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20 March 21
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Bernie Sanders | Income and Wealth Inequality Is in Fact a Moral and Economic Issue
Bernie Sanders, VTDigger
Excerpt: "Today, we are going to discuss an issue that is of enormous consequence to our country, but gets far too little discussion. And that is the crisis of income and wealth inequality in America."
These were the opening remarks by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., at a hearing this week titled “The Income and Wealth Inequality Crisis in America.”
oday, we are going to discuss an issue that is of enormous consequence to our country, but gets far too little discussion. And that is the crisis of income and wealth inequality in America.
The simple truth is that in America today, the very rich have become much richer while tens of millions of Americans are struggling to put food on the table and live in dignity.
We’re going to learn why it is that the middle class in our country, once the envy of the world, has been in a state of decline for decades, while, at the same time, we have seen a massive transfer of wealth from working families to the top 1 percent.
We’re going to talk about why it is that, during this horrific pandemic, 63 percent of our workers have been living paycheck to paycheck — worried that if someone in their family gets sick or if the car breaks down, they will be thrown into financial desperation, while 660 billionaires have become $1.3 trillion richer and now pay a lower effective tax rate than truck drivers, schoolteachers or nurses.
We’re going to talk about the obscenity of the 50 richest Americans now owning more wealth than the bottom half of our society — 165 million people — while over 90 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured and cannot afford to go to a doctor when they get sick.
We’ll be asking about how it happens that the top one-tenth of 1 percent now owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, and that two individuals own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent, while hunger in America has been at its highest level in many decades and more than half a million people are homeless and veterans are sleeping out on the streets.
Incredibly, if income inequality had remained the same as it was in 1975, the average worker in America would be making $42,000 more today. Instead, as the number of billionaires explodes, the average worker in America is now making $32 dollars a week less than he or she made 48 years ago — after adjusting for inflation.
Today, we’re going to ask about what it means morally and economically when one person in this country, the wealthiest person in this country, Jeff Bezos, has become $77 billion richer during this horrific pandemic, while denying hundreds of thousands of workers who work at Amazon paid sick leave and hazard pay.
As you may know, I asked Mr. Bezos to testify at this hearing. He declined my invitation. That is too bad. If he was with us this morning, I would ask him the following question:
Mr. Bezos: You are worth $182 billion. You are the wealthiest person in the world. Why are you doing everything in your power to stop your workers in Bessemer, Alabama, from joining a union so that they can negotiate for better wages, better benefits and better working conditions?
While Mr. Bezos could not be with us to answer those questions, we are going to hear from Jennifer Bates, an Amazon worker in Bessemer, Alabama, who will tell us what it’s like to work for one of the most profitable corporations in America and why she and her co-workers are trying to form a union.
But let’s be clear. Amazon and Jeff Bezos are not alone.
The American people are increasingly disgusted with the corporate greed they experience every single day. They are sick and tired of corporate CEOs who now make 320 times more than their average employees, while they give themselves huge bonuses and cut back on the health care benefits of their employees.
They want corporations to invest in their workers for decent wages, benefits and working conditions and not just higher dividends, stock buybacks and outrageous compensation packages to their executives.
And that is why I am introducing legislation today to impose an income inequality tax on corporations that pay their CEOs over 50 times more than their average workers.
It has always been true, of course, that CEOs make more than their workers. But what has been going on in recent years is totally absurd. In 1965, CEOs of large corporations made just 20 times as much as their average workers. Today, CEOs now make over 300 times and, in some cases, over a thousand times more than their average workers. That has got to change.
When we talk about the need to protect the working class of this country and to address the crisis of income and wealth inequality, there is an enormous amount of work that Congress must do:
- We need to raise the minimum wage to a living wage of at least $15 an hour. A job should lift workers out of poverty, not keep them in it.
- We need to make it easier, not harder, for workers to join unions. The massive increase in wealth and income inequality can be directly linked to the decline in union membership in America.
