18 March 21
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Matt Taibbi | With Ratings Down, the Networks Hunt for a Trump Replacement
Matt Taibbi, TK News
Taibbi writes: "Trump saved the cable news business once. Without him, things are looking bleak again. Who will news outlets find to feed the outrage machine?"
ariety just published a graph that should horrify cable news executives:
This data, showing significant declines in all of the major primetime cable news shows, came in a piece called, “Cable News Ratings Begin To Suffer Trump Slump.” Gavin Bridge of the Variety Intelligence Platform explained:
VIP has previously covered the initial ratings decline Fox News, MSNBC and, most of all, CNN, saw in President Biden’s first week, as the nonstop controversies of the previous administration slowed down.
Our prediction that audiences would perk up for President Trump’s second impeachment trial proved correct. But in the weeks after the trial ended, audiences for CNN have plummeted; MSNBC is seeing about half CNN’s drop, while Fox News is down single digits.
It’s natural for news audiences to dip after seismic events like the January 6th riots. CNN had its best month ever in January, and individual shows like Anderson Cooper 360 jumped above 5 million viewers.
Still, Variety’s report showing significant ratings drops as we move farther away from the Trump experience is both predictable and fascinating. It’s not clear how media executives will respond to losing the best friend they ever had. They will either have to surrender to the idea of significant long-term losses — impossible to imagine — or find a way to continue an all-time blockbuster entertainment franchise, which doubled as the most divisive public relations campaign in our history, without the show’s main character.
Trump transformed news into a ratings Krakatoa, combining the side-against-side drama of sports programming with the amphetamine urgency of breaking news.
Moreover, the Democratic Party’s response to Trump — which involved multiple efforts to remove him, premised on the idea that every day he spent in the Oval Office was an existential threat to humanity — allowed stations to turn every day of the Trump years into a baby-down-a-well story (the baby was democracy). Between the Mueller investigation, two impeachments, the Kavanaugh confirmation, multiple border crises, the “Treason in Helsinki” fiasco, and a hundred other tales, every day could be pitched as a drop-everything emergency.
Add the partisan rooting angle, and you had ratings gold. Imagine three or four dozen Super Bowls a year, each one played in the middle of a category 5 hurricane, and you come close to grasping the magnitude of the gift that Donald Trump was to MSNBC, Fox, and CNN.
Six or seven years ago, it was common to see CNN or MSNBC fall outside the top 20 rated cable networks, below titans like Disney, USA, TBS, and the History Channel. By 2020, the three top networks on cable — not just news networks, but overall — were Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN. The fact that news ate away so much of the market share of the entertainment business in the Trump years raises questions about what exactly we were watching.
Jump in your Dr. Who police box and go back to 2014, the last year Trump was not a major political figure. The cable news genre had what Variety described as an “overall down year.” It was a particularly grim time for CNN and MSNBC:
Total Primetime Viewers, 2014 Change
Fox News, 1.779 million (even)
MSNBC, 600,000 (down 8%)
CNN, 528,000 (down 8%)
HLN, 337,000 (down 16%)
CNN exemplified the pre-Trump dilemma. In 2011, the network’s average primetime viewership was 689,000. That dropped to 670,000 in 2012, and the year after that, in 2013, it fell all the way to 568,000, a 20-year low. Imagine the pucker factor at Time Warner the next year, when CNN’s entire 8-11 p.m. programming slate dropped 8% off that 20-year dip.
2013 was CNN’s first year under the management of Jeff Zucker, whose career arc leading into the Trump years was a dazzling study in failing upward. He was named head of NBC Entertainment in 2000, and rode the successes of a handful of shows — including, notably, The Apprentice — into a job as CEO of NBC Universal, where he presided over one of the most disastrous tenures of any TV executive in history. Under his leadership, NBC dropped to fourth behind ABC, CBS, and Fox, amid catastrophic decisions like trying to move Jay Leno into primetime.
When Zucker moved to CNN, he trumpeted a new plan to save the news. This is from Politico in 2013:
Zucker has told staff he wants to “broaden the definition of what news is,” meaning more sports, more entertainment, more human interest stories — and, at times, less politics.
That didn’t work out so well in 2014, though to be fair to Zucker, the ratings narrative started reversing at least somewhat before Trump jumped on the scene. But the first giant leap forward for the business as a whole came in 2015, when CNN's average primetime audience soared to 730,000, a 30% increase, in significant part because it hosted two Republican debates starring Trump.
The news business had never seen anything like the Trump effect. The first Republican debate on Fox drew 25 million viewers and was the most-watched non-sports event in the history of cable, while the second debate drew 23 million and was merely the top show in the history of CNN.
Taking note of all this was Trump himself, whose poll numbers were dipping a bit at the end of 2015. Some were predicting his demise. To this, Trump snapped, “I’m not a masochist,” and promised he’d pull out if his numbers worsened. However, he said, if he did, “There’d be a major collapse of television ratings,” adding a poisonous prediction: “It would become a depression in television.”
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Rep. Katie Porter. (photo: Erin Schaff/NYT)
Democrats Loved Katie Porter When She Bashed Trump. Now She Is Making Them Squirm
Jennifer Haberkorn, Los Angeles Times
Haberkorn writes:
emocrats loved watching Orange County Rep. Katie Porter skewer Trump administration appointees and corporate executives in congressional hearings.
