Senate Republicans voted Tuesday to advance Donald Trump’s massive spending and tax bill, which will now go back to the House of Representatives for final approval. President Trump has publicly pushed his party to get the bill on his desk to sign by July 4. Dozens of peaceful protestors, including disabled people in wheelchairs, were arrested last Wednesday, June 25, in Washington, DC, while protesting Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which will slash taxes, dramatically increase funding for war and immigration enforcement, and make devastating cuts to vital, popular programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Lorraine Chavez, an educator, researcher, and community leader based in Chicago, and Christine Rodriguez, a legal assistant from Pasadena, California, both of whom traveled to DC with the Debt Collective and were arrested for participating in the peaceful act of civil disobedience.
Guests:
Lorraine Chavez is an educator, researcher, and community leader based in Chicago. She is also a student debtor and traveled to the Washington, DC, protest with the Debt Collective.
Christine Rodriguez is a legal assistant and student debtor from Pasadena, California, who also traveled to the Washington, DC, protest with the Debt Collective.
Credits
Studio Production / Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Senate Republicans voted Tuesday to advance Donald Trump’s massive spending and tax Bill three Republican Senators, Susan Collins of Maine, Tom Tillis of North Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky joined all Democrats in voting against the bill. But with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote, the bill will now go back to the House of Representatives for final approval and Trump has publicly pushed his party to get the bill on his desk to sign by July 4th. Now, dozens of peaceful protesters, including disabled people in wheelchairs were arrested last Wednesday in Washington DC while protesting President Trump’s so-called one big beautiful bill, which will slash taxes and includes devastating cuts to vital, popular and lifesaving programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or snap.
Dr. Richelle Brooks:
These cuts are death sentences. Trump is proposing 1.4 trillion in cuts, 793 billion from Medicaid alone and 293 billion from a CA. This would result in 10.9 million people immediately losing their health insurance. If this bill is passed and its rules are codified, this will cause mass loss of insurance for many people in need for years to come. It’s not just going to affect us now. It’s going to affect us later. This bill doesn’t just remove care from those in need and who need access to it most. It adds barriers to access for everyone. They’re intentionally attacking Medicaid and benefits like Snap Pell grants and programs like public service loan forgiveness because they are the last remaining examples of what access to Repairative public goods can look like in this country. They don’t want us to think that we have a right to healthcare. They don’t want us to believe that we have a right to public goods. They want us to believe that we need to earn the access for our basic needs to be met with our labor, with our compliance, and with our silence.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Speaking to Republican colleagues who were worried about the public blowback to these deeply unpopular cuts, former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell reportedly said, I know a lot of us are hearing from people back home about Medicaid, but they’ll get over it now. These massive cuts to public programs like Medicaid and food stamps are part of a systematic overhaul that would place the biggest financial burden on poor and working people to pay for Trump’s staggering increases to war and immigration enforcement spending and to make permanent his tax cuts from 2017, which overwhelmingly benefit corporations and the rich as part of Trump’s plan to remove undocumented immigrants from the country. The Guardian reports Immigration and customs Enforcement will receive 45 billion for detention facilities, $14 billion for deportation operations and billions of dollars more to hire an additional 10,000 new agents by 2029. And more than $50 billion is allocated for the construction of new border fortifications, which will probably include a wall along the border with Mexico.
Now, the Senate version of the bill also includes over 150 billion in new military spending and decade after decade, Republican tax cuts have eroded the US tax base and enriched the wealthiest households all while funding for war policing and surveillance has continued to rise. Trump’s one big beautiful bill would reportedly increase the national debt by $3.3 trillion and someone has to pay for that. And Trump and the GOP think that that someone should be working people like you among other things. The so-called big beautiful Bill also includes a provision to bar states from imposing any new regulations on artificial intelligence or AI over the next 10 years. A move that critics say is both a massive violation of states’ rights and a dangerous relinquishing of government oversight on big tech and AI when oversight is most needed. The bill would also restructure the student loan and debt system imposing stricter limits on new borrowers who hope to attend college and much harsher repayment plans for current debtors.
The fact that so many millions of Americans will be directly impacted by this bill is exactly what brought so many different groups out to Washington DC last week to protest it, including popular Democracy in Action, the Service Employees, international Union, planned Parenthood, Federation of America, the Debt Collective Standup, Alaska Action, North Carolina, Arkansas Community Organizations and American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today, or Adapt. Now, I spoke with Lorraine Chavez, an educator, researcher, and community leader based in Chicago, as well as Christine Rodriguez, a legal assistant from Pasadena, California, both of whom were arrested in DC last week for participating in the Peaceful Act of Civil Disobedience and both of whom are student debtors themselves and traveled to DC with the Debt Collective. A union of debtors
Lorraine Chavez:
I came to DC having followed the Debt Collective for a number of years, and I came because I personally have student loan debt that I have no capacity to pay. I’m a single mother. I put my two kids who are twins both 33 through college, and they did not receive any financial assistance at all from their college professor, father, so it was all on me. So I have no capacity to pay back my own debt, and I know others have all kinds of medical debt. I know there are all kinds of cutbacks coming to the disabled community of which I had been a part of and an advocate for in Chicago. So I didn’t mind getting arrested. I was really thrilled to be with all these other advocates from all over the country.
Christine Rodriguez:
So all these things that are just interconnected. And then on top of this, all these tax cuts are going to basically allocate for funding for increased military defense, which I live near Los Angeles. I’ve definitely seen a lot heavier military presence along with our police, but specifically federal military, the Marines coming into Los Angeles, all these tax cuts, that’s just where our money is going to go to armed people who want to just lock us up and silence us. I came in for student loan forgiveness, but just in that introduction round, I had now become a part of other folks who were fighting for Medicaid, fighting for to reduce, to not cut the spending for the SNAP program or for the food stamp program.
Lorraine Chavez:
It just speaks to the crisis that we have around all debt on all levels and these really horrific policies that are about to or will be passed. And some of the banners that people had, which I fully support, said that people are going to die if these policies are put in place. How are Medicaid recipients going to get medical care? We are in a deep, profound crisis of health in the country, and these cutbacks will drastically increase the death rate for sure of millions of Americans who will be denied access to healthcare.
Christine Rodriguez:
And when we get to the Rotunda area, there’s already a lot of police presence there. I guess they got word because there’s so many of us at the hearing, they even tried to tell us like, you guys cannot, woo. You guys can’t chant. You can’t be too loud. You could only clap. So kind of in that moment at the press hearing, we could already see they’re trying to keep us quiet in a sense. The Capitol police were really almost waiting for us at the rotunda, definitely at the second floor where we wanted to do our banner drop at the rotunda at the time, we could already hear that the demonstration was going on. As we’re trying to drop our banner, we could already kind of hear that the plan of people are going to have a die-in at the bottom. They’re going to have a banner shush over us. And I think from the videos that I’ve seen already, when people were lying on the floor, banners were being taken away and people were already getting arrested just from, they could see their association with the Diane. So people were just getting arrested. We say arrest is really, it’s a dramatic citation. It is what happened because they let us go for $50. But again, it’s why does this need to be so dramatic of us advocating our First Amendment rights to express how much we don’t want the government to go through with this big disastrous plan?
Lorraine Chavez:
We were a peaceful group of demonstrators, totally peaceful, exercising our first amendment rights, and even within the holding center where we were, no air conditioning, it looked like a gigantic empty garage. There were fans, but it was excruciatingly hot the whole time. And I counted how many police men and women. There were about 30 of us there, and there were about 25 policemen and women. I mean, it was it absurd. And to see dozens and dozens and dozens of police, men and women swarming the Senate building as well. There must have been a police man or woman for every single one of us that was there. It was ridiculous, quite frankly, and also terrifying because we were just there exercising our First Amendment rights about issues that impact all of us. And there was an enormous crowd, enormous group of protestors in wheelchairs and amongst the disabled, their hands were tied in front or in back of them. It was a really dangerous situation. I actually had bruises on my wrist until the next day because of the plastic ties were just gripped around my wrists, and I wasn’t even allowed really to drink water. I mean, it was a dangerous situation given the heat and given the fact there was no air conditioning virtually in the police fans, there was no air conditioning at all in the holding center.
And here we were simply exercising our first amendment rights for free speech and to protest, which we are allowed to do under the Constitution. So it was really terrifying, honestly, to observe all of that going on around us
Christine Rodriguez:
And let the record show that I do not want my student loan forgiveness money to be funding ice my community in Pasadena. Just last week, two weeks ago, we experienced two raids within a week, and these raids were within walking distance of my apartment That’s happening right in my backyard. And as we saw with our action that we did earlier this week, there’s a lot of people who are going to suffer if these funding cuts happen. Unfortunately, it’s the opposite. That’s what should be happening. We should be giving more money to Medicaid. We should be giving more money to food stamps. People are barely getting by and this is their one lifeline that could be cut.
Lorraine Chavez:
I personally feel in such kind of a desperate state about all of this that I said, I don’t care if I get arrested. I mean, what else are we going to do? But unfortunately, put our bodies on the line. I don’t know. Of course, I’ve written 500 emails to my representatives. I’ve been an advocate myself for the fight for 15 in 2013, marching on the streets of Chicago for blocks and blocks. So I’ve done this before, but I just feel this incredible feeling of desperation right now.
Christine Rodriguez:
Are you tired of seeing the system fall in front of you? Are you tired of seeing injustice? Step number one, talk to your neighbors, right? We have to be our own kind of networks, and a lot of that takes just talking to strangers, but neighbors, but also strangers. Lorraine was a stranger a week ago, and now we’re buddies for life because we had this amazing experience. Say, definitely visit your local city council, city, town hall, any local thing, try to get tapped in because there’s a lot of information and drama there that’s not advertised, and it could cause a little change in your community and it could really push you to be more involved.
Lauren Sanchez, in preparation for her Venice wedding, is carrying an Eiffel Tower purse that likely costs more than your rent, your mortgage, or even your monthly salary. Jeff Bezos’s yacht Koru’s purchase price could supply insulin for 856,666 diabetics or feed roughly 1,285,000 people for an entire year. The Bezos/Sanchez $10 million wedding is just the tip of the selfish iceberg that is the Amazon empire, known for grinding warehouse workers into the ground with surveillance practices, extreme time management, on-the-job injuries, and aggressive union busting. Join your Inequality Watchdog Taya Graham as she breaks down the true cost of the wedding, Amazon’s harsh labor practices, and how the Venetians are fighting back—they just might win too!
Produced by: Taya Graham, Stephen Janis Written by: Amanda Scherker Studio Production: David Hebden Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Taya Graham:
Not everyone was ready to throw congratulatory rice at the wedding of Amazon Tycoon, Jeff Bezos and journalist slash socialite Lauren Sanchez, who was back fresh from her 11 minutes in heaven. I mean outer space. 200 or so famous guests, including Oprah Winfrey and Jared Kushner have been expected to descend on the island. City and Venetians are generally not excited. They’ve taken to the streets and protest hanging a gigantic banner that reads no space for Bezos. On the Rialto Ridge, one activist Federica Elli says that the wedding would be a symbol of the exploitation of the city by outsiders. And another vowed we’ll make sure they choke on their wedding cake. The Venetians are not here to play, but it’s important to note we recorded this video before the actual wedding and the couple has attempted to keep details of the event quiet. So I can’t predict exactly what will go down, but activists say they’re planning to prevent guests from reaching the event in a few ways, including jumping into the canals to block water taxis and obstructing Venice’s famously narrow streets.
And of course, my favorite filling the canals with inflatable alligators, which is just objectively very creative. But however the saga plays out, we think the controversial lead up to the event reveals a lot of righteous anger at how the elite treat our world as their personal playground while the rest of us pay the price. Just for one quick example, 50 of the world’s wealthiest billionaires will produce more carbon through their investments, private jets, and yachts in 90 minutes than the average person does in their lifetime according to NGO. Oxfam incidentally, some protests sign ahead of the wedding. Red Venice land a playground for an oligarch with Bezos. We see a flippant decision to use his vast resources and influence to largely take over Venice for his three day wedding celebration. Never mind how the locals feel about it. This is emblematic of how Bezos has built his empire by exploitation and strong arming like his wedding.
His mind boggling wealth is intrinsically made possible by the profound structural inequality that defines our times. But back to the party initially intended to be a $600 million affair in Aspen, Colorado, Bezos and Sanchez decided to downsize to a reported $10 million Italian affair. This was apparently in response to the bad press over the girl power theme space Flight Sanchez took on one of Bezos’s blue origin rockets accompanied by pop star Katy Perry, among other gal pals. Now Bezos’s own mere four minute flight back in 2021 apparently cost around $5.5 billion. That just so happens to be enough to save 375 million people from starvation. But we hope he enjoyed his trip. According to one guest, the couple decide to go a little less. Marie Antoinette in the hopes of registering better optics. When a $10 million wedding sounds like keeping things casual, I can confirm you are no longer visiting outer space.
You are living there in the runup to the Grand Event, Sanchez held an ostentatious Parisian bachelorette party that cost a whopping $670,000. Reportedly Kim Kardashian, Chris Jenner and Ava Longoria were part of her bachelorette. Her pink diamond engagement ring worth $3 million was on full display as she wield an $8,000 Eiffel Tower shaped purse. Very on theme, but life is no cakewalk for the world’s third richest man’s bride to be. She’s apparently also been busy procuring 27 Italian designer dresses in anticipation of the three day wedding. And yes, your math is right, that rounds out to nine dresses a day. The sickening display of massive wealth is perhaps best represented by Bezos’s $500 million, 417 foot long three masted super yacht called Koru, which may or may not dock in Venice. For the celebration, the largest sailing yacht in the world, Koru requires a support yacht which hosts the helipad presumably.
