03 February 21
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Charles Pierce | Look at These Cheap Bastards With Their Miserable Plan to Take Your Relief Money
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "No Republican Covid relief proposal can be trusted as long as Mitch McConnell is a living, breathing congressional leader."
o it seems that 10 Republicans are visiting the White House today so that the president can tell them that they're all miserable skinflints who want their fellow citizens to die gasping and broke. That’s how it seems to me, anyway. From the AP:
The Republican group’s proposal focuses on the pandemic’s health effects rather than its economic toll, tapping into bipartisan urgency to shore up the nation’s vaccine distribution and vastly expanding virus testing with $160 billion in aid. Their slimmed down $1,000 direct payments would go to fewer households than the $1,400 Biden has proposed, and they would avoid costly assistance to states and cities that Democrats argue are just as important.
There’s also no provision for raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, so, it’s nice of y’all to come by, and make sure to stop by the gift shop on your way out, but, no, this is a non-starter. And this is arrant nonsense.
“We recognize your calls for unity and want to work in good faith with your Administration to meet the health, economic, and societal challenges of the COVID crisis,” the 10 GOP senators wrote to Biden. “We share many of your priorities.”
The overture from the coalition of 10 GOP senators, mostly centrists, is an attempt to show that at least some in the Republican ranks want to work with Biden’s new administration, rather than simply operating as the opposition in the minority in Congress. But Democrats are wary of using too much time courting GOP support that may not materialize or deliver too meager a package as they believe happened during the 2009 recovery.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 290 times, shame on me. No Republican proposal on anything can be trusted as long as Mitch McConnell is a living, breathing congressional leader. Democrats—and this president, especially—have been down this road so often that they should buy a home on the cut de sac that is its inevitable end. The Republicans can intone the conjuring word, “bipartisan,” as often as they want. There are no buyers across the table for their magic beans anymore. If the president wants to have the gang over so he can turn them down personally, I have no problem with that.
The problem with the Republican proposal is not that their congressional leadership can’t be trusted. (Pro tip: It can’t.) It’s that their proposal doesn’t remotely meet the needs of the country which is in the middle of the worst public-health crisis in a century, and the worst economic slump in at least half that time. These two crises are feeding off each other with unprecedented destructive energy and the Republicans came to the White House on Monday bearing a mop and a bucket. White House press secretary Jen Psaki came right to the point in her briefing that preceded the meeting.
I appreciate the opportunity to give more comment on their proposal. I think if they put their ideas forward, that's how the president sees it, he felt it was an effort to engage on a bipartisan basis. And that's why he invited them to the White House today. But his view is that the size of the package needs to be commensurate with the crises we are facing—the dual crises we are facing—hence why he proposed a package that is $1.9 trillion...
He outlined the specifics of what he would like to see in the package in his primetime speech just a few weeks ago. There are some realities as we look to what the American people are going through. One in seven American families don't have enough food to eat. We will not have enough funding to reopen schools. We don't have funding to ensure that we can get the vaccine in the arms of Americans. There are real impacts that he will reiterate, as he he has publicly and privately in many conversation. They have put forth some ideas and he is happy to hear from them. He also feels strongly about the need to make sure the size of the package meets this moment and feels the American people expect that of their elected officials as well.
It appears as though there is a new sheriff in town. In Congress, the slim Democratic majorities on both houses are preparing to pass Biden’s package through reconciliation, if that’s what it takes, bipartisanship be damned. (Expect an ensemble of scalded cats bellowing about things being rammed down throats etc.) But it seems that the White House is planning to take advantage of the fact that its proposal is actually popular out in the country beyond the green rooms of the Capitol studios. In addition, over the weekend, the administration sent an unmistakable shot across the bow of two Democratic “moderates” who have been inclined to make mischief in the past.
Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kirsten Sinema of Arizona looked up and saw vice-president Kamala Harris all over the local media in their respective states, pushing hard for the administration’s relief plan. At the very least, Manchin got the message. From WSAZ:
“I saw [the interview], I couldn’t believe it. No one called me [about it],” Manchin said. “We’re going to try to find a bipartisan pathway forward, but we need to work together. That’s not a way of working together.”
The vice-president doesn’t need Joe Manchin’s permission to talk to anyone anywhere. I realize that it’s been a long time since a Democratic president played this kind of hardball, but a little touch of LBJ is what’s needed right now. In a proper, bipartisan manner, everybody should get used to that.
Bruce Castor and David Schoen. (photo: CNN)
ALSO SEE: Trump Set Off Capitol Riot 'Powder Keg,'
Impeachment Prosecutors Say
House Charges Trump Is 'Singularly Responsible' for Inciting Insurrection
Jeremy Herb, Manu Raju and Lauren Fox, CNN
Excerpt: "The House impeachment managers charged Tuesday that former President Donald Trump is 'singularly responsible' for inciting the insurrection at the US Capitol last month, while Trump's legal team argued his speech was protected by the First Amendment and a Senate conviction would be unconstitutional."
The dueling pretrial legal briefs from the House managers and Trump's lawyers detailed the major points that will be argued at next week's trial, in the first real glimpse at how Trump's new legal team plans to defend him after the House voted to impeach him last month.
In a 14-page response to the House's impeachment effort on Tuesday, Trump's lawyers, Bruce Castor and David Schoen, argued that the Senate cannot vote to impeach Trump when he no longer holds office as well as that Trump's speech about the election and before the January 6 riots did not cause the riots and was protected by the First Amendment.
