It’s supremely unhelpful of the New York Times (Upshot, 10/26/24) to compare income of white men without college degrees to white, Black, Latine and Asian-American women with college degrees:
The Times provided no similar graphic making the more natural comparison between white men without college degrees and Black, Latine or Asian-American men without college degrees. Why not?
Someone who did make that comparison is University of Maryland sociologist Philip N. Cohen, who has a blog called Family Inequality (10/27/24). Maybe you won’t be surprised to find that not only are white men without college degrees not uniquely disadvantaged, they’re actually better paid than any other demographic without a college degree. White men with college degrees, meanwhile, are at the top of the income scale, along with Asian-American men with college degrees.
As Cohen writes, the way the New York Times presented the data “is basically the story of rising returns to education, turned into a story of race/gender grievance.” That fits in with the Times‘ long history (e.g., FAIR.org, 12/16/16, 3/30/18 , 11/1/19, 11/7/19) of trying to explain to liberals why they should learn to love white resentment.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 28, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
With the world on track for 3.1°C of warming this century, Oxfam International on Monday blamed global billionaires who—with their superyachts, private jets, and investments—emit more carbon pollution in 90 minutes of their lives than the average person does in a lifetime.
That’s according to Carbon Inequality Kills, Oxfam’s first-of-its-kind study tracking planet-heating emissions from the pricey transportation and polluting investments of the world’s 50 richest people, which was released ahead of COP29, the United Nations climate summit scheduled for next month in Baku, Azerbaijan.
“The superrich are treating our planet like their personal playground, setting it ablaze for pleasure and profit,” said Oxfam executive director Amitabh Behar in a statement. “Their dirty investments and luxury toys—private jets and yachts—aren’t just symbols of excess; they’re a direct threat to people and the planet.”
The report explains that “Oxfam was able to identify the private jets belonging to 23 of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires; the others either do not own private jets or have kept them out of the public record.”
“On average, these 23 billionaires each took 184 flights—spending 425 hours in the air—over a 12-month period. That is equivalent to each of them circumnavigating the globe 10 times,” the publication continues. “On average, the private jets of these 23 superrich individuals emitted 2,074 tonnes of carbon a year. This is equivalent to 300 years’ worth of emissions for the average person in the world, or over 2,000 years’ worth for someone in the global poorest 50%.”
For example, Elon Musk, the world’s richest person based on Monday updates to the Bloomberg and Forbes lists, “owns (at least) two private jets which together produce 5,497 tonnes of CO2 per year,” the study highlights. “This is the equivalent of 834 years’ worth of emissions for the average person in the world, or 5,437 years’ worth for someone in the poorest 50%.”
“The two private jets owned by Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon, collectively spent almost 25 days in the air, emitting 2,908 tonnes of CO2. It would take the average U.S. Amazon employee almost 207 years to emit that much,” the document adds. Bezos is the world’s second- or third-richest person, according to the various billionaire indexes.
The report says that “the number of superyachts has more than doubled since 2000, with around 150 new launches every year. Not only do these giant ships guzzle an immense amount of fuel for propulsion, their air conditioning, swimming pools, and extensive staff further add to emissions. Although they are moored for most of the year, about 22% of their overall emissions are generated during this ‘downtime.’”
“Superyachts are exempt from both E.U. carbon pricing and International Maritime Organization emissions rules,” the publication points out. “Oxfam was able to identify 23 superyachts owned by 18 of the 50 billionaires in our study. These floating mansions traveled an average of 12,465 nautical miles a year: This is equivalent to each superyacht crossing the Atlantic almost four times.”
According to the group:
Oxfam estimates the average annual carbon footprint of each these yachts to be 5,672 tonnes, which is more than three times the emissions of the billionaires’ private jets. This is equivalent to 860 years of emissions for the average person in the world, and 5,610 times the average of someone in the global poorest 50%.
The Walton family, heirs of the Walmart retail chain, own three superyachts worth over $500 million. They traveled 56,000 nautical miles in a year with a combined carbon footprint of 18,000 tonnes: This is equivalent to the carbon emissions of around 1,714 Walmart shop workers. The company that has generated their extreme wealth has also been found to drive economic inequality in the USA through low wages, workplace discrimination, and huge CEO pay.
In terms of investments, the study says, “the richest 1% control 43% of global financial assets, and billionaires control (either as CEOs or principal investors) 34% of the 50 largest listed companies in the world, and 7 out of the 10 largest. The investment footprint of the superrich is the most important element of their overall impact on people and the planet.”
The organization found that “the average investment emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires were around 2.6 million tonnes of CO2 equivalents (CO2e) each. That is around 340 times their emissions from private jets and superyachts combined.”
“Each billionaire’s investment emissions are equivalent to almost 400,000 years of consumption emissions by the average person, or 2.6 million years of consumption emissions by someone in the poorest 50% of the world,” the report says. “Almost 40% of the investments analyzed in Oxfam’s research were in highly polluting industries including: oil, mining, shipping, and cement. Only one billionaire, Gautam Adani, has significant investments in renewable energy—which account for 18% of his overall investment portfolio. Just 24% of the companies that these billionaires invested in have set net-zero targets.”
This video is a real definition of climate inequality ,, richest 1% individuals indulge in their lavish lifestyles while the rest of humanity struggles. https://t.co/aywQeQOEiY
The publication also features “a new analysis of the inequality in the impacts of climate breakdown.”
Behar concluded that “Oxfam’s research makes it painfully clear: The extreme emissions of the richest, from their luxury lifestyles and even more from their polluting investments, are fueling inequality, hunger, and—make no mistake—threatening lives. It’s not just unfair that their reckless pollution and unbridled greed is fueling the very crisis threatening our collective future—it’s lethal.”
The document’s final section includes detailed recommendations to reduce the emissions of the richest, make polluters pay, and “reimagine our economies and societies to deliver well-being and planetary flourishing.”
The report is a reminder of how rich and powerful people are impeding efforts to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, whose government signatories will be gathering in Baku next month to discuss efforts to limit global temperature rise this century to 1.5°C.
“The wealth of the world’s 2,781 billionaires has soared to $14.2 trillion,” the study notes. “If it was invested in renewable energy and energy efficiency measures by 2030, this wealth could cover the entire funding gap between what governments have pledged and what is needed to keep global warming below 1.5°C, according to estimates by the International Renewable Energy Agency.”
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 28, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
With the world on track for 3.1°C of warming this century, Oxfam International on Monday blamed global billionaires who—with their superyachts, private jets, and investments—emit more carbon pollution in 90 minutes of their lives than the average person does in a lifetime.
That’s according to Carbon Inequality Kills, Oxfam’s first-of-its-kind study tracking planet-heating emissions from the pricey transportation and polluting investments of the world’s 50 richest people, which was released ahead of COP29, the United Nations climate summit scheduled for next month in Baku, Azerbaijan.
“The superrich are treating our planet like their personal playground, setting it ablaze for pleasure and profit,” said Oxfam executive director Amitabh Behar in a statement. “Their dirty investments and luxury toys—private jets and yachts—aren’t just symbols of excess; they’re a direct threat to people and the planet.”
The report explains that “Oxfam was able to identify the private jets belonging to 23 of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires; the others either do not own private jets or have kept them out of the public record.”
“On average, these 23 billionaires each took 184 flights—spending 425 hours in the air—over a 12-month period. That is equivalent to each of them circumnavigating the globe 10 times,” the publication continues. “On average, the private jets of these 23 superrich individuals emitted 2,074 tonnes of carbon a year. This is equivalent to 300 years’ worth of emissions for the average person in the world, or over 2,000 years’ worth for someone in the global poorest 50%.”
For example, Elon Musk, the world’s richest person based on Monday updates to the Bloomberg and Forbes lists, “owns (at least) two private jets which together produce 5,497 tonnes of CO2 per year,” the study highlights. “This is the equivalent of 834 years’ worth of emissions for the average person in the world, or 5,437 years’ worth for someone in the poorest 50%.”
“The two private jets owned by Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon, collectively spent almost 25 days in the air, emitting 2,908 tonnes of CO2. It would take the average U.S. Amazon employee almost 207 years to emit that much,” the document adds. Bezos is the world’s second- or third-richest person, according to the various billionaire indexes.
The report says that “the number of superyachts has more than doubled since 2000, with around 150 new launches every year. Not only do these giant ships guzzle an immense amount of fuel for propulsion, their air conditioning, swimming pools, and extensive staff further add to emissions. Although they are moored for most of the year, about 22% of their overall emissions are generated during this ‘downtime.’”
“Superyachts are exempt from both E.U. carbon pricing and International Maritime Organization emissions rules,” the publication points out. “Oxfam was able to identify 23 superyachts owned by 18 of the 50 billionaires in our study. These floating mansions traveled an average of 12,465 nautical miles a year: This is equivalent to each superyacht crossing the Atlantic almost four times.”
According to the group:
Oxfam estimates the average annual carbon footprint of each these yachts to be 5,672 tonnes, which is more than three times the emissions of the billionaires’ private jets. This is equivalent to 860 years of emissions for the average person in the world, and 5,610 times the average of someone in the global poorest 50%.
The Walton family, heirs of the Walmart retail chain, own three superyachts worth over $500 million. They traveled 56,000 nautical miles in a year with a combined carbon footprint of 18,000 tonnes: This is equivalent to the carbon emissions of around 1,714 Walmart shop workers. The company that has generated their extreme wealth has also been found to drive economic inequality in the USA through low wages, workplace discrimination, and huge CEO pay.
In terms of investments, the study says, “the richest 1% control 43% of global financial assets, and billionaires control (either as CEOs or principal investors) 34% of the 50 largest listed companies in the world, and 7 out of the 10 largest. The investment footprint of the superrich is the most important element of their overall impact on people and the planet.”
The organization found that “the average investment emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires were around 2.6 million tonnes of CO2 equivalents (CO2e) each. That is around 340 times their emissions from private jets and superyachts combined.”
“Each billionaire’s investment emissions are equivalent to almost 400,000 years of consumption emissions by the average person, or 2.6 million years of consumption emissions by someone in the poorest 50% of the world,” the report says. “Almost 40% of the investments analyzed in Oxfam’s research were in highly polluting industries including: oil, mining, shipping, and cement. Only one billionaire, Gautam Adani, has significant investments in renewable energy—which account for 18% of his overall investment portfolio. Just 24% of the companies that these billionaires invested in have set net-zero targets.”
This video is a real definition of climate inequality ,, richest 1% individuals indulge in their lavish lifestyles while the rest of humanity struggles. https://t.co/aywQeQOEiY
The publication also features “a new analysis of the inequality in the impacts of climate breakdown.”
Behar concluded that “Oxfam’s research makes it painfully clear: The extreme emissions of the richest, from their luxury lifestyles and even more from their polluting investments, are fueling inequality, hunger, and—make no mistake—threatening lives. It’s not just unfair that their reckless pollution and unbridled greed is fueling the very crisis threatening our collective future—it’s lethal.”
The document’s final section includes detailed recommendations to reduce the emissions of the richest, make polluters pay, and “reimagine our economies and societies to deliver well-being and planetary flourishing.”
The report is a reminder of how rich and powerful people are impeding efforts to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, whose government signatories will be gathering in Baku next month to discuss efforts to limit global temperature rise this century to 1.5°C.
“The wealth of the world’s 2,781 billionaires has soared to $14.2 trillion,” the study notes. “If it was invested in renewable energy and energy efficiency measures by 2030, this wealth could cover the entire funding gap between what governments have pledged and what is needed to keep global warming below 1.5°C, according to estimates by the International Renewable Energy Agency.”
