29 April 20
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29 April 20
Bernie's Army Redeploys for COVID-19's Frontline Workers
Steven Greenhouse, In These Times
Greenhouse writes: "As shoppers crowded into the McAllen, Texas, branch of Sprouts Farmers Market in mid-March to stockpile food, store clerk Josh Cano grew alarmed at the lack of safety precautions in place."
Steven Greenhouse, In These Times
Greenhouse writes: "As shoppers crowded into the McAllen, Texas, branch of Sprouts Farmers Market in mid-March to stockpile food, store clerk Josh Cano grew alarmed at the lack of safety precautions in place."
EXCERPT:
Cano filled out the form, and Michael Enriquez, former deputy field director of the Sanders campaign in Iowa and a member of the EWOC planning committee, responded to assist the Sprouts workers. With guidance from Enriquez, who previously ran the Fight for $15 office in Kansas City, Cano and a co-worker, Michael Martinez, soon got 44 of their store’s 50 workers to sign a petition demanding personal protective equipment, a $3 an hour increase for hazard pay, 14 days of paid sick leave and an in-store safety committee. “We started the petition out of fear,” Martinez says.
On the afternoon of April 1, six Sprouts workers marched on their boss’s office with their petition and protest signs saying, “Health and safety over profit,” and “Make the pay worth the risk.”
The workers wanted outside support, and with Enriquez’s help, they got the petition circulated through Change.org. Within a week it had 7,000 signatures, including workers from some of Sprouts’ 340 other stores. A huge boost came when Sanders himself tweeted his support for the Sprouts workers.
“Seeing that tweet made me and my coworkers feel we weren’t alone,” Cano says. “We were kind of scared about management. Seeing that tweet, we saw we had a lot of power on our side.”
Feeling heat from the petition, Sprouts agreed to provide masks, gloves and more sanitizer and to limit the number of customers inside the McAllen store at any one time. The workers hailed it as a victory, even though management refused to provide hazard pay. “There’s no power like workers united,” Martinez says. He adds that Enriquez’ expertise was “instrumental in our success.”
Supreme court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh attend the State of the Union address on 4 February 2020 in Washington DC. (photo: Doug Mills/Getty)
Trump's Judges: A Revolution to Create a New Conservative America
Tom McCarthy, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "The president's judicial appointments have been a quieter project than most of his flamboyant presidency, but will have longer-lasting impacts on healthcare, voting rights, criminal justice and the climate."
READ MORE
Tom McCarthy, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "The president's judicial appointments have been a quieter project than most of his flamboyant presidency, but will have longer-lasting impacts on healthcare, voting rights, criminal justice and the climate."
READ MORE
Some cities, such as Detroit, may experience cutbacks in sanitation services and the number of available first responders. (photo: Nick Hagen/The Washington Post)
Mass Layoffs Begin in Cities and States, Threatening Education, Sanitation, Health and Safety
Tony Romm, The Washington Post
Romm writes: "In Michigan, some unstaffed highway rest stops are shuttered. In Santa Barbara, Calif., local librarians are out of a job. Dayton, Ohio, has ordered furloughs at nearly every agency, and in Arlington, Tex., police officers and firefighters may soon see painful cuts."
READ MORE
Tony Romm, The Washington Post
Romm writes: "In Michigan, some unstaffed highway rest stops are shuttered. In Santa Barbara, Calif., local librarians are out of a job. Dayton, Ohio, has ordered furloughs at nearly every agency, and in Arlington, Tex., police officers and firefighters may soon see painful cuts."
READ MORE
New York residents wear masks while out in public. (photo: Reuters)
Coronavirus Death Toll in Seven States May Be 9,000 Higher Than Official Figures Suggest
Josh Katz, Denise Lu and Margot Sanger-Katz, The New York Times
Excerpt: "Total deaths in seven states that have been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic are nearly 50 percent higher than normal for the five weeks from March 8 through April 11, according to new death statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
READ MORE
Josh Katz, Denise Lu and Margot Sanger-Katz, The New York Times
Excerpt: "Total deaths in seven states that have been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic are nearly 50 percent higher than normal for the five weeks from March 8 through April 11, according to new death statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
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Amazon trailers. (photo: Jason Koebler)
Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart Workers Organize a Historic Mass Strike
Lauren Kaori Gurley, VICE
Excerpt: "On May 1st, frontline workers at some of the biggest corporations in the country will lead a mass strike action, asking customers to boycott Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, and Target."