"The constitutional provision requires that a person actually hold office to be impeached. Since the 45th President is no longer 'President,' the clause 'shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for ...' is impossible for the Senate to accomplish," Trump's team wrote.
The House impeachment managers, in their brief filed Tuesday, pushed back directly on that point, which Senate Republicans have coalesced around as a reason to acquit Trump, arguing there is ample history and precedent to hold a trial and convict Trump, who was impeached by the House while still in office.
"There is no 'January Exception' to impeachment or any other provision of the Constitution," the managers wrote. "A president must answer comprehensively for his conduct in office from his first day in office through his last."
House Democrats noted that Trump was impeached while he still was president, pushing back on Senate Republican arguments that Congress cannot impeach a former official. Still, they argued there's a precedent for impeaching former officials, too, as there have been a handful of such cases in US history.
The House managers laid out their case against Trump in their 80-page brief filed Tuesday morning, in which they accused him of stirring up violence against Congress in an attempt to upend the peaceful transfer of power. They argued that the Senate should convict Trump and bar him from holding future office after he "threatened the constitutional system that protects the fundamental freedoms we cherish."
"President Trump's responsibility for the events of January 6 is unmistakable," the House impeachment team wrote. "President Trump's effort to extend his grip on power by fomenting violence against Congress was a profound violation of the oath he swore. If provoking an insurrectionary riot against a Joint Session of Congress after losing an election is not an impeachable offense, it is hard to imagine what would be."
Both the House impeachment managers and Trump's legal team are expected to submit additional briefs ahead of the start of the trial on February 9. The legal briefings will provide the backdrop for a case in which the House impeachment managers face a skeptical Senate Republican conference. Last week, 45 of the 50 GOP senators voted to support dismissing the trial on constitutional grounds, a sign that the 67 votes required for conviction are unlikely to materialize.
Trump briefing echoes false election claims
Trump's legal filing briefly touched on the former President's baseless and false claims that the election was stolen from him, disputing that his claims were false and arguing they were protected speech nevertheless.
"After the November election, the 45th President exercised his First Amendment right under the Constitution to express his belief that the election results were suspect, since with very few exceptions, under the convenient guise of Covid-19 pandemic 'safeguards' states election laws and procedures were changed by local politicians or judges without the necessary approvals from state legislatures," Trump's lawyers wrote. "Insufficient evidence exists upon which a reasonable jurist could conclude that the 45th President's statements were accurate or not, and he therefore denies they were false."
There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud, and Trump embraced conspiracy theories to falsely claim the election was stolen from him. The Justice Department confirmed it did not uncover evidence of widespread voter fraud. Trump's filing Tuesday revives claims his campaign made about the voting process that were repeatedly thrown out of the courts, which is what led Trump to focus his efforts on the January 6 congressional certification of the election, which was then disrupted by the insurrectionists in the deadly riot.
Trump's team denied the charge that his rhetoric in a speech on January 6 had incited the mob that attacked the Capitol. "It is denied that President Trump incited the crowd to engage in destructive behavior," his team wrote. "It is denied that the phrase 'if you don't fight like hell you're not going to have a country anymore' had anything to do with the action at the Capitol as it was clearly about the need to fight for election security in general, as evidenced by the recording of the speech."
The brief was filed by Trump's two new lawyers, Castor and Schoen, who took over the former President's impeachment defense after five attorneys who had initially signed on left his team over the weekend. It's unclear how much Trump's new attorneys plan to wade into his false election fraud claims during the trial next week -- one Senate Republican leader warned Monday that it would be a "disservice" to his defense to do so.
'Like a loaded cannon'
The House's pretrial brief provided the impeachment managers' most detailed argument to date for why Trump's actions surrounding the January 6 attack on the Capitol warranted his second impeachment in a little over a year, making him the first president in US history to have been impeached twice.
The impeachment managers charged that Trump's actions in the months leading up to January 6 of baselessly claiming the election was stolen from him created the conditions for a violent mob to be aimed "like a loaded cannon down Pennsylvania Avenue" to attack the Capitol.
"President Trump created a powder keg on January 6. Hundreds were prepared for violence at his direction. They were prepared to do whatever it took to keep him in power," the managers wrote. "All they needed to hear was that their President needed them to 'fight like hell.' All they needed was for President Trump to strike a match."
In a preview of what's likely to be argued during next week's trial, the Democrats' filing Tuesday underscored how the rioters themselves have cited Trump as the reason they attacked the Capitol.
House Democrats also charged that Trump failed to respond to the riot, including reports that he had been "delighted" as the riot was unfolding, and noting that his tweets had not attempted to tell the rioters to leave the Capitol. Democrats argued that the events of January 6 and the former President's involvement had longer-term ramifications that threatened the security of President Joe Biden's inauguration later that month and beyond. Roughly 25,000 National Guard troops were deployed and state capitols around the country had to enhance security.
The Democrats also highlighted the bipartisan condemnation of the President's conduct, citing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's comments that the mob had been "provoked by the President" and statements from the 10 Republican members, including No. 3 House Republican Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who voted for impeachment.
"Representative Liz Cheney put the point simply when she recognized that '[t]here has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution,' " the impeachment managers wrote.