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 24, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
The union representing striking Boeing employees announced late Wednesday that its members rejected a tentative labor contract in a strong majority vote, news that came less than two weeks after the company divulged plans to slash 10% of its workforce following years of aggressive spending on executive-enriching stock buybacks.
The tentative deal, which was announced by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) and Boeing over the weekend, included a 35% general wage increase spread over the duration of the four-year contract—short of the 40% pay boost the union initially demanded.
IAM said Wednesday that 64% of members who voted opted to reject the proposal—though the union did not immediately disclose turnout figures.
IAM District 751 president Jon Holden and IAM District W24 president Brandon Bryant said in a joint statement that “we will continue to negotiate in good faith until we have made gains that workers feel adequately make up for what the company took from them in the past.”
“After 10 years of sacrifices, we still have ground to make up, and we’re hopeful to do so by resuming negotiations promptly,” said Holden and Bryant. “This is workplace democracy—and also clear evidence that there are consequences when a company mistreats its workers year after year. Workers across America know what it’s like for a company to take and take—and Boeing workers are saying they are fully and strongly committed to balancing that out by winning back more of what was taken from them by the company for more than a decade.”
“Ten years of holding workers back unfortunately cannot be undone quickly or easily,” they added.
Brian Bryant, international president of IAM, expressed support for the districts’ fight for a just contract in response to news of the contract vote.
“The entire IAM union, all 600,000 members across North America, stand with our District 751 and W24 membership,” said Bryant. “Their fight is our fight—and we support their decision to continue this strike for fairness and dignity for Boeing workers.”
Day 41 – Strike Update October 23, 2024
Tonight, IAM District 751 and W2 Members voted by 64% to reject the company's latest offer and continue the current strike. Here are the remarks IAM District 751 President Jon Holden gave during the announcement.
The vote marked the second time Boeing union members have rejected a tentative contract deal since last month, when workers walked off the job after dismissing an offer that included a 25% pay raise over four years.
Reuters noted Wednesday that Boeing workers have been “venting frustration after a decade when their wages have lagged inflation and critics have complained that the planemaker spent tens of billions of dollars on share buybacks and paid out record executive bonuses.”
Between 2010 and 2019, Boeing spent an estimated $68 billion on stock buybacks and dividends. The company’s new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, is poised to bring in $22 million in total compensation next year.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in a statement Wednesday that “while the recent tentative agreement from Boeing made important strides forward, it is clear from today’s vote that Boeing’s offer did not reach the demands of striking machinists.”
“Workers are recovering from years without pay increases, the decimation of their defined-benefit pension plans, and a previous management who did not respect them or even the quality of work,” said Jayapal. “Today’s vote makes it clear that Boeing still has more work to do to earn the trust of workers and to put more on the table for a fair contract.”
“I have been proud to stand with the machinists throughout the strike,” she added. “Every worker deserves fair pay, good benefits, and a safe workplace. I hope to see both parties come back to the table to negotiate a deal that is acceptable to the union, because at the end of the day there is no Boeing without the IAM.”
Food costs for Americans continue to soar – and so do the profits of the corporations selling us our food. Also, New York governor Kathy Hochul has always been deeply unpopular, but the arrest of her chief of staff last week for acting as an agent of China has made the situation so much worse. Mike […]
Two years ago, workers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, represented by five different unions, walked off the job on strike. The Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh has been in negotiations for a contract with Post Gazette management for SEVEN years—since 2017—and have battled bad-faith bargaining, illegal and unilaterally imposed changes to working conditions, and loss of vacation time and insurance benefits. As of Oct. 18, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette strike has officially entered its third year, despite the National Labor Relations Board ruling that management has flagrantly broken federal labor law and committed multiple Unfair Labor Practice charges. We speak with a panel of striking workers about how they are faring after two long years on strike and what it will take to secure a victory and return to work.
Panelists include:
Rick Nowlin, news assistant, editorial writer, and PG archivist
Bob Batz Jr., veteran editor, writer, photographer, and Interim Editor of the Pittsburgh Union Progress (PUP)
Steve Mellon, veteran photographer and writer, and regular PUP contributor
John Santa, copy editor, page designer, and sports writer for the PUP
Natalie Duleba, page designer, copy editor, web editor, and award-winning PUP contributor
Featured Music: Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song
Studio Production: Max Alvarez Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Rick Nowlin:
My name is Rick Nowlin, my title with the Post News Assistant. I work in new archives. I’ve been an editorial writer and I was also the jazz writer for 20 years.
Steve Mellon:
I’m Steve Mellon. I’m a photographer and writer at the Post Gazette. I’ve been at the newspaper since 1997. I write for the Pup pretty extensively. As a matter of fact, I’m often torturing Bob. He’s the editor of The Pup and Karen Carlin. I’m often torturing them with stories at 11 o’clock and I take every opportunity, actually, I’ve sent Bob’s stories to two o’clock in the morning, three o’clock in the morning, and I always take every opportunity to profusely apologize for being a night owl.
Natalie Duleba:
I’m Natalie Duleba. I started working at the Post Gazette early 2020. I’m a page designer and copy editor and a web editor there. My participation at the Union progress has been sporadic, but one of my articles did win a Golden Quill Award, so not a lot, but when I do, it’s a good one.
Bob Batz Jr.:
Hi, Mel. I’m Bob Batz Jr. I’m a 30 year editor and writer and photographer at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, and I got tapped to be the interim editor of the Pittsburgh Union Progress, which is our electronic strike paper.
John Santa:
My name’s John Santa. I’m a copy editor and page designer at the Post Gazette. I’ve only been there about a year, but I’ve been at various publications for about 20 years in the business now, so yeah. Oh, at Pop, most importantly, which I tell people that’s probably going to end up being the thing I’m most proud of in my entire career. But at Pop, I’m a sports writer and like Steve, I am very prone to sending in sports stories from late games at two, three in the morning and probably frustrating Rick Davis, our sports editor to No End. So thank you, Mel. Happy to be here.
Mel Buer:
I’m so glad everyone’s here. Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Working People. I’m your host Mel Buer. Working People is a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today, brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you love what we do and are looking for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, friends and family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks you’d like us to talk to, and please support the work we do with The Real News by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.
So we’re coming up on a pretty mind-blowing anniversary in the news labor world. Two years ago in October, 2022, after the newspaper unilaterally cut off insurance benefits to production workers and newsroom workers filed ULPs for bad faith bargaining. The workers of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette walked off the job on strike. The newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh has been in negotiations for a contract with the Post Gazette management for seven years since 2017, and have battled bad faith, bargaining, illegal and unilaterally imposed changes to working conditions and loss of vacation time and insurance benefits. In October, 2022, newsroom workers voted to go on strike and strike. They did. Now, two years later, the workers of the Post Gazette are still on strike, and despite the NLRB upholding their unfair labor practice charges against the company, they still have a long way to go to total victory. Today we’ve brought some of the striking workers onto the show to talk about the last two years of the strike, the welcome updates from the NLRB and what’s next for the workers as their battle continues. Before we begin, a small editorial note for me, just as a disclaimer, I am also a dues paying member of the News Guild, CWA local 3 2 0 3 5, and the folks we have on today are my union siblings from the Pittsburgh Local. Now that that’s out of the way, welcome to the show friends. Thank you for
Natalie Duleba:
Having us. Hi, thanks for having us. Thanks
John Santa:
Now. Thank you. Happy to be here.
Mel Buer:
All right, so to start off our conversation, I think it might be prudent to give our listeners an update about the current state of things at this point in the strike. Bob, can you explain the recent NLRB decision from August and what that has meant for the strike and for negotiations?
Bob Batz Jr.:
Well, we won our case, Mel, you wouldn’t know it to look at us or talk to us, but we won our case. The NLRB board upheld the its administrative law judge decision from January, 2023. These dates are mind blowing to say them even though we’ve led them. So the board said, yeah, our judge was right. The company’s been breaking federal law in lots of different ways, and we want to expand the remedy. We want them to pay more for breaking the law. The problem is, and this is the crux of the problem with our strike, a crux of our strike, the NLRB has no enforcement power, and so the board said we won, and then we were all sitting there like I wanted to break out pots and pans and whiskey shots, and we couldn’t do that because we were still on strike and we were still on strike a month later, more or less. So what we’re waiting for and our siblings in the other CWA unions and in the Pressman’s Union, we are counting on relief from the federal courts through injunctive processes that we don’t fully see what’s going on because it’s this federal agency doing stuff on our behalf. And as we sit here coming up on our actual two year anniversary of US walking, we’re waiting for that relief to come from the courts.
Mel Buer:
John, if you want to just give me a little, what’s your impression here? This is a common sort of complaint that a lot of folks have about the NLRB is an agency really is that a lot of folks will see these sort of victories with their ULPs being upheld with various sort of small sea consequences being meted out to these corporations and these management teams that are breaking labor law and creating untenable working conditions for their workers. But oftentimes it really does amount to a slap on the wrist, or if the corporation is big enough, the fines don’t do anything. It’s a drop in the bucket for their daily profit, not to say they’re even the millions of dollars that they make year over year. So you have this NLRB victory and you’re still waiting for these sort of consequences to push the management back to the bargaining table to get them to, I don’t know, show shred of humanity for their working employees. How does that make you feel?
John Santa:
Yeah, it’s obviously incredibly frustrating. I mean, we face ownership or my bosses if you want to call them that publishers in the case of our paper that are unreasonable and even aside from being unreasonable, they’re oftentimes just completely unattached to reality of the situation that they’re dealing with here. And it’s obviously frustrating. You then think about how underfunded the NLRB is, and you see how difficult it is for these decisions to have any real teeth. I mean, I think the number, something like 30%, 27% of union election petitions are up there have been 27% more union election petitions over the past year. That’s just way too much for the NLRB to have to deal with in its current state. I mean, I would have to look at the numbers exactly, but I think it’s like $20 million that the NLRB is underfunded by. I mean, until there’s real change in that regard, it’s hard to believe that there’s ever going to be any meaningful kind of fix for us. So we’re hoping that we can get more support in every way, and especially from politicians and local leaders locally and nationally that could really affect change with the NLRB.
Steve Mellon:
Mel, if I can cut in here real quick.
Mel Buer:
Absolutely.
Steve Mellon:
Our case is a perfect example. We have ruling after ruling that states unequivocally that the Post Gazette has violated federal labor law. There’s no question about the rulings in this and about what the facts of the case are, and yet here we are two years out still on strike. This is the state of labor law in the United States right now. They have money, we don’t, and they have the power of appeals. They have these high price law firms, union busting law firms that can come in and just try to grind us down. I’m amazed that I sit in these morning meetings that we have, and I look around at the number of people like John and Natalie and Bob and Rick who are still with us, who are still fighting these fights. And that’s the one thing that gives me hope is that despite the odds that are against us here, the processes, the underfunding of the NLRB, despite those processes that we are still standing, we’re still here talking to you, we’re still a unified group, we’re still on strike.
It’s not easy after two years, we have to check in on each other on a regular basis. We have these discussions about how you’re doing not just financially, but two years without work, without that work identity, without those morning check-ins that you do around the coffee machine. These are, it’s tough. I never thought 40 plus years in this business that I would be on strike in the two minute warning of my career. I’m 65 years old that I would be doing this, but I can tell you that despite all that, I’m so proud to be look and see Natalie and John and Bob and Rick and all those other faces in the morning meetings and know that we’re still in this fight.
Mel Buer:
I think that’s a good sort of segue into my next question. Rick, you’ve been on strike for the last two years, and I really want to just ask how have folks fared in the last two years? How are you feeling now that you’re coming up on this official anniversary, two year anniversary of walking off the job? What’s the state of the strike fund? How are folks staying positive on the picket line? What’s your sense of that?