But it felt different when Porter's progressive passion and impatience for convention turned to them.
Just as she wielded a whiteboard and sharp questioning to expose the flaws and outdated thinking she saw in Postal Service management or the nation's COVID-19 testing system, Porter recently took aim at House Democrats’ rules and traditions for what is usually a behind-the-scenes competition to determine which lawmakers sit on which coveted committees.
It was a calculated high-stakes gamble that resulted in Porter not returning this year to sit on the Financial Services Committee, one of the House's most sought-after panels and one for which the former bankruptcy and consumer law professor was highly suited.
Her sharp-elbowed maneuvering and willingness to publicly confront party leaders such as Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Los Angeles Rep. Maxine Waters underscored the brash determination that made Porter the surprise national standout of California’s 2018 House freshman class — and a strong contender for the U.S. Senate someday.
But in an institution fueled by seniority and relationships — especially within one’s own party — Porter’s tendency to ruffle feathers could cost her the allies she will need in the future in order to get legislation approved.
In an interview, Porter expressed no regrets that her actions might have cost her support. In some ways, she may have felt she had nothing to lose. Only one of her financial-services-related bills made it through the Democratic-controlled House as part of a broader piece of legislation during her first term, a factor in her decision to focus more on oversight.
“That was a big concern for me as a front-liner,” she said, using the Democrats’ term for a politically vulnerable member, “and as somebody who's very committed to governance and to doing the work.”
Though she will no longer serve on one of the House Democrats' four "exclusive" committees, Porter did not walk away empty-handed. She will continue to be on the House Oversight Committee, the body's top investigations panel, where her knack for cutting to the chase and simplifying complex issues will come in handy.
Porter also picked up a subcommittee oversight gavel on the House Natural Resources Committee, and she has already announced plans to go after polluters and oil and gas companies.
“I absolutely love oversight," said Porter, who recently purchased the new vanity license plate "OVRSITE" for her minivan. "I came into Congress with a background in banking, but what I found is that the oversight skills I developed there, and the ability to explain technical things, particularly economic issues, translates really well to oversight across a large variety of subjects."
Porter, 47, came into Congress in a freshman class distinguished by its unprecedented number of women, progressives and younger people. Like Porter, many hold no fealty to the expectations placed on new members, such as respecting seniority and waiting your turn.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said Porter is simply doing what she was elected to do.
“So many of us, regardless of ideology, run on ‘shaking up Washington.’ But then when you actually come here, there’s a lot of consequences for doing that,” said Ocasio-Cortez, who sat near Porter on the Financial Services Committee and remains on the panel. “There are many strong personalities in our class, and that leads to some ruffling of feathers, because we’re sent here literally to try to disrupt.”
But Porter’s critics say there is a risk in trying to change the system that her colleagues have been operating under for years, particularly trying to undermine committee leadership.
“This is a place that operates on relationships,” said one Democratic lawmaker, echoing a sentiment repeated by others but speaking on the condition of anonymity. “These things don’t win Katie any friends.”
Porter may already be on shaky political ground as a progressive serving in a Republican-leaning, Irvine-centered district that the GOP is targeting for a pickup in 2022.
Porter won reelection in November, but by less than President Biden’s margin in the district, a sign that she is vulnerable. The coming post-census redistricting of California's congressional map might make reelection even harder in 2022.
Though some have wondered whether Porter might seek refuge in a 2022 challenge for Sen. Alex Padilla's seat in the Senate, she took such a move off the table, disclosing that she has endorsed Padilla for 2022 and contributed to his campaign.
“I'm a strong supporter of Sen. Padilla,” Porter said. “[I] really look forward to working with him and have already begun conversations about policies we can collaborate [on] and opportunities to introduce him to the Orange County community.” Padilla was appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to fill the seat previously occupied by Vice President Kamala Harris.
Porter did not rule out, however, a future bid for the Senate. Progressives hope she runs when Sen. Dianne Feinstein, 87, leaves the Senate, although it is certain to be a crowded field.
Thanks in part to her hearing moments that went viral, Porter's campaign has become one of the top fundraisers in the House, a rarity for a lawmaker in only her second term.
"It’s so hard to break out and have a national presence,” said longtime Democratic operative Bill Carrick. “She managed to be able to do that in her first term, especially on the Financial Services side.”
Porter made her exit from that committee almost as prominent as her tenure, providing a window into her political style.
Committee assignments are key to lawmakers, offering television exposure, political contributions and a platform to advance a legislative agenda or steer federal dollars.
For Democrats, four committees are labeled “exclusive" due to their influence and time commitment. In addition to Financial Services, they include Ways and Means, Appropriations, and Energy and Commerce.
Two years ago, Porter and several other progressive freshmen, including Ocasio-Cortez and Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), landed on Financial Services.
Porter immediately clashed with committee Chairwoman Waters, a powerful member of the California delegation who is close with Pelosi. In addition to balancing the needs of her party's moderates with the boisterous newcomers, Waters, a longtime force on Democrats' left flank, didn't always see eye to eye with the new crop of progressives.