Lauren Kaori Gurley, VICE
Excerpt: "On May 1st, frontline workers at some of the biggest corporations in the country will lead a mass strike action, asking customers to boycott Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, and Target."
Workers at Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart, Walmart, FedEx, Target, and Shipt say they will walk off the job on May 1 to protest their employers’ failure to provide basic protections for frontline workers who are risking and losing their lives at work. Meanwhile, these same companies are making record profits.
In a flyer circulated widely on social media, organizers of the so-called “May Day General Strike” implore customers to boycott Whole Foods, Amazon, Target, and Instacart on May 1.
“It’s more powerful when we come together,” Chris Smalls, a lead organizer of the May 1 walkout, who was fired from Amazon’s Staten Island fulfillment center after staging a walkout on March 31, told Motherboard. “We formed an alliance between a bunch of different companies because we all have one common goal which is to save the lives of workers and communities. Right now isn’t the time to open up the economy. Amazon is a breeding ground [for this virus] which is spreading right now through multiple facilities.”
“While we respect people’s right to express themselves, we object to the irresponsible actions of labor groups in spreading misinformation and making false claims about Amazon during this unprecedented health and economic crisis," a spokesperson from Amazon told Motherboard in response to news of the May Day walkout.
In early April, Vice News obtained a leaked memo from an internal meeting of Amazon leadership, which described a campaign to smear the fired warehouse organizer Smalls, calling him "not smart or articulate" as part of a PR strategy to make him "the face of the entire union/organizing movement."
Led by Smalls, dozens of organizers have been planning the logistics of the walkout over Zoom calls in recent days. Since the pandemic broke out, retail, warehouse and gig workers have coalesced around a similar list of demands: personal protective gear, health care benefits, paid leave, and hazard pay—making it natural for them to coordinate a mass action.
“We have workers at more than 100 stores who’ve agreed to participate and some stores were enough people will call out to shut stores down,” Adam Ryan, a Target worker in Christiansburg, Virgina, and a lead organizer of the walkout at Target, told Motherboard. “We’re trying to echo calls for a general strike. We want to shut down industry across the board and pushback with large numbers against the right-wing groups that want to risk our lives by reopening the economy.”
On May 1, a day historically celebrated globally by the left as International Workers' Day or May Day, small business owners and right-wing groups will stage “Reopen America” rallies in cities around the country, including Washington DC and Chicago.
The so-called “May Day General Strike” is the culmination of a series of strikes led by workers at companies like Whole Foods, Amazon and Instacart since the pandemic began. The organizers at the forefront of the recent labor unrest form the face of the country’s resurgent labor movement: non-union, underemployed, and precarious workers who have taken things into their own hands to demand changes and organize their co-workers in the absence of a union—primarily over social media and encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Telegram.
Worker-led online groups, such as Whole Worker, Target Workers Unite, and the Instacart Shoppers (National) Facebook group, with thousands of members spanning the country—have been years in the making, but have experienced unprecedented growth during the pandemic, organizers say.
While the mass strike action might not be enough to shut down society, the collective action certainly echoes the calls for a general strike—a coordinated work stoppage across businesses and industries in pursuit of a common goal—the likes of which have not been seen in the United States since World War II.
The planned mass strike was in part seeded at the grocery delivery app Instacart, which recently became profitable for the first time since its founding in 2012, according to a report in The Information. On March 30, thousands of Instacart workers went on strike to demand protective gear, $5 hazard pay per order, and an expansion of paid sick leave to high risk workers. Following Instacart walkout, Whole Foods workers and Target’s delivery app Shipt workers staged their own strikes—making similar demands. Amazon workers at warehouses in Staten Island, Detroit, Chicago, and most recently Shakopee, Minnesota have staged their own walkouts.
The demands for Instacart, Amazon, Whole Foods, and Shipt strikes on May 1 remain largely the same as they did during initial strike actions, as companies have largely resisted providing workers with sufficient paid leave, protective gear, and hazard pay.