Rick Nowlin:
Well, I think with my situation, it is a little bit hairy because I got married about four years ago and my wife and I bought a house three years ago, and then the strike came even though I thought it was the right thing to do to take a stand, she was obviously quite concerned to say the least. So how are we going to make it, as I said, the process shake out and a big part of the issue that we’re working on is healthcare because I said healthcare being our healthcare being effectively canceled and replaced with another plan, which was way more expensive. One thing that has definitely been the case, in my case with the union picking up healthcare costs because a year and a half ago I was diagnosed with prostate cancer and you can imagine how expensive that might be it one going to not just hospitals, but also specialists, but because of that, if there’s a time to be on strike is your time to get prostate cancer, this will be the time to do it. And my wife, we’re very thankful for, if anything, that’s the time it happened. As far as that’s concerned, our income has been cut, but also because unions have been picking up many of our expenses, our expensive has also been cut out. So we’re thankful for that. And on a side note, to keep me from going stir crazy, many of these people know that I’m also a musician and my number of gigs that I’ve had have gone up prescriptions over the last year and a half as well. So in one sense it’s been for me personally, dialysis get to spend a lot of time with my wife that we wouldn’t have otherwise. But we’ve been able to weather the storm quite well because she has some investments that she’s made over the years. And as I said from the beginning, my being on Striker, I’m almost as old as Steve. I’m 63 and my being on strike is being a sympathy with my colleagues here because I’ve always felt that given the situation, as he’s mentioned in labor law that was being violated, that it does affect me in one sense, but I’m here for them. I just suppose it’s the right thing to do for me to go out with them because if they’re being screwed eventually it means that all my gut screwed as well. So it’s one of the things that we’re all in this together. That’s how I look at it.
Mel Buer:
That’s a very good point to make. And I really hope that your cancer fight is successful and that you do get the rest that you need to be able to heal from that.
Rick Nowlin:
And I want to say it was caught early enough, so we haven’t had any, I really haven’t had any treatments. I do know I have another biopsy in December, but the thing about it’s, we caught it early enough so that I really haven’t needed anything. The only thing we’ve been doing is just monitoring it. But once again, if I was still active, who knows how much we would’ve paid all these specialists there. And that’s part of the reason why, as I said, being on strike is, at least for me at this point, turned out to be a blessing.
Mel Buer:
Funny how that works. Right. Natalie, I did want to ask you a question.
Natalie Duleba:
Sure.
Mel Buer:
I know, and this is one of the, I think this is the hard question, I suppose. I know that some workers have crossed the picket line and gone back to work. I had a memorable and frankly heated exchange on Twitter with one of those scab workers back in 2023, and still others have been hired on in scab positions in the intervening two years. How have you as a group, as a union handled these strike breakers? Has it hardened resolve among the strikers, people pissed off, I imagine So unfortunately in this US labor movement management will do this every time there is a strike and it is a reality of it, of walking off the job. So how have folks at the Guild taken that in and yeah, what’s your thoughts about that?
Natalie Duleba:
So I remember that Twitter exchange quite a lot because that was a former striker who had gone back to work across the picket line was, I dunno, for lack of a better word, trying to get clout for supporting the SAG and WGA strikers and talking about, oh, well I’ll look at all this stuff that they had learned and it was just so hypocritical, but that’s not an attitude that is outside of the norm, that kind of hypocrisy that you see from scabs. And I actually lived with a striker, they lived in my house and they took a job at the Post Gazette outside of the bargaining unit, which just in the general of taking a position at the Post Gazette out of literally everything that they could have taken a job for. They’re a very talented writer, young and willing to work hard, and they decided to take an editorial position at the paper during the strike.
And it was a super personal betrayal. And that’s what I really think about a lot of people who have continued to work or who went back to work or even took the job. And it’s like, obviously I’m familiar with the kind of tough job market it is out there for journalists. I’ve moved across the country, this is my third cross country move to Pittsburgh chasing a job, better pay, et cetera. But especially people who live here and have an established reputation in Pittsburgh, they can get jobs probably almost anywhere else that needs a person who can put together a fun couple of sentences and knows how to talk to people.
And it’s just kind of mind boggling. I’m lucky that I really haven’t had any out in the wild encounters with scabs besides my former roommate. That was really tough. They did move out. They told me they took a job with post the day that they moved out. So it was definitely a shock, but I didn’t have to live with them after that. And the times that I have has just been in professional settings and we’re professional, so if we’re working, we’re going to be polite. And I know that sometimes if we have the mental capacity for it, we have the emotional bandwidth for it. We do try to say like, Hey, why did you take this job? Because a lot of people who have taken, well, a good portion of the people have taken jobs we’re freelancers already for the Post Gazette are known within the writing and photography communities here.
And it really felt, it feels like they saw an opportunity to, it was very self-interested to just slide in when the strike is on. When up until that point, they hadn’t been able to be hired during a non-strike situation where great photojournalist like Steve Mellon or Pan Pancheck are on strike and it feels very just self-centered, which is really the core of it. And I know that there’s a lot of, this is hard to say fortunate, but I started working right before the pandemic started, so I only had a couple weeks in the office and I was the nighttime worker, so I didn’t actually know a lot of people. I don’t think I had met Steve Mellon in person until that first day on the picket line. He had just been a name on a screen for me for two years. But we have strikers whose working relationships, friendships of decades are now broken and that’s not something that can be forgotten.
And it’s also something that if it’s ever to be, I don’t even know if forgiveness is like an option for folks. I’m not going to talk for anyone else, but that’s forgiveness, that has to be earned by the people who’ve continued to work and it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of indication that they want to do that because of the way that they don’t engage with us in good faith. At the beginning of the strike, we made a lot of bids. We called people regularly to hear their stances and I think we all remember just how emotionally draining that was. And some of this is just protecting our own mental health and our own emotional wellbeing to not engage with Strike Bakers or people who scabs who never came out. And I think that’s fine. I agree with that because it is so hard to parse those really intense interpersonal issues and it is going to be a huge uphill battle uphill negotiation when we’re back in the newsroom because I think that unfortunately it’s going to be us who has to be the bigger person when we’re 100% like the wrong party. Here we’re the people who some of us begged scabs to come out, begged them to not go back in and especially who came back in knowing the resources that we had already offered them that they just kind of spat on. And that’s going to be a really hard thing to work alongside knowing that they’re literally that they put their paychecks over supporting us and supporting themselves.
Steve Mellon:
That’s very well put, Natalie, and I appreciate hearing that. I’ve been around for a minute and some of these relationships that I have with some of the scab workers, I mean those go back decades. I’ve watched some of these people’s kids grow up and so it’s like a deeply personal betrayal in some sense. And I don’t know what those relationships are going to look like going forward once the strike is over. I don’t know. That’s just territory that we will have to navigate. I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about that right now. It’s pretty easy for me. I bumped into one of the new scab hires a couple of weeks ago at an assignment and for somebody like that, I didn’t know who he was. He came up and introduced me and I just told him, look, dude, I’m not having a conversation with you right now.
That’s pretty easy for me to do. I don’t know this person and I, he’s a human being, so I care about him on that level, but I’m not going to waste any brain cells on it. But some of these other relationships striking, you have a binary choice. You can either stand with your workers or you can stand with your employer. In our case, an employer that has been violating labor law. So if I break the law, if I go down and steal a toothbrush from the target store, my ass is going to end up in the back of a cop car and I’m going to go to jail. But if you’ve got money and you own a company, you can violate labor law. Go live at your main mansion, fly your airplane around, flash your fancy watch to your good buddies in New York City and live your happy life. So this whole thing with scabs, I used to, when we first started, I was calling some people who had crossed the picket line just to keep the lines of communication. I thought this would last three or four weeks. I didn’t know it was going to last for two years.
One of the issues I had is that I would call and just say, Hey, how are you doing? I’m just checking in and seeing how you’re doing. We can really use you out here on the line. And those weren’t successful conversations. Quite often it would be a litany of complaints about the union and about how I was hurting them, how I was making their job so much harder. And to your point, Natalie, I couldn’t have those conversations anymore because I was talking to strikers who were really struggling. That initial shock of going out on strike, I mean it’s hard to describe, to put into words what kind of a jolt that is to your life. It affects not only your paycheck but your sense of identity. There’s so many unknowns, like Rick said, so many unknowns, things you have to work through. And we were dealing with all that and then I would call people who were very comfortable in there getting a paycheck, very little in their lives had changed. The only thing that really had changed is that they might have somebody saying, Hey, isn’t there a strike going on there? Did you cross the picket line? Maybe somebody would call them a scab and they would become deeply offended. I just quite honestly didn’t have patience for that, so I stopped making those phone calls.
Mel Buer:
I think that’s a good point there Steve and John, I’d love to get your thoughts on this as well. I going out on strike, I think a lot of folks, particularly younger folks ostensibly on the left, these activists and organizers who maybe don’t have the benefit of union experience will get very excited when strikes happen understandably, because this is a monumental collective sort of action that happens where workers come together and say, we’re doing the thing that is going to have the most impact and that’s withholding our labor in service of better working conditions in our workplace. It’s a very uniquely empowering experience, but it is also a very difficult decision to make and I think it’s important to draw attention to that. And I wonder what your thoughts are, John, about what it means to go out on strike and also to maintain withholding your labor for two years. Incredible.
John Santa:
Yeah. Sincerely, there is not an aspect of my life that hasn’t been affected by this strike. I’ve friendships, family, money, struggles. I think it was Steve said, you lose your identity from a career that you’re very passionate about. I mean, let’s face it, no one gets into journalism to get rich. You do it because you believe in it. You believe in making an impact on your community. It’s hard. There’s no doubt about it that it’s hard. In terms of my personal story with going out on strike, I come from the very stereotypical Pittsburgh background. Like my dad lost his job at the mill in at the Westinghouse mill in the eighties when it closed. I come from grandfathers on both sides that were union workers. I have a grandfather that was a laborer. I have a grandfather that worked in a union rail yard. He did maintenance on the locomotives for years. So it was never a question I was coming out. And then you look at people like Bob Bats and Steve and Rick and Nolan and Natalie and Ed Bz mean I could name everyone that we’re on strike with and you know that these people are all on the right side of history and you want to be with them. I want to forever have my name mentioned with I stood shoulder to shoulder with Steve Mellon. I mean, I can’t imagine it being any other way. So there’s that, and you look at the people that are scabs and I think a lot of the scabs that are most responsible for keeping this going, I mean obviously the reason that the strike is still ongoing is because the Bloc family is unwilling to end this strike. They can do this, they could have done this at any point. They won’t do it. They want to make a point here and we’re not going to let that happen. If you look at some of our scabs, our worst scab offenders if you will, it’s the sports department. It’s guys like Jerry Lac who are cornerstone parts of this newspaper. They walk into that Steeler locker room, which Jerry walks in there to a Steeler locker room that is unionized by the way, and talks to these guys and makes it seem to the public, as I’m wearing my Steeler hat, makes it seem to the public that it’s business as usual.
It’s not, and it’s just whenever at the end of the day you get down to it, whose side do you want to be on? Want to be on the side of the owners of this newspaper who have time and time again for seven years, as you referenced at the top of the podcast, broken federal labor law. That’s not the type of person I want to be with. I want to be with Bob Batz, the interim editor of the Pittsburgh Union Progress. It’s an honor to stand with Bob Batz, an honor to stand with Natalie. And that’s what keeps me going because like I said, there’s no part of this that’s been easy. It’s been hard every day, every minute, every hour that we’ve been out on strike. And it’s that going back and forth between being, man, I’m fucking struggling and man, this is a fucking honor. I’m sorry for cursing. I don’t know if that’s allowed, but
Mel Buer:
Totally fine.