So Jeff Bezos feet never have to touch the humble ground. It’s among many luxury vessels that made Dock and Venice, a city whose infrastructure has already been greatly damaged by gigantic cruise ships. So it’s no surprise that activists ranging from an anti cruise ship committee to housing advocacy groups have united in opposition to the event. For them, it’s the perfect symbol of everything going wrong with their beloved island, which the Venetian Council for Tourism calls a dying city. They’re not eager to share their historic homeland with celebrities like Chris Jenner and Mick Jagger because they doubt they’ll feel much benefit in return and feel the event will upset the normal functioning of their community and they’re right to be irate. Bezos hasn’t built his $229 billion empire by being generous to us. Common folk designer Diane Vum. Furstenberg told the Italian press that she had suggested Bezos give a donation to the cast trapp city as a message of gratitude.
And Venetian politicians wrote him an open letter urging him to contribute to restoring the city’s crumbling infrastructure. At the time of this video, Bezos had apparently done no such thing, which is fitting for a man who has made an art out of evading any obligation to the public good. And I truly mean any obligation by keeping his official Amazon salary artificially low and claiming scores of hefty losses in investments. The billionaire mogul managed to pay zero, literally $0 in federal income tax in 2007 and 2011. And this guy even had the gall to claim a $4,000 child tax credit in the latter year between 2006 and 2018. Bezos’s Wealth grew by a whopping $127 billion, yet he paid a true tax rate of 1.1% on his fortune. The average American’s income tax rate is 14.5% and Bezos is still at it. After the state of Washington instituted a 7% tax rate on stock exchanges in 2022, Bezos stopped selling off his Amazon stocks, which he’d been doing at a steady rate for over two decades.
Quickly, he officially moved to Florida where no such tax exists and promptly resume selling stocks. A strategy expected to save him an estimated $610 million in taxes. Along the way, he acquired two mansions on an exclusive Miami Island known as Billionaire Bunker. So I guess that means Bezos’s richest neighbor is actually just himself. Despite the mogul’s refusal to contribute his share or any share at all to the public good, Venetian politicians have spoken enthusiastically about the event and the expected revenue it will bring to the island. They’ve equally expressed annoyance towards protesters who have argued that his revenue will only benefit luxury businesses and hotels rather than ordinary Venetians. Although people close to the couple told AP news that the couple will be sourcing 80% of wedding provisions from Venetian vendors. The outlet only identified two businesses involved a luxury glassware company and a historic pastry company with a catering service in five locations.
It’s not exactly humble salt of the earth stuff going on here, but still the Venice Counselor Director General bragged to the London Times that he actively campaigned for the privilege of hosting the event. Even deputizing Dominic Dolce of the controversial ban, Dolce and Cabana, and incidentally Sanchez and Bezos were spotted having a wedding fitting at the Milan Dolce and Cabana store. See, Bezos is no stranger to being feted by iconic cities for the privilege of his presence. In 2018, during the excruciatingly drawn out public process of selecting a new city for Amazon’s second headquarters, locations competing locales offered Bezos more than $22 billion in tax credits, including my own city of Baltimore. Chicago’s proposed tax credits alone could have funded a year’s worth of public school education for nearly 150,000 students. But who needs math class when you can Amazon a calculator with same day shipping?
Ultimately, Arlington, Virginia won with a sweet offer of $750 million in taxpayer subsidies. In exchange, Amazon promised to add 25,000 jobs by the end of 2020, but in just its second year of operation, Amazon was already instituting layoffs among local workers. The company has vowed that it will meet the 25,000 job goal by 2038. See, bringing Jeff Bezos to your city is rarely the boon you expect it to be, especially for the average resident apparently ahead of the wedding. Bezos specifically booked hotels that are international chains, not owned by Venetians, where local staff work for a minimum wage of seven euros an hour. Of course, this couldn’t bother Bezos, who’s been dubbed the world’s worst boss by the International Trade Union Federation. Condition in Amazon warehouses are famously atrocious, defined by impossible quotas and grueling manual labor. One North Carolina Amazon warehouse worker told Oxfam, it’s so bad I have to psych myself up and pray to go to work, adding stress to already difficult work.
Amazon has mainstreamed constant surveillance to keep tabs on workers’ individual metrics. 53% of workers say they feel a sense of being watched always, if not most of the time, while 58% say their pace is actively ranked. And compared to their coworkers 45% report not being able to take breaks due to the high pressure. It’s no wonder that stories about water bottles fold with urine have become depressing. Company lower. The results of this high stress environment are predictable and tragic. In 2021, New York Amazon Warehouse reported nearly 20 injuries of the most serious kind for every 100 workers. And the following year, injury rates across Amazon warehouses were nearly double that of all other warehouse jobs. In 2023, the Department of Labor charged Amazon with exposing workers to unsafe working conditions, resulting in high rates of low back injuries and other musculoskeletal disorders among workers that same year.
Amnesty International reported that migrant workers at an Amazon warehouse in Saudi Arabia suffered horrific housing and working conditions, which practically speaking amounted to human trafficking. And Amazon risk assessment from 2021 proves that Amazon knew of the high likelihood of abuse in the country, but went ahead with the operation anyway. Amidst this widespread mistreatment, Amazon workers have consistently tried to unionize and order to demand better conditions, and Amazon has responded with aggression. In 2022, Amazon allocated a full $14.2 million to anti-union consultants. I mean, we don’t know for certain what these consultants suggested, but we do know that the following year a judge on the National Labor Relations Board ruled that supervisors at Amazon had threatened workers trying to unionize saying they’d withhold their wages and benefits if they voted in favor of the motion. To be clear, this is patently illegal. Amazon tactics to destroy worker solidarity have included fire union organizers creating anti-union propaganda, and I kid you not hiring the private Investigation Agency Pinkerton to spy on those trying to organize their fellow warehouse workers for their part.
Venetian tourism workers have been equally eager to fight oppressive working conditions. They just haven’t faced quite as many barriers to having their voices heard as we’ve had here in the US Last year, three unions representing over 100,000 Venetian hotel workers went on strike over the meager below poverty wages they received. While working at luxury hotel chains like the Hilton and Star Hotels, they accused their employers of using stonewalling tactics to deny workers’ demands for a higher minimum wage for nearly a decade, despite the rampant inflation plaguing Venice. While Venice is the most expensive city in Italy to stay in a hotel, its workers are struggling just to get by. Doesn’t that sound familiar? And that’s what makes this whole spectacle so irritating because imperfect parallel Bezos is unimaginable wealth funding. The nuptials is only made possible by exploiting and underpaying his workers. In 2024, Amazon reported record profits of $15.3 billion.
Meanwhile, the majority of the company’s warehouse workers experienced food insecurity during a three month period in 2024 while nearly half experienced housing insecurity and 56% were unable to pay all their bills. According to a University of Illinois study, presumably the working and living conditions of Amazon employees will not be on anyone’s mind during the leisurely three day wedding celebration. But based upon recent averages, bezos’s personal fortune, which grows $8 million an hour, can be expected to balloon to nearly $600 million over the course of those 72 hours. Just as Bezos’s party benefits wealthy Venice hotels while failing to trickle down to its workers, Bezos is only able to afford this wedding in the first place because he built his fortune on the literally broken backs of his workers. Now, politicians have insisted that regardless of Venetian’s feelings about Bezos, their are normal lives will be undisturbed by the event.
But activists argue that the wedding which is liable to be disruptive is actually most low sum because it embodies the way Venice increasingly caters to rich visitors while neglecting its dwindling population of residents. This is part of a broader overt tourism concern plaguing Europe. In Venice, housing prices have skyrocketed. As much of the city dwellings have been converted into Airbnbs leading to massive housing shortages for full-time residents. The shortage is exacerbated by the city’s crumbling infrastructure, which is further strained and destroyed by overt tourism. It’s so bad that the United Nations education and science culture organization has twice considered deeming the island a heritage site in imminent danger of total destruction. Meanwhile, the city’s increased reliance on tourism keeps most of its residents working in the industry doing precarious labor subject to seasonal fluctuations and shocks in global economics.
This calls to mind the way Amazon’s own proliferation changed its home city of Seattle, which according to one Gawker writer back in 2015, always represented possibility and prosperity until Amazon swallowed it. The company bought up a historic low rent neighborhood and converted it into a corporate campus that spreads blight in all directions. The result worse, traffic, longer hours, higher cost of living, greater income inequality, and lower quality of life. Venetians might count themselves lucky that Bezos’s Empire is only invading their island for a few days, but during those days, the lavishness of the celebration will greatly contrast greatly with the lived realities of most Venetians, who due to overt tourism, have seen housing opportunities as well as resources like hospitals and nursery schools evaporate. But judging from how Bezos runs his company and with it much of the world’s economy, it’s hard to imagine that he’ll give much thought to the plight of the average Venetian, as he says I do. But congrats to the happy couple. I hope you’ll take a moment in the comments to let me know if you’d liked me doing a deep dive on these oligarchs that are running our country and the world’s economy. I have a few more billionaires I want to investigate in depth 813 to be exact in order to truly understand their impact on our lives and our futures. And I hope you’ll join me. I’m Taya Graham, your inequality watchdog reporting for you. Take care.
Wherever you live these days, you’re likely seeing plenty of evidence that political polarization is increasing all around you. Some of this polarization is reinforcing conventional left-right fault lines. Elsewhere in the world, other divisions — cultural, social, geographic, intergenerational — have ripped up and replaced those traditional polarizations.
Socio-economic inequality has, of course, long rated as one of those conventional fault lines. The right has typically seen inequality as an inevitable — perhaps even necessary and desirable — byproduct of the dynamism that drives prosperity. Inequality, this argument contends, incentivizes and rewards effort and entrepreneurial risk-taking.
An Oxfam report published Wednesday estimates that the richest 1% globally have seen their wealth surge by more than $33.9 trillion over the past decade, with just 3,000 billionaires accounting for $6.5 trillion of that increase. The report, released ahead of June 30 development financing talks in Seville, Spain, argues that the international community’s plan to achieve the Sustainable…
We speak with former Labor Secretary Robert Reich about the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York Democratic primary for New York mayor, the rise of Donald Trump, and the role of big money in politics. “This is the one thing that I agree with Donald Trump about: The economy is rigged — but it’s rigged against working-class people. And I think Mamdani understood that. He understood that people have got to want a change, but also they want affordability. They want an economy that is working for them.”
We also speak with him about his decades-long career as a teacher and The Last Class, a new documentary that follows Reich over his last semester at the University of California, Berkeley. The class, and much of Reich’s career, has focused on rising inequality and its impact on society. “Most Americans feel powerless,” says Reich. “This is a crisis right now.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
On June 6, resistance ignited in the streets of Los Angeles to confront the Trump regime’s brutal campaign against immigrants, enforced by the brutality of ICE agents and the machinery of mass deportation. In a chilling escalation, Trump branded the protesters “insurrectionists” and threatened the use of military force — turning dissent into a crime and protest into a pretext for repression.
In 2024, for the fifth year in a row, the world’s nine nuclear-armed nations increased spending on nuclear weapons, according to a report published by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). The annual report, entitled, “Hidden Costs: Nuclear Weapons Spending in 2024,” reveals that last year, the nine nuclear states increased spending by 11 percent ($9.9 billion)…
47% of UK adults (28.3 million people) experienced financial insecurity – or ‘economic precarity’ – in 2022/23, according to new research led by the London School of Economics (LSE). Given the UK is one of the richest countries in the world, it’s clear that rampant inequality – where 1% of the population have more wealth than 70% – is a factor.
The number of adults facing economic precarity has risen significantly since 2014/15, where it stood at 29% (16.7 million people).
Large numbers of adults experienced other forms of insecurity in 2022/23. A further 46% of adults experienced health insecurity. 27% faced housing insecurity, while 36% experienced work insecurity.
Austerity-driven economic precarity
The study found that the rise of economic precarity is driven by austerity cuts such as the benefit freeze and NHS underfunding, along with inflation in utilities, consumer and housing costs.
The research underscores the need to bring public services back into public ownership and deliver a Green New Deal. A publicly owned Green New Deal would remove profiteering from the energy system including the national grid, uphold the UK’s role in stopping the climate crisis, bring about cheaper renewable energy and shield the UK from volatile global gas markets, all in one fell swoop.
Instead, Labour appears to have abandoned its previous commitment to what chancellor Rachel Reeves called ‘securonomics’. Indeed, they are not nationalising utilities like Keir Starmer pledged to. And they are continuing with Tory austerity, whether it’s the illogical and cruel two child benefit cap or the cuts to disabled people’s support. All this is deepening people’s economic precarity.
Multiple insecurities
The report also found that 9% of people (5.2 million) experienced a combination of financial, health and housing insecurity in 2022/23. That’s up from 6% in 2014/15.
For some groups of people, that figure of economic precarity and its intersections is much higher. It includes:
32% of people who are economically inactive due to being long term sick or disabled
28% of unemployed people
27% of lone parents
21% adults living alone
The study notes that the surge in economic precarity negatively impacts society in multiple ways. It leads to mental health issues, difficulty raising children and makes it hard for people to take up further education. 57% of those with multiple insecurities felt constant strain.
It’s clear that austerity and inequality is having a destructive impact on the UK. We must reverse these trends.