- We need to create millions of good-paying jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure — our roads, bridges, wastewater plants, sewers, culverts, dams, schools and affordable housing.
- We need to fundamentally transform our energy system away from fossil fuels toward energy efficiency and renewable energy, which will also create millions of good-paying jobs.
- We need to do what every major country on earth does and guarantee health care to all people as a human right. It is absurd that we pay twice as much per capita for health care as do the people of virtually every other nation, while tens of millions of Americans are uninsured or under-insured.
- We need to make certain that all of our young people, regardless of income, have the right to get a higher education. And that means making public colleges and universities tuition-free and substantially reducing student debt for working families.
- And yes. We need to make the wealthiest people and most profitable corporations in America begin to pay their fair share of taxes. In my view, it is unacceptable that some of the largest corporations in America have paid nothing in federal income taxes after making billions of dollars in profits. It is unacceptable that billionaires are now paying a lower effective federal income tax rate than the bottom 90 percent.
Now, I know my Republican colleagues have a different view. At a time of massive wealth and income inequality, they believe that we should provide even more tax breaks to the richest people in America. In fact, just last week, several Republicans in the Senate, including Majority Leader McConnell, introduced a bill to repeal the estate tax — legislation that would provide a $1.7 trillion tax break to the billionaire class, while doing nothing to help working families or family farms.
Let’s be clear: Repealing the estate tax would only benefit the top one-tenth of one percent of Americans who inherit over $11.7 million, and 99.9 percent of the American people would not receive a penny if this legislation became law. Under this bill, the richest family in America, the Walton family, would receive a tax break of up to $87 billion. The family of Jeff Bezos would receive a tax break of up to $70 billion if the estate tax was repealed.
That may make sense to my Republican colleagues. But it does not make sense to me.
Here is the bottom line: The issue of income and wealth inequality is in fact a moral and economic issue. It is an issue that we must confront here and across the world.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein. (photo: Getty Images)
Filibuster Opponents Just Got Good News From a Key Democratic Holdout on Reform
Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes:
Senate Democrats don’t yet have the votes for reform, but they appear to be agonizingly close.
ast fall, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) appeared as adamantly opposed to filibuster reform as any Democrat.
“I think the filibuster serves a purpose. It is not often used, it’s often less used now than when I first came, and I think it’s part of the Senate that differentiates itself,” she said in September. (In reality, the number of filibusters — or, at least, the number of votes taken to break filibusters — spiked precipitously in recent years.)
The senator’s support for the rule, which essentially requires most legislation to receive 60 votes in order to pass the Senate, was seen as so strong that as recently as Friday afternoon, the conservative National Review published a piece with the triumphant headline “Feinstein Still Supports the Filibuster.” In that piece, Feinstein is quoted responding “I do right now, yes” when asked if she supports leaving the 60-vote requirement in place.
But the National Review’s piece appears to have had a very short shelf life. In a statement released Friday night, Feinstein now says she’s “open” to changing the Senate’s filibuster rules, if necessary to pass legislation such as expanded background checks for firearm purchases, reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, or a voting rights bill.
“Ideally the Senate can reach bipartisan agreement on those issues,” the 87-year-old senator said in that statement. “But if that proves impossible and Republicans continue to abuse the filibuster by requiring cloture votes, I’m open to changing the way the Senate filibuster rules are used.”
Feinstein’s journey from a vocal defender of the filibuster into someone more open to reform mirrors that of many of her fellow Democrats. In 2017, for example, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) was one of two primary organizers behind a letter signed by 61 senators, which called on Senate leaders to “preserve existing rules, practices, and traditions” that allow senators to filibuster legislation.
Yet Coons, who is widely viewed as a close ally of President Joe Biden, said last summer that he’s open to reform because he “will not stand idly by for four years and watch the Biden administration’s initiatives blocked at every turn.”
