Here's Mike Bloomberg's Soon-to-Be-Released Higher Education Plan

19 February 20 Will RSN Survive the Political Season? Right now we are competing with a wide array of high-powered political campaigns with sophisticated fundraising methods. We are hurting. Please try to remember, when the smoke clears RSN will be there. But we’ll need a budget to get there. Put something aside for RSN, we need it. Marc Ash Founder, Reader Supported News Sure, I'll make a donation! Update My Monthly Donation If you would prefer to send a check: Reader Supported News PO Box 2043 Citrus Hts CA 95611

---

19 February 20

It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News

DOUBLE THE READERSHIP, HALF THE MONEY - YES WE ARE FREAKING OUT - This is it, the biggest month of readership in our history. We are also raising half the money we were two years ago. Please try to understand that we have to confront that - quickly. Many of you are actually ignoring donations altogether. Don’t do that. The situation becomes quite serious. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

Sure, I'll make a donation!

---

Here's Mike Bloomberg's Soon-to-Be-Released Higher Education Plan

Ryan Grim and Aída Chávez, The Intercept
Excerpt: "Billionaire Mike Bloomberg's presidential campaign is planning to release a higher education plan on Tuesday that pledges to make community college free, increase subsidies for low-income students, and end the practice of legacy admissions - but falls far short of what much of the Democratic pack has so far laid out on the campaign trail."
READ MORE

Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich arrives at O'Hare International Airport after being released from prison on February 19, 2020 in Chicago, Illinois. (photo: Kamil Krazaczynski/AFP/Getty Images)

ALSO SEE: Supreme Court Lawyer Calls Donald Trump's Actions
'Lawless' and 'Unprecedented' After Pardons

Trump Commutes Sentence of Rod Blagojevich, Announces Pardons for Michael Milken and Others
Aaron Katersky and Allison Pecorin, ABC News
Excerpt: "President Donald Trump announced pardons for several high-profile individuals in addition to commuting the sentence of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich."

EXCERPTS:

Kerik, a former New York police commissioner, was sentenced to 48 months in prison in 2010 after pleading guilty on multiple charges of tax fraud and lying to officials. 

He served as Giuliani's body guard during Giuliani's 1993 mayoral campaign and was later appointed to serve as the New York City police commissioner in 2000. He was nominated by President George W. Bush in December 2004 to be the secretary of Homeland Security but withdrew his nomination due to potential tax violations.

Kerik was released from prison in 2013 after serving three years for good behavior. In recent years he's been a frequent defender of Trump's on Fox News. Kerik did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley -- flanked by football legends Jim Brown and Jerry Rice -- announced to reporters earlier Tuesday that the president had signed an executive order pardoning DeBartolo.

Debartolo pleaded guilty in 1998 to concealing an alleged extortion plot by former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards, involving the licensing of a casino. 

Debartolo pleaded guilty in 1998 to concealing an alleged extortion plot by former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards, involving the licensing of a casino. 

Michael Milken, the former investment banker who became known for his involvement in an insider trading scandal, was among those who received a pardon. 

He pleaded guilty to securities fraud in 1990 and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, of which he ultimately served two. 

Trump also issued pardons to Ariel Friedler, a former technology entrepreneur who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to access a protected computer; Paul Pogue, a former construction company owner who underpaid his taxes; David Safavian; a former government official who served one year on perjury charges; and Angela Stanton, a television personality who served six months of home confinement for activities related to a stolen vehicle ring. 

In addition to Blagojevich, sentences were commuted for Tynice Nichole Hall, a mother who was sentenced for possession and intent to distribute drugs; Judith Negron, who was serving time on charges related to a scheme to defraud the government, and Crystal Munoz, who was convicted for her role in a marijuana ring. 

READ MORE

"I Would Love Medicare for All": A Nevada Culinary Union Member on Why She Supports Bernie Sanders
Rebecca Burns, In These Times
Excerpt: "While the powerful Culinary Workers Union in Nevada is attacking Sanders' universal healthcare plan, a rank-and-file worker says 'a lot of members want Bernie' and support Medicare for All."
READ MORE

President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. The Secret Service has paid up to per night to stay at the hotel. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

How Much Has the Government Spent at Trump's Properties? It Won't Say.
Ilya Marritz, WNYC and ProPublica
Marritz writes: "While the president has visited his properties on nearly a third of his days since he took office, the Secret Service has not listed its spending on Trump properties in a public database of federal spending. And some of what has been disclosed has been misleading."

“He’s paying our money to himself,” the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold told “Trump, Inc.” “There must be so much more we haven’t seen.”

his month, The Washington Post detailed lots of previously undisclosed government spending at the president’s properties. For example, the Secret Service has paid $650 per night to stay at Mar-a-Lago, despite Eric Trump’s statement that his father’s company would provide rooms “for free — meaning, like, cost for housekeeping.”