The first time Porter tried to use a poster board in the committee, Waters upheld a Republican objection, citing committee rules. When Porter came back to another hearing with a “Financial Services bingo” board, Waters again told her to take it down. “We’ve talked about this before,” she said.
Porter balked at Waters' ruling. “Are we adding additional committee rules at this time?” asked Porter, whose use of such props was not an issue on the House Oversight Committee. In a show of her emerging political star power, Porter eventually got to display the bingo poster — on “Late Night with Seth Meyers."
"I disagreed with her interpretation of the rules regarding the ability of committee members to use evidence to make their points," Porter said in the interview. "I was overruled on the whiteboard. I was overruled on my ability to play audio. I was overruled on my ability to display a poster board.”
Waters' office declined to comment.
There were some substantive clashes over legislation as well between Waters and the committee's progressives.
For some Democrats, the biggest snub came late last year when Porter lobbied to take Financial Services off the list of exclusive committees. That top-tier designation comes with a price: Members may not serve on any other committee unless they receive a waiver.
Such waivers are not rare. But if Financial Services were no longer exclusive, it would be easier for new members like Porter to remain on the committee while also branching into other areas without the need for special permission.
“The goal should be to get members on the committee who stay, year after year, who will make this a primary committee and build up expertise over time,” Porter said. “Financial Services is so important and no one knows that better than Chairwoman Waters — how important this really is to people and to our economy and to Southern California.”
Porter’s proposal to change the exclusivity status went nowhere.
When it came time to request committee assignments in the new year, Porter raised eyebrows once again. She requested to remain on Oversight and join the Natural Resources committee as her top two choices. Then she asked for a waiver to continue on Financial Services.
Porter pitched herself to Pelosi in a letter, which Porter has shared. “As the only single mother of young children in our Democratic Caucus, and an expert on consumer debt, mortgage lending, and bankruptcy, I bring deep knowledge and great passion to issues of economic justice and fairness,” she wrote.
It didn’t work. The steering committee in charge of the matter got 10 requests for waivers to get on the Financial Services Committee, according to Porter’s calculation. Only Porter and one other Democrat were denied.
Some progressives say Porter was targeted for removal, pointing to the fact that several members of the Financial Services panel are allowed to serve on other committees, some even as chairpersons. "She wasn’t really wanted, perhaps because of the spotlight she garnered and the goals she sought," wrote David Dayen, executive editor of American Prospect.
Skeptics say Porter tried to game the complex House Democratic rules to her advantage, and when it didn't work, allowed herself to be cast as a victim who was kicked off the committee.
Once members have a seat on an exclusive committee, all they typically need to do to stay on it is keep it is as their first choice. If Porter really wanted to stay on Financial Services, critics say, she should have prioritized it.
“She chose to ‘get removed’ from Financial Services,” said one member of the panel, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “You can’t be that choosy.”
Advocates of the committee-approval process say it is designed to ensure there is diversity — racial, gender and geographic — on the committees. Members can lobby the steering committee for waivers; eventually the entire caucus ratifies assignments.
But Ocasio-Cortez called the process a “black box.” She said she and Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) were “pretty lined up” for positions on the Energy and Commerce Committee — another exclusive panel — but “that rug got pulled out from under us.”
In the end, Porter made no secret of her disappointment.
In a tweet, she pointed out that others in the same situation got waivers. "I did not," she wrote. "I play by the rules."
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If a unionization effort at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, succeeds, it could galvanize similar campaigns at other Amazon facilities. (photo: Jared Ragland/The New Yorker)
ALSO SEE: Tensions High at Amazon Warehouse as Milestone
Union Vote Gets Underway
Charles Bethea | The Alabama Workers Trying to Unionize an Amazon Fulfillment Center
Charles Bethea, The New Yorker
Bethea writes: "South of Birmingham, warehouse employees are voting on whether to form a union. Their decision could have ripple effects around the country."
ne afternoon in late February, a sixty-five-year-old Alabamian named Randy Hadley stood on a street corner outside an Amazon facility in Bessemer, twenty minutes south of Birmingham. It was about time for a shift change, but the expected exodus from the enormous fulfillment center, which employs nearly six thousand workers, wasn’t happening. “Amazon plays with us,” Hadley said, shrugging. “Sometimes they let them out early during the day. Sometimes they let them drift in and drift out. Usually, it’s a pretty good trickle coming out right about now.” (A spokesman for Amazon, when asked about this, replied, “Due to COVID, shift start times and break times are being staggered to promote social distancing.”)
Hadley, the president of the mid-South council of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, has an easy manner and a white goatee. He’s spent most of the past forty years organizing poultry factories and nursing homes, and he didn’t mind waiting—an opportunity to unionize Amazon doesn’t come around often. Although Amazon employees have unionized in other countries, no Amazon facility in the U.S. has a union. Alabama is a so-called right-to-work state, and Amazon, which opened the fulfillment center a year ago, was one of the largest employers to come to Bessemer since a Pullman-Standard train-car plant shut down, in 1981.
Last June, however, Hadley got an e-mail from a man named Darryl Richardson, who had filled out a form on the R.W.D.S.U. Web site. “I had Googled which union could represent Amazon,” Richardson told me. “R.W.D.S.U., they came up.” The form asked for his name, address, and phone number, and had a box for writing in queries. Richardson wrote: “How do I go about organizing?”
