymandered for the second time.

The justices ruled that the Ohio Redistricting Commission’s latest attempt to draw constitutional maps that accurately represent the electorate were too skewed toward Republicans. It was a 4 to 3 ruling, with one moderate Republican joining the court’s Democrats in rejecting the redrawn map.

According to the ruling, Republicans in the legislature had proposed nixing one Republican-leaning House district and one Republican-leaning Senate district in central Ohio. But the Democratic-leaning districts that would replace them were only Democratic by “very slim margins,” the justices wrote.

Although prior elections have shown that roughly 54 percent of Ohio voters prefer Republicans while 46 percent prefer Democrats, the new maps skewed even more favor to the GOP, giving them 58 percent of seats. According to the Ohio Constitution, the maps must be representative of the electorate’s preferences.

“[T]he revised plan’s structure guarantees that the 58 percent seat share for Republicans is a floor whereas the 42 percent seat share for Democrats is a ceiling,” the ruling reads. New maps are due back by February 17.

Though the new maps are closer to a representative partisan split than the first ones Republicans submitted, the ruling said that adjustments to the maps were a facade.

The first maps gave Republicans about 62 percent of House seats and nearly 70 percent of Senate seats. Justices wrote that Republicans had not started the new maps from scratch, but rather tweaked the old, unconstitutional maps. GOP lawmakers “started with the same plan that we invalidated and then merely adjusted certain districts just enough so that they could nominally be reclassified as ‘Democratic-leaning,’” the ruling reads.

Voting rights advocates praised the court decision. “Now that the Ohio Redistricting Commission is back to square one, we ask that they finally stop and listen to the voters’ demands for a fair redistricting process,” Common Cause Ohio said in a statement, lamenting the fact that the commissions’ map drawing process is done behind closed doors. “After today’s ruling, these partisan games must come to an end. It’s time for the Ohio Redistricting Commission to do its job.”

The bipartisan Ohio Redistricting Commission is made up of five Republicans and two Democrats and was created in the hopes of stamping out partisanship in map drawing. But the panel has failed to reach a bipartisan consensus on its maps twice so far.

Republican lawmakers have been able to sidestep the commission in the map drawing process, though Republican House Speaker Bob Cupp told reporters that the new maps will be drawn solely by the commission.

In response to the maps being rejected for a second time, Democrats released their own version of the maps, which they say adheres to the Ohio Constitution’s guidelines for a partisan split.

“Our congressional map proposal keeps communities together, reflects the preferences of Ohio voters, and follows the Constitution. Most importantly, it does not unduly favor or disfavor a political party, in compliance with the Court’s ruling,” House Minority Leader Allison Russo, a Democrat, said in a statement.

“There are multiple pathways to achieve the fair, constitutional map that Ohioans deserve, and our updated map is yet another example demonstrating this legislature can deliver a fair map that complies with the court order and the Ohio Constitution,” Russo continued.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
February 8, 2022

Manchin Says He’s Skeptical of Congressional Workers’ Union Drive

As Democratic lawmakers rallied behind congressional staffers’ unionization effort on Tuesday, Conservative Democrat Joe Manchin (West Virginia) expressed skepticism about the workers’ recently announced union drive.

Manchin claimed that he has “always been a big supporter of unions” — as many union-busting companies also claim – but added that congressional workers are paid by taxpayers. “When you’re working for tax dollars and you’re [at] will and pleasure, I’m here at the will and pleasure of the people. They have a chance to change and things of that sort, so we’ve got to make sure we’re doing it and doing it right,” he told Politico.

As reporters and pro-labor figures were quick to point out, there are already several congressional unions in place, as agencies like the Government Accountability Office, the Library of Congress and the Capitol Police have already unionized.

Manchin’s statement came after the Congressional Workers Union formally announced their union drive on Friday. Democratic staffers say they have been quietly organizing for over a year, and at least 78 members of Congress have publicly announced their support for the union effort, according to a count by Demand Progress.

Manchin’s argument that publicly-funded workers shouldn’t reap the benefits of unionization and collective bargaining is bizarre. In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, public sector workers are consistently unionized at a higher rate than private sector workers; last year, about 39 percent of public sector workers were in a union, five times the unionization rate in the private sector.

If Manchin supposedly supports unions, but doesn’t support public sector unions because the workers are funded by the government, then it would appear – based on his own statements – that he doesn’t actually support a large swath of unions in the country.

Often, workers unionize not only to secure better wages and benefits, but also to combat poor working conditions. Indeed, many congressional staffers report not being paid sufficiently to live in Washington, D.C., which leads to high turnover rates. Further, staff are often viewed as dispensable, they have little say over their working conditions.

“There is a political culture that treats staff on Capitol Hill as being expendable,” Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-New Mexico) told Bloomberg Law. “I certainly have heard senior staff and other congressional members in my time on the Hill allude to the fact that staff are a dime a dozen.”

For the past few months, an anonymous Instagram page called Dear White Staffers has been documenting abuses and microaggressions that staffers have experienced in the workplace, including having to run errands after hours or having things thrown at them by lawmakers.

“While not all offices and committees face the same working conditions, we strongly believe that to better serve our constituents will require meaningful changes to improve retention, equity, diversity, and inclusion on Capitol Hill,” the union said in a statement announcing their union drive.

Republicans in the Senate have already come out against the unionization efforts, and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) announced his opposition to the drive on Tuesday. While Republican support for the effort won’t be necessary in the House, Republicans would likely need to be on board for a resolution giving staffers the green light to organize in the Senate.

House Democrats may soon have a chance to allow their staff to unionize, a process that would have to take place office-by-office, according to Insider. This week, Rep. Andy Levin (D-Michigan) is planning to introduce legislation that would allow staffers to unionize. Although it’s unclear if the legislation has the votes to pass, prominent Democrats like House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California) have said that they will support the measure.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.