Biden himself endorsed a kind of reform earlier this week, saying, “back in the old days,” a senator who wished to maintain a filibuster “had to stand up and command the floor” and “keep talking on.” The president suggested that the Senate could reinstate this requirement, allowing the majority to end a filibuster if its supporters stop giving Senate floor speeches in favor of it — creating a so-called “talking filibuster.”
Even Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), a senator who has repeatedly said that he wants to keep the filibuster alive in some form, has indicated that he’s open requiring talking filibusters — although Manchin’s been reluctant to open the door to other kinds of filibuster reform.
That leaves Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), who said last month that she’d even support strengthening the filibuster by rolling back previous reforms, as the primary Democratic holdout on filibuster reform. Because Democrats control exactly half of the Senate’s one hundred seats plus the vice presidency, they will likely need every single member of their caucus to support filibuster reform in order for any filibuster reform to pass.
The momentum appears to be on the side of “talking filibusters,” but it’s not clear such a reform would matter much
If filibuster reform does pass the current Senate, it’s likely to include some form of the “talking” filibuster. This reform appears to have the greatest support among Democrats who appear cautious about abolishing the filibuster outright. Feinstein’s statement, for example, says that a talking filibuster is “an idea worth discussing.”
But a requirement that a least one senator must give a floor speech opposing a bill in order to block it is unlikely, on its own, to do much to reform the Senate. In its simplest form, a talking filibuster requires just one senator who supports a filibuster to be on the floor at any given time. Thus, so long as the GOP caucus’s 50 members are allowed to tag-team, each taking turns maintaining the filibuster, they could theoretically keep a filibuster going forever.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) recently proposed a more robust reform that would circumvent any tag-team efforts — requiring at least 41 senators who oppose legislation to remain on the floor while a talking filibuster is going on. Manchin, however, appeared to take that idea off the table earlier this week.
Biden, meanwhile, suggested support for a different limit on filibusters during an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday. Under Biden’s idea, if a pro-filibuster senator paused while they were speaking in favor of that filibuster, “someone could move in and say I move the question of” — a motion to “move” a “question” can refer to a procedural maneuver that seeks to end debate on a matter and force a vote.
That could create a chaotic, but effective, process to end filibusters as senators hoping to block legislation grew tired, and as alert senators of the opposing party looked for opportunities to force filibuster-ending votes.
In any event, negotiations over filibuster reform remain very much in flux within the Senate. And it remains to be seen whether holdouts like Sinema move towards reform. But Feinstein’s recent statement is good news for anyone hoping to see opponents to filibuster reform softening their stances — and to anyone who wants an ambitious legislative agenda to pass the Senate in the next two years.
Undocumented immigrants from El Salvador wait to be deported on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flight bound for San Salvador. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
The US Deportation Machine Undermines Workers' Rights
Adam Goodman, Jacobin
Excerpt: "Despite America's self-image as a land of immigrants, over its history, the United States has deported more people than any other nation in the world. Yet migrant workers have found ways to sabotage the deportation machine to win their dignity and rights."
n May 17, 1978, forty investigators with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the precursor to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), raided the Sbicca shoe factory in Los Angeles. Less than a week earlier, the factory workers had voted in a union election filed by the Retail Clerks Union. The election was still under review when the INS came rolling in “like gestapo,” in the words of one union organizer.
The INS that day was relying on tactics US authorities had developed over more than a century of expelling immigrants: detain and deport targeted groups (especially Mexican workers) without due process, before broadcasting news of such actions (and potential future actions) to terrorize other immigrants into leaving the country or receding further into the shadows.
Only this time, the immigrants refused to play their parts.
Rather than being coerced into signing away their rights, more than sixty of the 119 workers arrested by the INS insisted on speaking with lawyers from the ACLU and elsewhere. The workers’ recalcitrance, bolstered by the support of the lawyers, union, and wider community, gummed up the works of the otherwise whirling deportation machine. Buses carrying the workers en route to Mexico were halted, all of the workers who wanted to stay were released from detention, and those who took their cases to court beat the INS by invoking their right to remain silent.