Hadley called Richardson and suggested a meeting. “We met one-on-one in Tuscaloosa, at Dreamland BBQ,” Richardson told me. “We ordered dinner—ribs—and we got to talking about what they gonna do and how would they do it. Strategizing.” Soon afterward, Richardson got a few other employees together who felt the way that he did about conditions at the facility. “We started meeting with a few people here in Bessemer, at the hotels,” Hadley told me. Then he and the union headed out to the fulfillment center.
“When we got here, we realized, Wait a minute, there’s more than five thousand employees here!” Hadley said. “That’s more than we thought. I actually turned around—we were standing down there at that gate—and looked at one of the guys who was handing out leaflets, and I go, ‘We gonna need a bigger boat.’ ”
That was last fall. The union started collecting authorization cards—they amassed more than three thousand—and the National Labor Relations Board decided that the union had enough support to hold a vote. Amazon insisted that the election should be held in person, but the board, which has been allowing mail-in balloting since the pandemic began, ruled against the company. A seven-week balloting period began last month and will end on March 29th. The effort has garnered international headlines, and a handful of the employees who have been among the most involved, like Richardson, have spoken to reporters from across the country. One of the employees I talked to, Jennifer Bates, is slated to speak at a congressional hearing on Wednesday. Late last month, Joe Biden unexpectedly offered a statement of clear, albeit nonspecific, support for the union push. “Unions lift up workers, both union and non-union, and especially Black and brown workers,” Biden said. Though he did not mention Amazon by name, he referred to “workers in Alabama and all across America.”
If the effort in Bessemer succeeds, it could galvanize similar campaigns at other facilities. “We’ve already got contacts at other Amazons that we’ve started meeting with,” Hadley told me, fanning out his union flyers before him, as a few vehicles approached the traffic light where he stood. A county official told More Perfect Union that Amazon had asked for the pattern of the light to be altered, so that employees could get to and from the facility more quickly. This leaves less time during stops for organizers to talk to departing workers. “We’ve timed them,” Hadley said. (An Amazon spokesperson denied any attempt to limit conversations between the company’s employees and the union, adding that Amazon works with local officials to insure that traffic flows to and from its facilities as smoothly as possible.)
A woman behind the wheel of an old Honda held eye contact with Hadley for just long enough, then lowered her window. “I’ve already voted,” she said, smiling and taking a flyer anyway. She thanked Hadley, he blessed her, and she drove off. This ritual was repeated a dozen more times in the next half hour. A few cars waved Hadley away, a few ignored him. Some had door knockers hanging from their rearview mirrors with the words “Vote No.”
“A lot of people have already voted,” Hadley said, returning to his clump of grass. “They’re tired. I think it’s gonna be close.”
Amazon has urged its employees to vote against the union in a variety of ways, highlighting the strength of its benefits package and its entry-level hourly pay—more than double the minimum wage in Alabama, which is the federal rate of $7.25 per hour. The company also created a Web site urging workers to “Do It Without Dues”—an arguably misleading message, because in Alabama members of unions cannot be required to pay dues. Amazon has held mandatory meetings for employees at the Bessemer facility about how unions work, and the R.W.D.S.U. has accused the company of spreading misinformation in these sessions. (An Amazon spokesperson said it was important that all employees understand the facts of joining a union and the election process, and that the company hosted regular information sessions to answer their questions.)
In early March, Amazon held a virtual roundtable featuring employees who oppose the unionization effort, including a forty-two-year-old supervisor named J. C. Thompson and a forty-four-year-old problem solver at the fulfillment center named Carla Johnson. I spoke to Thompson and Johnson by phone; an Amazon communications director, who had arranged the call, joined us on the line. Both employees emphasized that they were already getting what they needed. Johnson, who was diagnosed with cancer last year, and is now cancer-free after a series of treatments, praised the company’s health-insurance plan. Thompson said, “I can walk up to any manager and I can talk to them about anything. I don’t need a third party negotiating or talking for me.”
Meanwhile, R.W.D.S.U. staffers and volunteers are making hundreds of calls a day, according to the union, reaching more than five thousand employees by phone or text. The union hopes to reach every employee at the facility by the end of the month. Joshua Brewer, the lead R.W.D.S.U. organizer for the campaign, told me that “the conversation always seems to kind of circle back to a worker’s desire to just have somebody there on their side.” Workers’ reactions aren’t always positive, and Brewer has gotten the occasional “Fuck you, don’t call me!” and “I’m not funding liberals.” But, he said, “we’re not under any expectation that everyone we talk to is going to be supportive.”
In Bessemer, after speaking with Hadley, I spoke one-on-one with Richardson and two other employees at the fulfillment center who have been active in the union effort. I asked them why they support it, what they think a union could accomplish, and how they expect the historic election to turn out. Their accounts have been condensed and edited for clarity.
Darryl Richardson, fifty-one
“I used to work at a company called Faurecia. We made the seats for Mercedes. And we was union. And some of my people, from Detroit, they was U.A.W., and they worked for Chrysler, G.M. So, I’ve always been union. Raised union. My dad, he worked at TAMKO, from Tuscaloosa, a roofing company. They was union.