The Democrats' brief, which was filed two hours before Trump's, anticipated some of the arguments they were likely to face, such as the speed at which they had moved on impeachment, which the House voted on one week after the riots. The managers dismissed those concerns, arguing that "this case does not involve secretive conduct, or a hidden conspiracy, requiring months or years of investigation."
House Democrats pushed back on Trump's claims that his speech was protected by the First Amendment, noting the First Amendment does not apply to an impeachment proceeding, and even if it did, its free speech protections do not extend to inciting violence.
"The First Amendment protects private citizens from the government; it does not protect government officials from accountability for their own abuses in office," they wrote. "Speech is not protected where it is 'directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.'"
The House's impeachment brief also made the case for the Senate to bar Trump from holding future office. If the Senate convicts Trump, which requires a two-thirds majority, it can also hold a vote on preventing him from holding office again.
"Constitutional history, text, and structure, as well as prior Congressional practice, all confirm that the Senate has jurisdiction to try President Trump," the managers wrote. "So does common sense. While sworn to faithfully execute the laws — and to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution — President Trump incited insurrection against the United States government. His conduct endangered the life of every single Member of Congress, jeopardized the peaceful transition of power and line of succession, and compromised our national security."
Biden is taking a series of executive actions on immigration, including forming a taskforce to reunify families separated at the US-Mexico border. (photo: Herika Martinez/AFP/Getty Images)
Biden to Launch Taskforce to Reunite Families Separated at US-Mexico Border
Amanda Holpuch and Maanvi Singh, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Joe Biden plans to create a taskforce to reunify families separated at the US-Mexico border by the Trump administration, as part of a new series of immigration executive actions signed at an Oval Office ceremony on Tuesday."
President decries Trump administration that ‘literally ripped children from the arms of their families’ as he signs executive orders
Biden condemned Donald Trump’s immigration policies as a “stain on the reputation” of the US.
The president pledged to “undo the moral and national shame of the previous administration that literally, not figuratively, ripped children from the arms of their families, their mothers, and fathers, at the border, and with no plan – none whatsoever – to reunify”.
The two other orders announced on Tuesday call for a review of the changes the Trump administration made to reshape US immigration, and for programs to address the forces driving people north.
A briefing document released before the president’s executive orders said Biden’s immigration plans were “centered on the basic premise that our country is safer, stronger, and more prosperous with a fair, safe and orderly immigration system that welcomes immigrants, keeps families together, and allows people – both newly arrived immigrants and people who have lived here for generations – to more fully contribute to our country”.
A central piece of the Tuesday actions is the family reunification taskforce, charged with identifying and enabling the reunification of all children separated from their families by the Trump administration.
The government first made the separations public with an April 2018 memo, but about a thousand families had been separated in secret in the months prior. Administration officials said children in both groups would be included in the reunification process.
Biden officials said they could not say how many children had to be reunified because the policy had been implemented without a method for tracking the separated families. In an ongoing court case, a reunification committee said in December that the parents of 628 children had not been located.
The taskforce will consist of government officials and be led by Biden’s nominee for secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, who was confirmed by the US Senate earlier on Tuesday.
A senior administration official said the family separation policy was a “moral failure and national shame” and that reversing the policies that made it possible was a priority.
The second action on Tuesday is intended to address the driving forces of migration from Central and South America. Senior administration officials said this included working with governments and not-for-profit groups to increase other countries’ capacities to host migrants and ensuring Central American refugees and asylum seekers have legal pathways to enter the US.
It also directs the homeland security secretary to review the migrant protection protocols (MPP), better known as Remain in Mexico, which require asylum seekers to await their court hearings in Mexican border towns instead of in the US, as before.
The Biden administration also plans to use this action to bring back some Obama-era policies, such as the Central American Minors (CAM) program, which allowed some minors to apply for refugee status from their home countries.
The Trump administration made more than 400 changes to reshape immigration, according to the Migration Policy Institute, and Biden’s third action includes a review of some of these recent efforts to restrict legal immigration.
This includes a review of the public charge rule, which the Trump administration expanded to allow the federal government to deny green cards and visas to immigrants if they used public benefits. Though the rule was suspended repeatedly because of lawsuits, its initial introduction created a chilling effect in immigrant communities, with families disenrolling from aid programs out of concerns about its effect on their immigration status.
Administration officials said changes to US immigration would not happen “overnight” and that there would be more executive orders.
Advocates are still waiting for policies that address immigration detention and Title 42, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bar on asylum seekers and refugees during the Covid-19 outbreak. An estimated 13,000 unaccompanied migrant children were deported under the order before it was temporarily blocked by a court in November.
On Biden’s first day in office, he signed six executive actions on immigration, including to rescind the travel ban on people from Muslim-majority countries and halt funding for constructing the border wall. He also rolled back Trump’s policy that eliminated deportation priorities.
Since taking office, Biden has also introduced a comprehensive immigration reform bill to Congress, put a 100-day moratorium on deportations – which has since been blocked in federal court – and rescinded the “zero tolerance” policy that allowed for family separations.
On Monday, the Biden administration asked the US supreme court to cancel oral arguments in two forthcoming cases filed by Trump about the border wall and Remain in Mexico. The cases could effectively be moot because of Biden’s actions.