John Santa:
That’s just, that’s the truth of the matter, and that’s the way I feel.
Mel Buer:
That’s the power of solidarity. There’s nothing quite like it, frankly.
Rick Nowlin:
Yeah, and I want to take off on that too because as I’ve met, this is not my first strike. I was with Giant Eagle, which is the region’s largest grocery chain in 1991. As we went out for contract reasons, and I also do have some of the labor background, my mother was a teacher mostly in Wilkinsburg schools. That’s where she spent her career. And when we went out, we contemplated going out. I asked her for her advice, she gave me one piece. She said, don’t cross picket line, and that’s all I need to hear because frankly, I saw the proposals that the company was offering us back then, and my first reaction is they’re not going to accept this and they didn’t. So we went on for six weeks. One thing that helped us, I will say is that the customer’s boycotting. So yeah, this is not my first go around with stripes, but I do believe, and John mentioned to you is that we’re doing the right thing. Standing up for what I believe is justice. We’ve been doing it for two years is hard, but if when we go back to the newsroom, and I’ve said this in our Zoom meetings a number of times, we’re going to own it because we’ll be going to be tough. We’re going to be tried and tested once we go back in the newsroom. I can’t say how, of course, when is it going to happen, but we’re going to be the leaders in the newsroom when we go back because we’ve been through the ringer, we’ve been through the fire, we know what it’s like. We’ve been through the struggle. And the struggle is what makes us who we are.
Mel Buer:
Well said, well said. I think a lot about despite maybe because of these betrayals by these strike breakers, when you get back into the newsroom after victory, I think it’ll be maybe gratifying to know that this victory was one for them as well, despite their, I dunno how to put this nicely, inability to maintain their own piece of the picket line. They will still benefit, right? And I think that in itself is also a really good piece to kind of keep in the back of your mind as you’re out there on the picket line. It sucks that they’re not there, but you’re still fighting for them too and hopefully they appreciate that when they see the benefits that end up in their contract when you are finished negotiating this round,
Rick Nowlin:
And that’s the attack that many of us who have actually spoken with the strike breakers to Theca have gone back in, have been trying to come across. We’re not doing this simply for us. You’re going to benefit from us too.
Mel Buer:
Right? A hundred percent. Bob, I’d like to take a little bit of a sideways jump here. We’ve talked a little bit about the Pittsburgh Union progress, the strike paper that you’ve put together collectively since you’ve walked out in the last two years. I really personally would like to say that I think it’s one of the best strike papers in labor’s recent history. There is a long and storied history of American strike papers and what those do, it’s not just strike papers written by Newspapermen who’ve gone out. These are ways to communicate among striking workers, particularly for long haul strikes. And at some point, hopefully I’ll be able to do a couple part episode with working people about the history of strike papers because it is so cool and it’s like it hits the right nerd space in my brain about it. But I really want to, I’m going to start with you Bob, but I would also like to open this up to anyone else who has thoughts. What has it been like contributing to this paper the last two years? What are some of the things that you’ve learned in the course of publishing it? Has it changed the way you think about journalism? And I know that in terms of solidarity, there have been individuals in the community both in positions of power and just community members who have chosen to speak only to PUP and not speak to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. And so I want to get your thoughts about that. A lot of questions there, but pick and choose what you’d like.
Bob Batz Jr.:
All right, and I’ll be quick and I can turn it over to these guys. They’re all part of this too. I mean, we went on strike on October 18th and we had our first edition of Pup published on October 20th. We were the first strike paper of the digital age, whatever the hell that means. But we didn’t have to worry about printing it and sending it out, and we knew we were going to withhold our labor, but we didn’t want to withhold what we do because we still wanted to do what we do. It mattered to us. We wanted to write about things that mattered to us. We wanted to write about things that our community cared about, so that’s separate from the labor issue with our bad bosses. And so that’s what we did. And we never tried to be a replacement for the Post Gazette, the big daily metro.
We didn’t have the bodies for that even at the start. As Steve said, there’s a lot to unpack the first weeks and months of being on strike where you don’t know where your healthcare is going to come from and you don’t know there’s a lot of other work to be done, but we got off to a good strong start and we’ve never looked back. And I think I would say, and this Steve and I have deep talks about this all the time. We have from the beginning set out to do just journalism. That’s what we did when we got paid for it, and that’s what we do for free and it’s straight up the kind of stuff we do could run in any good journalistic publication, but we have found our sweet spot reaching out to communities that are overlooked or other people that are struggling.
We sort of have a new empathy certainly for labor issues, and our strike has coincided with a lot of other people going through these struggles as well. So we found sort of a new mission in reaching out to some of these other communities and individuals and neighborhoods and movements. And one of Steve’s stories is one of the things that I think we’re all proudest of is his ongoing coverage of East Palestinian, Ohio and after the trendy realm there. And that’s something that’s what we want to do. That’s the pure stuff that we do. We do all kinds of other stuff. Natalie had a great story about L-G-B-T-Q bar in a neighborhood that doesn’t get a lot of coverage. Sometime Johnny Santa goes out on Friday night to football games with other grandkids and great grandkids with mill workers. That’s what we do and those are things that are all important to us.
So I don’t know what to say. I’m happy for it to go out of business in a lot of ways because these people, Johnny San is going to work all Friday night and he’s going to work all day Saturday on college football and he doesn’t get paid. The Honor is mine to a work with him and with Steve and to do this work because that’s always mattered to me, but we want to get paid for doing this, so that’s the part that we have to finish up and get back to getting a paycheck is nice. A last word on being an unpaid journalist, though I keep saying this, it’s like journalism drugs. You’re not beholden to a boss, you’re not beholden to a company, you’re not beholden to a founder or a foundation. It’s just not something that you can do for two years when you’re not getting paid. So I hope we can keep doing what we do maybe with a little bit of strike flavor on it, but I would like to get paid for it as well and get benefits.
Mel Buer:
I will say before I pass it along, I worked as sort of part-time independent. I say I was in grad school at the time, but I was also working as an independent journalist and not getting paid for it because working as a freelancer is a godawful profession and I never want to do it again. And I commend to the people who sell their stories and their photos piecemeal and try to strong arm these publications into paying them a decent rate. I was not very good at it, but I will say that didn’t stop me from doing the work. There’s something unique about having some skills that maybe other folks in the community don’t have access to, and being able to tell a cogent story about a beautiful thing that’s happening to the humans around you and to have them trust you with that is extremely, it’s a privilege and I think about it a lot in the context of the strike paper and of strike papers in general.
It is a labor of love. No one’s getting paid for it, especially not in the digital era where you can pay five bucks to host a website for three months or what have you. And I think it’s an important thing to kind of point out is that you’re doing this voluntarily because you have the skills and you care about the community that you’re covering, and that translates as well to the work that you do at the Post Gazette when you’re getting paid for it. It’s the same thoughts, it’s just nice to have a paycheck and I will be the first to tell you that I really do appreciate being a union journalist and having a contract that guarantees a living wage. It’s very, very nice and I hope that you can get back to that soon. I will pass it along. I just wanted to offer my thoughts about it. Natalie, you were about to speak.
Natalie Duleba:
Yeah, I mean, I don’t want to toot my small little popcorn horn here because Steve and John and Bob have contributed infinitely more than I have, but Bob saying that it’s kind of like we get to decide what we cover and the stuff that I have done has been just things that I thought were cool. I did the Polar plunge into one of our rivers here on New Year’s Day, two years in a row. I’m hoping it’s not going to be three for the Pup, but that was something that I saw and I wanted to do, and I was like, Hey, is it okay? I’m not even sure if I told Bob beforehand that I was going to write about it. I was just like, Hey, I did this thing. Here’s photos and a story. And I talk to people and I’m sure that we all know that New Year’s Day is sometimes a slower Newsday.
Maybe there was some gratitude there to have something to run, or the story that I wrote about, it’s a they bar instead of a gay or a lesbian bar. I just thought it was a cool place and I told Bob I was working on a secret story, I would get it to him and he was like, cool, just turn it in. And knowing that we’re shaping it ourselves, I know that it’ll be an adjustment to have to listen to these managers and editors that haven’t advocated for us at all or in any meaningful way. I think that one of our strikers was in contact with a quote manager who doesn’t manage anybody, and that will have to go back to working with them and listening to their directives and that’ll be an adjustment, but we all know now what it can really feel like when it’s a truly collaborative, supportive environment that is journalists driven and story driven, not just, oh, we have to hit these bases. We have to talk about this because it’s important to Pittsburgh, which is, I guess it’s kind of that weird determination of the paper determining what’s important to Pittsburgh instead of Pittsburgh community determining what’s important to itself. And I think that we’ve done a really amazing job with that, with having it be community led and story led and journalist passion led instead of, I don’t know, being the record of paper. I mean the paper of record.
Steve Mellon:
That’s a good point, Natalie, and one of the things that’s been interesting to me to write for the strike paper is that it’s not only unburdening ourselves from the institution of the Post Gazette and all the being supported by a big newspaper has the advantages of you have resources and you have a built-in readership. It also comes with some weight, and that’s not always beneficial to your work as a journalist. I remember in 2020 during the George Floyd protest, the publishers, the editors of the paper made some really stupid decisions and you can Google that and figure that for yourself, but what that did is that it signaled to the community where the newspaper stood on these issues, and I was going out to cover some of these protests a number of times and people, I’ve covered these communities for years and people that I know were coming up to me and saying, Steve, we don’t want you here.
And I’d say, look where I’m coming from. You know how I write and how I cover these things. And I was told, it doesn’t matter. You’re working for the man. And those same people, those same people now are calling me. I think they recognize and appreciate that we have taken that have made a sacrifice to help not just ourselves, but for our colleagues and for the community that Pittsburgh will not benefit from a newspaper that treats its workers like shit and becomes a piece of garbage that’s not a benefit to the community and people, we tell people that they understand that and I think they appreciate that. The conversations I have with people are different now because I think they’re more trusting from the communities that I’m interested in covering. I like Bob says, I spent a lot of time in East Palestine and I was treated there the first several weeks I was up there to write to cover things.
I was treated as every other journalist. There were a certain number of journalists up there. I think once people, I didn’t talk about who I was or why I was up there. I was just Steve Mellon from the Pittsburgh Union Progress, and once people figure out that this was part of a strike effort, that we weren’t getting paid for it, that we were publishing the strike paper because we realized that there were stories that needed to be told that weren’t being told or that were being told from a corporate standpoint, they were being shaped by editors who sent maybe naive reporters who hadn’t spent enough time in the community to kind of figure out what was what, and that there was a realization that we were in this for the right purpose. I don’t want to sound self-righteous here, but I’m going to claim that mantle because you go on strike and you don’t like the paycheck and you do these stories, you work your ass off to cover these things, you put up a bunch of shit.
It’s because we believe in this and we have a lot of people who have taken the strike pledge. One thing I want to mention is that we’ve all stuck together and there’s a lot of solidarity in our group and people have spoke very ELO about that today, but we’ve also had a lot of support out in the community, and it’s the people that we’ve talked to that supported us that have come to us with stories. I never come up with a story idea anymore. We have so many story ideas coming into us that we don’t have time to fit around and think about what’s a good story. But we’ve had support too from, and everybody here, but maybe you, Mel, will recognize the name of Ali Batt and she is a member. She works for the United Steelworkers, but she has helped us raise money. They’re always out helping message us. This is a labor town, and we’ve been able to do this for two years because we’ve had each other to lean on, but we’ve also had members of this community that have stepped up to us when we’ve really needed it and backed us both financially and with just providing good vibes to us.