The Post’s figures — adding up to $471,000 — are far from complete because government agencies have resisted disclosing their spending at Trump properties.

“He’s paying our money to himself,” the Post’s David Fahrenthold said in our latest episode of “Trump, Inc.” “There must be so much more we haven’t seen.”

While the president has visited his properties on nearly a third of his days since he took office, the Secret Service has not listed its spending on Trump properties in a public database of federal spending. And some of what has been disclosed has been misleading. The Post discovered that the nearly dozen payments listed as “Trump National Golf Club” were actually made to Mar-a-Lago, which is not a golf club.

The White House did not respond to the Post’s questions about the payments. The Secret Service said it always “balances operational security with judicious allocation of resources.” It did not explain why it hadn’t disclosed the spending in the government’s public database. And the Trump Organization said it’s not currently charging the Secret Service $650 per room per night.

There are still plenty of questions. For one: Why has the Secret Service spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at the Trump hotel in Washington, D.C., even on days when the president was not visiting?

Fahrenthold and his colleagues asked the government about that. They haven’t gotten an answer.

READ MORE

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announces the cofounding of The Climate Pledge at the National Press Club on September 19, 2019 in Washington, DC. (photo: Paul Morigi/Getty Images/Amazon)

AOC Knows Exactly What the Problem Is With Billionaires Like Jeff Bezos
Ben Burgis, Jacobin
Excerpt: "Jeff Bezos is donating billions of dollars through his new foundation. But as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argues, we need to redistribute his power, not just his wealth."

n Monday morning, Jeff Bezos announced the creation of a new $10 billion environmental foundation, the Bezos Earth Fund. This is on top of the $2 billion he already committed to the Bezos Family Foundation to build preschools and fight homelessness.

The combined sum might be a fraction of his net worth, and Bezos might have a history of standing in the way of political efforts to address some of the same problems he seeks to address with his charity. Even so, many would argue that his efforts are still praiseworthy.

In a Martin Luther King Jr Day discussion with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez  argued for a very different perspective. If Jeff Bezos “wants to be a good person,” she said, he should “turn Amazon into a worker cooperative.” She argued that our primary message to billionaires shouldn’t be that we want to redistribute their money. Instead, it should be that “we want their power.”

In making this distinction, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez was giving voice to an idea with deep roots in socialist thought — that the unequal distribution of wealth is just a symptom of the deeper problem of the unequal distribution of economic power.

To see her point, take one of the most often cited indications of wealth inequality — that the average American CEO makes 265 times the salary of the average American worker. (This is actually one of the more conservative estimates. An analysis released by former Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison puts the differential at a staggering 339 to 1.) Where nonsocialist progressives typically think that the proper solution to excessive inequality is redistributive taxation, socialists think the underlying issue is a matter of who gets to set pay scales in the first place.

An interesting piece of real-world evidence comes from the example of the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque region of Spain. With eighty-five thousand worker-owners, it’s the largest worker cooperative in the world today. The average Spanish CEO makes 143 times the salary of the average Spanish worker. Even in a business environment where Mondragon has to compete with traditional hierarchical businesses that can lure skilled managers away with higher salaries, the maximum pay differential between the highest-paid executive and the lowest-paid worker allowed by Mondragon policy — set by the General Assembly, where all eighty-five thousand workers get a vote — is capped at a paltry six to one.

I’ve been a socialist for long enough that I can remember a time when hearing one of the highest-profile congresswomen in the country advocate the transformation of big businesses into worker cooperatives would have been unthinkable. I find the change refreshing. Unsurprisingly, not everyone shares this reaction.

The Libertarian Critique

Michael S. Rozeff argues that since Amazon workers who “made wage bargains with Amazon and didn’t form a cooperative” were freely choosing the first course over the second one, if Bezos is a bad person for not restructuring Amazon as a worker cooperative, his employees share the blame.

Liz Wolfe at Reason claims in her response to Ocasio-Cortez that a cooperative form of organization “is unlikely to work for a company of Amazon’s size.” She backs up this point by quoting an older article by John McLaughry that claims life in “[a]n unstructured participatory workplace” can lead to “problems of severe emotional intensity.” He mentions “rage, tears, splitting headaches, and other real stress afflictions.” McLaughry concedes that such experiments might work despite these problems in cases where “everyone involved comes from a common cultural, ethnic, racial, or political background,” but he says that “success can be close to impossible” when this is not the case.

Putting Rozeff, Wolfe, and McLaughry’s points together, we get the following objections to converting Amazon into a worker cooperative:

1. Despite the unviability of cooperatives, if Amazon’s workforce preferred a cooperative form, they would have formed a cooperative to compete with Amazon.