Adam Goodman recounts this story of successful resistance in his book, The Deportation Machine, a history of the US’s often-brutal immigration policy. Contrary to tales of the US as a welcoming nation of former immigrants, Goodman finds that the country has expelled more people than any other nation in the world. And the beneficiaries have been business interests, who rely on the immigration system to coerce, control, and divide immigrant laborers from the rest of the working class.
Jacobin contributor Arvind Dilawar recently spoke with Goodman about how the US built its deportation machine and the ways that immigrants and other workers have learned to fight back.
AD: Much of The Deportation Machine is dedicated to revealing how the United States has expelled many, many more immigrants through so-called “voluntary departures” and “self-deportations,” rather than formal deportations. How do you define these three categories — voluntary departures, self deportations, and formal deportations?
AG: A startling discovery sparked my interest in writing this book: The United States, the so-called nation of immigrants, has deported more than 57 million people since the 1880s. That’s more than any other country in the world.
Yet we know very little about the vast majority of these expulsions. Journalists and scholars have focused most of their attention on formal deportations, which have typically been by order of an immigration judge. These expulsions have often involved immigration hearings, prolonged detentions, and lots of paperwork. (This has become less true in recent years, as officials have limited noncitizens’ rights by streamlining more than three-quarters of all removals.) But formal deportations represent only a small sliver of total expulsions from the country since the late nineteenth century.
My book reveals that deportation without due process has long been the American way. The overwhelming majority of expulsions — around 85 percent during the past 140 years — have happened via an administrative process euphemistically referred to as voluntary departure. I say euphemistically because there is nothing voluntary about these fast-track deportations, which occur after authorities apprehend someone and then coerce them into leaving the country without fighting their case.
Voluntary departure has played a similar role in the immigration enforcement system as plea bargains have played in the criminal justice system. For noncitizens facing harsher consequences if formally deported, including multiyear or even lifetime bans on reentering the country, voluntary departure has represented the best of all the bad options before them. For the US government, these expedited expulsions have served as a cost-saving measure by minimizing the number of hearings and detention-related expenses. The machine wouldn’t function without them.
Public officials and ordinary citizens have also orchestrated self-deportation drives to effect expulsions at different points throughout US history. The idea here is to make people’s lives so miserable that they decide to pick up and leave, often without ever coming into contact with an immigration agent. The tactics deployed to spark self-deportation include fear mongering, mass immigration raids, the strategic use of the media, restrictive local and state laws, and violence or the threat of violence. The Trump administration relied heavily on such strategies, whose origins date back to before the founding of the country.
AD: As you relate in your book, the United States was waging a racist, anti-Mexican deportation campaign called “Operation Wetback” in the 1950s, while also expanding the Bracero Program for Mexican guest workers. In the eyes of the state and business interests, what was the relationship between the Bracero Program and undocumented Mexican workers?
AG: I should first note that authorities have disproportionately targeted Mexicans for deportation since the 1910s. I crunched a bunch of numbers from government reports and discovered that nine out of ten deportees from the United States have been Mexican. That’s astounding and has to do with the persistent demand for Mexican labor, as well as the racist policing practices that have created and reified the stereotype of Mexicans as prototypical “illegal aliens.”
In the middle of the twentieth century, government officials preferred braceros to undocumented workers because they wanted to regulate Mexican labor migration. During the Bracero Program’s twenty-two-year history, from 1942 to 1964, the US and Mexican governments issued more than 4.6 million short-term contracts to upwards of four hundred thousand workers, mostly in agriculture.
The terms of the Bracero Program were favorable to employers, which resulted in widespread abuses that should serve as a warning about the problems inherent to many guestworker programs. Still, many employers probably preferred undocumented Mexican laborers to braceros, since they could exert even more control over them. Employers’ desire for cheap, exploitable labor and the number of Mexicans seeking out better-paid opportunities far exceeded the number of bracero contracts available. In some parts of Mexico, there were as many as twenty aspiring braceros for every available contract. So many people crossed the border without documents.