Investigative journalists Taya Graham and Stephen Janis break down the insider knowledge surrounding Joe Biden’s decline—and how the Democratic Party’s culture of silence, conformity, and caution may have sealed its own fate. From the “get in line” politics that killed bold policy and risk-taking to focus groups calling Democrats “sloths,” Stephen and Taya explore why Biden was protected despite clear signs of decline, the Democratic Party’s aversion to bold candidates, what Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump had in common, and why the Dems just spent $20 million just to learn how to talk to men.
Produced by: Taya Graham, Stephen Janis Written by: Stephen Janis Studio: David Hebden Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Taya Graham:
Hello, this is Taya Graham, along with my reporting partner, Stephen Janis.
Stephen Janis:
Hey, Taya. How are you doing?
Taya Graham:
I’m doing great.
Stephen Janis:
Good, good.
Taya Graham:
And I want to welcome everyone to the Inequality Watch Real News React. It’s a show where we challenge the conventional wisdom touted by the mainstream media and use our perspective as reporters to provide some alternative explanations for some of the hard to understand happenings in America and throughout the world.
And today, that means unpacking the great Joe Biden conspiracy.
Stephen Janis:
It is a great conspiracy, Taya, a real conspiracy.
Taya Graham:
I mean, really, it was like a Weekend at Bernie’s-like conspiracy, actually Weekend at Bernie’s sequel.
Stephen Janis:
Let me chime in. For people who don’t know, Weekend at Bernie’s is a movie where a man dies and his younger friends carry him around because they don’t want people to know he’s dead. So it’s like a corpse at a party.
Taya Graham:
Yes. That sounds very morbid, but it was actually a funny movie, or at least back when I watched it.
Stephen Janis:
Exactly.
Taya Graham:
And if you read some of the recent reports about just how out of it Biden was, it sounds like he was the grandpa who fell asleep at the dinner table at Thanksgiving.
But along with these revelations about the depth of Biden’s declining cognitive abilities comes a much more important question: Why was a man who couldn’t function after 5:00 PM allowed to run an entire country, and why didn’t anyone who supposedly had access tell the truth about it? And that’s what our show will discuss today. And our answer, which we’ll share soon is probably not what you expect.
But first, let’s get to the facts. Stephen, the discussion about Biden’s inability to function, according to some of the recently released books, goes back to 2019, involves some really embarrassing moments. I think for example, he couldn’t remember the name of a close aid, or he didn’t recognize George Clooney at a fundraiser that George Clooney was throwing for him.
So what have we learned about Biden’s health while in office, and what do you think the main talking point is there?
Stephen Janis:
We’ll tell you, unlike you and I who basically learned about Biden’s cognitive abilities at that horrific debate, there was a small group of Washington insiders and politicians who now we know knew that Biden was not right. Meaning stretching back to 2020 with congressional Democrats where they’re like, he lost his train of thought. There were a lot of signs.
And so now what happens in Washington when people ignore something right in front of their faces? They do a lot of hand wringing and see who they can blame. The big question is now, well, there’s two big questions right now. Number one, how bad was he, which needs to be clearly established that he was in no position to run a country. And number two, who can we blame so it doesn’t fall on us?
Taya Graham:
Exactly. How will it not be our fault?
Stephen Janis:
Exactly. And that seems to be the biggest preoccupation of Washington and all the Washington insiders is how can I pin this on someone else, and how can I avoid taking any blame? Which is kind of politics as usual.
Taya Graham:
Or to sell a book, which is apparently what CNN’s Jake Tapper is now doing. Did you see how many, gosh, did you see how many ways he tried to sell that book and hawk that book on CNN? It was almost embarrassing.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. Every person talking about Joe Biden, even not about Joe Biden, was mentioning Jake Tapper’s book [crosstalk] —
Taya Graham:
You would’ve thought they were working on commission.
Stephen Janis:
Well, it’s extraordinary because Jake Tapper is a quintessential insider, and the quintessential establishment journalist tends to be a bit of a moralizer, likes to sneer at people, and, of course, was constantly sneering at Trump. But I don’t think he was a person who was out ahead of this story either. He tries to make it seem like he was, but I think a lot of, if you went back, I think he was a person who would give the Republicans a hard time for talking about Biden’s condition, or anyone.
Taya Graham:
Absolutely. He’s definitely the type that would’ve pushed back and said that the Republican Party was focusing on the wrong thing. But apparently they were focusing on the right thing. And it was a thing, it was like The Emperor’s New Clothes. Everyone was trying to ignore what was right in front of them.
Stephen Janis:
I think this is more about the culture of a party than it is about what the Republicans thought. To me, this is really much more important than Biden, much more important than Biden’s condition, it’s about the culture of a party and why that culture keeps that party from ever winning an election, and, I think, connecting with voters. There’s a lot of things that went on to keep Biden in power that have a lot to do with some of the biggest problems of the Democratic Party.
Taya Graham:
Absolutely. It is so much bigger than Biden, and that’s why we have a theory to share of why this really happened,
Stephen Janis:
Which we’ll share shortly, before we go through what I call the conventional wisdom about this.
Taya Graham:
We should take a look at some of the mainstream media explanations that are being touted by pundits. So let’s take a look at some of the reasons that pundits and politicians gave.
So they set up these excuses for Biden running when it’s obvious that he is too old and he’s still getting fierce support from Dem insiders. So what do you think were some of the things that pundits came out with? There were certainly politicians like Rep. Clyburn who even now still defends Joe Biden.
Stephen Janis:
And they certainly haven’t talked much about Dean Phillips, the one guy who ran against Biden, who got thrown out of the party. But I think [crosstalk] —
Taya Graham:
He got thrown under the bus, actually.
Stephen Janis:
I think the general explanation has been that I see that comes out through all the BS is just that he didn’t say anything, she didn’t say anything, so I wasn’t going to say anything even though I knew something and even though I was outraged, and people trying to share secretly or confidential sources, even though I knew something, I couldn’t say anything because they didn’t say anything. So there was this very much, it bumps up against our theory, but really everybody was groupthinking here.
Taya Graham:
Absolutely.
Stephen Janis:
I’m not going to say anything. Well, you say something. No, I’m not going to say anything. You say something. And that, as we’ll get to, says a lot about the Democratic Party at this point.
Taya Graham:
Stephen, the word groupthink encapsulates it there perfectly. But there’s another angle that people are taking, which was that they’re blaming hubris, they’re blaming Biden’s ego.
Stephen Janis:
I don’t think you can rule that out because I’ve seen politicians hold onto city council seats until they’re 90.
Taya Graham:
That’s so true. Yes, [crosstalk] in Baltimore City, yes.
Stephen Janis:
You can imagine the illustrious power of the presidency is nice. One of his aides was going, you don’t give up the plane, you don’t give up the house. And I mean, it’s kind of understandable if small time politics can be a narcotic, being president is probably a wonder drug. You’re going to be high all the time.
But I also think, and this was discussed on another show, which I thought was a good explanation, that Biden had had a career of turning expectations on their head. He was a guy who, I’m always going to push through, I’m going to find a way to do this, and people have written me off before. I think some people are trying to blame the 2022 midterms where the Democrats outperformed or overperformed expectations, and Biden took credit for it. But personal hubris has a lot to do with this. Why do I want to give this up? It’s great being the president. It’s great to be the king.
Taya Graham:
Right. And he also ran multiple times. So he’s always wanted this office and perhaps his ambition overcame what should have been his intelligence, which is that he was supposed to be a transitional president.
Stephen Janis:
And looking back at what’s happened since, it almost ruined his whole legacy. So it’s a good lesson, like, hey, sometimes it’s time to quit. Not always, but sometimes.
Taya Graham:
You think the Democrats would’ve learned that with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but apparently they had to learn this lesson again.
Now, there was another thing they did, which is they blamed his inner circle. So for example, it came out that aides had sought to ensure that he would walk shorter distances or they made sure that he had handrails available when he was mounting stairs, and they had him wear, I think the shoes are called trainers to make sure that he wouldn’t slip. When you have aides essentially baby proofing the world around a politician, I mean, how did someone not speak out? It’s incredible.
Stephen Janis:
Well, it’s weird because a lot of these people who are insiders spend their whole careers, and from my experience as a reporter, they’re like attack dogs. They refuse to look inward. They’re always looking outward. So anyone that mentions anything or says, hey, Biden, he doesn’t perform after 5:00, they get attacked. And these are the attack dogs. And the attack dogs, from what I’ve seen, and I have more experience with Democrats, the attack dogs don’t care about the candidate, what the candidate’s doing, you’re the problem. Anyone who speaks up is the problem. Anyone who writes a story is a problem. It’s always other people who are the problem.
And I’ve seen that fiercely in the Democratic Party. If you buck the narrative you’re going to get — And I think a lot of reporters had talked about that, who wrote about this prior to this moment we’re in now.
So Democrats have these cluster of aides, and Republicans have them too. It’s not a party thing. But I’ve had experience with them. They’re attack dogs. They don’t want to see reality. They think you’re reflecting the wrong reality, even though it’s really actually true. And I think that culture and that, I don’t know, whatever, we don’t care, we’re just going to attack people, we’ll attack the messenger, is pervasive and part of this problem.
Taya Graham:
That’s exactly it. Attack the messenger and not acknowledge the message at all. So you’re showing the anger and the attack dog, but there’s another aspect of it, which is that I think the Democrats were afraid.
Stephen Janis:
Trump has had a huge, profound psychological impact on the Republican Party for a decade now. They are Trump traumatized, and I think they think, well, Trump is this horrible threat to democracy. That’s what the Democrats think. And no matter what we do, we just have to stop it, so we become more risk averse. We are not going to do anything to rock the boat because if we question Joe Biden, we’re just letting Trump in. And I guess I can understand that, but it seems antithetical to the idea you want to beat Trump, but you’re going to have a zombie candidate, or you said you’re going to have a big Weekend at Bernie’s campaign? That’s what I think you get when you become, I think, that enured to the facts. So yeah, that’s a really, really, really important point.
Taya Graham:
OK. Now Stephen, this is our chance to explain our theory as to why Biden was cosseted —
Stephen Janis:
Finally!
Taya Graham:
— And protected and kept in office despite many people knowing that he was no longer capable. And that is the Get in Line theory.
Stephen Janis:
It’s a good theory.
Taya Graham:
OK. It is. Stephen, can you explain this most excellent theory?
Stephen Janis:
OK, so we have covered politics, especially in Democratic state and local, which means our city council, the state legislature, and in the nation’s capital, all levels. And what we have seen in the Democratic Party is what’s called the Get in Line culture that rules the way the party is governed.
And what it means is that you don’t jump out of line, you don’t get ambitious if you’re a candidate, you wait your turn. The way Hillary Clinton came out of the Obama era, and it was her turn. The way Joe Biden emerged from the Democratic establishment. It was his turn because it was no longer Hillary Clinton’s turn. On the local level, I can give you many examples of people who are like, don’t jump the line. Don’t get out of line.
And so sometimes when we talk about democratic politics, we always say Democrats are like all the kids in class who sat at the front of class, always did the assignment —
Taya Graham:
Raise the hand for teacher.
Stephen Janis:
— Never piss off the teacher, gets in line. A lot of Democratic candidates, like our governor, Wes Moore, have these perfect resumes, military service, nothing against that. But they they’re creatures of institutions, and inherently they’re risk averse, and candidates have to get in line.
Now, look at the Democratic example and why this is so important in the case of Biden. Who was our most successful, Taya, electoral president of the past, like, 20 years, right? Who was that?
Taya Graham:
President Obama?
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, of course, of course. Now, did he get in line?
Taya Graham:
No, he jumped the line. He sure did. And the establishment Democrats weren’t always pleased about it.
Stephen Janis:
No. They picked Hillary Clinton. And do you remember —
Taya Graham:
Hillary fought him tooth and nail.
Stephen Janis:
Actually, yeah. Do you remember the criticism of him? He’d only been two years in the Senate. Do you remember that criticism?
Taya Graham:
Yes, absolutely.
Stephen Janis:
Right. So the Democrats, in their conventional get in line, it would’ve been Hillary Clinton’s turn, which they tried really hard, but Obama was just too good a candidate and was able to beat her. And then they have this huge electoral success. And then when they go back to their Get in Line policy, which has Hillary Clinton, Biden, and then Biden’s hanging on because all the Get in Line people didn’t want to say anything about it, then you have two out of three losses, two Trump, which who, whether you support him or not —
Taya Graham:
Well, wait a second here. Now you’re coming to a really important point here, which is that when you mentioned that President Obama was not a Get in Line candidate and yet he managed to shoot to the front of the line because of his personal charisma and his ability to campaign, President Trump was also not a get in line guy.
Stephen Janis:
Oh, you taught me.
Taya Graham:
At the time the Republican Party was absolutely [crosstalk] aghast.
Stephen Janis:
Oh my God, Republican establishment was like the Democratic establishment. They didn’t want this guy. He was crazy to them and they didn’t want him, but he didn’t get in line.
Taya Graham:
He sure didn’t.
Stephen Janis:
Hardly. No one wanted him to run. And I think we can all remember that when he ran, because the Republican establishment had Jeb Bush, low… I don’t want to say that.
Taya Graham:
Low energy Jeb?
Stephen Janis:
Low energy Jeb Bush, and people like that being touted.
Taya Graham:
That was kind of sad.
Stephen Janis:
No one thought Trump had a chance, but he jumped the line just like Obama.
Taya Graham:
Wait a second, couldn’t Bernie have jumped the line?
Stephen Janis:
Oh, Bernie’s a line jumper.