Darryl Richardson, an Amazon employee who supports unionization, in Tuscaloosa, Ala., on Jan. 30. Workers at an Amazon warehouse in nearby Bessemer are working toward becoming the first unionized location in the country. (photo: Cameron Carnes/WP)
ALSO SEE: Jeff Bezos to Resign as Chief Executive of Amazon
Amazon's Anti-Union Blitz Stalks Alabama Warehouse Workers Everywhere, Even the Bathroom
Jay Greene, The Washington Post
Greene writes: "Some workers in Amazon's Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse complain that the company's aggressive performance expectations leave them little time to take bathroom breaks."
The stakes couldn’t be higher for the e-commerce giant, which is fighting the biggest labor battle in its history on U.S. soil
When they do get there, they face messaging from Amazon pressing its case against unionization, imploring them to vote against it when mail-in balloting begins Feb. 8.
“Where will your dues go?” reads a flier posted on the door inside a bathroom stall.
“They got right in your face when you’re using the stall,” said Darryl Richardson, a worker at the warehouse who supports the union. Another pro-union worker who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution said of Amazon’s toilet reading: “I feel like I’m getting harassed.”
The stakes couldn’t be higher for Amazon, which is fighting the biggest labor battle in its history on U.S. soil. Next Monday, the National Labor Relations Board will mail ballots to 5,805 workers at the facility near Birmingham, who will then have seven weeks to decide whether they want the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union to represent them. If they vote yes, they would be the first Amazon warehouse in the United States to unionize.
What’s more, a union victory could spark a wave of organizing campaigns among the 400,000 operations staff at the hundreds of other Amazon warehouses and delivery sites that dot the nation.
“Amazon workers all over the country will see there is a path to have a voice on the job,” said Rebecca Givan, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University. “Collective action is contagious.”
A battle for higher wages and improved working conditions in Bessemer and beyond could stall Amazon’s growth, forcing the company to negotiate expansion plans with the union. It would probably increase costs and could even hurt efficiency. Amazon has said its workers don’t need a union coming between them and the company, and some of the nearly five text messages sent daily to its Bessemer staff urge them not to abandon “the winning team.” It’s also pressing its case with leaflets and mandated anti-union meetings.
The company has steadfastly said its workers don’t need the RWDSU, or any union. It offers Bessemer workers a starting pay of $15.30 an hour, well above the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. (Alabama has no state minimum-wage law.) That pay, along with health-care, vision and dental benefits and a retirement plan, offers employees more than comparable jobs provide, said Amazon spokeswoman Heather Knox.
“We don’t believe the RWDSU represents the majority of our employees’ views,” Knox said in an emailed statement.
(Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
If Amazon workers unionize, it would mark a major milestone for worker representation, which has long been in decline. As U.S. manufacturing has waned, participation in unions has shrunk to about 11 percent last year, down from 30 percent of the nonagricultural workforce in 1964. Some older companies, like 113-year-old logistics giant UPS, are unionized, but major nonunion employers include more recent entrants like retailers Walmart and the Gap.
Amazon is a ripe target, as a major player in logistics, transportation and retail. Adding to its appeal is the rapid growth of its warehouse operations — it added 400,000 workers primarily to its global warehouses and delivery operations in the first nine months of last year.
Amazon is the great white whale, a target that labor groups have longed for years to organize, said Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, which is providing personnel and strategic guidance to aid the RWDSU.
“We’ll give them whatever they need to help them win,” Trumka said. “It’s an important, important drive.”
Amazon is one of the nation’s largest employers, with more than 1.1 million workers worldwide, and it has long opposed the unionization of its domestic workforce. For years, U.S. unions have been quietly working to crack the company, with no success. The closest was a bid by a small group of equipment maintenance and repair technicians at its Middletown, Del., warehouse in 2014. Those workers ultimately voted against forming a union, following a drive led by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.
In 2019, Amazon fired an employee who had been outspoken about working conditions inside his Staten Island warehouse and had called for unionization. The company said the worker was terminated for violating a safety regulation at the facility.
Much of its warehouse staff in Europe already belongs to unions, which are part of the cultural fabric of those countries. In Germany, where Amazon has several warehouses, the right to form a union is enshrined in the postwar constitution.
Meanwhile, Amazon has faced fresh scrutiny over the past year for its treatment of warehouse workers. At the beginning of the pandemic, Amazon’s warehouse employees raised concerns about their safety in its busy facilities, where, they said, managers initially didn’t take enough precautions. Amazon has since put in place more measures to address concerns. But even before the pandemic, the company had faced criticism of lack of adequate bathroom breaks, overheated facilities and overly aggressive performance targets for workers.
Many of the workers in the Bessemer warehouse are Black, and the union has framed the fight around issues of “respect and dignity” as well as pay, RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum said. “We see this as much as a civil rights struggle as a labor struggle,” he added.
Bessemer workers in support of the union who spoke with The Post said they would welcome more protections. They expressed a litany of concerns about issues from a lack of air conditioning during the hot Alabama summer to fears about the novel coronavirus spreading in the facility.
Richardson, the worker there who supports the union, complains about the scant time Amazon gives employees to use bathrooms, breaks that can sometimes require lengthy walks in the massive warehouse. Too much time away from picking items off shelves to ship to consumers — time that is tracked by computers — can lead to reprimands that can slow raises and promotions, and even lead to termination. He also bemoans last-minute directives from managers to work mandatory overtime shifts, sometimes coming just hours before the shift starts.