We should be careful here not to create artificial divisions between “good” and “bad” migrants. Many Mexicans, including some I interviewed, migrated regularly over the course of many years, sometimes as braceros and other times without authorization. The bottom line is that employers wanted Mexican labor and Mexicans needed work, regardless of whether they had a bracero contract.
As unauthorized migration increased, US authorities ramped up their enforcement efforts. The simultaneous rise in labor migration and deportations left some people scratching their heads. “This Mexican business mystifies me,” one of the pilots hired to transport workers and deportees told a reporter in the 1950s. “We just hauled a load of contract laborers from Mexico to Michigan. Now we’re hauling a load of other Mexicans back to Mexico. Well, I just fly the plane.”
AD: Labor unions played a changing role in the United States’ history of deportations. Radical unions like the Industrial Workers of the World were early targets of immigration, moderate bodies like the AFL-CIO supported anti-immigrant efforts, and finally the mainstream labor movement came around to defending immigrant workers. Why do you think the relationship between unions and immigrants changed over time?
AG: For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, many labor unions saw guestworkers and undocumented workers as a threat to the rights, wages, and conditions of their members. Organized labor’s staunch opposition to the Bracero Program, combined with public outrage about the abysmal treatment of Mexican workers, contributed to officials’ decision to phase it out.
But in the mid-1970s, as overall union membership declined, some labor groups shifted their position on undocumented workers and started recruiting them into their ranks. As a leader within the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union said at the time, “We’re trying to organize all unorganized workers. It’s not of interest to us what their status is except their status as exploited workers.” By organizing undocumented workers, unions expanded their labor protections and also empowered them to defend themselves from punitive immigration policies.
I show this in the book by tracing the incredible story of a group of sixty shoe factory workers who, after being apprehended in an early morning immigration raid in suburban Los Angeles in 1978, fought against the deportation machine and won.
AD: The Deportation Machine illustrates how business interests were able to profit from the deportation of immigrants via government contracts for their detention and transport. How much of the United States’ immigration policy is influenced by the profit motives of such businesses?
AG: We need to recognize that perverse economic incentives have played an important role in shaping and implementing immigration policy. Over the course of the twentieth century, state policies criminalized migrants and turned deportation into a lucrative business.
Many people have heard about the growth of the private immigration detention industry in recent years. Far fewer know about the history of the US government contracting private transportation companies to move noncitizen detainees within the country and to expel them across international borders. I show how the companies’ desire to maximize profits and the government’s wish to minimize expenses led to inhumane conditions aboard the buses, trains, boats, and planes used in these operations.
Many transportation companies treated deportees as human cargo. I trace the story of a private Mexican shipping line in the mid-1950s that took bananas north to the United States, then made the treacherous, two-day return trip south across the Gulf of Mexico with hundreds of deportees packed into the same ships. US officials deported nearly 50,000 Mexicans this way over a two-year period.
These expulsions also served another purpose: to punish migrants in hopes of discouraging them from returning to the United States in the future. This policy was a precursor to later prevention-through-deterrence strategies, such as the militarization of the US-Mexico border in the 1990s and the separation of Central American children from their parents in recent years.
The toxic combination of profit motives and punishment has exacted an extraordinary physical, psychological, and material toll on migrants. Though we cannot calculate the cumulative impact of such policies, this history makes clear the urgent need to radically reimagine an immigration system that has subjected generations of noncitizens — and a significant number of citizens — to state-sanctioned violence.
AD: How have immigrants been able to defend themselves from “the deportation machine?” Do you see a change in effective tactics over time? What’s been most successful?
AG: Part of my interest in writing this book was to help us better understand how the deportation machine works and how people have defended themselves against it in the past, in hopes that it might prove useful to immigrants and their allies in the present or in the future.