“I’ve been at Amazon for about a year. And I thought it was a good place to work. Amazon, man—nice company, nice facility to work for. But, after I got there, a couple of months, I realized there need to be some changes. They’re changing your schedule while you sleep. You’ve got single parents out there. I got four girls—they’re grown, though. But we shouldn’t go to sleep knowing we’ve got to be at work at seven-fifteen, then wake up in the morning scared it changed to six-fifteen. You’ve got to change the whole plan in an instant. [A spokesman for Amazon insisted that the company’s policy is to alert employees to “mandatory extra time” as much as three weeks in advance and no later than “before the employees’ lunch break the day prior.”]
“I’m a picker. Picker is pulling apart the items and put it in a tote. We’re told which tote to put it in and then push it down the conveyor, and then it goes to a packer, and they pack it and put it in a box and send her off. I’m one of the top pickers in the facility—that’s what I was told. The other day, on the second floor, the learning ambassador, he said, ‘Darryl, you’re the top picker on the second floor today.’ I’m fifty-one years old. And I give them all I can get. I get tired. After three o’clock, I’m drained. I try not to go to the bathroom. I try not to leave off my station, because I don’t want to get no T.O.T. time.
“Any time you leave off your machine—go and get some water, use the bathroom—every minute you are not on your station scanning, that’s T.O.T.: time off task. If you get up to two hours, it’ll lead to termination. I feel like, if you’ve got to go to the bathroom, it’s not fair to get docked for it. Sometimes the bathrooms and the water on each floor are not working. And you’ve got to go to the next floor.
“I think we should all make twenty an hour. And our breaks—out of ten, eleven hours a day, we only get two breaks. And the breaks don’t change if they add an hour to you: it’s your two breaks. So that need to be changed. [An Amazon spokesperson told me that employees leaving their workstation for two hours, not counting breaks, without a reasonable explanation would be subject to the company’s time-off-task policy, and that employees receive an additional fifteen-minute break if they work more than twelve hours.]
“On break, I go out to my truck. When I talk to employees, to the young generation—because they’re the ones we need to talk to, because they’re confused—they don’t know nothing about the union. I tell them, ‘The union don’t come here to take away our pay. If that’s the case, what we calling them for?’ And I said, ‘Before you all make a decision, you all just think about this: If the union was so bad, why are they doing everything they can to keep it out of here?’ And I leave that with them. ‘Why they telling you all to vote no?’
“This an anti-union state. They bring companies down here because they feel like we not going to stick together. But I’m glad to see we the first to try. And I believe the other Amazons around—not just the other Amazons but everybody—I really think they’ll follow. And I hope they do, because we’re not the only one going through this.
“Sometime at night, I sit there and think about, Is what I’m doing wrong, or, Why the company’s fighting so hard? All we want to do is get paid a better rate, get treated with respect, have the opportunity to move up, job security—all of that. What I don’t understand is why a company will fire you when the only thing you want for them to do is be fair?”
Catherine Highsmith, twenty-four
“I slacked off in high school. And so I joined the Army. And then that didn’t work out, either, so I’m here. I have the G.I. Bill, but I’m not planning on going back to school yet. I’ve been actively seeking other employment, but it’s kind of hard when Amazon gives you health insurance—right now, that’s a pretty valuable thing to have. My parents are senior. They live in a camper about forty miles that way. They both work.
“The thing about Amazon is that they don’t care what job you had. They don’t care about your education. All you have to do is pass a drug test. And they said seventeen-fifty an hour, and I was, like, ‘I’m not doing anything else!’ I work night shift, so when I started, it was an extra two dollars and fifty cents an hour. I do ‘stow.’ You stand on a pad and you pull something out of a plastic tote and put it in a pod. I also used to do ‘problem-solve,’ which is where, if something won’t scan, you fix it.
“I had heard that they wouldn’t let you go take a piss, and all that stuff. But when I got there, I’ll be honest, I was pleasantly surprised. I’m allowed to go piss whenever I want. Then you start to understand that if you don’t talk, and you work really fast, you’re fine, but if you have a problem—if they mess up your time card, or if you get sick or something like that, if you don’t follow their rules perfectly—then that’s where you start running into problems. I’ve seen it happen to lots of people. And I’ve only been there since October.
“I got sick, and it wasn’t COVID—it was just regular sick. If you go on leave, they won’t take you off leave until they get around to it. And I didn’t get paid that week. They were, like, ‘Check back next week.’ Meanwhile, I have to go home and tell my roommate, ‘I don’t have the electric bill. I don’t have the rent money.’ And they’re, like, ‘Not a problem. That’s just how the leave system is.’ Imagine if you had to go home and tell your kids, ‘Sorry, I didn’t get paid because I got sick one day.’ And that’s the whole point of this union thing. It’s not about you. [An Amazon spokesperson told me that human resources manually inputs the returning employees’ information to insure there are no breaks in the payment process, adding that the process depends upon employees promptly filing their paperwork.]
“Stuff that I saw and had to participate in in the Army pushed me pretty far left, I would say. I don’t want that to create a bias, because there’s a lot of people who are pro-union that want nothing to do with leftism or Democrats.
“The first week that I showed up to work, the union organizers were already out on the street. I took the card immediately.