Taya Graham:
Yeah.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah.
Taya Graham:
They really had to hamstring him when he was originally running.
Stephen Janis:
In 2016 with the super delegates.
Taya Graham:
And that really upset a lot of loyal Democrats who felt that Bernie Sanders’s campaign was hamstrung from the inside, that the party attacked him.
Stephen Janis:
We were in South Carolina in 2020 when the Democratic establishment rose up. We witnessed it like a wave and said, not your turn, Bernie, not your turn. It’s got to be Joe Biden. He’s the next in line.
And you could see the results. The results speak for themselves. There’s a disconnect between Democrats and voters because the party is so orderly and so unwilling to take a risk and so unwilling to really conjure policies of any sort. They don’t want to say anything. They don’t want to say Medicare for all like Bernie Sanders says. Why do you think people support Bernie Sanders? Because he’s willing to say Medicare for all. Many Democrats are afraid to say it because of the implications with donors, et cetera.
But the Get in Line candidate and the Get in Line culture is fierce in the Democratic Party locally and nationally. Look at AOC trying to jump ahead [in the] Oversight Committee.
Taya Graham:
Oh, that’s right.
Stephen Janis:
And Connolly, who’s…
Taya Graham:
I mean, you know.
Stephen Janis:
He died.
Taya Graham:
With all respect.
Stephen Janis:
With all due respect.
Taya Graham:
With all due respect, but he was an older gentleman, and obviously not in good health, and instead of picking a young, popular candidate like AOC, they chose him. What does this say about the Democrats when they make choices like this?
Stephen Janis:
AOC would’ve been the jump the line candidate, and AOC would’ve been a bold move. And Democrats keep thinking now with Trump being excessively bold, that somehow they have to be excessively conservative. The real dynamic here is are we going to be a centrist party or a leftist party? That’s not really the right question. Are we going to be a bold party that offers something to people, or are we just going to be the same old, same old who’s next in line, who’s going to run, and who’s going to end up losing again to whomever?
I think you had some interesting information, right, about a focus group that the Democrats did?
Taya Graham:
Yes, there was the… Oh gosh. Well, actually, yes. Let me tell you about this New York Times article.
Stephen Janis:
I really want to hear about it
Taya Graham:
— Media. I wrote about it, and they said The New York Times basically unleashed this brutal analysis. So they have someone who’s done over 250 focus groups for the Democratic Party. And one of the ways they try to really tease out how people think of the party is to ask them, if you had to choose an animal to represent the party, what animal would it be? OK. So for Republicans, they choose like apex predators, they’re like sharks and tigers and stuff. Guess what they choose for Democrats?
Stephen Janis:
I don’t want to hear it.
Taya Graham:
You don’t. It’s terrible. Slugs, sloths, tortoises.
Stephen Janis:
Are you kidding?
Taya Graham:
Does that not speak to all the things we’ve talked about, about Democratic inertia, Democratic institutionalism, calling them a tortoise?
But what was really, now, this is actually kind of sad, I feel bad for the focus group, the gentleman who did the focus group, because he finally got someone to name a different type of animal for the Democrats, and the person said, a deer. And he’s like, oh, wow, that’s interesting. Why did you choose deer? And the guy said, a deer in headlights.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah.
Taya Graham:
What does that tell you?
Stephen Janis:
That tells me everything I need to know. But it tells me what we’re already talking about here, and this is very important to remember: the Democrats are afraid. They have no bold proposals, they have no vision, and they’re spending $20 million. What’d you say they spent? $20 million?
Taya Graham:
They were spending $20 million sitting in a luxury hotel to discuss the best way to talk to regular people. So that’s also another great Democratic take.
They also are planning — I was just looking at another article — They’re also planning on pouring a lot of money into influencers. And I think there was an excellent criticism from More Perfect Union, and they said maybe the Democratic Party should actually have a unified platform and unified policy positions and a bold policy platform before you start trying to create your own little influencer group. Maybe you should all be on the same page first.
Stephen Janis:
But paying consultants to do something that you haven’t done yourself, you can’t create a character, or you can’t create a person who people will put their faith in.
Taya Graham:
Well, they keep on saying, we need a Joe Rogan for the left, or we lost Joe Rogan, wow do we fix this? So they’re trying to create a model instead of realizing that, for example, Sen. Bernie Sanders, he went on Joe Rogan, he went on Andrew Schulz, he went on Theo Von. And these folks aren’t necessarily… You could argue that some of them are Republicans, some of them are libertarian, or some of them are just independent. And they were open to Bernie. Why? Because of his authenticity, because of his bold ideas, and because he stays on point. I think that’s something that a lot of people really respect about Sen. Sanders.
Stephen Janis:
You can go back to the 1990s and watch.
Taya Graham:
You can go back to the 1990s and hear him talking about oligarchs then. So I think people really appreciate that authenticity and honesty from a candidate.
Stephen Janis:
So if the Democrats have been a bold party and not a stand in line party, Bernie Sanders might be president right now. If he’d been nominated in 2020, I mean, he could have won. You can’t rule that out.
Taya Graham:
But the question here is will the Democrats learn their lesson? Will they allow some line jumpers?
Stephen Janis:
I don’t think so. No. Just the fact that they’re having focus groups paying $20 million instead of [crosstalk] finding a candidate —
Taya Graham:
How absurd is that.
Stephen Janis:
— That has a vision to offer voters, hey, this is what we’re going to do. Politics is, as much as it’s about aesthetics and slogans and everything, it’s still about practicalities. It’s still about envisioning a reality. Maybe you should spend your time finding someone who has a message that people might like, and taking that person and giving them the ability to change and transform this moribund party. You can’t just screech at the top of your lungs. You’ve got to have something to offer people. We’ve written extensively about, we’ll put the articles we wrote about the Democrats having to get something done, which of course they can’t do nationally, but on the local level, we’ll put that link in the comments.
Taya Graham:
Right, we’ve seen it up close.
Stephen Janis:
Democrats have to do something, and they have to stop spending money on consultants, I think.
Taya Graham:
And also they need to learn how to speak to people. One of the things that this article explored, it was a program that they’re creating called SAM. I think it’s like a Strategic Approach to Men. So Democrats are trying to learn how to talk to men. They can’t even talk to the regular public just one-on-one. But folks like Sanders and AOC seem to be breaking through.
Stephen Janis:
That’s what I’m saying. You have to pick the people, the candidates, the people that are dynamic that don’t need to be told how to talk to someone, that actually have a vision that, when they sell it — Well, not sell their vision, but talk about their vision, people are attracted to their vision. So it’s amazing that Democrats keep spending money like this when they’d be better thinking about what is our grand vision and what candidate would actually attract people? What candidate could attract people without having to spend a hundred million dollars on consultants and things like that.
Taya Graham:
You know what, we are not going to pay any money for consultants — Well, as a matter of fact, we should run a poll ourselves. As a matter of fact, we’re going to put a poll down in the live chat and we want to find out how people think about Democrats, if they have any idea on how Democrats can learn to speak to people effectively. What do you think could fix the Democratic Party, if it can be fixed? We would love to know your thoughts in the comments and in that poll. So I’m going to make sure to have a poll in the live chat.
And also, Stephen, for the record, I think we’ve done a pretty good autopsy on the Democratic Party.
Stephen Janis:
I think so.
Taya Graham:
Didn’t cost $20 mil. We did it for free. We shouldn’t have done it for free.
Stephen Janis:
I think it’s pretty clear that they need someone to jump the line, to run, that the Democratic establishment does not want to run, someone with a vision that seems authentic, and someone who’s willing to take risks. You gotta take risks. The risk averse nature of the Democratic Party has turned them into losers in many cases. So yeah, we will be back to breakdown this more, but I think we did a little bit of damage today
Taya Graham:
A little bit, but hopefully the Democrat strategists out there who are spending millions of dollars, maybe they’ll take some time to listen to independent journalists as well as listen to the public, and let them know that they have an authenticity issue and they need to find a way to break the inertia and their Get in Line platform, essentially.
Stephen Janis:
Well, their Get in Line order of things that has led them to…
Taya Graham:
So they’re not considered tortoises anymore.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah.
Taya Graham:
Well, OK.
Stephen Janis:
That was great!
Taya Graham:
That’s our great free help for the Democratic Party. It didn’t cost $20 million. Maybe they’ll listen, maybe they won’t. But I want to thank everyone who’s watching for joining us for this first of a series of Inequality Watchdog Reacts on The Real News Network. And if you have a topic you’d like us to explore, just throw it in the comments and we’ll take a look. And if you want to see more of our inequality reporting, just take a look for our playlist on The Real News Network channel, and I look forward to seeing you all soon. Right, Stephen?
Stephen Janis:
Yep. We’ll be back.
Taya Graham:
We’ll be back. And as always, please be safe out there.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Taya Graham and Stephen Janis.
Already burdened by years of funding cuts and understaffing, registered nurses who work at Veterans Health Administration (VA) facilities across the country are facing a crisis as the impact of the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal workforce take effect. In this episode of Working People, Maximillian Alvarez speaks with VA nurses and union representatives for National Nurses United about how these cuts, coupled with Trump’s attempt to strip over one million federal workers of their collective bargaining rights, are hurting VA workers, the quality of care they’ve been trained to provide, and the veterans they serve.
Guests:
Irma Westmoreland, a registered VA nurse in Augusta, Georgia, who currently serves as secretary-treasurer of National Nurses United and chair of the National Nurses United Organizing Committee/NNU-VA
Sharda Fornnarino, a navy veteran who has worked as a VA nurse for 25 years, and who currently serves as the National Nurses United director of the Denver VA.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. The show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we are continuing our on the ground reporting on the Trump administration’s attacks on the federal workforce and the people who depend on their services. The Department of Veterans Affairs is the second largest department in the United States government. Second only to the Department of Defense as Eric Umansky and Vernal Coleman report at ProPublica, the VA has cut just a few thousand staffers this year, but the administration has said it plans to eliminate at least 70,000 through layoffs and voluntary buyouts within the coming months.
The agency, which is the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States currently has nearly 500,000 employees, most of whom work in one of the VA’s 170 hospitals and nearly 1200 clinics. Documents obtained by ProPublica show Doge officials working at the VA in March prepared an outline to transform the agency that focused on ways to consolidate operations and introduce artificial intelligence tools to handle benefit claims. One Doge document proposed closing 17 hospitals and perhaps a dozen more. Now, VA workers and veterans advocates have been sounding the alarm that these cuts and proposed restructurings could upend services that have already been burdened by years of underfunding and understaffing. And it’s not just the cuts. Workers employed by the VA have joined other unions ensuing the Trump administration over President Trump’s attempts to override the law through executive order and strip more than 1 million federal government employees of their collective bargaining rights.
In an April press release from National Nurses United NNU President Nancy Hagens said the VA nurses rely on collective bargaining to advocate for patient safety and ensure the best care for our veterans, most of whom are over 45 years old and many of whom have a disability. Without these bargaining rights, we risk retaliation for speaking up and holding our employers accountable. Our veterans deserve nurses who can fight for their care without fear. This latest move by the administration is a clear attempt to intimidate us for standing up against its efforts to dismantle and privatize the va, which studies have shown is a better place for veterans to receive care compared to the private sector, we will not be silenced by this bully behavior. And I just want to give a disclaimer up top here that our guests here are speaking as healthcare workers and member officers of National Nurses United.
They are not speaking on behalf of the VA or the federal government. I want to make that very clear. Now, Irma, Sharda, thank you both so much for joining us today on the show, especially amid all the chaos going on right now. I know this is a really hectic time, but our listeners are desperate to hear from y’all about what’s going on in the va. So I’m really, really grateful to y’all for making time for this and I want to kind of dig right in. And before we get to everything that’s been happening under the new administration, I wanted to ask if we could start by having y’all introduce yourselves, tell us more about you and the work that you do at the va, how you got into that work, and let’s give listeners a sense of what it’s been like working as a VA healthcare professional before 2025.
Irma Westmoreland:
Okay, well, I’ll go first. My name is Irma Westmoreland. I’m a registered nurse at the Charlie Norwood va and I’ve been here for 34 years. I started working at the VA because I wanted to work where I could give back to veterans. My mother was a volunteer at the VA for 50 years and one of my earliest memories was being taken into the VA to do bingo parties for our veterans or dance parties for the veterans. And we had to drag all of our friends with us because we needed ’em and it was a great time, but also because my husband is a veteran, many members of my family are veterans or were married to veterans or part of our family and we wanted to give back and support the va. I’ve been doing this, like I said, for 34 years and I wouldn’t do anything else.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And Irma, could you just say a little more about what the on the ground work has been like for you? I know it’s a big question to cover 34 years, but just give us a little sense of the day-to-day work and how that work has changed over the time that you’ve been at the va.
Irma Westmoreland:
I’ve been working at the VA, like I said, for 34 years. My first job was an ICU nurse and I’ve been a manager for a while, IV team manager, med surg manager. And then my latest job and last job at the VA has been as an informatics nurse, which means I’ve been working with physicians and nurses and helping them to learn how to document with our computerized charting system, developing charting tools and assisting them in that way.
Sharda Fornnarino:
So I’ve been a nurse for about 25 years at the Denver va. I started off as an ICU nurse or say a med surg nurse and then eventually evolved into the ICU and it was truly amazing. I worked with some amazing, amazing nurses and then eventually I got injured on the job and then I had to transition from inpatient care to outpatient. And since then I’ve been doing what’s called a float coordinator. I’ve worked in different medical specialties. What that means is I go where there’s people needed. I worked in neurology assisting doctors with procedures. I’ve worked in neurosurgery and I’m currently working in dermatology, assisting with procedures and help running their clinics day to day and connecting the patients with the providers. I would tell you that before all the stuff that’s happening now, the VA was a great place. It’s still a great place to work and the amazing people that I work with, a lot of us are veterans.