People have been fighting against the deportation machine for as long as it has existed. Many of the tactics they’ve turned to have remained the same during the past century and a half: taking to the streets and to the courts, engaging in bold acts of civil disobedience, organizing know-your-rights workshops, orchestrating sophisticated media campaigns, and pushing for legislative change and executive action to protect all people from expulsion.
The deportation machine has been, is, and will be vulnerable. Activists have to identify which strategies are best suited to a particular moment. Though the machine’s weak points have changed over time, at least one thing has remained the same: sustained organizing and broad-based solidarity are preconditions for effective resistance.
United States Postal Service worker. (photo: Paul Ratje/AFP/Getty Images)
Arizona Republicans Push New Laws to Limit Mail Voting
Jane C. Timm, NBC News
Timm writes:
One bill would purge infrequent voters from an early voting list while others seek to add restrictions to mail ballots.
rizona Republicans are proposing drastic changes to its mail voting systems, a move that echoes the flurry of election restrictions advanced in GOP-controlled legislatures in a number of states after former President Donald Trump's election loss.
Republican lawmakers in Arizona have introduced at least 22 restrictive bills, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. More than half the proposals address mail voting, with one particularly contentious bill seeking to kick infrequent voters off something called the Permanent Early Voting List, or PEVL. Arizona voters have been voting by mail for 30 years, while the GOP-led Legislature created the PEVL, which sends voters who have opted in ballots in the mail automatically, in 2007.
"We are seeing this as a full on assault on voting rights and democratic institutions in Arizona," Emily Kirkland, executive director of the advocacy group Progress Arizona, said, arguing that the same state lawmakers advancing voting restrictions had spread Trump's lie of a stolen election. "This is part of a pattern."
Progress Arizona is one of several lobbying against the legislation, using everything from billboards to T-shirts to mobilize against bills it argues would make it harder for voters, and particularly voters of color, to register to vote and cast ballots by mail.
While Republicans control all three branches of state government, it's unclear if these bills can make it past Gov. Doug Ducey, who has defended the state's mail voting system in the past. Democrats, as well as leading civil and voting rights advocates have protested the laws as voter suppression. One of the proposed bills, which has since died in committee, would have let legislators ignore the election results and override the certification of presidential electors. Last week, state Rep. John Kavanagh, a Republican, told CNN that the party was concerned with the "quality" of the voters.
"Not everybody wants to vote, and if somebody is uninterested in voting, that probably means that they're totally uninformed on the issues," Kavanagh told the network. "Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well."
His remarks prompted immediate outrage. Rep. Colin Allred, D-Texas, said on MSNBC that "these are the same justifications that we heard in the era of Jim Crow."
The proposed restrictions come after President Joe Biden won Arizona by approximately 10,000 votes, triggering an onslaught of attacks from Trump, his allies and local Republicans, who have rushed to litigate the election process this year.
Trump’s stolen election lie has convinced many that fraud is a problem in American elections. Three out of every 4 Republicans believe that there was widespread voter fraud in last year’s election, according to a December Quinnipiac University poll, despite all evidence to the contrary. State Republicans in Texas, Georgia and Florida are now proposing voting restrictions that they say are needed to restore trust in the system. According to the Brennan Center, there are at least 253 restrictive bills under consideration in 43 states this year.
Mail voting, meanwhile, is an incredibly popular way to vote in Arizona: According to the state secretary of state's office, approximately 80 percent of voters cast ballots early — by mail or in person — before the pandemic. In 2020, that number rose to 88 percent.
Republicans hold narrow majorities in the Arizona Legislature, so broad support and attendance from lawmakers in sessions would be needed to get these measures through the state House and Senate. After that, they'd need to convince Ducey, who has defended Arizona's mail voting system in the past, to sign the bills. Ducey's office said he would not comment on pending legislation.
Democrats have come out in strong opposition to the bills, wearing Progress Arizona's "I <3 PEVL" T-shirts.