John Santa:
Yeah, I should say with the pop specifically, it’s sort of like a buzzword these days, but local journalism really gets thrown around a lot. Pop is living proof that local journalism really matters and how important it is not just tooting Steve Mellon’s horn because I’m in awe of him and he’s sitting in front of me. There’s no better coverage of East Palestine, not the New York Times, not the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. It’s the best there is. I mean, Google it and look, it’s astounding. I mean, Natalie was being gracious, but her story about Harold’s Haunt, I mean, that’s vital to our community. That’s a safe space. That’s a fun place for people. These are important stories that we’re not going to get to read otherwise wise.
Being a member of the sports team at the put, we are very intentional every day about telling local stories. It’s not about what the Steelers are doing. The scab column this at the Post Gazette, Jason Mackey can go off and have fun covering the pirates and sealers, and we really know that that’s what he’s about. It’s about the experience for him, not about the experience for the readers. Bob Bats instills that in us every day, how critical that is. We follow that example. That’s really the feedback I hear most about the Pup is this is truly, you truly are focused on what’s happening locally, and I think that’s the greatest Laura we can get from this. I mean, we care about this community. We love this community. We are this community. We’re not taking advantage of it, and that’s what makes me really proud. Seriously, go look at Steve’s Z policy and coverage. It is astounding.
Mel Buer:
Rick, did you have any thoughts about the union progress and about being a part of this incredible strike paper?
Rick Nowlin:
Well, I have not written for at all. So because
Bob Batz Jr.:
Yeah, Rick, I wanted to talk to you about that. I’ll catch you after this podcast.
Mel Buer:
There you go. Get a chance to kind of join in and enjoy the progress. As a sort of final thought before we head into this last question about what our audience, my audience can do to help support the strike is I’m in awe of the work that you do every day, and I feel very proud to be a member of the same union that is keeping the strike going. And I just want to say that in terms of the strike paper, it really is an example of what happens when community members come together to collectively create something important and impactful for the community that you live in. And it says a lot about the future of journalism that this is the kind of space where folks can really feel like they’re actually connecting to the community. And hopefully you can bring that collaborative spirit back into the newsroom when you’re done with the strike and maybe cajole a couple more editors into taking stories that actually people actually give a shit about. And hopefully that will also mean that these community members who maybe have a soured relationship with the post cassette can maybe rebuild some trust with these individuals who did such a good job with Union Progress with Pup, when this is all said and done and over, that would be the hope, right? That’s the optimistic sort of space. Okay, so this is an open question, anyone who would like to talk about this, but what can my listeners do to help you as you head into the, oh my God, third year of your strike?
It could be financially, it could be locals or folks who live within driving distance of Pittsburgh. What are some things that folks can do to kind of keep you in mind and keep you going?
Natalie Duleba:
Well, I mean this is going to be, we do still have a Stryker fund. You can donate that if as a one-time donor or as recurring donor, that money in terms of giving money that will go one-to-one to support people. That fund helps people pay their bills. It’s not just it’s going to disappear into a PR machine or anything like that. That is money that goes into our pockets when we need it. And you can get all this at union progress.com/donate. You can also subscribe to the union progress. That’s always really great to have a lot of eyes and supporters for our work. It shows the Post Gazette that these are stories that the community wants and that people wanted to read and that they should want us back in the newsroom writing their stories. And also, if you sign the Strike Solidarity Pledge, you’ll get on the email list that anytime you have an action, you’ll get an email. All of this is kind of all going to be clustered into on the union progress.com website. There’s a whole section to donate, subscribe, sign the Strike Solidarity Pledge, which is putting your name committing to support us and not to talk to the Post Gazette. And that way you can get on our mailing list when we have rallies, if you are within driving distance or local or feel like flying into Pittsburgh. And it’s a cool town, and we’ll show you a good time if you come.
And when we have actions, we always are pretty active on our social medias, so engagement with that retweets, posting to your stories, things like that are helpful and can be done just from your phone. All of this I just said, you can all do just from your phone and just continue to support union labor in general. We’re not the only strike that is there’s probably another strike happening right now. We saw the power of the Shoreman Strike strike recently that if we could put the fear of God into the Post Gazette the way that they did to the nation, that’d be great. And even though we’ve been in for this long, we’re still so proud and in awe of every other newspaper newsroom who go out on strike. We’re happy that their strikes are so much shorter than ours, but it still takes, we know the bravery in the sacrifice it takes to walk out even for a single day. So yeah, that’s my little spiel here. Anybody else have anything?
Bob Batz Jr.:
Mel? One thing I’ll say is, and we appreciate labor journalism and more than we ever would’ve before, so we appreciate you. We are glad that you and Max and other people don’t just forget about us because there’s just something about that if you’re doing it and people don’t even know you’re on strike. But one of the things I see going forward is we need more journalism about what it means to go on strike, why you don’t cross a picket line. What is the NLRB and how does it work? How should it work? A lot of the problems that we’re dealing with are just, we know that the Post Gazette is hiring people while we’re out that don’t even know what that means. Or maybe they’re not even being told there’s a strike, but there’s a lot of just education that has to happen. And I think people like you and Max, we’re doing our part now, but we need to just continue to keep that word out there about how this stuff works and doesn’t work and how it should work.
And that might help people down the road. I don’t wish any of the scabs, well that I feel like I’m fighting right now, but it’s easier for me to look ahead to some of the young college kids that we’re working with, had interns and we have writers, and I want to have a post Gazette that works for all my colleagues and for myself working there. But what I really want is for it to be a place that a real journalist of the future could work and have, do really good work and work that really matters, and also not have to work three jobs and not have any healthcare. But I think that the kind of work that you do can help make strikes shorter and maybe not happening as often in the future. That would be my hope.
Mel Buer:
Well, that’s kind of part of the mission that I have here as a co-host working people, is to really kind of draw back the curtain on union organizing and the contemporary sort of US labor movement and what that means to be a part of a union and what that looks like from election to bargaining, to contract to strike to. So hopefully in the future there is more of that chance for us to have these conversations. And I leave the door open for you, the experts on a long haul strike to come back and talk about what it means to be on strike for as long as you have, and especially after victory. You’re going to come back on and we’re going to celebrate. It’s going to happen. And yeah. Any final thoughts before I close it out, or is this a great way to end it?
Thank you so much, all Thank you so much. So much. Yeah, thanks so much for coming on. Thank you for sharing your experience and for talking about the good, the bad, and the ugly of what it means to be on strike. And as always, I want to thank you, my listeners for listening, and thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes we’ve got there for our patrons. And please go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so that you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. Once again, I’m Mel Buer and with much love and solidarity, I’ll see you next time.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 19, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Striking union members who work for the aerospace giant Boeing reached a tentative contract agreement Saturday after nearly 6 weeks on the picket line demanding better wages and benefits.
The International Association of Machinists (IAM) and Aerospace Workers District 751, which has been on strike since September 13, announced the breakthrough in a statement and Boeing also confirmed that a deal had been reached.
The tentative agreement—which will have to receive a majority from union members before finalized—includes a 35% wage increase over four years of the contract, a larger signing bonus of $7,000, guaranteed minimum payouts in a new annual bonus program, and increased contributions to worker 401(k) retirement plans.
“With the help of Acting U.S. Secretary of Labor Julie Su, we have received a negotiated proposal and resolution to end the strike, and it warrants presenting to the members and is worthy of your consideration,” IAM’s negotiating committee said in a message to members on Saturday.
The union said it plans to hold a ratification vote as early as Wednesday and that a 50%+1 majority is all that’s needed to approve the deal.
“The fact the company has put forward an improved proposal is a testament to the resolve and dedication of the frontline workers who’ve been on strike—and to the strong support they have received from so many,” the machinists union said.
“Like many workers in America, IAM members at Boeing have sacrificed greatly for their employer, including during the pandemic when these workers were reporting to the factory as executives stayed at home,” they wrote. “These workers deserve to have all of those sacrifices recognized.”
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” John Maynard Keynes made this observation in 1936, in his masterwork The General Theory. Nearly a century later, readers and viewers of corporate media face the same fate.
The fundamental problem confronted by these news consumers is not that corporate news outlets consult economists in their reporting; as experts in their field, economists often have important and worthwhile contributions to make. The problem is that these outlets consistently elevate the views of specific economists who serve particular ideological interests over the views of other economists, or even the academic profession as a whole.
The austerity gospel
Simon Wren-Lewis (LRB, 2/19/15): “‘Mediamacro’…prefers simple stories to more complex analysis. As part of this, it is fond of analogies between governments and individuals, even when those analogies are generally seen to be false by macroeconomists.”
Consider the case of the 2008 financial crisis and the austerity mania that followed. The British economist Simon Wren-Lewis (London Review of Books, 2/9/15) has documented how media depictions of austerity diverged sharply from professional economists’ understandings and textbooks’ explanations of macroeconomics. His term for the media’s unique understanding of macroeconomics is “mediamacro,” which is characterized by an obsession with cutting the deficit over and above all other concerns.
In the wake of the banking crisis that followed the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007-08, and then the onset of the Eurozone crisis in 2010, standard textbook macroeconomics dictated a runup in the deficit to stimulate the economy out of a downturn. Corporate media, however, bought the arguments of political conservatives and a fringe of academic economists (who nonetheless held positions at prestigious universities), who maintained that austerity, specifically through spending cuts, could return the economy to health.
In the most notorious instance, corporate media outlets opportunistically promoted the findings of a 2010 paper, written by two Harvard economists, that were later famously invalidated due to an Excel error. As Paul Krugman noted in 2013 (New York Times, 4/19/13), this paper was controversial among economists from the start, but this did not stop corporate media from citing it—and its flimsy assertion that there existed a tipping-point for government debt at 90% of GDP, beyond which this debt supposedly imposed a major drag on economic growth—as gospel:
For example, a Washington Posteditorial earlier this year warned against any relaxation on the deficit front, because we are “dangerously near the 90% mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth.” Notice the phrasing: “economists,” not “some economists,” let alone “some economists, vigorously disputed by other economists with equally good credentials,” which was the reality.
The view from finance
As Mark Copelovitch (SSRN, 10/27/17) has noted, “The single most important factor [in elevating falsehoods about austerity] has been the media’s willingness to embrace and promote these narratives, while largely ignoring the overwhelming empirical and historical evidence that austerity is deeply contractionary and counter-productive.”
In another instance recounted by Wren-Lewis (LRB, 2/9/15), after the return of some growth in 2013 in Britain following the election of a Conservative government committed to austerity in 2010, the Financial Times editorial board (9/10/13) declared the Conservatives victorious in their political argument for austerity. This despite the fact that “less than 20% of academic economists surveyed by the Financial Times thought that the recovery of 2013 vindicated austerity.”
Such false right-wing narratives about macroeconomic policy came to dominate media discourse, not merely because political elites adopted these false narratives and thus made them newsworthy, but because corporate media outlets were compliant messengers for elite views and prescriptions.
Why does the media adopt “mediamacro” as its approach to coverage of the economy? One reason proposed by Wren-Lewis (LRB, 2/9/15) is the influence of City of London (or, in the US case, Wall Street) economists, whose
views tend to reflect the economic arguments of those on the right: Regulation is bad, top rates of tax should be low, the state is too large, and budget deficits are a serious and immediate concern.
Moreover, the political leanings of corporate media outlets, whether or not they are made explicit, may encourage them to seek the expertise of economists of a particular ideological bent. These economists’ views may, in turn, be out of step with the academic mainstream on topics like austerity.
The inflation oracle
The corporate media’s tendency to elevate economists of a specific type hasn’t disappeared in the 2020s. With the onset of Covid and the spike in inflation that followed, media broke out their familiar playbook of consulting prominent economists with extreme, and business-friendly, positions.