He says he has been outspoken with managers on these topics. At a mandatory meeting Thursday for workers, where the warehouse’s leadership pressed its case to vote against the union, the 51-year-old rebutted the company’s suggestions that the RWDSU’s goal was to raise money to pay for union leaders’ cars and meals. One Amazon manager took a picture of his employee badge, a tactic Richardson believed was intended to intimidate him.
“They say, ‘Darryl, can’t you give us a chance to fix it?’ ” Richardson said. He said he replied: “I’ve been here 10 months. How much chance do you need?”
Workers at the Bessemer facility filed notice to hold the unionization vote in November.
Amazon sought in early December to delay hearings on the election until after the busy holiday shopping season, a request the NLRB rejected. Last month, Amazon appealed the decision to conduct the seven-week voting period exclusively by mail to protect workers, as well as NLRB staff, from the spread of the coronavirus. Amazon promised safety precautions for in-person balloting. Its appeal is pending.
As the vote approaches, some workers are advocating for change.
“I ain’t going to lie, I thought it was going to be a great place to work. It’s Amazon,” said Richardson, who started at the warehouse when it opened last March.
Richardson, who makes the 40-mile trip from his home in Tuscaloosa four days a week, took the position after losing his job at an auto-parts-maker when its plant shut down. He was active with the union at his previous job, and he realized shortly after starting at Amazon that workers needed labor representation there as well.
And with the ongoing spike in coronavirus cases, Richardson believes that Amazon should resume the $2-an-hour bonus it instituted at the start of the pandemic but eliminated at the end of May as infection rates across the country began to stabilize.
“We’re not making what we should be making,” Richardson said.
Amazon’s Knox said that the company, like many others, has performance expectations for workers, but workers can use restrooms whenever they need to. Mandatory overtime, Knox said, is communicated to workers no later than their lunch break the previous day. And while Amazon did end the bonus pay program it introduced at the start of the pandemic, its pay and benefits remain higher than those of many comparable jobs, she said.
Another worker, the one who felt harassed by Amazon’s anti-union messaging in the bathroom, worries about safety. She contracted the coronavirus last fall, the same time a co-worker nearby also got the virus. The worker, who stows products as they come into the warehouse from brands and third-party merchants that sell on Amazon’s marketplace, said no one among her family and friends had the virus.
“My assumption is it was someone on my floor who had it,” said the worker, who was hospitalized as her illness worsened.
She’s since recovered and is back to work, even though she thought about leaving. But she believes that a union can make the workplace better.
“I’m not a quitter,” she said. “I want to see it through.”
Amazon has invested $961 million in coronavirus safety measures, including providing more than 283 million masks at warehouses and deploying more than 351,000 thermometers and 16,500 thermal cameras at its facilities, Knox said.
In October, the company said nearly 20,000 of its U.S. employees had tested positive or had been presumed positive for the virus since the pandemic took hold. In a filing in its case before the NLRB, Amazon noted that 218 of the 7,575 employees of Amazon and third parties that work at the Bessemer facility tested positive for the coronavirus in the two weeks preceding Jan. 7.
Fears about contracting the virus have led some workers to seek union representation.
“The equation changes when you are talking about your own life and the lives of your family members,” the RWDSU’s Appelbaum said.
The union drive is all the more astonishing because it’s taking place in conservative Alabama, a “right to work” state where employees in unionized workplaces aren’t required to pay union dues.
“The last place they would have thought they’d have to face this is in Alabama,” Appelbaum said.
But being in a right-to-work state could actually help the RWDSU in the election. That’s because employees who oppose the union, or are indifferent to it, wouldn’t need to pay dues even if the union won the election. So there’s no financial risk for workers who don’t want to become union members.
“Amazon is trying to make dues the issue, even though people don’t have to pay dues,” Appelbaum said.
To win, the union needs yes votes from a majority of the ballots cast, rather than a majority of the nearly 6,000 workers that the NLRB has determined are the bargaining unit. Appelbaum is cautiously confident, in part because more than 3,000 workers have signed cards authorizing the RWDSU to represent them. He acknowledges, though, that some of those employees have left Amazon.
“If it weren’t for employer intimidation and interference, I have no question we would win,” Appelbaum said.
Carla Johnson has already been won over by Amazon. The 44-year-old from Birmingham works as a “problem solver,” fixing orders with damaged packages or ones where the wrong products were picked before being shipped to customers.
Johnson traces her support for Amazon to the way the company treated her when she suffered a seizure on the job in July, two months after starting at the site. She had brain cancer, and Amazon gave her three-and-a-half months’ leave to undergo surgery and subsequent treatments. The bills topped $100,000, but her company-provided health insurance picked up the tab, she said.
Johnson, who is now cancer free, acknowledged she might still have the same benefits even if the warehouse was unionized. But her experience makes her believe that Amazon cares for her and her co-workers and that a union isn’t necessary. And she worries that a union could disrupt the line of communication she has with her managers.
Before joining Amazon, Johnson worked as a seventh- and eighth-grade science teacher in Alabama and was a member of the American Federation of Teachers. She supported that union’s efforts to secure regular raises for its members. But teaching, she said, is different from working at Amazon because teachers have fewer paths to advance to higher-paying jobs than warehouse workers do.
“I want to grow within the company,” Johnson said. “That’s how I want to make more money.”