“Many of these measures would not improve our election systems but would only serve to make it harder for people to vote," Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, said in a statement to NBC News. "Voters should not be punished because the Legislature did not like the outcome of the election."
Voting rights advocates told NBC News they are most worried about three proposed mail voting restrictions.
Senate Bill 1485, which awaits a final House vote,would remove voters who haven't cast a ballot in "both the primary election and the general election for two consecutive primary and general elections."
The bill says purges would occur in December of even-numbered years, removing voters who do not respond to a notice from officials. While the bill has been pitched as removing voters who do not cast a ballot in four elections, advocates warn that the language is confusing enough that it could lead to voters being tossed off the rolls for missing a single election. And independent voters have to request a party primary ballot to participate, so they could be removed after missing just two mailed ballots for general elections.
Arizona Wins, one of the groups working with Progress Arizona, analyzed state voter file data and found there were 126,686 Arizonans who voted in 2020 after sitting out the 2018 and 2016 primary and general elections. Those voters — a fifth of whom are Latino — might have been removed from PEVL by such a bill.
Senate Bill 1593 would shorten the window for mail voters to get and return their ballots and require they be postmarked on or prior to the Thursday before an election, something that could be particularly difficult on Arizona's many Native American reservations, where many people do not have home mail service. Turnout among Native American voters surged in 2020, fueling Biden's win.
What's more, post offices don't always postmark prepaid mailers, something advocates worry could lead clearly on-time ballots to be tossed by postal carrier error.
The bill awaits a Senate floor vote.
Senate Bill 1713would require voters to add more voter ID to their mail ballots, which could force those without driver's licenses to make copies of identifying documents. Currently, mail voters sign an affidavit attesting to their identity under penalty of perjury, and signatures are verified by county officials.
The bill will be heard in committee next week.
“These are all assaults on our democracy,” said Pinny Sheoran, an organizer with the League of Women Voters of Arizona, a nonpartisan group lobbyingagainst a spate of proposed bills. "No one in Arizona is buying the specious claims."
'Even as weed becomes more legal, cops are still using it as an excuse to arrest people of color.' (photo: OCC)
Even Where Weed Is Legal, Cops Still Mostly Arrest Black and Brown People
Katie Way, VICE
Way writes:
In Washington, D.C., alone, where weed is mostly legal, nearly 90 percent of the people arrested for cannabis-related crimes in 2020 were Black.
e elected the only Democratic presidential candidate who didn’t support wholesale, federal cannabis legalization (and won’t let his staffers light up, either), but it still feels like we’re living in a favorable climate for recreational drugs—weed especially. After all, five new states voted in favor of legalizing it in some capacity in 2020, with a sixth, New York, on the horizon in 2021. We’re even living in some kind of recreational drug renaissance, with full decriminalization of all “illicit” drugs underway in Oregon.
But even as weed becomes more legal, cops are still using it as an excuse to arrest people of color—see New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s reported refusal to eliminate a policy that allows cops to approach and search people if they smell the odor of cannabis. In New York City, where medical marijuana is legal and possession of less than 2 ounces is decriminalized, 94 percent of the people arrested on cannabis charges in 2020 were people of color, according to a report from AMNY. The vast majority of those arrestees (just under 92 percent) were Black or Latinx. According to a November report from L.A. Taco, 75 percent of the people the LAPD arrested for cannabis-related offenses in 2020 were Black or Latinx, and the number of Black people arrested for pot-related reasons jumped 12 percent from 2019. And per a Washington Post story from September 2020, “just under 90 percent” of the people arrested for cannabis-related crimes in Washington, D.C., in 2020 were Black.
Arrest rates in the latter two cities are especially glaring, given the fact that cannabis is recreationally legal in both California and Washington, D.C. So how is it possible that Black and brown people could still be getting arrested for cannabis-related offenses? Simple: regulations about who is allowed to sell and use cannabis, plus where and how. D.C. has a convoluted system for dispensing weed—it’s still technically illegal to sell recreationally and must be given as a “free gift” alongside, say, a $45 baseball hat. Los Angeles in particular has struggled with dispensary licensing, meaning many stores that sell weed through a veneer of legality are technically breaking the law.