“It’s very important for us as similarly positioned workers to come together for demands that are pretty universal,” Vanessa Bain, a lead organizer of the Instacart walkout, told Motherboard. “In addition to building broader worker power, the point of our mass strike action is to bring this to the attention of the politicians and policy makers. We need them to address our demands now, and the fastest way to ensure that this happens is for companies to feel pressured into doing it.”
Following the March 30 Instacart strike, workers did claim a victory when the company agreed to provide workers with face masks and hand sanitizer, which was one of their demands. But workers say the supplies are frequently damaged and low-quality. Meanwhile, Instacart, organizers say workers cannot access paid Covid-19 sick leave because Instacart does not accept doctor’s notes.
“The protective gear they’ve offered us is a joke, and the paid leave they’ve promised us is really hard to get, which many workers don’t have health insurance and cannot afford to go to the doctor,” Bain added. “May Day is the day you don’t go to work or buy things or pay rent. To consumers, we’re saying: ‘Don’t buy from these companies on May 1. Don’t empower them with your dollars.’ That’s what we need for an effective general strike.”
At the Target-owned delivery app Shipt, which has been criticized by its workers for its culture of censorship and retaliation, the action marks the second time workers have walked off the job this month. On April 7, Shipt workers organized the first walkout since the company’s founding in 2014. Shipt workers have demanded $5 hazard pay per order and an expansion of paid leave for high risk workers and those with doctor’s notes.
“It is unconscionable that Shipt is asking workers to get letters from public health officials in order to get paid leave,” Willy Solis, a gig worker in Dallas, who is organizing the walkout at Shipt, told Motherboard. “They are asking us to jump through hoops when we’re sick, so we’re demanding that they expand their policy.”
At Whole Foods, a subsidiary of Amazon, workers will also make many of the same demands as their first strike: guaranteed paid sick leave to those who wish to stay home, the reinstatement of health care coverage for part-time workers which was revoked in 2019, and the closure of stores when employees test positive for coronavirus until they can safely reopen.
The group Whole Worker, which is coordinating the Whole Foods strike, has created a running tally of positive cases at stores, currently at 253 cases and 2 deaths at 132 stores across the United States.
Tyler Robertson, a lead organizer of the walkout, who helped found the group Whole Worker in 2018, told Motherboard that social media and messaging technologies have played an important role in building a mass movement at Whole Foods stores from Texas to California to New York in recent years. These tools have become even more important at a time when workers cannot organize in real life.
“We’ve built this using free tools like Telegram, social media, and Google docs. We don’t have unions but one of the advantages for the new labor movement has been free tools. We haven’t spent any money organizing,” Robertson told Motherboard. “What I’ve seen in the past two months, I’ve never seen before. It’s a mass awakening of workers.”
The US administration's Middle East plan would let Israel illegally annex Jewish settlements in the West Bank. (photo: Lior Mizrahi/Getty)
US to Recognize Israeli Annexation of Occupied Palestinian Land
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Expanding on remarks made last week by United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who said annexation was 'an Israeli decision,' the U.S. State Department confirmed Monday that it was prepared to recognize Israel's annexation of much of the illegally occupied West Bank."
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Expanding on remarks made last week by United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who said annexation was 'an Israeli decision,' the U.S. State Department confirmed Monday that it was prepared to recognize Israel's annexation of much of the illegally occupied West Bank."
"We are prepared to recognize Israeli actions to extend Israeli sovereignty (...) to areas of the West Bank," a U.S. State Department spokesperson said.
"As we have made consistently clear, we are prepared to recognize Israeli actions to extend Israeli sovereignty and the application of Israeli law to areas of the West Bank that the vision foresees as being part of the State of Israel," a U.S. State Department spokesperson said.
The step would be "in the context of the Government of Israel agreeing to negotiate with the Palestinians along the lines set forth in President Trump's Vision," the official said.
These comments come after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday he was confident the U.S. would give Israel the approval within some weeks to move ahead with the de facto annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank.
Netanyahu, who has sealed a power-sharing agreement with former rival Benny Gantz, will remain in office for now and has vowed to go ahead with annexations on the condition of Washington’s greenlight.