That’s really one of the reasons why I started to work at the va. When I got out of nursing school, I was looking at trying to get a job like everybody else, but I really wanted to give back. I served in the military for active duty for four years and I served in the reserves for about eight years and I really connected with the veteran patient. We were always able to joke around, we’re always able to talk about our past service and it’s always heartwarming to, they always enjoy talking about the old times, I should say, where they serve. They enjoy that comradery. There’s something about being in the military, you connect with all these people in just a different level. So that’s one of the reasons that had me join the Veterans Administration and just to know that I work with some really wonderful people and half of them are veterans too. We joke around, we just have this unique bond.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Was there anything about your service that sort of led you to feel like healthcare was where you wanted to give back or was that kind of more of an accident?
Sharda Fornnarino:
Well, I was a Navy corpsman, which is basically like an LPN on the outside. And so I provided a lot of nursing care while I was in the military and I worked in the psychiatric unit where mental health overseas was definitely needed and the nurses I worked with there basically said to Meda, you should really go into nursing. You would do benefit, it’ll benefit you greatly benefit your patients. You really have a knack for connecting with the patients and so you should go into nursing. And so they were really influential. One of my captains was very influential in leading me toward nursing, so I felt that it was eventually a good fit.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Sharda Irma, I wanted to ask if we could just go a little bit deeper and reveal a bit more about the VA healthcare system itself. Because a lot of folks listening to this, especially if they’re not veterans or they don’t have veterans in their family, they don’t know a lot about what goes on in there or how the VA itself is different from the healthcare that say they get. So I wanted to just ask if we could help listeners understand a bit more what the VA healthcare system is, how it works across the country and who it serves.
Irma Westmoreland:
VA care is very special. The care that our veterans need is mostly care for injuries that they served while in combat or while in service. So when a person signs up for the military, we tell them, Hey, if you get hurt, we’re going to take care of you. But what I have found, my husband was in the military for 23 years, he’s retired from the Army, and it’s changed just dramatically over the years about the benefits that our veterans get. So we have shrunk those benefits. Unfortunately, we tell them, Hey, you get hurt. We’re going to take care of you forever. But some of those things have changed, but we do better in the VA more than anywhere else is that we do PTSD, which is mental health care, spinal cord injury care, military, sexual trauma care, care for rehab, rehabilitation people with prosthetics. We do that better than anybody, our care, the nurses and the doctors in the va.
We train every single year. We have to take a course in what kinds of injuries in the different kinds of theaters of war or actions would we expect our veteran to have. So patients from World War I or different from patients from World War II or different from patients that were the Korean War and the Vietnam War and in the skirmishes that follow. And so each year we do that. We train on what kinds of things are we going to look for, what kind of injuries your care in the VA has been researched because the kinds of injuries that our veterans get has changed over time based on the technologies. So now we get a lot more traumatic brain injury, what we call TBI injury. So we need a lot more different and people lose limbs more than and come back more from injuries because of the advances in healthcare.
So we have a lot of rehab care and that care has been researched and studied and it’s also been researched and studied and how we get that care in the va, provide that care in the va and then how it’s provided on the outside. It’s light years better in the VA because our veteran comes to a place where they are around fellow veterans and there is some support from that. But there’s also, we provide care for people who are homeless. We provide care for people who again are spinal cord injury or people who need supportive care versus nursing home care versus acute care. All throughout the va, we have around the clock veterans care for your whole life. So we call it holistic care.
Sharda Fornnarino:
I would tell you what’s unique about the VA Max is really just to reiterate what Ermo is saying, it does encompass from mental health to any kind of physical injury. So where you would have to go on the outside and go to different areas and go to different hospitals, I feel like it’s a little fragmented in that way. The VA does provide it all encompassing. It’s all usually in the same place. Like my particular va, we have a spinal cord injury center. We have A-P-T-S-D Ascend program, which is an inpatient intensive program, and we have everything. We take care of everything between heart surgeries to minor hernias. So you can see it runs the whole gamut of everything. And we also were affiliated with some nursing home, so the VA has some nursing homes with us. So everything that we’re doing is all together. It’s all in one. The system is completely connected, which is different from the outside. I don’t want to say it’s better or worse, it’s just different. Everything is all there. And so when you see a VA provider, they can see all those things and look in your records and everything is all there where they in one spot where they don’t have to research to find different things or
Irma Westmoreland:
Go to different providers and such. You see a primary care physician right on the outside. So if you see your primary care physician, if you need to see a specialist, you have to farm you out right to somebody else. And then you have to get those records sent back to you. If you go to a facility, if you’re a primary care physician. Now a lot of them are only outpatient. So at a hospital you have to go to a hospital and see a hospital. Intensivist. In our facility, in our facilities in the va, we are 100%, like she said, integrated in that your primary care facility also is your hospital facility also is your other outpatient and specialty facilities. And all of that’s together. Like at the Charlie Norwood VA where I work, we have the same things like she’s talking about, we have inpatient mental health units, we have outpatient mental health care, and we have nursing home care, we have blind rehab centers, spinal cord injury, and all of the acute care and in between.
So all in one place. And we of course we both, we are both in big cities and so we have metro facilities, but we also have clinics that are attached to our facility that are in the rural areas of Georgia. And we even have one into South Carolina from our facility. The same thing that’s going on in Denver. So it’s an integrated thing. And you also have one medical record, which is really key in that everything is integrated no matter where you see. So if my patient was seen in Denver last week and is on vacation in Augusta, Georgia and gets ill, we have the same medical record so we can look at everything that was related to him, anything that happened to him, if he left his medications at home, we can go in and give him a prescription, which we have a pharmacy that gives it out to them right there.
And so our ER doctor, if they come in, ill can see everything that’s happened to them. One of the biggest big things that you said earlier that I want people to really see is it’s the biggest largest integrated healthcare system in the country, and integrated is the key. We are integrated one medical record, one system of how do we do things? One set of care standards for spinal cord injury, one set of care standards for our primary care clinics. And so that’s what makes us so great. We are all doing the same thing. People will tell you, oh, it’s one VA is one va, but that’s not true. We are integrated 100% and that makes us even better than anywhere else. I wish we all had the same thing that the VA offers.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and I wanted to ask, in the spirit of walking us up to the current attacks, one of the things that folks in the civilian population have heard over the years about the VA is that it’s underfunded, that there are long wait times, like the typical fodder that you get when someone’s trying to privatize a government agency. Because I’ve been hearing the same stuff in industries across the country, and I’ve been interviewing workers in those industries dealing with chronic funding cuts over years, like education. How many public school teachers have I interviewed over the years who have said, yeah, we have class sizes that are too big and we can’t retain teachers because our funding keeps getting cut and they keep piling more work onto fewer teachers and the same thing’s going on in the railroads, the same things going on in retail. Right? I So I wanted to ask before we take a quick break here, you guys could just, if you had anything you wanted to respond to folks out there who are maybe just thinking about those stories. They don’t know the VA themselves, but they’ve heard that the VA is yet another government run agency isn’t adequate that it’s something wrong with the agency itself. Can you give us an on the ground view of what folks are not seeing when they’re hearing those kinds of stories?
Sharda Fornnarino:
I was just going to say yes, just like teachers. My husband is a teacher, and so we have the continued same woes of anything, any agency that’s funded by the government right now over the years, you’re correct. Our funding has been getting chipped away. And so really what we need, what people are saying, well, what’s wrong with the va? What’s wrong with the fact that we can’t keep getting the ultimate healthcare? We keep hearing about the issues that we’re having in the va. Well, we need the funding is ultimately what we need. We need to get a fully staffed va. We need to get all our funding, not getting leached out to the outside, but bringing back that funds back inside, invest in our va, invest in our staff, invest in our nurses, so that way we can give the best care and protect our veterans moving forward and provide the programs that we have so we’re not short staffed so we can give all the things that we say we want to give.
Irma Westmoreland:
One thing that can go with that is that I would like people to really look at what’s going on in the outside. If in the VA right now across the country, we have our primary care appointments, you can get a primary care appointment with your doctor in less than two weeks. We have same day appointments just like they do outside. They only have a few a day, just like outside. My husband is an army veteran. He was in an outside hospital because he got very sick and was taken there and he had to wait. If he didn’t see a different doctor and not his doctor he was assigned to for cardiology, he would’ve had to wait two and a half months for a cardiology appointment. And that’s on the outside, not as a veteran, but just as an outside person paying a private pain citizen in the va, we have the same kinds of things because we do have those staffing specialties, but we don’t have enough of them either.
So if you’re telling me I have got to send my patient outside, if he can’t get an appointment in 30 days, he’s got to go outside. That way you leach the funding away from the VA and send it to somebody outside because here’s what I’m saying, those doctors outside, they’re going to want to see the VA patient because the VA pays on time every time federal government on time, every time we’re going to pay you. So you’re going to your funds all the time. So those patients still have to wait, you go to send them outside. The appointment outside is longer than the appointment they had to wait for in the va. Correct. It’s ridiculous. Nobody is telling you that. I’m not saying that there aren’t some appointments that you can get faster. I’m not saying that, but what I am saying is many times what we are finding is that those specialty care appointments are just as long wait outside or longer than it is in the inside. And what we see is if you come back to the VA and be seen in the va, your care is faster, quicker, and better. And research has shown over and over that the morbidity and mortality rates and complication rates, death rates of our veterans are much less when we treat them in the VA than when they’re treated outside the va.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Now, Sharda, Irma, we’ve sort of given listeners a bird’s eye view of the state of the VA leading up to 2025. Let’s talk about what the hell has been going on over the past few months, like the attacks from the Trump administration, both on federal agencies including the Department of Veterans Affairs, but also federal workers, many of whom we’ve interviewed on this show and at the Real News Network. There’s been so much happening in just the past few months alone. I wanted to ask if you could just sort of talk us through what the hell’s been going on in your world since the new Trump administration came in. What attacks have been affecting you all and your work directly?
Irma Westmoreland:
What I wanted to say about that is as I represent nurses from all of our VAs that we represent, I hear from across the country what’s going on. And what we have been seeing is that the first set of cuts that came forward was the terminating of probationary employees. And in general, none of those were nurses, registered nurses that I have been able to find. But what we have found is that the terminating of employees and cutting of employees has been all of the support staff kind of folks. So in a hospital where we work, every single person is important, whether it’s the groundskeeper to the housekeeper who cleans the beds and turns over our beds so that we can get them them back to us quickly and put a patient in, whether it’s the dietary staff bringing the food, the respiratory therapist doing Jet N treatments or the physical therapist, every single person is important.
The person who transports our patients or transports our labs down to the lab, all of those people are important. When you cut those people, when the Secretary Collins is saying to everybody that will listen to him and please hear exactly what he’s saying, he’s saying he’s not going to cut doctors and nurses that are front what he’s calling front facing staff. So that means people that are taking care of our patients on our med search units and our clinics and those sorts of things. So he’s not going to cut those people. But if you cut the secretary who’s answering the phone, who is going to answer the phone, it’s got to be the nurse. And when I am having to stop or my nurses are having to stop and answer the phone, when a patient needs something, they have to wait. And that is a problem for us as nurses.
We want to be able to spend our nursing time taking care of our patients, making relationships with them, assessing them so that when I come in to see you, max, if you’re my patient, I’ve had you for eight hours today. I’ve been in and out of your room multiple times. I’ve done my assessment with you, you and I, I’ve had you this my second day. I see you. I come in in a split second. I can tell you there’s something wrong with you. I know if you’re having a problem because I’ve been seeing you. I know I’ve watched you multiple times, I’ve spoken to you. I know in a split second there’s something wrong. We got to get something. What’s happening. I need to assess you. I need to reassess you what’s happening, and that’s what giving me my time to see you does. But also if you call me and you need pain medication, should you have to wait long for that because I’m having to go and take another patient down to radiology because I don’t have anybody to take care of radiology.
And then the nurses that are left on the floor that are taking care of patients got to pick my patients up too. So now instead of my five or six that I have, they’ve now got 10 or 11 or 12 patients they’re listening out for who can do that? Nobody can do that adequately. So what we need is to have adequate funding to fully fund the va. What’s happening with all these cuts and the proposed cuts is to starve the VA of not only dollars but to starve the VA of resources like staffing. When we’ve had these cuts, what people we’ve got freezes have a vacancy. Who’s going to want to come to the VA if they know now I’ve got firings coming, guess who goes first? The police senior who wants to come if they know who’s going to leave their solid job to come and work even in an ancillary job when they know those people are going to be fired first. So that starves us not only of dollars, funding dollars that ARD has been talking about, but also staffing dollars and resource dollars.
Sharda Fornnarino:
Max. I was I thinking about the question and a good analogy. What I can give you is really right now at RVA, we don’t have enough HR staff to even hire or go through the vetting process for an employee that does want to take the chance to come in and work with our veterans. So where a hiring process may take maybe three to four months for the va, it’s now taking longer. We just hired a PA dermatology. It took her 10 months to get onto the va and thank goodness she was dedicated and really wanted to come and work with our staff and our veterans. So she waited it out and was willing to come. But that tells you we can’t give that kind of timely care. We can’t fill these open positions fast enough in order to give that care to that patient. So that’s definitely a problem. And also Secretary Collins, as Irma alluded, they’re not cutting medical doctors, nurses, which thank goodness they’re not. But we don’t send in time of war. We don’t send just our frontline out to battle and then leave all their support people in the back and just behind and cut them out. We need all the support we can get to make the frontline snipers, whoever to be successful in the battle. So that’s how I feel. It’s like we’re going into battle without all our support, if that makes any sense.