The infamous example was the elevation of Larry Summers, who slammed Biden’s 2021 stimulus as “the least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years” and warned stridently of inflation (Washington Post, 5/24/21). When inflation rose to a high of just over 9% the next year, Summers was hailed by the media as “an oracle: the man who saw it all coming,” as Jacobin editor Seth Ackerman (2/13/23) sarcastically put it.
In one sense, it was true that Summers had seen inflation as a strong possibility, and he did deserve some credit for that. Other economists, notably Paul Krugman, had downplayed the possibility of a jump in inflation and had to eat their words (New York Times, 7/21/22). But the fact that Summers had gotten this one point right, after an illustrious career of getting things wrong, did not exactly justify his skyrocketing status as the go-to voice on inflation, or the heaps of at times fawning media coverage thrown his way (Wall Street Journal, 6/27/22; Fortune, 9/23/22).
Did it justify, for example, Summers garnering six times as many mentions as Krugman on top cable news channels from 2021 through 2023? A Nobel laureate and widely respected commentator, Krugman also happened to be the most prominent proponent of a more dovish, less austere approach to inflation. Though he failed to foresee the initial rise in inflation, Krugman accurately predicted, in contrast to Summers, that the US economy could achieve a “soft landing,” a fall in inflation without a substantial rise in the unemployment rate (New York Times, 5/18/23).
Meanwhile, Summers capitalized on his new status as economic prophet to insist that extreme pain was required to tame inflation. By mid-2022, he confidently proclaimed (Bloomberg, 6/20/22):
We need five years of unemployment above 5% to contain inflation—in other words, we need two years of 7.5% unemployment or five years of 6% unemployment or one year of 10% unemployment.
Cherry-picking expertise
Like the views of extreme austerity advocates in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Summers’ views in 2022 were acutely out of sync with the mainstream among academic economists, as becomes apparent from surveys of professional economists taken over the course of the inflationary outbreak.
Financial Times/Booth survey of macroeconomists (9/13/22)
One FT/Booth survey taken in the fall of 2022 is particularly informative. It found that most economists thought that the Federal Reserve was on track to contain inflation with its pace of interest rate hikes. Specifically, when asked to react to the statement “Futures markets now suggest the Fed will raise the federal funds rate to about 3.9% by the end of 2022,” only 36% of economists classified the Fed’s actions as “too little too late and insufficient to help keep inflation under control.” The rest either thought that this policy path was sufficient to contain inflation (55%) or thought that it was overkill (9%).
When asked about the toll Fed policy would take on the labor market, academic economists took a moderate stance. Most agreed that the unemployment rate would peak below 6% and that a recession would last for less than a year. Incidentally, only a small minority of economists seem to have foreseen the possibility of inflation returning to target without a recession and with unemployment rising no higher than 4.3%, which is what in fact has occurred. But notwithstanding their apparent excess of pessimism, economists generally agreed that inflation would come under control with nowhere near the punishment Summers was prescribing.
To be fair, these economists were not asked directly what would be sufficient to contain inflation, and if asked directly, it is likely that some segment would have been in Summers’ camp—after all, about a third of the economists surveyed thought that the Fed was doing “too little too late.” But those backing Summers’ full diagnosis would be a fraction of those taking this minority view. So the central point that Summers was in the minority, and likely in quite a small minority, among professional economists is undoubtedly true.
Yet with his quasi-divine status granted by corporate media, Summers could pontificate freely about the need for mass suffering without fear of marginalization for lack of evidence or credibility. So when he prescribed 5% unemployment for five years, all that an outlet like Bloomberg (6/20/22) did was report on his views, no skepticism necessary. And no warning label stating: This is completely out of step with the academic mainstream. In effect, corporate media decided to once again cherry-pick expertise to legitimize austerity policies.
‘Not sensible policy’
James K. Galbraith and Isabella Weber (Boston Globe, 8/22/24) : “Americans still have some common sense…. It shows that all of the efforts of free-market economists to beat it out of them have not yetworked.“
At the same time, alternatives to the dominant austerity paradigm have been treated with caution, if not outright hostility. The New York Times (8/15/24), for example, in a recent piece on Kamala Harris’s advocacy for anti-price-gouging legislation, did consult Isabella Weber, a progressive economist who has become well known for her work on profit-driven inflation. But her testimony was overshadowed in the piece by that of economists with more conservative takes on the issue.
Most notably, the Times relied heavily on the insights of Harvard economist Jason Furman, who helped lead the push for extreme austerity alongside Summers (Wall Street Journal, 9/7/22). His first quote in the article had a simple Econ 101 message: “Egg prices went up last year—it’s because there weren’t as many eggs, and it caused more egg production.” In other words, egg prices went up because of supply issues, and it’s good that prices went up because that spurred more egg production.
Unfortunately, this story doesn’t fit with the facts. Responding to this Furman quote, Weber and James Galbraith observed in a separate article (Boston Globe, 8/22/24):
In fact, US egg production peaked in 2019 and then fell slightly, through last year. Egg prices spiked from early 2022 to $4.82 a dozen on average in January 2023, before falling back again, with no gain in production. High prices did not stimulate America’s hens to greater effort. On these points, Furman laid an egg.
It might be assumed that the Times would engage in this sort of basic factchecking of its sources, and not leave it to two progressive economists writing in the Boston Globe to do that for them. But when the source is a Harvard economist who not too long ago was suggesting (wildly incorrectly) that unemployment would have to jump over 6% for two years to tame inflation (Wall Street Journal, 9/7/22), apparently skepticism is not in order.
Leaving little room to doubt the leanings of the Times reporters, the article ended with another quote from Furman, this time on Harris’s proposal to go after price gouging:
“This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality,” he said. “There’s no upside here, and there is some downside.”
Hand-picked by elites
Conor Smyth (FAIR.org, 2/14/24): “For media outlets owned by the wealthy, there’s obvious utility in directing the conversation away from inequality and toward other concerns.”
If one of the main functions of the media is agenda-setting—deeming certain topics, like government debt, newsworthy and others, like inequality, not so much (FAIR.org, 2/14/24)—another primary function is legitimization: letting audiences know who they should trust and who they should treat with skepticism. Over the course of the recent bout of inflation, corporate outlets have made it clear that those economists who erred on the side of far-reaching austerity were worth listening to. The ones who dissented most strongly from the austerity paradigm were, for the most part, sidelined or only tepidly consulted.
The result has been a constrained debate. Extreme pro-austerity positions have enjoyed high visibility, while progressives have been relegated to the background. This is not because of an imbalance in the evidence. If anything, the side that has been arguing for anti-austerity measures to fight inflation, like temporary price controls, has more evidence for their claims than the side that’s backed harsh monetary austerity. They, at least, haven’t been proven embarrassingly wrong by the experience of the past couple years.
What could help explain the imbalance in coverage is instead the background of different sets of economists. Before being legitimized by corporate media, extremists for austerity like Summers and Furman were legitimized by political status—Summers served in top roles under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and Furman served as a key adviser to Obama. Progressives like Isabella Weber have not enjoyed similar political standing.
Thus, we can see a sort of chain of legitimization that runs from a political system dominated by economic elites to a media ecosystem owned by economic elites. If you can secure a top post in politics, it doesn’t matter whether you’re an extremist with views contradicting the consensus among academic economists. Your views should be taken seriously. For progressives, who have largely been excluded from elite politics in recent decades, serious skepticism is in order.
On the face of it, this system makes some sense. But think a little deeper and you can see an insidious chain servicing the dominant players in American society. That chain needs to be broken. Media outlets need to listen to the evidence, not the false wisdom of economists hand-picked by American elites.
With less than a month until Election Day, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, sat down for an interview with Bill Whitaker on CBS‘s 60 Minutes (10/7/24). (Donald Trump backed out of a similar interview.)
Aside from one televised debate (ABC, 9/10/24), both Harris and Trump have given corporate news outlets remarkably few opportunities to press them on important issues. While Whitaker didn’t offer Harris many softball questions—and included some sharp interrogation on the Middle East—his focus frequently started from right-wing talking points and assumptions, particularly over immigration and economic policy.
FAIR counted 29 questions, with 24 of them going to Harris. Those questions began with foreign policy, which also accounted for the most policy-related questions (7). Whitaker also asked her five questions about the economy, four about immigration, and one more generally about her changed positions on immigration, fracking and healthcare. Seven of Whitaker’s questions to Harris were unrelated to policies or governing; of the five questions to Walz, the only vaguely policy-oriented one asked him to respond to the charge that he was “dangerously liberal.”
‘How are you going to pay?’
A Pew survey (9/9/24) shows little correlation between what voters care about and what 60 Minutes (10/7/24) asked Kamala Harris about.
Economic issues are a top priority for many voters. But rather than ask Harris about whether and how her plan might help people economically, or formulate questions to help voters understand the differences between Harris’s and Trump’s plans, Whitaker focused on two long-standing media obsessions: the deficit and bipartisanship (or lack thereof).
Whitaker first asked Harris: “Groceries are 25% higher, and people are blaming you and Joe Biden for that. Are they wrong?” It’s not clear that people primarily blame the administration for inflation, actually; a Financial Times/Michigan Ross poll in March found that 63% of respondents blamed higher prices on “large corporations taking advantage of inflation,” while 38% blamed Democratic policies (CNBC, 3/12/24).
Whitaker went on to list some of Harris’s more progressive economic proposals: “expand the child tax credit…give tax breaks to first-time homebuyers…and people starting small businesses.”
These are all generally politically popular, but Whitaker framed his question about them not in terms of the impact on voters, but the impact on the federal deficit, citing a deficit hawk think tank:
But it is estimated by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget that your economic plan would add $3 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade. How are you going to pay for that?
There is a very popular assumption in corporate media that federal deficits are of critical importance—that is, when Democrats are proposing to provide aid and public services to people. When Republicans propose massive tax breaks for the wealthy and for corporations, the same media tend to forget their deficit obsession (FAIR.org, 1/25/21).
It is worth noting—since Whitaker did not—that the CRFB found that Trump’s plan, which follows that Republican playbook, would increase the debt by $7.5 trillion. One might also bear in mind that US GDP is projected to be more than $380 trillion over the next decade.
Dissatisfied with Harris’s rather oblique answer, Whitaker insisted: “But pardon me, Madam Vice President, the question was how are you going to pay for it?” When Harris responded that she intended to “make sure that the richest among us who can afford it pay their fair share of taxes,” Whitaker scoffed: “We’re dealing with the real world here. How are you going to get this through Congress?”
After Harris argued that congressmembers “know exactly what I’m talking about, ’cause their constituents know exactly what I’m talking about,” Whitaker shot back, “And Congress has shown no inclination to move in your direction.”
Sure, journalists shouldn’t let politicians make pie-in-the-sky promises, but it’s true that Harris’s proposals are supported by majorities of the public. Whitaker did viewers—and democracy—no favors by focusing his skepticism not on a corrupt system that benefits the wealthy, but on Harris’s critique of that system.
‘A historic flood’
Serious efforts to count the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States show little sign of the “flood” touted by 60 Minutes (Pew, 7/22/24).
Whitaker’s framing was even more right-wing on immigration. His first question, framed by a voiceover noting that “Republicans are convinced immigration is the vice president’s Achilles’ heel”:
You recently visited the southern border and embraced President Biden’s recent crackdown on asylum seekers, and that crackdown produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings. If that’s the right answer now, why didn’t your administration take those steps in 2021?
Whitaker is referring to Biden’s tightening restrictions so that refugees cannot be granted asylum when US officials deem that the southern border is overwhelmed. It’s certainly valid to question the new policies; the ACLU (6/12/24) has argued they are unconstitutional, for instance.