U.S. President Donald Trump -a close ally to Netanyahu- has been enforcing pro-Israel policies for the past three years.
The White House has moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights, and already declared that West Bank settlements are not illegal.
Trump unveiled in January a so-called "deal of the century" for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The plan would let Israel impose sovereignty all the way to Jordan while Palestinians would be granted a sovereign but disjointed and demilitarised entity along with promises of major investment. The Palestinian state's capital would be on the outskirts of Jerusalem, the disputed city that would remain fully under Israeli sovereignty.
The annexation of occupied territory is illegal under international law, and Palestinians along with the United Nations (U.N.) and the European Union (EU) have rejected Trump’s proposal and Israel’s plans to annex its illegal settlements.
But because of Israel's increase in settlement building and its efforts to consolidate control over Palestinian lands, Some Palestinians are starting to believe that the two-state solution has become a distant dream.
Some argue that current circumstances make a one-state solution with equal rights for both Israeli and Palestinian citizens the only realistic option.
The Arab League is planning to hold a virtual meeting this week to discuss the annexation plan.
Grand Canyon rafters often make a stop at the confluence of the Little Colorado and Colorado's rivers. (photo: Judy Fahys/InsideClimate News)
New Trump Nuclear Plan Favors Uranium Mining Bordering the Grand Canyon
Judy Fahys, Inside Climate News
Fahys writes: "The administration, seeking to restore America's 'competitive nuclear advantage,' also wants to create a $150 million uranium reserve in the coming decade."
Judy Fahys, Inside Climate News
Fahys writes: "The administration, seeking to restore America's 'competitive nuclear advantage,' also wants to create a $150 million uranium reserve in the coming decade."
vergreen forests blanket the Grand Canyon's less traveled northern plateau, and the perfume of Ponderosa pine drifts down a creekbed to the bottom of the great redrock canyon. Downstream, the strangely blue waters of the Little Colorado River meet the main Colorado, coming from the southern plateau close to sacred places for indigenous people who have lived here for centuries.
Both plateaus are also where mining companies want to unearth uranium. Mining those claims has been barred since 2012, when Congress imposed a 20-year mining ban across 1 million acres here because past uranium extraction has polluted drinking water and poisoned the air and the ground. Local tribes and environmental groups that sought the temporary ban have been pressing Congress to make the ban permanent.
But in a sweeping plan to revive the domestic uranium mining industry unveiled Thursday, the Trump administration proposed instead to open the scenic and sacred areas once again in the name of economic vitality and national security. Allowing more uranium mining on federal lands is just one of the suggestions that emerged from an eight-month review by the White House Nuclear Fuel Working Group.
So are the creation of a federally funded, $150 million uranium reserve over the next decade, the easing of environmental regulations at mines and processing plants and the global expansion of U.S.-made nuclear technologies, such as the small modular reactors being developed at the Idaho National Laboratory.
Proposals outlined in the Restoring America's Competitive Nuclear Advantage report quickly triggered criticism. Some environmentalists say that the administration shouldn't propose using taxpayer funds during a pandemic to bail out a dirty, uncompetitive industry that's largely owned by foreign companies. They also question why more isn't being done to support existing nuclear plants that generate more than one-third of the nation's carbon-free electricity.
The new nuclear-fuel strategy is the latest example of the Trump administration exploiting natural resources on federal lands while ignoring the risks climate change poses to the future of the planet. The new nuclear strategy is in concert with environmental policies that have become familiar in the Trump years. Among them: revoking California's strict auto emissions rules, scrapping stricter pollution limits at coal-fired power plants and rolling back limits on fossil fuel extraction at the nearby Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments just north of the Grand Canyon, in Utah.
For some climate hawks, including former NASA climate scientist James Hansen and almost half of Americans, nuclear power is seen as at least part of the answer to reducing fossil-fuel emissions blamed for climate change. The climate benefits of nuclear power have been a selling point for the industry in its struggle to compete with cheaper coal, natural gas and renewables like solar and wind power.
Last year, the International Atomic Energy Agency said that nuclear power should be part of the global strategy to meet the Paris Agreement's climate goals, which will require near-zero emissions from electric-power generation by 2050. Nuclear reactors, which produced about 10 percent of the world's electricity last year, along with renewable sources "can play a key role in the transition to a clean energy future," IAEA said.