Maximillian Alvarez:
No, it makes tons of sense. And I wanted to also impress upon listeners that there is no shortage of need for this healthcare, right? I mean, before COVID-19, the fastest growing sector in the workforce was home healthcare and elder care because we have a generation of folks who are aging out of the workforce who need elder care. These are also veterans of 20th century wars who are going to need that care. But we also have this influx of new veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who are also needing that care. All the while the situation that y’all are describing sounds catastrophic, especially not only for retaining the existing healthcare staff that the VA has, but attracting new workers to join the va. It really does, I think kind of sound the alarm for us because I wanted to just ask if you could say a little more about that from the worker or perspective worker’s point of view, what exactly folks are signing up for if they’re signing up to work at the VA now, and what the hell we’re going to do when folks stop signing up because of all the things we’re talking about here?
Irma Westmoreland:
Well, what we’re going to get is exactly what they’re trying to get. Doge and all of the Trump administration, secretary Collins, they’re trying to the va, that’s what we’re going to get. So you keep taking the dollars and the resources away and then it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Oh, the VA’s not doing their job. We need to streamline the care so we can streamline it. We need to cut 80,000 people so that we can streamline care, but it’s not going to affect that the care we give our veteran is the public stupid. No, they are not. All they need to do is listen to exactly what Secretary Collins says, we’re going to cut 80,000 people, but it’s not going to cut the direct care the patient gets. Let me tell you this. Or the veteran gets, you can’t cut 80,000 anything from any type of job or any type of anything and expect that they’re not to have any effect on the bottom line of a company or the bottom line of the amount of work that you get.
So people right now are afraid. So now we have chaos. They’re talking about, well, should I take a buyout if I can get a buyout because they’re not doing buyouts for a lot of nurses and doctors because guess what? We’re not going to cut them. So they’re not allowing buyouts to happen. They are allowing some early voluntary retirements or retirements, but then we’re going to have these cut staff. So we’re not allowing that to happen. So then people are thinking, am I going to be the person who’s going to be left? So then we have chaos, right? People are worried about their job, they’re afraid. People are scared about the va, scared about coming to work for the VA because what might happen with us, but what’s the bottom line is it’s again a self-fulfilling prophecy that we’re going to cut the VA to the point or cause such chaos that there is an issue and then we’re going to farm that out, right?
We’re going to privatize that, we’re going to farm that out. Then you farm more and more of it out with it goes the dollars to take care of it. When if you had just put those dollars back into the VA and reinvested in the va, we’d have it even better of a system than we have right now. But what will happen is that you get to a point where there’s a tipping point. It’s like a rollercoaster. You go up the hill, up the hill, up the hill, and when you get to a certain point, bam, you’re done. And so it becomes to a point when you tip the scale so far, it then goes over and what happens is they’re going to try to privatize the va, which would be the absolute worst possible thing that could happen for our veteran because our veterans need the care that we give because we over and over again provide the best care for our veteran in the care that they need and the systems that they need.
Sharda Fornnarino:
I can tell you max, that a lot of our veterans over and over will tell us they prefer waiting for the va. They want to be seen at the va. I have veterans every day that tell me they’d rather wait, and sometimes I have to encourage them to go to the outside to make sure they’re getting their care. But really this is why we’re here today is speaking up because of all this chaos that’s happening. We as union, we’re trying to make sure that we’re able to use our voice and say, look, you can’t scare us. We’re here. We’re here to stay. We are here to stand alongside with our veterans and give the best possible care that we can.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I apologize for kind of asking a question about something that you both have already touched on, but I really want to drive this point home for listeners. Could you just say a little more about what the cuts translate to on the ground? Irma, you were talking about the fact that when you don’t have an assistant to take your patient down to another ward to the hospital, you as the nurse got to do that, which means you are not tending to your patients. I want to just tug on that thread a bit more because on this show we talk to workers about their jobs, like the day-to-day reality of what they’re doing. And if we’re talking here about workers providing care and veterans and fellow workers or retired workers receiving care, could we just drive home a bit more like what the quality of care looks like when you are dealing with these impossible circumstances, not only from the recent cuts from the Trump administration, but decades of underfunding and understaffing?
Irma Westmoreland:
Absolutely. One of the things we’ve had is not just cuts in where we’re at right here, but logistics, which are the people that buy our supplies and then the people that bring them up to the units. So we have had shortages of supplies where we just came through the holiday weekend, Memorial Day weekend a couple weekends ago, and so we are supposed to have enough supplies on Friday afternoon to get you through till Tuesday morning of supplies. And routinely what we have is that there are supplies that are missing. We don’t have enough supplies, we don’t have people to get them. I’m running, I’m sending people to go to another unit. I’m on the phone calling down to the emergency room. I had a nurse explain to me. One of my nurses said, look, I didn’t have urinals. I mean just something just crazy that we have majority of veteran male staff patient, so I didn’t have urinals.
I’m calling around to every single unit to see who’s got some extra so I could run down to the found. I found four in the er. They gave me two of the four they had. So we run to do that. I had a nurse anesthetist tell me a story where they had to hold an OR case in the waiting room in what we call our holding room because they didn’t have the supplies that they knew were ordered for the case. They had to leave our facility, go to the other facility, which is about 10 minutes away, 10 15 minutes away, go up to the dock, warehouse dock, search through the stuff in the warehouse till they found the tray. They needed to take care of that patient and come back. And that is unfortunately not just an isolated story because there’s also shortages of supplies like normal sailing that have been national shortages across the country just because of shortages in medical supplies overall.
So it’s not just people, us not being able to get it. It has to do with what They’re not available in some cases, but we have shortages in those kinds of staff and so it does affect our patients, but what we have is that nurse anesthetist who knew what they were looking for, who knew what they needed and was able to go find it and go get it, they went and did it. Right? So that’s what you have for our nurses, what charter was saying, us as the union, we stand with our nurses. We are going to be standing with our nurses and they’re going to be standing with us and our veterans so that we know what they need so we can stand up and say, this is not right. This shortage shouldn’t have happened, this incident should not have occurred. So that our nurses don’t feel afraid to stand up and speak out for their veterans and speak out for our patients and their working conditions. And that’s really important to us as a union to make sure that these nurses have the way to do that and have a way to feel good about doing it so they know they’re not retaliated against when they do that.
Sharda Fornnarino:
I mean, the day-to-day work has been affected for the nurse between what Irma mentioned before of answering the phone. They need to grab a tray for their patient. Now their patient can eat again. They may been not been able to eat because of an impending procedure, but now they said, okay, well no, now you can eat. So now they have to run down to the kitchen and get their tray. Sometimes we are going down to the supply area to get supplies because they don’t have a supply tech to come up and bring up the supplies that we need, things like that. It takes away from the bedside care that we could be doing going in and checking on our patient. Those are the things that we need.
All these jobs are important to help support taking care of this patient that’s sitting on that bed, laying in that bed. So all these different jobs that people are saying that, well, maybe that’s okay, or maybe we can cut that or, oh, it’s only whatever. It’s never an only, it’s we all work together as a team. Whenever we take care of a patient, it is a team dynamic. Whenever there is a wheel, a cog in the wheel that’s missing, it’s a problem. So having these people leave because maybe they’ve decided to take the deferred resignation program or doing an early retirement or having an opening for more than a year and that position get cut because they can’t recruit. Having all these things are kind of leading to the demise and we have to fight back against this. We have to fight back against the privatization. We can’t do this anymore. We really need to make sure that we have all the people in the right places doing all the things that we need to take care of that veteran in the bed.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Now, Sharda, Irma, with the last kind of 10 minutes that I’ve got you both here, I want to focus in on the union itself and talk about where NNU fits into the current attacks on federal workers across the board and the unions fighting back against it. We’ve interviewed folks here on this show and at the Real news, people working at the CFPB folks working for the National Park Service. I mean, cannot stress enough how broad these cuts have been to the federal workforce, but also how much of an impact it’s going to have if Donald Trump’s executive order attempting to eliminate collective bargaining rights for all these federal workers. What that is going to mean for federal unions, federal workers, and all of us who depend on their labor. So I wanted to kind of ask if you could talk about the attacks on Federal Union collective bargaining rights and how that connects to everything we’ve been talking about here. Why should folks listening to this, I guess care, it’s a blunt question, but why should folks care about the administration attacking your union’s ability to collectively bargain at places like the va?
Irma Westmoreland:
Well, let me just tell you right up front that President Trump’s order, if it’s enacted, will take away the federal bargaining rights for over a million federal workers. And he said from his own lips that the reason he’s doing it is because those are the people that stand up and fight against him. And so the Federal Union in itself or any union, us especially, we are standing up enforcing our contracts, enforcing our nurses’ rights to stand for their patient and to talk about issues that are going on and to make sure that our nurses are treated fairly and that we have adequate support to provide the care that we need for our veterans. And that’s our main job. Nurses, nurses, working conditions and our patients. Those are the two things that we stand for. And if I have told people over and over again that the federal workforce is a federal union, right?
If they decide to take it to say that we no longer are exclusively the nurses in the VA because they can never tell me I’m not a union member, they can never tell me that I’m not a union member. What we want folks to know is that the nurses are the union. I am the nurse, I am the union. It is not the contract. It is not the building. It is not where we’re at. It’s because us as workers are going to continue to ban together. We have joined the other five national unions in the VA to file a national, two national cases in the court against this cuts to try to stop the federal work. But what it is is just it’s union busting at its finest, right? That’s all it is. Union busting at its finest, but we are not giving up. We will always be here.
We will always be helping our nurses. We will always be doing it. Whether I have to do it at my lunchtime, whether I have to do it after hours, I’m going to still be doing it. And so are all our other nurse leaders. We are going to be assisting our nurses and helping them to navigate through the system so that they can still stand up for their patients because it will be harder. It won’t be as easy. It will be harder because you won’t have the same protections that you have with a contract right now of doing that. But let me tell you what you will have. You will have nurses and a union who will stand behind our nurses and we will be helping them every single day, every single minute of the day. We’re not going anywhere.
Sharda Fornnarino:
That’s right. Max Irma said, it’s so eloquently we are not going anywhere. But ultimately with nurses and the union, we’re representing and trying to fight for not just the nurses and the patients, it’s for their safety, their safety in working conditions. We talk about the working condition. We got to make sure that things are getting cleaned up, that our patients are safe, but not just the patients. The nurses are safe. We deserve to be able to go into work and not have to worry about will there be enough police officers to help me in the emergency room if a patient started to act out. We need to know that we are going to always be safe and be treated fairly and not allow people to step on us as we go along about our day. We did lobby recently for the VA and Play Fairness Act during Federal Lobby Day. And right now we’re continue to speak up. We’re supporting the United for Veterans Rally on Friday just to stand along the veteran and the VA nurse standing along. We’re speaking up, we’re doing our part. And the nurses all know that the nurses are all standing together and making sure they show that we’re a united front.
Irma Westmoreland:
And I would like to just say as related to that, the Unite for Veterans and Unite for America rally that’s happening at the National Mall on July the sixth. If you’re anywhere around that area, come out, join us. We’re going to be there with veterans groups and other labor groups that are going to be there rallying to bring issue to this. This is Friday, June the sixth. Did I say July? Sorry, June the sixth. It’s June the sixth. Friday two o’clock. We’re going to be there. I’m going to be speaking and lots of other people are as well. We have done congressional briefings, rallies all around the country talking about these issues, bringing them forward with our veterans groups, with our congressmen. We need the people who are listening to this podcast to call their congressmen, to call their senators and tell them to stop these cuts to the va.
They need to stop it. They need to pass the Employee Fairness Act to give us full bargaining rights, but they need to stop these cuts. They need to enact a law that will make sure that we have bargaining rights in the federal government for all federal workers, the whole million that they’re trying to take away, not just the ones for the va, but all of us. We need people to call their congressmen, call their senators, tell them this is not right, fully fund the va, whether it’s for internal resources, external resources, what we need to make sure we can care for our veterans every single day. Those veterans stood on the line for us and it’s time for us to stand on the line for them, come join us. And
Sharda Fornnarino:
We as nurses, we will not abandon our patients, we will not abandon our veterans.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And we will include information about that rally in the show notes for this episode. And I myself will try to get down there on Friday so that we can do an on the ground follow-up to this podcast. So stay tuned for that. And with the last kind of minute or two that I have you both here, I wanted to just sort of ask if you had any more notes about what folks listening to this can do to help and why they should get involved here. I mean, I think one of the biggest changes that I’ve seen in the national consciousness around unions and union workers since the time I started this show is that more and more people have learned to understand unions not as a special class of workers who have something that we don’t, but workers who have more power in key industries that we all depend on.
And people have learned to see the struggle of their fellow workers and union workers, especially as fights that involve their interests, right? So folks who don’t want to fly on janky Boeing jets that are going to fall out of the sky have learned to support the machinists who build those planes who are fighting against the company and all of its cost cutting corner, cutting crap. Same thing for the railroad workers. If you don’t want to train to derail in your backyard, like in east Palestinian, Ohio where we’ve been interviewing residents there, then folks have learned to support the railroad worker unions who are actually fighting against the companies that are putting all of us at danger with their cost cutting their corner, cutting to serve their Wall Street shareholders, so on and so forth. People have learned to see healthcare worker unions as important because our quality of care across the country has been going downhill over my lifetime.