But Whitaker clearly wasn’t interested in constitutionality or human rights. His questioning started from the presumption that immigration is a problem, and used the dehumanizing language that is all too common in corporate media reporting on immigrants (FAIR.org, 8/23/23):
Whitaker: But there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration. As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?
Harris: It’s a longstanding problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.
Whitaker: What I was asking was, was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?
Harris: I think—the policies that we have been proposing are about fixing a problem, not promoting a problem, OK? But the—
Whitaker: But the numbers did quadruple under your watch.
As others have pointed out, using flood metaphors paints immigrants as “natural disasters who should be dealt with in an inhumane fashion” (Critical Discourse Studies, 1/31/17).
But Whitaker is also using a right-wing talking point that’s entirely misleading. Border “encounters” increased sharply under Biden, but these encounters, as we have explained before (FAIR.org, 3/29/24),
are not a tally of how many people were able to enter the country without authorization; it’s a count of how many times people were stopped at the border by CBP agents. Many of these people had every right to seek entry, and a great number were turned away. Some of them were stopped more than once, and therefore were counted multiple times.
In fact, only roughly a third were actually released into the country (Factcheck.org, 2/27/24).
Whitaker used these misleading figures to paint undocumented immigration as a crisis, which has been a media theme since the beginning of the Biden administration (FAIR.org, 5/24/21). In fact, the percentage of the US population that is unauthorized has risen only slightly—from 3.2% in 2019 to 3.3% in 2022, the latest year available—which is down from a peak of 4.0% in 2007 (Pew, 7/22/24).
‘Does the US have no sway?’
Internal controversy over Tony Dokoupil’s confrontational interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates (CBS Mornings, 9/30/24) may have given Bill Whitaker an opening to challenge Harris on whether she was too supportive of Israel.
Whitaker’s first questions to Harris, about the Middle East, represented a shift in tone from ABC‘s questioning at the September debate—where moderator David Muir asked Harris to respond to Trump’s charge that “you hate Israel.” Whitaker started his interview by pressing Harris about the United States’ continued support of Israel despite its recent escalations:
The events of the past few weeks have pushed us into the brink, if not into, an all-out regional war into the Middle East. What can Hthe US do at this point to prevent this from spinning out of control?
Harris repeated the Biden administration (and, frequently, media) line that Israel has a right to defend itself, while noting that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” and that “this war has to end.” Whitaker pushed back, pointing out that the United States is an active supporter of Israel’s military and, thus, military actions:
But we supply Israel with billions of dollars of military aid, and yet Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu seems to be charting his own course. The Biden/Harris administration has pressed him to agree to a ceasefire, he has resisted. You urged him not to go into Lebanon, he went in anyway. Does the US have no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu?
Whitaker continued with two more brief questions about the relationship with Netanyahu. It’s possible that his line of questioning was influenced by the controversy within his network over CBS Mornings host Tony Dokoupil’s interview (9/30/24) with author Ta-Nehisi Coates, which pushed a pro-Israel line hard enough to prompt charges of unprofessionalism (FAIR.org, 10/4/24; Zeteo, 10/9/24).
The three other foreign policy questions concerned US support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion. Two of the three asked about ending the war: “What does success look like in ending the war in Ukraine?” and “Would you meet with President Vladimir Putin to negotiate a solution to the war in Ukraine?” The third asked whether Harris would “support the effort to expand NATO to include Ukraine.”
In contrast to the Middle East line of questioning, Whitaker did not push back against any of Harris’s answers, which expressed support for “Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia’s unprovoked aggression,” and to “have a say” in determining the end of the war.
Crucial missing questions
The aftermath of two hurricanes supercharged by climate change didn’t prompt 60 Minutes to ask any questions about climate (CBS, 9/30/24).
Though Whitaker took time to ask Harris what kind of gun she owns and Walz whether he can be “trusted to tell the truth,” he didn’t ask a single question about abortion, other healthcare issues, the climate crisis or gun control. These are all remarkable omissions.
A Pew Research survey (9/9/24) found abortion was a “very important” issue to more than half of all voters, and to two-thirds of Harris supporters. But Whitaker asked no questions about what Harris and Walz would do to protect or restore reproductive rights across the US.
The healthcare system was another glaring omission by 60 Minutes, though it is voters’ second-most important issue, according to the same Pew Research survey; 65% of all voters, and 76% of Harris supporters, said that healthcare was “very important” to their vote.
Healthcare only came up as part of an accusation that “you have changed your position on so many things”: Along with shifts on immigration and fracking, Whittaker noted that “you were for Medicare for all, now you’re not,” with the result that “people don’t truly know what you believe or what you stand for.” Like a very similar question asked of Harris during the debate (FAIR.org, 9/13/24), it seemed crafted to press Harris on whether her conversion from left-liberal to centrist was genuine, rather than to elicit real solutions for a population with the highest healthcare costs and the lowest life expectancy of any wealthy nation.
At a moment when Hurricane Helene had just wreaked massive destruction across the Southeast and Hurricane Milton was already promising to deliver Florida its second devastating storm in two weeks, the lack of climate questions was striking. While voters tend to rank climate policy as a lower priority than issues like the economy or immigration, large majorities are concerned about it—and it’s an urgent issue with consequences that can’t be understated. Yet the only time climate was alluded to was in the flip-flop question, which included the preface, “You were against fracking, now you’re for it.”
Similarly, a mass shooting in Birmingham, Alabama, killed four people just over three weeks ago; as of this writing (10/15/24), the Gun Violence Archive reported that gun violence, excluding suicide, has killed 13,424 Americans this year. In 2019, the American Psychological Association reported that one-third of Americans said that fear of mass shootings stops them from going to certain places and events. In a Pew Research survey (4/11/24), 59% of public K-12 teachers said they are at least somewhat worried about the possibility of a shooting at their school, and 23% have experienced a lockdown.
Yet the two questions Whitaker asked about guns had nothing to do with these realities or fears, or what a Harris/Walz administration would do about them. Instead, he asked Harris, “What kind of gun do you own, and when and why did you get it?” (Harris answered, “I have a Glock, and I have had it for quite some time.”) Whitaker followed up by asking Harris if she had ever fired it. (She said she had, at a shooting range.)
‘Out of step’
Walz was mostly asked non-policy questions, things like “Whether you can be trusted to tell the truth,” and why his calling Republicans “weird” has become a “rallying cry for Democrats.”
In keeping with the media’s preoccupation with pushing Democratic candidates to the right, the governor was asked to respond to charges that he was “dangerously liberal” and part of the “radical left“: “What do you say to that criticism, that rather than leading the way, you and Minnesota are actually out of step with the rest of the country?”
The right-wing framing of many of the questions asked, and the important issues ignored, might make CBS think about how in step it is with the country and its needs.
Over the past two weeks, people around the country have watched in horror as our neighbors and fellow workers have been battered by the successive disasters of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. “After making landfall as a Category 4 hurricane on Sept. 26 and tearing through the Gulf Coast of Florida,” Adeel Hassan and Isabelle Taft write in The New York Times, “Helene plowed north through Georgia and walloped the Blue Ridge Mountains, washing out roads, causing landslides and knocking out power and cell service for millions of people. Across western North Carolina, towns were destroyed, water and fuel supplies were disrupted, and residents were in a communications black hole, scrambling for Wi-Fi to try to reach friends and family… As of Oct. 6, there were more than 230 confirmed deaths from the storm.” The hurricanes have passed, but the devastation and dire need they left in their wake remain. In this urgent mini-cast, we speak with two guests who are on the ground in Asheville, NC, providing relief and mutual aid to their community: Byon Ballard, a cofounder of the Mother Grove Goddess Temple in Asheville, where she serves as Senior Priestess, and Lori Freshwater, a journalist and relief aid volunteer who is originally from North Carolina.
Featured Music: Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song
Studio Production: Max Alvarez Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Lori Freshwater:
Hey Max, I am Lori Freshwater and I am originally from North Carolina, although I’m on the coast, but when I heard that my beloved mountains were in trouble, I had to come here and see if there was anything I could do to help and I found the Mother Grove goddess where I am today. I’m a journalist, kind of a nomadic journalist, and so I’m going to be here for the foreseeable future trying to get the news out about what the needs are here in Western North Carolina.
Byron Ballard:
I’m Byron Ballard. I am one of the founders, one of the co-founders, and I serve as senior priestess for the Mother Grove Goddess Temple here in Asheville. We are a church that honors and celebrates the divine feminine in whatever spiritual tradition you’re in, and we’ve been around for about 18 years doing public rituals, teaching classes, and this is our first and we are hoping, hoping it is going to be our last major push on relief efforts. Please. Oh, please.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright, welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focus shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. And please support the work that we do at The Real News Network by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.
My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got an urgent episode for y’all today. If you have been watching the news or just going outside in the record breaking October heat, then you like me, have surely been feeling ever more anxious and uneasy about the intensifying effects of climate change. If you live in the American Southeast, however, chances are you are feeling the disastrous effects of what must be understood as a full-blown climate emergency. Over the past two weeks, those of us around the country have watched in horror as our neighbors and fellow workers have been battered by the successive terrors of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. As a deal, Hassan and Isabelle Taft write in the New York Times after making landfall as a category for hurricane on September 26th and through the Gulf coast of Florida, Helene plowed north through Georgia and walloped the Blue Ridge Mountains washing out roads causing landslides and knocking out power and cell service for millions of people.
Across Western North Carolina. Towns were destroyed. Water and fuel supplies were disrupted and residents were in a communications black hole scrambling for wifi to try to reach friends and family officials raced to rescue survivors, locate victims, and restore flood damaged water systems. The chaos in the state was part of a path of destruction that Helene carved through the region, including portions of Tennessee, South Carolina and Virginia. As of October 6th, there were more than 230 confirmed deaths from the storm. Helene is the deadliest tropical cyclone to strike the mainland United States since 2005 when Hurricane Katrina caused nearly 1400 deaths on the Gulf Coast. According to statistics from the National Hurricane Center, pounding rain flash, floods and dangerous landslides savage, the area around Asheville and Western North Carolina putting the region in crisis. It’s like a mini apocalypse said Gretchen Hogan, a resident of Brevard, North Carolina. Now the hurricanes may have passed, but the devastation and dire need they left in their wake remain.
The stories coming out of communities ravaged by Helene and Milton are ghastly, devastating and heartbreaking. And the reality that humanity has been barreling down a decades long path to the extremely predictable climate emergency we’re now in is in infuriating, terrifying and overwhelming, but out of darkness. There has been light out of crisis, an outpouring of love, solidarity, and sacrifice, and today we are talking with two incredible human beings on the ground around Asheville, where communities have been directly impacted and where folks have been working overtime to provide relief and mutual aid to their community. Lori Byron, thank you so much for joining us today amidst all this chaos. We really, really appreciate it and I promise I won’t keep you too long. I was wondering if we could just start by turning things over to you and asking if you could talk us through what you have been seeing, feeling, experiencing, hearing from your community there in Asheville since Hurricane Helene hit and especially in the weeks since.
Byron Ballard:
I’ve got to be honest with you, many of the people that I talk to and deal with every day aren’t feeling anything. We can’t. We can’t because there’s too much work to do to stop and process. So we’ll do that later. I’m dreaming of a trip to the beach in the winter where nobody’s there and I don’t have to answer anybody else’s questions. We are in a place that we’re in the middle of a natural disaster. We’re at the beginning of a natural disaster. There are places that look perfect and untouched only to discover that there’s four feet of toxic mud inside them. My family has lived on the French Broad River since they came from an adjoining county at the end of the 19th century, and I lived there still, but high up so that I could watch the river rise in 1916. This river rose to 22.4, I think feet above its banks and it was over 27 feet for this flood.