In 2019, the American Civil Liberties Union released a report titled “A Tale of Two Countries: Racially Targeted Arrests in the Era of Marijuana Reform” that found that racial disparities in arrest rates actually worsened in 31 states since 2010 and Black people are still 3.6 times as likely as white people to be arrested on cannabis charges. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like 2020 was any less on-trend.
U.S. troops in Syria. (photo: AFP)
Syria: Losses in Oil Stolen by US and Its Allies Revealed
teleSUR
90 percent of Syria’s oil resources are under the control of Washington and its allies, Oil Minister Bassam Touma has revealed.
yria’s oil resources are not as significant as those of other countries in the region but were sufficient to guarantee the country’s energy self-sufficiency and allowed Damascus to earn a modest income from exports. Since 2011, much of these resources have been damaged or looted, first by jihadists and then by the U.S. military and their Kurdish allies.
Ninety percent of Syria’s oil resources are under the control of Washington and its allies, Oil Minister Bassam Touma has revealed.
“Americans and their allies are targeting the Syrian oil wealth and its tankers just like pirates,” Touma said, speaking to Syrian News Channel on Thursday.
“What has happened all through the war in Syria has not happened in any country, in terms of preventing us from tapping our wealth and at the same time stopping basic commodities from reaching our country,” Touma added.
The minister estimated direct and indirect damage to Syria’s oil sector of over $92 billion and stressed that the industry had been targeted deliberately by its enemies because it is a crucial income source for the country’s economy.
Syria produced about 400,000 barrels of oil per day before the war. With this income, worth about $730 million a month, the country met its energy needs, accounting for over 20 percent of state revenues.
Between 2014 and 2017, the Daesh group occupied much of the country’s oil fields, looting and destroying infrastructure and illegally shipping hundreds of thousands of tons of black gold out of the country.
In 2019, Washington redeployed troops from the Syrian-Turkish border into the oil-rich interior of northeastern Syria, with President Donald Trump admitting freely that the US’s main aim was to “take” and “keep the oil.”
The Biden administration has resorted to a milder language but has likewise kept the oil-siphoning activities in place. The Russian military has estimated that the US and its allies earn at least $30 million a month on their oil-plundering business.
'Heatwaves and wildfires will be more likely.' (photo: NOAA)
Summers Could Last for Half the Year by 2100
Kate Ravilious, Guardian UK
Ravilious writes: "Our summers are already about 20% longer than they used to be, and if the climate crisis continues unabated then northern hemisphere summers could cover nearly half of the year by 2100, making them more than twice as long as they were in the 1950s."
Heatwaves and wildfires will be more likely and winter will be squeezed to just 31 days
ur summers are already about 20% longer than they used to be, and if the climate crisis continues unabated then northern hemisphere summers could cover nearly half of the year by 2100, making them more than twice as long as they were in the 1950s. And unlike their counterparts of the 1950s, future summers will be more extreme, with heatwaves and wildfires more likely.
Researchers used historical climate data to measure how much the seasons have changed already. They defined summer as the onset of temperatures in the hottest 25% for that time period and winter as the onset of the coldest 25% of temperatures. Their results, published in Geophysical Research Letters, show that the average northern hemisphere summer has grown from 78 to 95 days between 1952 and 2011, while winter has shrunk from 76 to 73 days. Spring and autumn have contracted too.
Using climate change models, they were able to show that even bigger changes are to come, with northern hemisphere summers lasting an average of 166 days by 2100, squeezing out all the other seasons and shrinking winter to just 31 days. The Mediterranean region and the Tibetan plateau are projected to experience the greatest changes, but far-reaching impacts on agriculture, human health and the environment will be felt everywhere.
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