“It’s cooled down now that everybody has their ballots. But, leading up to it, we had to go to these union-busting classes. The last one I had was at two in the morning. One before that was at, like, twelve. I would ask questions, but a lot of the response was, ‘You can see me after and I’ll explain it to you further.’ So it’s, like, ‘I’ll give you some bullshit privately, but this is only for pro-Amazon discussions.’ So I quickly learned that I shouldn’t do that, because I don’t want to get in trouble.
“You see all this propaganda that they have. If I go to the break room—it’s socially distanced, and you use a plastic cubicle, and they have these little flyers that are set up in these frames. And it’s all these people saying, ‘I don’t need a union. I can speak for myself. I like the way things are.’ When I noticed this at first, those people seemed to only be managers or process assistants or learning ambassadors in leadership roles. They’ve been promoted. If you ask somebody who’s been working in stow for the past six months, they probably wouldn’t have the same answers. [An Amazon spokesperson told me, “The materials printed do not include salaried leaders. Those who are featured volunteered to participate.”]
“They had some woman in one of the classes—she was telling me, ‘You might lose your benefits, or your pay might go down, because of the union negotiation.’ I asked why. And she said, ‘Well, it’s a negotiation.’ And I was, like, ‘Well, if you like paying us X amount of dollars and like us having X amount of benefits, what’s the pros for Amazon taking that away?’ And she just kind of deflected and was, like, ‘I didn’t say they were going to—I said it could happen.’
“And you’re not trying to raise your profile. They could find anything. They could be, like, ‘Well, your rates were bad this day. You didn’t stow or problem-solve enough items per hour.’ If they were super dastardly about it. . . . I have nothing. My parents don’t have any money. So I hate to be cowardly, but that’s just kind of how I’ve had to do things.
“When I took the job at Amazon, I didn’t foresee that I’d be working there more than a couple of years. This is not a career thing for me. And that’s O.K. if it is for some people, but I’m still really young.
“My hope for this, if it works out, is it will embolden another place. Because the one in Bessemer—it’s not all that bad there. It’s a new facility. But somewhere else where they’re getting treated really badly—I’ve read the stories. Basically, if it works out, somebody else might say, ‘We can do that, too. We don’t have to sit here and listen to this crap.’ ”
Jennifer Bates, forty-eight
“Marion is near where Coretta Scott King was born and raised. I’m from the same area. I’m the oldest of six. I have three children and seven grandchildren. I started working when I was thirteen. My first little job was at an okra field in the city. That was one of the things in the summertime that most of the kids would do. We would go out there, for a little extra change for the week. By the end of the week, we may have had a dollar or something.
“After turning sixteen, I worked at a local restaurant in my home town with my aunt. I’ve done a lot of things. Working with the police department, as a dispatcher. I’ve been an assistant manager, secretary for a pastor, worked in ministry, worked with youth.
“I worked in stow when I first got here. In the decant department, where I work at now, it’s receiving. That’s when all the trucks come in, we take the boxes off, open them, put them in containers that go to the stow department, scan them in the system, and make sure the count and everything is in. I’m an ambassador now, too. That’s the first step of moving up. We train new employees and also assist management. With stow, you have to walk up and down the stairs if you have to put stuff on the top. It’s a lot of walking, a lot of standing, and then for the pay that we’re getting it’s not worth it.
“Going to break, they do security checks. If the buzzer goes off on you, then you have to scan your badge. You’re not going to lunch now, even if you’re hungry, because I have to go in this little room, undress, take off our jackets, remove all our pockets, pants, take our shoes off, to make sure we didn’t steal anything. That counts against my break. [A spokesperson for Amazon insisted that this was not company policy.]
“You hear the complaints about people going to H.R. ‘They take our hours away from us because they made a mistake and they didn’t give us the mandatory overtime in time.’
“Since the union surfaced, Amazon has tried to do what we’ve been crying out for. They’re sending human resources on the floor on break, so you’ll have time to go talk to them. ‘Is there anything you need? Can we help you?’ They’re being so nice—it’s like they brought out the candy jar.
“They’re giving promotions, to make the younger generation feel good: ‘Hey, I’m not voting for the union, because they just promoted me.’ [An Amazon spokesperson insisted that the company’s promotion process and pace has remained the same since the facility opened, and that it is standard practice for human resources to regularly engage with all associates.] Younger people probably don’t really understand the union, except for the ones whose parents and grandparents have told them, ‘Go sign the card—take it back now. You all need it.’ Still, some are saying, ‘They’re going to take five hundred out of your check every year’ and ‘You’re going to lose your benefits.’
“This is what they tell us at the meetings. One time, there was a Caucasian lady and a Black lady—they both asked about the pay. ‘We’re doing so much work,’ one said. ‘I don’t think we’re getting paid enough.’ The woman running the meeting said, ‘I’m surprised that you all are saying this, because you’re making fifteen an hour and you’re only paying four hundred for rent.’ One girl said, ‘What do you mean? You think it’s cheap to live in Alabama? Where did you get that from?’ I’m sitting behind her, and I said, ‘I pay twelve hundred a month for rent in Birmingham.’ It was one of those things, like, ‘You all are living in low-income, so you ought to be grateful.’