And so if you want that care to improve, and you don’t want insurance companies just telling you that you don’t need this operation or that you got to support the workers who are actually fighting for that quality of care. And so I think there’s something really going on here where folks are identifying their common interests with the struggles that workers and unions are waging. But I wanted to ask in that vein for folks out here listening who maybe they’re not in a union, maybe they don’t have a connection to the va, but they are a working person just like you and me. Why is this important for them to care about what’s happening to the VA and what can supporting the union do to address the issues that all of us care about in this country right now? So any final notes you had on that and then we’ll wrap.
Irma Westmoreland:
Okay, max, I’ll give you a 32nd thing. And what I want to tell you is that workers need to realize that all of the things that they value right now, paid vacation, social security, sick leave, any of those things all came from workers uniting together with the public and fighting for those things. And right now, this fight that the federal workers are going through is just the tip of the iceberg. If the federal worker, this goes through and it happens and the federal workers lose their union, they’re going to come for the private unions next. And then what’s next? Your rights. We need to stand together with workers and healthcare workers and the federal unions because they are the people that are on the line right now fighting to make sure that you have healthcare, that you need adequate healthcare for our veterans, our teachers unions are out there. They’re fighting for you to make sure that your students are educated adequately. We need safe patient staffing ratios like they have in California, federal standards of staffing so that it isn’t related to the insurance company, that we need Medicare for all, for every person to have healthcare available to them as a human right in this country. And those are the righteous fights the unions are doing for you right now, every day, day in and day out that you may not see.
Sharda Fornnarino:
What we want people to do right now is, yeah, we need them to call their congressmen and tell them they do not want these cuts to happen. Last week I spoke to a veteran who was a little displeased with the fact that he had to wait so long to go see a provider on the outside and they had some issues connecting, getting records and all these things, and he wanted to voice me all his concerns that was happening, that he’s actually seeing right now the effects of some of these cuts. And I did explain to him, well, sir, this is what’s happening. This department has reduced in size. And so of course this was going on. And what can you do is contact your local congressman, contact your senators, let them know you don’t want this to happen. And unfortunately at that time, he said, well, if I felt like it would work, then I would do something. And what I told him is that if you don’t do something now, then when will you have a voice to do it? I encouraged him to use his voice now and stop what’s going on and to let his congressional people know what his best interests are and to help support him. And at the end of the conversation, he understood because if we lose his fight now, then where does it stop?
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Sharda Fornnarino and Irma Westmoreland of National Nurses United. And I want to thank you all for listening and I want to 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 explore all the great work that 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 newsletters so 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. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.
There has been a surge in the number of UK families turning to baby banks to support their babies. It underscores yet again that charity is a sign the Labour government is failing. 3.5 million items, including cots, clothes, prams and nappies, were handed out in 2024. That’s a 143% increase on the previous year.
Labour austerity is exacerbating child poverty
Unfortunately, this comes as no surprise when Labour’s maintenance of the Tories’ two child benefit cap plunges 100 children into poverty per day. Rather than tackling this head on and announcing measures such as ending the cap (which can only punish children for being born), Labour has delayed its child poverty strategy to autumn at the earliest.
There are 4.5 million children living in poverty in the UK, at an increase of 200,000 from 2023 to 2024. And Labour are making it worse – by their own estimation. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) admitted on 26 March that its own figures show that fresh government austerity will push 250,000 people, including 50,000 more children into poverty by 2029/30. That’s because of cuts to welfare including support for disabled people. The impact assessment found that 3.2m families will lose an average of £1,720 per year.
The reality and a solution
The two child benefit cap strips benefits such as universal credit from a third child. It’s worth noting that two thirds of households impacted by the cap have at least one working parent. And that the amount of unemployed people in the country vastly outpaces the number of jobs, by ten million if you include the ‘economically inactive’. In fact, neoliberal managers sometimes consider unemployment a good thing because they believe it keeps workers competitive and eager for any job they can get. This is complete nonsense: as long as wages and job benefits are fair, people will appreciate their job even if it was guaranteed (within reason). Labour could be bold and undertake a training and jobs programme in support of the public and private sector, including job sharing to address the fact some are on benefits while others work 40 hour weeks.
Labour’s baby bank scandal
Baby banks in the UK supported 219,637 families in 2024 – a 35% increase on the year before. One of them was single parent Adam Coggins who told the Independent:
I was so uncomfortable going there, because I’ve never had to ask for help before. I felt like a failure; that was hard. [But] without these people, we would be in trouble. They’ve saved a lot of people – [and] especially when you’ve got two young kids, you need that help. That could be the difference between getting a couple of meals for them. Getting two packs of nappies saves you money to get food for them.
This is no surprise when you consider research from the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG). It found that a lone parent working full time on the minimum wage can only meet 69% of costs. And even two parents working full time fall short of a basic standard of living for them and their children, according to CPAG.
Meanwhile, a report from the Education Policy Institute (EPI) has highlighted that a quarter of households with children under four are experiencing food poverty. The EPI also found that children under five are 25% more likely to experience food poverty than other children.
The figures on baby banks come from the Baby Bank Alliance (BBA), which also found that demand is well beyond their supply. 65% of the more than 400 baby banks that are BBA members reported in a survey that they had more requests for help than they could deliver.
Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South, hit the nail on the head, saying:
That baby banks even exist in one of the richest countries on Earth is an indictment of our political choices. The fact they’ve now seen a 35 per cent surge in demand speaks to a crisis not of resources, but of priorities. If we can afford tax breaks for the wealthy, we can afford dignity for children. Ending child poverty is a political decision. This government is choosing not to make it.
The Los Angeles City Council this month passed a law requiring hotel staff and airport catering industry workers be paid at least $30 per hour and given comprehensive health benefits by July 1, 2028. The minimum wage will be raised to $22.50 this year and increase by $2.50 each July for the next three years. This is a huge victory for UNITE HERE Local 11, the union that campaigned for the…
A new study confirms what locals and environmental activists across the Gulf South and beyond have said for years: Black, Brown and Indigenous workers do not benefit equitably from jobs offered by the petrochemical industry despite their communities often bearing the brunt of its pollution. In Louisiana, for example, residents and activists say jobs promised to Black communities located near…
At the beginning of the Tory/ Lib Dem coalition government in 2010, the amount of foodbank parcels handed out stood at 60,000. The Trussell Trust has now revealed that this figure is close to three million for the year 2024/2025. And that only includes foodbanks run under the Trussell group. That is a 50 fold or 5000% increase.
What are politicians – namely Labour – doing about it?
The response to the foodbank epidemic from politicians is quite something. In 2022, former prime minister David Cameron tweeted that he had been volunteering at a foodbank for two years. Yes, the very architect of austerity who slashed public services and benefits must be drowning in hypocrisy. He’s a major reason the foodbanks are necessary.
Then there’s now-Reform MP Lee Anderson. As a Tory MP previously, he said:
I think you’ll see first-hand that there’s not this massive use for food banks in this country. You’ve got generation after generation who cannot cook properly. They can’t cook a meal from scratch. They cannot budget
Yet 15% of UK households are living in food insecurity, meaning eight million adults and three million children. In September, union leaders called on Keir Starmer to put a stop to the issue:
We simply cannot allow food banks to be seen as a normal part of life in the 21st Century. People are already at breaking point. You must tackle food insecurity and end food bank Britain.
The Trussell figure for foodbank use for 2024/25 is only an 8% reduction on 2023/24 levels.
Nonetheless, Starmer is going ahead with budget cuts to public services (branded as ‘efficiency savings’), along with cuts to disabled people’s support that will plunge 670,000 families who are already poor into even deeper hardship.
This is contrary to Labour’s manifesto, which said:
We want to end mass dependence on emergency food parcels, which is a moral scar on our society.
The Trussell report into foodbank use
In its report, Trussell made clear the main cause of foodbank use:
Emergency food parcel provision remains close to record levels first and foremost due to a weakened social security system that is unable to protect people from the most severe forms of hardship
The inadequate safety net forced 567,235 people (including 200,224 children) to turn to foodbanks for the first time in 2024/25. At the same time, the UK’s richest 350 households have £773 billion in wealth, according to the Sunday Times rich list for this year.
Low wages are also a factor in foodbank use. 11% of people referred to foodbanks in 2024/25 were earning.
Corporate control
At the same time as people rely on foodbanks, Tesco has reported profits of over £3 billion for 2024/25 and Sainsburys around £1 billion. That is obscene profiteering because of control over the food supply.
It’s clear the system is broken and Starmer doesn’t look likely to fix it.
An analysis released Thursday by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation found that the tax cuts at the center of Republicans’ massive reconciliation package would do little to boost economic growth — and would not come anywhere close to paying for themselves. The JCT report, published hours after Republicans pushed the bill through the House, estimates that the tax cuts would boost the…
Early on Thursday, Republicans passed Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” in the House of Representatives, with just two GOP defectors. The budget codifies trillions of dollars of tax cuts for the wealthy, alongside hugely increased spending on immigration enforcement and the military, both by adding to the national debt and through slashing programs that aid tens of millions of low-income…
On 18 May, Newcastle held a people’s assembly with former North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll. The Canary went along to the exciting and packed event, where people living locally discussed the issues they’re facing and what potential solutions could be.
Driscoll spoke to the Canary after the event. And the plan is clear: listen, prepare, and act.
Jamie Driscoll: planning, fighting, and winning for Newcastle in 2026
Candidates with Jamie Driscoll’s majority party are “intending to fight and win” next year’s local council elections in Newcastle. And he said that, while it’s important to be angry about what’s going on both at home and abroad, the really key question is “what are we going to do about it?”
That’s why a clear plan is essential. Because the idea isn’t to ask voters locally to “agree with us that you should be angry”; it’s to say “vote for us because this is what we’re going to do”. And if you actually want to deliver for people, he stressed:
the best way is to have the people right at the heart of it. Because if you want to know how to speed up the buses, ask a bus driver – they do it for a living every day!
As mayor, Driscoll listened to people living locally and, where he had “the power and the funds”, he took action. Even when it wasn’t his role, he spoke up. Where the council had the power, for example, he worked with councillors to encourage action. And on bigger national issues, he spoke up and lobbied.
If he and his team “take control of Newcastle City Council next year and the Labour government isn’t gonna stump up the cash that is needed and it’s not gonna tax billionaires”, he promised they won’t stay quiet:
What you won’t get from us is a lot of hand wringing, ‘oh it’s terrible’, ‘oh national government’s made us do it’… What you’ll get is a 40ft banner down the side of the Civic Centre saying ‘these are the people responsible’. And you know what? If you wanna take our school crossing safety off us, we’re all gonna get in a bus as councillors and we’re gonna lie down outside parliament. We’re gonna make a fuss. So you’ll still get a fight back.
Putting people at the heart of the movement
Driscoll asserted that:
the role of a councillor is to be a shop steward for the community inside the Council, not a cheerleader for the Council inside the community
And the idea of community assemblies is precisely to make sure people living locally have a central role in determining what the priorities are and how to address them.
The 18 May assembly brought together many dozens of people who were passionate about participating and sharing their lived experiences locally. They discussed insights into the problems and potential solutions to the challenges facing them. And this collaborative agenda will become the key message ahead of the local elections next year. Campaigners will then use that to “get out there, get a coalition together, and win, and then implement it”.
One key issue that came up for people was the urgent national need for a wealth tax – something that has widespread support across the country. But people also discussed local issues that had a clear connection to elite plunder via “big corporations lobbying government” and “billionaires’ wealth extraction”.
Jamie Driscoll: we have the same concerns, and mustn’t let grifters exploit our differences
Though we all have much in common, there are clearly cultural divides in Britain. And that can create tension sometimes. But we can diffuse that tension and come together around shared goals, Driscoll stressed, if we listen to people with an open mind. We need to focus on “hearing what they’re saying and not projecting your opinions onto them”, he said.
Recently, Driscoll explained, he was talking to someone in a neglected nearby town. And the feeling of “why is no one listening to us?” was clear. As he said:
you talk to them and actually they’ve got exactly the same concerns. Why isn’t my bus on time? Why is it so bloody expensive? Why is it there’s so much month left at the end of the money? Looking in their supermarket trolley thinking, ‘I used to be able to buy twice this much’.
Another person he spoke to said he was thinking of voting for Reform, despite disagreeing with the party on immigration. Why? Because he felt Nigel Farage was “the only one shouting”. And that’s something to take stock of. Sometimes, people just appreciate someone who’ll stand up and fight, whether they agree on everything or not.
Driscoll knows that Reform will disappoint people. Because it won’t actually fix any of the key issues affecting people’s daily lives. And fixing things is “what really matters”. As he argued:
when they look at politicians, what the voting public want is two things: 1) Do I think these people could run the country? 2) Have these people got my back?…
And that’s the whole point of the detailed manifesto. It’s gotta fix something…
Republicans pushed their massive reconciliation bill through the House Budget Committee late Sunday after striking a deal with GOP hardliners who tanked a vote on the package late last week, complaining that the measure’s proposed cuts to Medicaid and other programs were not sufficiently aggressive. The final vote on Sunday was 17-16, with the four Republicans who voted against the bill on…
This year, the Sunday Times rich list came out on the same day as financial regulator the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) revealed that 21% of UK people have less than £1,000 in their bank. The rich list shows that the 350 wealthiest families have maintained vast wealth at £773 billion, down only 3% from last year.