Amazon is working hard to persuade other workers to join Johnson in opposing the union. Since mid-January, when the NLRB scheduled the vote, the company has ratcheted up efforts to sway workers, warehouse employees said. It set up an anti-union website — DoItWithoutDues.com — discouraging workers from joining the union drive. The company has also held ongoing mandatory meetings for workers on company time, so-called captive-audience sessions, to show videos and run through PowerPoint presentations that disparage unionization.
“Amazon is throwing down their throat that the union is going to take your money,” said a pro-union worker at the Bessemer facility, who spoke on the condition of anonymity over fear of retribution.
The worker, who audits machinery at the warehouse to make sure it functions properly, says Amazon sends her multiple text messages a day, with exhortations to work with management.
“We don’t believe that you need to pay someone to speak for you or that you need to pay dues for what you already get for free,” a recent text read.
The employee isn’t swayed by Amazon’s onslaught. She described a co-worker passing out, she believed, from excessive heat in the warehouse. Now, as the unionization vote approaches, she said managers have come by workstations to hand employees water bottles and candy.
Amazon‘s Knox said she didn’t have information about any workers passing out at the Bessemer warehouse, but she said the new facility was built with climate control systems that kept its average temperature in the summer at 71 degrees.
By rule, Amazon’s frenzy of anti-union campaigning in Bessemer will slow soon enough. The NLRB requires mandatory worker meetings to end 24 hours before it mails out ballots. That’s Sunday. And Knox says the company will comply, though it may still continue to try to persuade workers with other forms of anti-union campaigning.
But if workers vote to join the RWDSU, the fight to unionize Amazon’s workplaces in the United States will have only just started.
“This is just the beginning,” the AFL-CIO’s Trumka said. “I can promise you this is not the last effort.”
Black Lives Matter Pasco leader Christina Boneta, 32, talks to an unidentified Proud Boy member at a rally. Boneta, who provided the undated photo, was pulled from a demonstration in late August and taken into custody for noise violations that carried a $2,500 fine. (photo: Bryan Edward Creative)
Proud Boys and Black Lives Matter Activists Clashed in a Florida Suburb. Only One Side Was Charged.
Tim Craig, The Washington Post
Craig writes: "When local Black Lives Matter activists started marching through the small, coastal town of New Port Richey, Florida, last summer - shouting slogans through bullhorns demanding racial justice - it took only a few days for the Proud Boys and other counterprotesters to show up and confront them."
Burly groups of mostly White men encircled the demonstrators. They revved motorcycles while yelling threats, obscenities and support for the police and President Trump, at times using their own bullhorns.
Amid fears that the confrontations could lead to clashes or shootings, police started enforcing the town’s rarely used noise ordinance, which essentially forbids disturbances louder than a close conversation between two people. But only the Black Lives Matter protesters were cited.
“We were harassed [by the counterprotesters]. We had a few guns brandished on us. … One guy even came up to me and flashed a White Power gesture in my face, but they didn’t get any noise violations,” said Christina Boneta, a Black 32-year-old mother who was taken into custody in late August and saddled with a $2,500 fine. “We are the ones who got the noise violations when, all summer long, we never threatened anybody, looted anything or burned anything.”
After months of public outrage and accusations of discrimination over the disparate penalties, New Port Richey police dropped the citations against Boneta and six other Black Lives Matter demonstrators in early January. But not before the Tampa-suburb became another front in the national debate over whether authorities treat left-wing protesters too harshly while cozying up to far-right extremists.
That discussion has turned particularly intense in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and other GOP leaders are pushing for a sweeping state bill to crack down on disruptive protests, creating new classes of crimes that include up to 15-years in jail if police declare that nine or more people have participated in a riot.
DeSantis initially proposed the legislation last summer amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, singling out tactics associated with racial justice protests: damaging memorials and blocking roadways, while providing protection from lawsuits for drivers who push through such protests.
Similar legislation has proliferated through statehouses around the country in recent years in response to racial justice demonstrations. At least 28 states considered bills that created new or harsher penalties for protesters last year, according to the International Center for Not-For-Profit Law, a global organization focused on laws affecting civic freedom.
The flurry of legislation has continued since the Capitol riot, many continuing to target blocking of traffic and shielding drivers who hit protesters. In Mississippi, lawmakers are considering a bill that would add up to one year in jail for protesters who block traffic. In Indiana, two state senators have proposed a bill that would make it harder for judges to grant bail to people who are arrested for attending an assembly considered unlawful.
Dozens of Floridians showed up at the state capitol in Tallahassee to testify against the governor’s protest bill in front of a House committee Wednesday, arguing that the measure would cripple free speech and make it easier for law enforcement agencies to discriminate against people of color.
“We just want to know, was it written on the same parchment paper that the slave codes were written on?” asked community activist Arlinda “Tray” Johns. “Because to us in the Black Community, this feels very Jim Crowish.”
The GOP-dominated committee approved the bill, which is expected to pass the full House in coming weeks.
DeSantis and GOP leaders have sought to reframe the proposal recently, saying it would also help prevent the kind of far-right assault that was inflicted on the U.S. Capitol earlier this month.
“What we saw in Washington D.C., and what we are seeing in Oregon and Washington [state], we don’t want to see here in Florida,” said state Sen. Joe Gruters, who is also chairman of the Florida Republican Party. “I don’t care if you are the Proud Boys or antifa. If you are a thug, you are going to jail.”