So it is the worst flood that anyone here has ever historically experienced. What we are looking at is need on every possible level. So people need water because the water system is destroyed. There are towns that are gone. There’s a little sweet little touristy town called chimney rock, and it is much of it is simply gone. It’s not that the trees are down and there’s some mud, it’s that the buildings are gone. There is a beautiful valley called Swano, which we understand is a native ward and I don’t know if it’s creek or Cherokee, but that means beautiful valley and it is a long valley between heading east out of Asheville, heading towards downstate and the Swanno River, which is a tiny little drought, water river most of the time floods a lot and it flood flooded. It flooded in a horrific and substantial way so that the Swanno Valley is now the Swanno Valley of the shadow of death.
And for over a week it was almost impossible to get in and people would get in with a four wheel drive or an A TV or however they could do it and do the basics, pull people off the roofs of their houses, get the people into shelter and safety. It was extreme wartime triage, and I’ve heard that again and again from people who say, I was in Korea, I was in Iraq, and this is wartime damage. We are fortunate in that no one is bombing us actively. But yeah, that’s what we’re looking at. And at this point, two weeks in much of the triage is accomplished. People have water people, the hierarchy of needs are met with exception of shelter. And that’s what everyone is working on now, cleaning up, rebuilding, building where they can, but the infrastructure is gone.
The water system can’t be rebuilt in places because there are no roads left in those places. So first a road has to be built and then the water system can be addressed. And I want to address one thing right now, right up front there’s a lot, lot of misinformation. And here in the mountains we would just call it damn lion about what is and is not here. FEMA is here, the Army Corps of Engineers is here. We have had utility workers from as far away as Canada to reestablish power here. The government that everybody hates is here and they are functioning, but the terrain is impossibly difficult. So there are still without any doubt, families and individuals in the far western part of this state and in the higher elevations in these counties around here and in Buncombe County that have not been reached yet because it’s the terrain.
These are among the oldest mountains in the world and people look at ’em and go, well, they’re not the Rockies. They shouldn’t be too bad. Well, they’re bad, they’re bad. And because decisions were made on a higher level than any of us, we’ve had ridge top development and steep slope development that never should have happened because in addition to the flooding, we have landslides, we have rock falls. They tell us in order to drive the federal highway I 40 west to get from North Carolina to Tennessee, we will not be able to do that until November of 2025. So that’s the level of destruction. I’m going to say one more thing and I’m going to turn it over. Last night we had been expecting a load of supplies from the Charlotte area and the fellow got here and with his father-in-law, and we started unpacking all that we needed unpack.
And he turned me and just grabbed me in a big bear hug and looked in my face and he said, I don’t know if I should say this to you, but I was in Katrina and this is worse than Katrina. And he had tears in his eyes. So we know. But to get back to your first question, what are we feeling? We can’t feel that yet. Not yet, because we’re still delivering water, we’re still collecting diapers and bleach wipes and every afternoon we drink elderberry, tincture and hope we’re not going to get sick. Yeah, I mean that’s our reality right here on the ground.
Lori Freshwater:
Thank you, Byron. I would really also like to kind of clear up from people on the ground some of these absolutely insane conspiracies. I complained about FEMA being slow, getting in here with water openly. So I’m not someone who is afraid to criticize the government, but they are here and you see them with vest everywhere and they’re going around to people that are in the parks and that just clearly don’t have any place to go. The Army Corps of Engineers is here. I was listening to the Buncombe County press conference this morning and just heard this statistic that was just mind blowing from the Army Corps of Engineer Engineers. He said that there are an estimated, there’s an estimated 10 million tons of debris out here, 10 million tons of debris that has to be taken care of. So that alone is enough to just cripple the entire area if we aren’t really all working together. And that’s what people have been doing. They’ve been working together in a way that I’ve never seen through any other community. People have been communicating with people in far areas. They’ve been looking online in different Facebook groups to see, oh, there’s somebody that needs a meal for their autistic child. We can bring it up.
People are rising above what I would have ever even expected or dreamed. And I would just ask the rest of America to kind of the best thing you could do for the people of Western North Carolina is to follow their example. Stop looking at hate and conspiracies and things that push people down and look at what is going on here now and get your As to work. Sorry, that was a little interruption from Byron. They’re welcome to come here and work as well. We have plenty of work to do. But would just say what I’ve seen here has been really, really special and incredible. And I think that what I want to do going forward is to tell other communities whether you are a coastal community or wildfire or just a community that hasn’t been touched yet, start working together now with your community because that’s what’s going to save you.
Luckily the people here, were able to get things together quickly and are still trying to do so, but when you have to go to a cashless society overnight, it’s like no technology. So there’s no way to buy gas. There’s no way to buy food. You run out of cash pretty quickly. You want to be prepared. And so that’s a big lesson that I would say Max, that people really need to take from this is get going now. Get to know your neighbors, get out there and talk to people in your community and say, who’s got these skills? Who has a chainsaw? Who’s a good organizer on doing meal drops? That kind of thing. And that’s what people should be doing instead of talking about conspiracy theories, how you get through disasters, that’s how we become better Americans and that’s how we become better humans. So that’s my little preach for the day Max.
Maximillian Alvarez:
No, I can’t thank you both enough for laying that out and preaching the good word that needs to be heard right now. I want us to end here in a second by talking about those relief and mutual aid efforts and the light that has come out of this darkness. The great Mr. Rogers famously said, in a moment of disaster or crisis like this, we always need to look for the helpers. We need to know that there are people there helping and you all are out there helping. And I want folks listening to this to look for the helpers and to be the helpers. And I want to emphasize that the people out there spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories and all that crap are not helping shit. So I want us to end on that in a second. And pardon my French, it’s heartbreaking hearing what you guys are laying out for us.
And I just wanted to, by way of getting us to the final question here, I want hover on something that you guys said about how other communities need to be preparing themselves for eventualities like this. Because when the catastrophe comes, you’re going to need your neighbors more than you ever thought you would. But this really speaks to the heart of an investigation that we’ve been doing on this podcast for years now. We’ve been interviewing working class people, living, working and fighting in different, so-called sacrifice zones around the country, places like East Palestinian, Ohio where working class residents have had their lives upended by the derailment unavoidable derailment of a Norfolk southern bomb train two years ago almost, right? And to communities here in South Baltimore who are being poisoned by another railroad, a medical trash incinerator, all that kind of work that we’ve done to talk to folks, living in areas like that has taught us something that I’ve said on this show many times is that we are all more or less being set up for sacrifice.
And in these communities you can see the future that’s in store for most of us. And if you don’t believe that, just look at the last two weeks. Listen to what Byron said about the toxic sort of sludge that you can’t control where that stuff goes when a hurricane hits your area. What about the mountaintop removal that’s increasing the likelihood for deadly landslides? I mean, what about the insurance companies that are telling people after a natural disaster that they are shit out of luck? I mean, this is what we mean when we say we all need to care about this and we all need to be fighting together against this because we’re all being set up for sacrifice. And that is unacceptable on every single level. And so I can’t stress that enough for people out there listening, please don’t comfort yourself with the notion that you’re going to be fine even if others aren’t.
And just hoping and praying that you live in a safe zone. We need to be proactive about this. And I just can’t emphasize that enough. And I know I can’t keep you both for much longer because you have the vital work to do of repairing your community and meeting your community members’ needs. And once again, we can’t thank you enough for doing that work. I want to just ask if you could tell our listeners a bit more about the kind of relief work that you’ve been doing, the kind of needs in the community that you referenced earlier that are ongoing, the different orgs, volunteer groups that are doing the work of helping and what folks out there listening right now can do to support those efforts and support our fellow workers in these regions battered by the hurricanes.
Lori Freshwater:
Right. Thank you for all that and thank you for just, it’s so nice to talk to someone so informed from a distance about what’s going on, not just here, but like you said, so many places. I was at a place called Beloved Asheville yesterday, which is they’ve kind of risen to the top of the organization chart. It’s amazing to watch. I was there a couple of days after the storm and I watched them ramp up and now I think it’s acres out there and they’re on social media, so please go find them on social media. They’re posting a lot of videos and reels and that kind of thing, and it really does show you how massive their relief efforts have become. And they have everything from gas cans, camping supplies, things we still need. By the way, it’s getting cold here. So we need blankets, we need clothes for people, gloves, those kinds of things.
We need medical first aid supplies. Like Byron said, I think we’re okay on water. We need to keep distributing what’s here and make sure that people aren’t getting left out, but we are pivoting now to a different kind of needs. When I was at Beloved Asheville, I spoke to the co co person facilitator, I’m not sure if his title, I apologize. And he was saying that what we need is land and we need housing, and that’s what we need to start thinking of now. Instead of saying, well, this isn’t the time to think of that, it is the time to think of that. There was a homeless population here before and now that population, we don’t know. We have no idea how many people are homeless in Western North Carolina right now. So his point is so valid. We need to be thinking about getting land and building housing for people and people who are owning investment homes here.
They need to do the moral thing since our laws won’t force them to do it, and they need to stop sitting on empty houses in these places where people are homeless. So that’s the focus going forward. How can we not just get to where we were, but how can we come out better? So that’s what I would say. And I think I would just ask Byron if she has a couple of things to say that people are sending here that we might have enough of or things that we need. Let me see what she has to say because kind of really got her eye on everything coming and going. Right now,
Byron Ballard:
I course want to talk about Barnardsville. So we heard early on that Barnardsville was a disaster, and it is the big Ivy River, which is kind of a misnomer. It’s never been a real big river, but the devastating flood on that river in this little valley, again, in this beautiful little valley, we just heard how terrible it was. So we loaded it up, a four wheel drive with water, food, diapers, all of that. We headed out there and the road was good, and that is a huge blessing. The road was good, but on a quarter mile, either side of the road, it looked apocalyptic.
Lori Freshwater:
It really max. It does. I have to just say it really does look like what people think of as the zombie apocalypse.
Byron Ballard:
It looks like the suburbs of Beirut, just fewer buildings. But then we got to the place we were headed and they said it’s right across from the post office. We got there, and it’s an old firehouse and the group of people who have organized that, a group of, I’m going to call them anarchists, that is a word close and dear to my heart, but they’re primitive skills experts and they do workshops in the area all the time. They had that thing set up so elegantly. So the first bay was missing persons. Second bay was first aid. After that, there was a section of clothing and a section of food and outside under 10 by 10 popups or thousands of cases of bottled water. And you pulled in differently if you were delivering versus picking up. The point is they had within hours of the disaster, they had organized that because they knew how to organize. So we at Mother Grove, goddess Temple are doing nothing, anybody. We’re not doing anything special. Everybody can do this, but you need to think about it now when you’re not in the grips of a crisis, it is possible to organize so that you get people what they need. But you need to think about it now because it is absolutely true that the first responders of any disaster are the people who are also the most effective victims, the disaster.
And we need to be ready for that because this is a warning shot the same way that Katrina was a warning shot, and we’re not going to get many more warning shots before the big huge cataclysm happens. We just simply aren’t. So I would say, and I’ve said this again and again, do the work. Do the damn work. Look at what your community needs and do it and do it and do it. And yes, it is exhausting. I mean, I look at your face and I know you look at my face, look at us, look at hanging out over your phone and we look tired because we aren’t tired, but we’re doing good work. So if people want to come to Mother Grave, goddess Temple, we are here. We will give you a cup of tea or a cup of coffee and a cookie and maybe some food, and then we may say, how much gas you got in your car? Can I give you money for gas? This stuff needs to go and I want to emphasize this. We are not special. Anybody can do this, but you just have to have the guts to do it, and you’ve got to get off your lazy ass and do something. Okay, I guess I’ll finish with that.
With less than a month until Election Day, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, sat down for an interview with Bill Whitaker on CBS‘s 60 Minutes (