Rich list: taking the piss
The figures will heighten calls for a wealth tax. Deputy leader of the Green Party Zack Polanski is running for the leadership. He has called for a 1% wealth tax on the richest 1%, rebalancing the economy by £75 billion per year. Ahead of Chancellor Rachel Reeves budget, 30 MPs called on her to introduce a wealth tax.
The FCA also found that one in ten people have no money in their bank whatsoever. They live entirely pay check to pay check. Meanwhile, the 14th richest family in the country is that of the Duke of Westminster. His own father said he was “born with the longest silver spoon anyone could ever have”.
According to the Sunday Times rich list, his family fortune now stands at £10bn. It illustrates what people mean when they say the economy is ‘rigged’. The cash goes back to Norman times when his ancestor was gifted loads of land by the King, with the fortune also increasing after a marriage.
Rigged economy
Now the Duke has a property empire. He holds 300 acres of London as part of his global property ‘assets’. After inheriting his wealth, he is now profiteering on it through exploitation of the housing bubble, which successive governments have maintained. Despite housing being a common necessity to all that could be organised at cost price, Real Estate is the most profitable industry in the UK. Top companies average an astonishing £686,000 of profit per year per employee. That’s a private tax on homes at 23 times the UK average salary, per employee.
On top of that, the Duke avoided the 40% inheritance tax on the £9bn estate. If he had been taxed, it would have rebalanced the economy by almost as much as the Treasury collected in inheritance tax in the entire year. That’s because the estate is registered as a trust. What a joke.
Meanwhile, as the rich list dropped the FCA also found 12 million people in the UK feel overwhelmed or stressed because of their financial circumstance. We need to remove profit from our risk-free common essentials, while the private market can explore avenues in the rest of the economy.
Four children in every British classroom face the grim reality of hygiene poverty, with a staggering 21% of these children opting not to play with others out of fear of judgment regarding their cleanliness.
Hygiene poverty: a scourge of UK society
This distressing statistic comes from a recently released report, A Clean Start in Life, which highlights the dire situation in which almost 1.1 million children in the UK find themselves without access to basic hygiene necessities. In the wake of these findings, it is clear that many families are making the impossible choice between feeding their children and providing them with essential hygiene items.
The report reveals that a worrying 14% of children across Great Britain are affected by hygiene poverty, with some unable to attend school due to the lack of a clean uniform. Nearly 350,000 children have missed school because they were embarrassed about their appearance, including dirty clothes and unwashed hair.
According to the research, conducted by Children North East in collaboration with the charity In Kind Direct, 20% of children routinely go without basics such as toothpaste and deodorant.
Michael Gidney, CEO of In Kind Direct, articulated the heartbreaking choices families are forced to make:
Children are sharing toothbrushes, worrying about standing out at school for the wrong reasons, and families are having to choose between eating and keeping clean – impossible choices no one should have to face.
The report underscores how this silent crisis is undermining the joyful experiences of childhood and contributing to lower self-esteem among young people.
A far-reaching impact
The impact of hygiene poverty extends beyond mere embarrassment; the report found that 26% of affected children experience low self-confidence, while 17% feel ashamed. Strikingly, 15% of these children have had to share hygiene products, often resulting in them wearing the same clothes for multiple days. Bullying remains a prevalent issue, with nearly one in ten experiencing negative treatment related to their hygiene.
The challenges are not confined to just individuals; rather, they permeate the entire educational environment.
A survey of 500 UK school staff indicated that around 30% observed children missing school due to hygiene poverty. Teachers are stepping up to fill the void left by government inaction, with many spending their own money on hygiene products and even washing uniforms to support families in need. On average, teachers are reported to have spent £27 over the past year on such initiatives.
The alarming contributory factors reveal a disheartening truth; eight out of ten educators believe that hygiene poverty has increased markedly in the past year.
Teachers have reported cleaner classrooms but with the heartbreaking footnote that many students arrive with dirty clothes and unkempt hair. The stigma attached to being unable to maintain personal hygiene not only impacts mental health but also limits children’s social interactions and overall school attendance.
Hygiene poverty is ruining young people’s lives
Leigh Elliott, CEO at Children North East, lamented the stigma surrounding hygiene poverty:
The shame and stigma attached to wearing a dirty school uniform or having greasy hair can be an unbearable burden for our children and young people. Every baby, child, and young person should be able to live a happy, healthy childhood.
This sentiment resonates deeply in light of the findings that children are not just facing challenges in their social lives but also struggling with their mental health as a result of inadequate access to basic hygiene.
As discussions around child poverty gain traction, the call for government action is becoming increasingly urgent.
Campaigns led by organisations like The Hygiene Bank and small businesses demand that the government address hygiene poverty as part of its child poverty strategy. This issue must be addressed not only as a matter of welfare but as a fundamental aspect of ensuring that every child has the opportunity to thrive in their educational journey.
The reality of hygiene poverty is a crisis that should not be hidden behind closed doors. Rather, as a society, we must foster understanding and compassion, pushing for the necessary changes to lift families out of this cycle of poverty.
A collective effort is crucial if we want to safeguard children’s dignity and ensure they have the chance to grow up free from the added burdens of shame and stigma.
They’re the latest figures to come out as anger grows over Labour’s proposed DWP Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and Universal Credit cuts.
These households—each with at least one member living with a disability—stand to lose up to £390 per month, according to internal DWP projections. So, these cuts will not fall on the wealthy or the comfortable.
No, they will fall squarely on people already living on the edge: carers, people with chronic illnesses, individuals managing severe mental health conditions, and those too unwell to work.
Stripping them of vital support will not encourage them into employment; it will simply impoverish them further, punish them for being ill, and heap pressure on an already threadbare social safety net.
The move, buried within the government’s so-called “modernisation” of DWP PIP and changes to Universal Credit, shows a disturbing contempt for disabled people. The changes appear to be designed not to support those in need, but to appease a hardline fiscal agenda—an agenda that views the sick and disabled as financial burdens to be slashed from the ledger.
The most damning revelation is that the government knows the damage it will cause. These aren’t speculative figures from campaigners or charities. They come directly from within the DWP. They know this policy will devastate lives—and they plan to press ahead regardless.
What has Labour become?
For the Labour Party, once seen as a defender of the DWP welfare state, this marks a shameful betrayal. Keir Starmer has not only failed to challenge the Tory-era narrative that people on benefits are to blame for their poverty—he has embraced it. He has chosen to champion “tough choices” over compassion, and now disabled people must pay the price.
Critics have rightly condemned the move as morally reprehensible. The Disability Benefits Consortium has warned that the changes risk stripping away the bare minimum support many rely on just to survive. Meanwhile, organisations like the Joseph Rowntree Foundation point to the obvious: taking money from people in poverty deepens poverty.
This is not reform. This is not progress. This is a government waging war on the poorest, hitting disabled people with a double injustice—first of circumstance, then of DWP policy. In a civilised society, we measure our success not by GDP or fiscal targets, but by how we treat those who need help the most.
Labour had a chance to chart a new path. Instead, it has chosen to continue the punitive legacy of austerity. Disabled people will pay the price—with their health, their dignity, and, in some cases, their lives.
House Republicans late Sunday unveiled legislation that analysts said would rip Medicaid coverage from millions of low-income Americans — including children and people with disabilities — to help fund tax breaks that would disproportionately benefit the wealthy. The bill text released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee is a section of the sprawling budget reconciliation package that…
The U.S. approach to addressing homelessness in the wake of a recent Supreme Court ruling will maim and kill people, housing rights advocates and experts tell Truthout. It will disproportionately harm disabled Americans, who comprise more than a quarter of the nation’s population and about half of its unhoused population. The court’s decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, issued in June 2024…
Under the Conservatives, inequality has surged with now over 14 million people… living in poverty while the richest 1% see their incomes soar. Of the developed countries we are now the ninth most unequal. Will the prime minister listen to the Liberal Democrats, the public and many of his own backbenchers and commit to reversing changes such as PIP, the winter fuel allowance and two child benefit cap and introduce clear poverty reduction targets to ensure that any economic growth benefits those who need it most.
Starmer: anti-anti-austerity
Indeed, from 2024-2025 UK billionaires saw their wealth go up from an already staggering £170 billion to £181 billion. Meanwhile, the least well off 10% are literally in debt. Nonetheless, Starmer is upholding the Tories’ two child benefit cap (restricting benefits to two children). Analysis from Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) shows the cap will increase the number of children living in poverty from 4.5 million to 4.8 million.
Starmer also cut the winter fuel allowance for some of the least well off pensioners. Yet the prime minister’s own government admitted that the cut will plunge 250,000 more elders into poverty by 2029-30.
As if austerity 2.0 wasn’t already well on its way, Starmer is also cutting support for disabled people. Again, the government’s own analysis shows that this will impact 700,000 families who are already in poverty.
Appalling response at PMQs
Then, at PMQs, Starmer had the gall to say:
Mr Speaker, we’re already delivering 750 free breakfast clubs boosting the minimum wage for over 3 million that’s the lowest paid workers in our country and the child poverty task force is looking at every lever that can be pulled
Hold on, Starmer’s pulling the lever the other way with his continuation of austerity.
The basic funding for free primary school breakfasts Labour initially offered is just 60p per pupil. That has resulted in schools taking part in the pilot either pulling out or paying the rest from existing budgets.
Also, the status quo for free school meals is unhealthy sponsors such as Greggs and Kellogg’s.
Starmer has raised the minimum wage by around 80p per hour. Does he expect that to solve the richest 1% owning more than 70% of us? And this approach arguably doesn’t make sense because it treats all employers as the same. When in fact, the UK’s top 100 FTSE companies make an average of £64,000 profit annually per employee. That’s a private tax of double the UK’s average yearly wage for every single employee at those corporations.
Instead, Labour could make a company’s minimum wage relative to their profits. This would enable small and up and coming businesses to pay less and mean that employees aren’t being ripped off by big business. It would link employee pay directly to the company’s performance, driving up productivity.
Starmer showed yet again at PMQs that he is taking us in the wrong direction.
After a five-year pause, the Trump administration is bringing back financial penalties for the many millions of borrowers who are too far behind on their student loan payments. It’s led to confusion and financial uncertainty. At least 5 million people are in default, meaning they have failed to make payments on their loans for at least nine months — and millions more are projected to join…
The fact that people are facing hunger and hardship cost the UK economy, public finances and public services at least £75.6 billion in 2022/23, according to a new report from the Trussell Trust.
Hunger: uncivil and economically backwards
The charity broke down the figure. £38.2 billion is from the loss of productivity and employment, most prominently because people undergoing hunger and hardship are ‘scarred’ by the experience, whereby it’s more difficult to sustain a job.
In turn, that loss of employment leads to lower tax revenues and higher welfare payments, costing £23.7 billion.
Hunger and hardship further has an impact on public services, at a cost of £13.7 billion, with about half of that coming from increased healthcare costs. The Labour government should particularly listen here given their NHS plan is centred on ‘prevention’. Another portion of this figure comes from increased education spending and childcare spending. And £3 billion of this sum comes from increased spending on homelessness services.
The report points out that a “widening gap between the rich and poor is creating divisions and tensions between people at a community level”. Indeed, Oxfam has found that 1% of the country has more money than 70%. Polling from the Fairness Foundation identified that 63% of Britons believe the super rich have too much power over politics.
Solutions from Trussell
Trussell offers p9 recommendations to remedy the impact and cost of hunger and hardship. One is the ‘Essentials Guarantee’, which a number of charities have been campaigning for. This would mean that no one in the country goes without the essentials they need to survive. It would bring 2.2 million people out of hunger and hardship by 2026/27 and drive £17.6 billion in economic benefits. It makes sense: if people receive what they need to live they will automatically spend that in the economy, driving growth.
Another recommendation is scrapping the two child benefit cap. This would boost the economy by around £3.1 billion and lift 470,000 children out of hunger and hardship by 2026/27.
The scale of the issue
The Trussell report found that 9.3 million people, including 3 million children, faced hunger and hardship in 2022/23. Corresponding with an increase in inequality, 46% more children now experience hunger and hardship than a decade ago.
Money equates to real material resources in the economy and if rich people’s portion of the wealth keeps growing, it’s at the expense of the poorest. Last year, UK billionaires saw their wealth increase by £35 million every single day. Meanwhile, Trussell estimates that an additional 425,000 people will face hunger and hardship by 2026/2027.
The charity identified the rate of different groups that are facing hunger and hardship:
31% of families with three or more children.
32% of single parent families.
70% of people facing the issue are renters.
People living in a disabled family are much more likely to experience hunger and hardship (17% compared to 11% for non-disabled people).
The issue is dramatically worse for minority ethnic groups, at up to 28% compared to 11% for white families.
It’s clear that Labour’s planned welfare cuts to disabled people’s support is only going to make the issue significantly worse. As well as the human cost, there is a domino effect on the economy, delivering negative outcomes for us all.
As congressional Republicans consider slashing the federal safety net to fund tax giveaways for the wealthy, polling published Thursday by KFF shows that a large majority of Americans oppose cuts to health programs, including Medicaid. The research group asked respondents about potential funding cuts for various programs, and found that 84% oppose cuts to Social Security, 79%
As people worldwide filled the streets Thursday to celebrate International Workers’ Day and mobilize against attacks on the working class, a new analysis showed that average global CEO pay has surged 50% since 2019 — 56 times more than the pay of ordinary employees. The Oxfam International analysis examined figures from nearly 2,000 corporations across 35 countries where CEOs were paid more…