On Thursday, U.S. Energy Secretary Dan Brouilette seemed to be channeling that idea when he told reporters that the administration's nuclear strategy "absolutely" includes the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
"For any nation to even come close to any of the carbon goals that have been set, we feel strongly that nuclear energy has to be a part of their portfolio," he said. "We want to see carbon reduction all throughout our economy, and we think that this is a very important part of doing that."
But the strategy unveiled included just a single, oblique reference to climate change—the words "carbon-free" buried in a paragraph about energy fueling the U.S. economy.
"Without a stable energy supply, health and welfare are threatened and the U.S. economy cannot function," the report says. "As a result, U.S. national security interests begin with preserving the critical infrastructure provided by baseload, carbon-free, reliable commercial nuclear power."
Supporters of the Trump administration's nuclear initiative say they want to breathe life into the uranium industry, drawing parallels to the Covid-19 crisis that's claimed more than 50,000 lives this year.
"The coronavirus pandemic has clearly demonstrated why America should not rely on other nations to supply critical materials," said U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican who applauded the plan in a news release. "That includes uranium."
The senator applauded the Trump administration's "bold and immediate action" to save a U.S. industry that has struggled for decades and, for the first time since World War II, is producing no uranium. Barasso had been joined by other proponents in pressing the administration on uranium before Thursday's official announcement.
"Domestic uranium mines are suspending operations and people in our industry are losing jobs, and our industry is on the cusp of complete collapse, now," Mark Chalmers and Jeff Klenda wrote in a March 27 letter to Trump and key administration officials. The two lead Energy Fuels Resources (USA) Inc. and of Ur-Energy USA, respectively, subsidiaries of Canadian uranium companies with Colorado headquarters.
The companies had been petitioning Trump for federal support for more than a year, asking for price quotas that U.S. power plants opposed because of the added cost. After Trump rejected that idea last summer, he appointed the nuclear-fuels panel, which also suggested ways to limit imports from state-supported competitors in Russia and China.
"The Covid-19 crisis will pass," the executives said in their letter, "but without immediate support from the federal government we could emerge from it and learn that a critical domestic capacity was permanently lost."
Then, in an April 17 letter, 21 GOP House members urged the administration to open up public lands where mining of critical minerals is currently banned, including the Breccia Pipe Uranium formation near the Grand Canyon.
"Keeping this valuable resource off limits does not make economic or environmental sense and puts our long-term energy security at risk," they wrote.
Environmental groups criticized the Trump administration and supporters of the nuclear rescue plan for exploiting the pandemic and degrading the environment.
Their main concern? Loosening environmental restrictions on uranium mining and processing in light of how much harm such mining has done historically to the environment and human health, especially among indigenous people who live in the Four Corners and whose water, land and air have been contaminated by uranium. Besides the mines, Energy Fuels operates the only operating uranium processing plant in the United States on the edge of the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation at White Mesa, Utah.
Amber Reimondo, energy program director for the Grand Canyon Trust, said Four Corners ore contains uranium concentrations that are relatively low, close to 1 percent, compared to concentrations from suppliers in Canada and Australia whose ore contains concentrations of 20 percent or more. That helps explain why U.S. uranium companies have had trouble competing, she said.
"All of these requests—the request for taxpayer support for their business; the request to lift the mining ban around Grand Canyon; asks for streamlining environmental regulations—those are old arguments," she said.
"Now, during a global pandemic when people are just trying to get by, they're trying to twist this situation to benefit their own agenda," she added.
Ed Lyman, director of Nuclear Power Safety, Climate & Energy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the new strategy also fails to preserve nuclear power plants that provide about 20 percent of U.S. electricity and make up around 28 percent of the nation's low-carbon electric power by helping them solve safety and waste disposal issues.
"But that's not what this report is," he said. "We recognize that nuclear power is a low-carbon generating technology and that it could play a role in helping mitigate climate change, but it has a whole host of problems associated with it."
Lyman said the administration could have helped aging nuclear plants to continue operating safely and securely with a comprehensive national policy. But he said nuclear power can't help reduce emissions without addressing its safety and security problems.
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