But James Shaw Jr., an attorney affiliated with the American Civil Liberties Union who helped represent Boneta, said his client’s experience in New Port Richey previews how the bill could be inequitably enforced against demonstrators in Florida.
“Make no mistake about it,” Shaw said, “the legislation was proposed in direct reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement, and to throw a bone to a certain voting bloc that was distressed by this movement and wanted to use violence against it.”
New Port Richey, a town of 16,000 residents located about 30 miles northwest of Tampa, is one of the most vibrant commercial centers of Pasco County. A population boom has boosted diversity in the overwhelmingly Republican county, where Trump won nearly 60 percent of the vote in November.
But Pasco County has long battled allegations of harboring racism. The Ku Klux Klan sponsored a stretch of highway there as recently as 1993.
That reputation for intolerance was a major reason Marlowe Jones, who said his grandparents were one of the first African Americans to settle in Pasco County in the 1920s, helped form an independent Black Lives Matter group here immediately after video of George Floyd’s death went viral in May, showing the Black man lose consciousness beneath the knee of a White officer in Minneapolis.
Initially, Jones was heartened by the honks of support he and fellow activists received from their neighbors as they held signs along a state highway. But by mid-June, that support faded, replaced by cries of “Blue Lives Matter” from passing motorists.
By early July, Jones said large groups of counterprotesters, many of them waving Trump flags, started showing up to drown out their message. Some identified as Proud Boys, an extreme-right group whose members are known to engage in violence, including the riot at the U.S. Capitol.
“They would surround us, calling us communists and calling us [racial epithets], and calling us socialists,” said Jones, 30.
A Florida-based representative for the Proud Boys did not respond to messages. But Jonathan Riches, a veteran conservative activist from Tampa, said counterprotesters flocked to New Port Richey last year because residents were fed up with the Black Lives Matter activists’ tactics, which he said included disrupting restaurant patrons and shouting near parents and children in community parks.
Riches said he is not affiliated with any right-wing extremist groups, but he attended about a dozen counterprotests last year and does not recall abusive language being hurled at the Black Lives Matter activists. Rather, the activists were the ones causing disturbances, he said.
“If you got a bullhorn and yelling a message that is one thing,” said Ritches, 42. “But when you are screaming ‘F the police’ and ‘F Trump,’ and marching around downtown New Port Richey in all black, and screaming obscenities at children, I have a problem with that.”
Jones does not deny that some protesters used profanity during their demonstrations, but said it was due to their frustrations over seeing Confederate flags and white nationalist groups in their town.
Jones said Black Lives Matter protesters attempted to keep their protest locations private to evade the counterprotesters.
But they kept showing up.
“We thought someone from inside [the police department] was communicating with them,” he said.
Later in the summer, the activists were alerted to a Facebook post by a local businessman that showed him dressed in black tactical gear while holding an assault rifle.
“So BLM is bringing a bunch of people to downtown NPR tonight?? Hold on, let me get dressed,” the photo caption read.
New Port Richey police officer Corey Oliver responded, “They canceled for tonight, but will be doing silent protest tomorrow, per my department’s intel.”
City leaders said Oliver has since left the police department, but they declined to comment further, calling it a personnel matter. Oliver could not be reached.
Black Lives Matter protesters say they have other reasons to be leery of local officers’ connections to the Proud Boys and other extreme-right groups. In early September, activists unearthed a video that shows New Port Richey police officers praying with a group of counterprotesters in a restaurant parking lot ahead of a Black Lives Matter demonstration.
A department spokesperson said Port Richey Police Chief Kim Bogart was unavailable to comment. But City Manager Debbie L. Manns, who oversees the department, said that there was “no malice” in the officers’ actions and that they “did not intend to side with any particular group.”
“In their profession, they need to accept all the prayers that may be offered to them,” Manns said.
New Port Richey Mayor Rob Marlowe (D) said the city dispatched a sizable number of officers to the demonstrations to keep the Black Lives Matter demonstrators safe as “whack jobs from the far-right” traveled from as far as North Florida to confront them.
At least one of the marches did end in violence, and Jones said he was the one who ended up facing a felony charge as a result.
One night, when about a dozen protesters marched past a local bar, a patron stormed out shouting epithets and struck two female demonstrators. When police arrived, Jones said he tapped a police officer on the arm to give him information about the suspect.
Jones said he was arrested a week later on charges of battery on a law enforcement officer and obstructing a police officer.
“They were clearly trying to destabilize our movement, and trying to target those who they thought were leaders of our movement,” Jones said.
Manns denied that Jones merely tapped the officer.
“He was told stand back, more than once but he wanted to get himself embroiled in the situation,” she said, calling it “blatantly false” that police were targeting protest leaders.
Yet, attorneys for the Black Lives Matter activists contend that the use of city’s noise ordinance revealed just how unequally some laws can be administered.
Photographs taken by the activists show both sides using megaphones, and Tampa civil rights attorney Luke Lirot, who represents the protesters, called it “blatantly unconstitutional” that only the activists were cited for violating the ordinance.
Manns rebutted that the counterprotesters cooperated with police.
“When the other groups were told, ‘don’t use the megaphone, they put them in their cars,” she said.
In the end, New Port Ritchey leaders concluded it was not worth the city’s time to defend their position in court and dismissed the citations. But the ordeal only reinforces concerns of activists and legal scholars about DeSantis’s legislation.