“Amazon says, ‘The union can’t promise you anything.’ But Amazon hasn’t promised us, either, because everything they say they’re giving us—they can take it back, because it’s not in a contract.
“I’ve changed some minds. One girl, she worked with me on the line, in receiving. She’s, like, ‘Why do you all want a union? We’re going to lose our insurance. They said if we could vote the union in, they’re going to shut the plant down.’ So I began to explain to her, ‘Did you know that the organizers, we’re the union, we negotiate with Amazon on what we want?’ She shook her head.
“A lot of folks quit—they couldn’t take it. But we also have a lot of people who stay because we still have bills to pay. We still have to eat. It’s a pandemic right now, and a lot of other places aren’t hiring.
“We didn’t realize it was going to catch fire the way it is, because we’re a small group of people who just want to make a change in our building. So I feel good that there are a lot of people who’s been crying inside now ready to speak outside that ‘O.K., I can say something now and somebody will hear me.’ ”
Randy Hadley, the president of R.W.D.S.U.’s mid-South council, sixty-five
“The first day we came here was October the twentieth. We’ve been here every day since, except Christmas and Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday. We have folks here from two-thirty in the morning to seven in the morning. [Organizers are also there for the evening shift change, from 3:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.] We catch as many people as we can. It’s been about fifteen to one this past hour, Yes to No.
“Labor movements, where we drop the ball—and I’ve been in this business forty-three years, so I can say this—is we don’t market ourselves as well as we should. You see these signs? We’ve got the upside-down Amazon smile. We got the Web site and TikTok set up before we arrived. The day we showed up, we put signs in the ground. ‘RWDSU on Your Side.’ ‘Mail Your YES Ballot.’ People steal them and damage them. We put them back.
“Just getting into an election is something no one ever thought we’d be able to do with the number of people here, and the turnover. The employer didn’t take us seriously when we first came down here. ‘It’s just a little old damn union. They’ll just get a couple of cards signed and be on their way.’
“We represent about twenty thousand people in the mid-South council. Poultry plants, nursing homes, dog-food plants, meatpacking houses. We’re not afraid of working. We’ll come out here and stand. Like I say, when you hit Goliath in the nose, you better hit him every day.
“Not everyone is nice. We get people saying ‘Fuck you!’ The old one-fingered salute. But they’re usually in management and stuff, pulling up in a B.M.W. or a Mercedes or a Denali. You know they’re not making fifteen an hour.
“They’ve shortened this traffic light, that light, and they’ve done a light over there. All the entrances. And the way we figured that out is we’d seen two pickup trucks parked off a distance. We actually thought they were surveilling us. I said, ‘Let’s go over and see what this cat’s doing.’ So we walked over there, and he’s sitting in his car with his computer and stuff, and I looked down and I told him, ‘You might want to be careful over here. It’s a little dangerous.’ And then I said, ‘What you doing, anyway?’ He says, ‘I’m doing a time study of traffic.’ On a Saturday afternoon? I found that odd. I was looking at his paperwork as we were talking. I said to my guy, ‘They’re getting ready to recalibrate the traffic lights, so people can’t stop and chat with us.’ And that’s exactly what they did.
“Amazon is trying to turn them at their meetings. During a union-busting meeting, the buster asked if anyone had been a union member. One woman, she said, ‘I’ve been a member.’ The union buster said, ‘What union was it?’ She said, ‘Actually, it was that one standing out there at the gate. I know those guys and those ladies personally—they’re great people.’ Well, they didn’t ask her to come back to the next meeting.
“History shows you’ll have around thirty per cent turnout. I think we’ll have a bigger turnout here by the time they start counting ballots. But I bet it’ll be a week before all the challenged ballots are resolved. Amazon is gonna do everything in the world to delay, delay, delay. That’s been their goal since Day One. [An Amazon spokesperson said that an in-person election, which Amazon wanted, would have been shorter than a mail-in election.] But, if two thousand people vote, we just need a thousand and one to vote Yes.”
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The vice president's home at the Naval Observatory, seen here in 2016, reportedly is in need of repairs. (photo: Mark Wilson/Getty)
Man Arrested With Guns, Ammo Outside of Kamala Harris' Vice Presidential Residence
Alana Wise, NPR
Wise writes:
man was arrested Wednesday afternoon near the Naval Observatory and charged with several counts related to weapons and ammunition, according the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department. The Naval Observatory is the vice presidential residence, though Vice President Harris and her family do not live at the estate yet.
Paul Murray, 31, of San Antonio was first detained by the U.S. Secret Service based on an intelligence bulletin originating from Texas. He was later formally arrested by Washington police. A rifle and ammunition were recovered from his vehicle.
The arrest comes as the district is in a state of heightened security following the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt at the U.S. Capitol.
Violent pro-Trump extremists, fueled by the idea that President Biden and Harris had stolen the election from Donald Trump, stormed the Capitol, threatening lawmakers and law enforcement.
Since then, security and intelligence officials have redoubled their warnings of the dangers of homegrown extremism and the way it manifests.