2. Even if cooperatives are generally viable, Amazon is too big to function as one.


3. Amazon workers are too diverse to handle democratic decision-making together.


4. The transition to democracy in the workplace would be too stressful and upsetting for Amazon workers to handle.

An obvious problem with the first point is that it ignores considerable barriers to entry. Research on worker cooperatives shows that they’re at least as efficient as other firms. Once they get going, they do about as well and last about as long as regular capitalist businesses. The problem isn’t a higher death rate — it’s a considerably lower birth rate.

There are many reasons for this, but an obvious one is that it’s easier to attract investors for a new business if you can offer them ongoing ownership shares. That’s why Karl Marx praised worker cooperatives as “great social experiments” that provided a valuable proof of concept that it was possible for “modern industrial production” to take place without a division between “a class of masters” and “a class of hands,” but he said that actually transitioning to an economy based on workplace democracy would require political struggle.

The second objection makes sense — if we assume, as Wolfe and McLaughry seem to, that turning Amazon into a worker cooperative would mean “unstructured” participatory workplaces — endless mass meetings striving for consensus on every issue. But there’s no reason to assume this. Workers (at individual fulfillment centers and throughout the company) could elect a management structure in the way that they do at Mondragon.

To be sure, this isn’t a panacea. There are serious critiques of the Mondragon model that advocates of worker cooperatives would do well to grapple with — but the question isn’t whether working at Amazon would be a workplace utopia blissfully free of worker alienation and other problems if it were converted into a cooperative. The question is whether it would be better.

The best counter to the third objection is the real-world history of the labor movement, which has proven over and over again around the world that workers from diverse ethnic, cultural, and political backgrounds can work together in democratic organizations to decide what they want to be paid, how they want their workplaces to function, and so on. The only difference is that in a unionized workplace, the workers have to negotiate with a boss (who has more bargaining power) about how many of these plans come to fruition. In a cooperative workplace, the democratic decision of the workers or their elected representatives is the final say.

As to the fourth objection, it’s true that getting to make decisions for yourself can be stressful and upsetting. The question is whether this would be more or less stressful, upsetting, exhausting, and demoralizing than working in the rigidly hierarchical structure Jeff Bezos currently imposes on his workforce.

Rozeff might think that Amazon workers “chose” to work at the company rather than going into business for themselves, but the severe inequality in bargaining power between an ultra-wealthy corporation and its atomized “associates” means very few of their preferences are reflected in the company’s policies. A full 91 percent “wouldn’t recommend working there,” 89 percent described themselves as “exploited,” 71 percent “reported walking more than 10 miles per day” during their shifts at fulfillment centers, and 78 percent “felt their breaks were too short.”

Former Amazon “associate” Candice Dixon reported having to scan a new item once every eleven seconds to meet her quota. “Amazon always knew” if she didn’t. This nightmare of “cutting-edge technology, unrelenting surveillance, and constant disciplinary write-ups” led to Dixon destroying her back.

Today, not only can she not work at the company, she can “barely climb stairs.” This experience isn’t unusual. The rate of serious injuries at Amazon fulfillment centers is more than twice the national average for the warehousing industry — “9.6 injuries per 100 full-time workers in 2018, compared to an industry average that year of 4.”

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to convert Amazon into a cooperative might not solve all the problems of its workers in one fell swoop. Democracy in any sphere can be complicated and messy — and it might indeed be stressful. It would, however, probably be a lot less stressful than working for a company that cares so little about your preferences that, in its constant drive to fill orders a little bit faster, it’s willing to literally maim you.

READ MORE

Relatives of a social leader attend her wake in Puerto Tejada, Colombia in 2019. (photo: EFE)

Colombia: 46 Social Leaders, 10 Ex-FARC Members Killed in 2020
teleSUR
Excerpt: "The systematic killing of social leaders and former members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) continues with impunity in Colombia, as two brothers - human rights defenders and campesino leaders - were killed Sunday in the southwest department of Cauca, raising the tally to 46 murdered in 2020."
READ MORE

Fewer than 15% of recycling facilities surveyed could process plastic clamshells, like these. (photo: Prakaymas vitchitchalao/Alamy)

America's 'Recycled' Plastic Waste Is Clogging Landfills, Survey Finds
Erin McCormick, Guardian UK
McCormick writes: "Many plastic items that Americans put in their recycling bins aren't being recycled at all, according to a major new survey of hundreds of recycling facilities across the US."

Many facilities lack the ability to process ‘mixed plastics’, a category of waste that has virtually no market as new products

any plastic items that Americans put in their recycling bins aren’t being recycled at all, according to a major new survey of hundreds of recycling facilities across the US.