In addition to creating new crimes and penalties for damaging memorials, the bill increases penalties for battery of a law enforcement officer and outlaws “mob intimidation,” defined as two or more people attempting to compel another “to assume or abandon a particular viewpoint.”
In a statement, DeSantis said the legislation “aims to stop violent assemblies, combat rioting and protect Florida’s law enforcement” and “does not discourage peaceful assembly or freedom of speech.”
But Melba Pearson, a civil rights attorney and former homicide prosecutor in Miami-Dade County, said she worries the legislation will have a “chilling effect on free speech,” especially for minorities who decide to protest in Florida’s most conservative counties.
“There is going to be disparity in enforcement, depending on who is involved and depending on the people who are at the protest,’ Pearson said. “You may find enforcement being done one way in metropolitan areas, but you cross to another jurisdiction, and you will see it done in completely a different way.”
Officers of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship at the National Stadium Detention Center, in Santiago, Chile, Sept. 1973. (photo: Twitter/ @EdwinRomm)
Chile Convicts Dictatorship's Ex-Agents for Poisoning Prisoners
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Santiago's Court of Appeals on Tuesday convicted five ex-officials of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship for poisoning seven inmates at the former Chilean Public Prison in December 1981."
They were poisoned with botulinum toxin as part of a secret operation to eliminate opponents of Augusto Pinochet's military regime.
Retired Army officers Eduardo Arriagada, Sergio Rosende, Joaquin Larrain, and Jaime Fuenzalida were sentenced to 15 years in prison for Victor Corvalan and Hector Pacheco's murder.
The victims, who were common prisoners, received lethal doses of botulinum toxin, one of the most powerful venoms produced by humans. The officers will also face jail for the attempt of murder of another five captives.
Justice authorities proved that the ex-agents' real intentions were to poison the Revolutionary Leftist Movement (MIR) militant Guillermo Rodriguez and his followers Adalberto Muñoz, Ricardo Antonio, and Elizardo Aguilera.
The revolutionaries, who shared cell and meals with Corvalan and Pacheco, overcame the serious injuries produced by poisoned food.
The former prison warden Ronald Bennett was sentenced to 10 years for being an accomplice in crimes against humanity.
The substance that killed the inmates was introduced into the prison as part of a secret maneuver led by the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE).
According to the court's ruling, the operation sought to "imperceptibly eliminate opponents of Pinochet's military regime."
California sea lions on Pier 39 in San Francisco. (photo: jjron/GFDL 1.2)
Chemical Dumping Linked to California Sea Lions' High Cancer Rates
Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
Rosane writes: "California sea lions have one of the highest rates of cancer of all mammals, and scientists have long wondered why."
The answer, published in Frontiers in Marine Science in December 2020, is complex. But a key component is exposure to toxic chemicals, from when the California coast was an industrial dumping ground.
"It is extraordinary, the level of pollutants in these animals in California. It is a big factor in why we're seeing this level of cancer," study coauthor and Marine Mammal Center pathologist Dr. Pádraig Duignan told the Los Angeles Times.
In the past 40 years, 18 to 23 percent of the sea lions treated at the Marine Mammal Center hospital in Sausalito, California died of a particular type of cancer, the center wrote in a press release. This is unusual, as wild mammals tend not to develop this disease. In fact, the California sea lions have the highest rate of a single type of cancer of any mammal, including humans.
This shocked study lead author Frances Gulland when she first started to work at the Marine Mammal Center 26 years ago.
"Wildlife should not be getting cancer like this, that's crazy!" Gulland told the Los Angeles Times. "How can that be?"
But the 250,000 or so California sea lions breed on islands off the Central California coast, the study authors noted. This is the same area that saw dumping of DDT in the 1960s, and pollution from industrialization and urbanization in the following decades. Industrial trash, radioactive material and waste from oil refineries was also dumped into the ocean, the Los Angeles Times reported.
"With all the dumping since the Second World War, right up to the 1970s, that's a lot of stuff out there," Duignan told the Los Angeles Times. "These legacy chemicals haven't broken down anything appreciable in intervening years, and nobody knows if they ever will. This is something that they're going to have to be exposed to for who knows how long."
To find out if the chemical dumping was to blame for the cancer, researchers examined 394 dead sea lions over a more than 20-year period. They found that the sea lions were infected with a herpes virus that was partly responsible for triggering the cancer. At the same time, the sea lions with higher concentrations of DDT, PCBs and other toxic chemicals in their blubber were more likely to see the cancer spread.
What's more, the sea lions in the study had some of the highest concentrations of organic pollutants in their blubber of any marine mammal, the press release noted.
The results show the dangers that toxins can pose to wildlife long after they are phased out of use. They also have troubling implications for human health.
"Even though some of the pollutants we're finding in the blubber have been out of use for years, these cancer-causing elements remain in the environment for a very long time and wreak havoc on opportunistic coastal feeders like sea lions," Duignan said in the press release. "It concerns me knowing that we consume very similar seafood as these cancer victims and that the ocean is raising a loud and clear alarm in the sick bodies of a sentinel species."
Gulland agreed.
"While there is more to be learned about the complex factors that play into the development of this disease, what we learn from these animals contributes to research that underpins the threat to human health from pollutants in the ocean," she said in the press release.
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