Harris has not moved into the residence at the Naval Observatory due to a need for repairs at the building, media outlets have reported
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Joseph Biggs, left, and Ethan Nordean walking toward the Capitol before the mob attack on Jan. 6 in Washington. (photo: Carolyn Caster/Associated Press)
Proud Boys Leaders in Four States Are Charged in Capitol Riot
Adam Goldman and Alan Feuer, The New York Times
Prosecutors accused prominent members of the far-right nationalist group of conspiring together in connection with the Jan. 6 attack.
.B.I. agents have arrested two organizers for the Proud Boys in Philadelphia and North Carolina, and prosecutors filed new charges against two other prominent members of the far-right group in Florida and Washington State as federal authorities continued their crackdown on its leadership ranks, three law enforcement officials said on Wednesday.
With the new conspiracy indictment, prosecutors have now brought charges against a total of 13 people identified in court papers as members of the Proud Boys. Federal investigators have described the group, which appeared in force in Washington on Jan. 6, as one of the chief instigators of the riot at the Capitol that left five people dead, including a Capitol Police officer.
In the indictment, prosecutors accused Charles Donohoe, a Proud Boys leader from North Carolina, and Zach Rehl, the president of the group’s chapter in Philadelphia, of conspiring to interfere with law enforcement officers at the Capitol and obstruct the certification of President Biden’s electoral victory. Two other high-ranking Proud Boys who were already facing similar charges — Ethan Nordean of Auburn, Wash., and Joseph Biggs of Ormond Beach, Fla. — were also implicated as part of the conspiracy.
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A child soldier (C) in an irregular armed group, Los Pozos, Colombia. (photo: Getty
Humanitarian Group Condemns Recruitment of Child Soldiers in Colombia
teleSUR
Excerpt: "The SOS Children's Villages NGO on Wednesday warned about the ongoing recruitment of child soldiers in Colombia since the pandemic outbreak."
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A refining plant in Houston. From the 1960s, a mass of files shows the oil industry began to grasp the damage to health caused by the burning of fossil fuels. (photo: Mark Felix/Getty)
Oil Firms Knew Decades Ago Fossil Fuels Posed Grave Health Risks, Files Reveal
Oliver Milman, Guardian UK
Milman writes:
Exclusive: documents seen by Guardian show companies fought clean-air rules despite being aware of harm caused by air pollution
he oil industry knew at least 50 years ago that air pollution from burning fossil fuels posed serious risks to human health, only to spend decades aggressively lobbying against clean air regulations, a trove of internal documents seen by the Guardian reveal.
The documents, which include internal memos and reports, show the industry was long aware that it created large amounts of air pollution, that pollutants could lodge deep in the lungs and be “real villains in health effects”, and even that its own workers may be experiencing birth defects among their children.
But these concerns did little to stop oil and gas companies, and their proxies, spreading doubt about the growing body of science linking the burning of fossil fuels to an array of health problems that kill millions of people around the world each year. Echoing the fossil-fuel industry’s history of undermining of climate science, oil and gas interests released a torrent of material aimed at raising uncertainty over the harm caused by air pollution and usedthis to deter US lawmakers from placing further limits on pollutants.
“The response from fossil-fuel interests has been from the same playbook – first they know, then they scheme, then they deny and then they delay,” said Geoffrey Supran, a researcher at Harvard University who has studied the history of fossil-fuel companies and climate change. “They’ve fallen back on delay, subtle forms of propaganda and the undermining of regulation.”
The effects of burning large amounts of coal, oil and gas from factories, cars and other sources has long been evident, with major cities in the US and Europe sometimes shrouded in smog before the advance of modern clean-air laws.
From the 1960s, however, a mass of historical documents from corporate archives at libraries in the US and Canada, scientific journals and paperwork released in legal cases shows the oil industry began to grasp the damage to health caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
In internal memos and reports, Imperial Oil, an Exxon subsidiary, acknowledged in 1967 the petroleum industry is a “major contributor to many of the key forms of pollution” and took surveys of “mothers who worried about possible smog effects”.
In an internal technical report in 1968, Shell went further, warning that air pollution “may, in extreme situations, be deleterious to health” and acknowledging the oil industry “reluctantly” must accept that cars “are by far the greatest sources of air pollution”. The report states that sulphur dioxide, given off by the burning of oil, can cause “difficulty in breathing” while nitrogen dioxide, also given off by vehicles and power plants, can cause lung damage and that “there will be a clamor to reduce [nitrogen dioxide] emissions, probably based on suspected long-term chronic effects”.
Small particles given off by fossil fuels, meanwhile, are the “real villains in health effects”, the Shell report admits, as they can bring toxins, including carcinogens, “deep into the lungs which would otherwise be removed in the throat.”
These microscopic specks of soot and liquid, known as particulate matter, are expelled when fuels are burned and inhaled by people. In 1971, Esso, a forerunner to Exxon, sampled particles in New York City and found, for the first time, the air was rife with tiny fragments of aluminum, magnesium and other metals. Esso scientists noted that gases from industrial smokestacks were “hot, dirty and contain high concentrations of pollutants” and suggested further testing was needed for symptoms including “eye irritation, excess coughing, or bronchial effects”.
By 1980, Imperial Oil had outlined plans to investigate incidences of cancers and “birth defects among industry worker offspring.” Esso experts, meanwhile, raised the “possibility for improved particulate control” in new vehicle designs to reduce the emission of harmful pollution.
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