The research, conducted by Greenpeace and released on Tuesday, found that out of 367 recycling recovery facilities surveyed none could process coffee pods, fewer than 15% accepted plastic clamshells – such as those used to package fruit, salad or baked goods – and only a tiny percentage took plates, cups, bags and trays.

The findings confirm the results of a Guardian investigation last year, which revealed that numerous types of plastics are being sent straight to landfill in the wake of China’s crackdown on US recycling exports. Greenpeace’s findings also suggest that numerous products labeled as recyclable in fact have virtually no market as new products.

While the report found there is still a strong recycling market for bottles and jugs labeled #1 or #2, such as plastic water bottles and milk containers, the pipeline has bottomed out for many plastics labelled #3-7, which fall into a category dubbed “mixed plastics”. While often marketed by brands as recyclable, these plastics are hard for recyclers to repurpose and are often landfilled, causing confusion for consumers.

“This report shows that one of the best things to do to save recycling is to stop claiming that everything is recyclable,” said John Hocevar, director of Greenpeace’s Oceans Campaign. “We have to talk to companies about not producing so much throw-away plastic that ends up in the ocean or in incinerators.”

In a news release accompanying the report, Greenpeace threatened to file federal complaints against manufacturers who mislead the public about the recyclability of their packaging.

Jan Dell, the founder of the Last Beach Cleanup and the leader of Greenpeace’s survey team, said the point of the report “was not to kill recycling, it was to show which products are recyclable and which are not”.

She emphasized that bottles and jugs are indeed worth recycling, but said “our findings show that many items commonly found in beach cleanups – cups, bags, trays, plates and cutlery – are not recyclable. In America’s municipal recycling system, they are contaminants.”

The US recycling economy was upended in 2018 when China enacted bans on imports of most US recycling, leaving recycling companies at a loose end. The report chronicled how dozens of cities – stretching from Erie, Pennsylvania, to San Carlos, California, – have either stopped taking mixed plastics or are sending them to landfill.

The report noted that recyclers often report “mixed plastics” as having negative value – in other words, they cost money to get rid of. Additionally, it cited federal studies that have estimated that fewer than 5% of these products get reprocessed into new products.

Martin Bourque, the director of the Ecology Center which handles recycling for Berkeley, California, told the Guardian his organization is spending about $50,000 a year attempting to recycle material that largely isn’t recyclable. He pays to send the city’s mixed plastic to an extra sorting facility in southern California – and half of it still gets thrown out, he said.

“Let’s just get real about what is recyclable,” he said. “Now instead of making money [by reclaiming valuable recyclables], we’re paying $75 a ton to subsidize these brands and packagers, who make all this stuff.”

The report claims that advertising this almost-impossible-to-recycle plastic packaging as recyclable violates the Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides, which state that “marketers must ensure that all reasonable interpretations of their claims are truthful, not misleading, and supported by a reasonable basis”.

Asked to comment on the report’s findings, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, which represents brands trying to improve packaging, acknowledged the recycling industry was facing disruption but said that new US processing capacity was being developed to enhance the recyclability of products.

“I think our industry is rebuilding and adding capacity and that’s a good thing,” said Nina Goodrich, the director of the coalition. “We should be processing our material at home.”

Kelly Cramer, who leads the organization’s efforts to create a standard labeling system for products, said the organization is now advising consumers to “get to know their local recycling program” by checking locally with their waste services provider to see if packages are recyclable.

“It’s perfectly acceptable to be disappointed that we have a fragmented, difficult to understand recycling system,” Cramer says. “We have always told people when packages aren’t recyclable and should be left out of the bin to help prevent contamination in the stream. For example, 3s and 7s have always been labeled not recyclable in our program history. Given the problems with our recycling system and the complexity of packaging, the most effective strategy might be challenging the companies that aren’t labeling their packaging at all.”

Kate Bailey, a manager for Eco-Cycle Solutions which runs the recycling program in Boulder, Colorado, said that her organization has found outlets that will process most of its mixed plastic, because its hi-tech machinery and devoted customer base gives it the ability to sort the material into unusually clean bales. But she said this is a challenge for many recyclers, especially since these materials currently fetch record low prices.

She hopes the problems that China’s decision has caused for the domestic recycling market will lead to long-term improvements in the US.

“The silver lining is that we’re starting to have some conversations about who should be paying for recycling,” she said. “Turning to cities and residents to pay for recycling is not the way it should be going.”

“We [the recyclers] are the scapegoats, but we don’t control how products are made,” she said. “If manufacturers are going to make these products, they should be buying them back. They can be the ones closing the loop.”

READ MORE

---

Contribute to RSN 

Update My Monthly Donation