29 March 21
Off that Couch and Help Out … Yes You!
We have overwhelming numbers in our favor. What we need “you” to say is, “yes me.” I’ll be the one. It’s never fair, it’s never ideal or perfect. The only way to make it work is reject failure and take responsibility.
Yes you. Who is better suited?
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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29 March 21
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WHY I AM UNCOMPROMISING ON FUNDING: The stakes are high. We can have a powerful, influential publication — that serves the community or we can have nothing. It's a thin line. "We the community" often get less, because we accept less. Enough of that. Watch us fight, you fight too. Step up with what you can afford, watch what we do with it. In peace and solidarity. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News
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Greg Palast and Thom Hartmann | The Oil Industry Floats on Lies
Greg Palast and Thom Hartmann, Greg Palast's Website
t wasn’t human error that caused America’s greatest environmental disaster, the Exxon Valdez catastrophe, it was inhuman corporate miserliness — the oil industry’s systemic fraud, corruption, and penny-pinching la-di-da view of safety. In this edition of The Thom Hartmann Program, Hartman and Palast discuss the Exxon Valdez on the 32 anniversary of the catastrophe.
Thom Hartmann: 32 years ago today, the Exxon Valdez disaster happened. The myth that I think most of us believe, the story that was told — in fact a movie was made out of it — is that the captain of the ship was a drunk and therefore it ran aground… But there’s a much deeper story here and one of the guys who was on that story at the time, doing the research, publishing articles about it is the author of Vultures’ Picnic, which features the full Exxon Valdez story. It’s one of Greg Palast’s absolutely does books…Greg, welcome back to the program. Tell us the true story of the Exxon Valdez.
Greg Palast: Yeah, let me declare that I was the chief investigator for the people that owned the shoreline, the Chugach Natives of Alaska. I lived up there with the natives. I was up there for a few years doing the investigation.
Here’s the story: There’s this whole myth that there’s a drunken skipper, like someone at the wheel of a car who’s drunk and smashes into a rock. No, he was below deck sleeping it off. That’s not how that happened… Anyone could’ve taken that ship through there because they had the very first GPS system in the world on that ship. It was very easy to sail through and not hit a rock. There’s a big, giant light on Bligh Reef, they should have missed it. But, believe it or not, Exxon had the radar turned off — I kid you not. The radar was turned off. Why? Because it was broken. It was too expensive to fix. It’s not like your $200 Garmin. We’re talking a $2 million piece of equipment, which took a lot of people, millions of dollars of training. They turned off the radar.
The other thing is that it hit at Bligh Reef at the Tatitlek village. You have to understand, the Chugach Natives, my clients who I was investigating for, they were standing on the beach, watching this ship come towards them and smash into the rocks. And here’s the tragedy. it destroyed their village, it destroyed 1200 miles of coastline, it destroyed their lives… They’d cut a deal, the Chugach Natives had given Exxon and BP the Port of Valdez — a billion dollar property — for $1. But they said, what we care about is not your money, we want these waters clean and safe. You put us in charge of the safety. Number one, you must have state-of-the-art radar. And they got Exxon to agree to it. And of course they turned off the radar… The second condition is that you have to have safety equipment at Bligh Reef in case oil spill.
It’s very easy, by the way, to clean up an oil spill. It’s really simple. You put rubber boom around it and then you get a containment ship and you suck it out. So you put on the rubber on it and suck it out and you’re done — you would have never heard of the Exxon Valdez. Exxon lied and BP lied and said that there was spill equipment right there at Bligh Reef, right where the ship hit, but it was a complete lie. They signed a document. It was a fraud.
And even worse, part of the deal for getting Valdez was that they hire the natives who were experts in being able to get into that icy water, with special suits on to surround a ship where there’s a spill. But kust before the tanker hit, they’d fired the natives to save money. They never put out the equipment. They fired the natives who were prepared and trained to surround a stricken vessel and stop the oil from flowing out, by pumping it out. You would have never heard of the Exxon Valdez except that Exxon and its partner British Petroleum lied and lied and lied — and that’s why we still know the name Exxon Valdez 33 years later.
Hartmann: I think we also know the name of Joseph…
Palast: Hazelwood. Look, if you’re a captain, you shouldn’t be drunk. But he wasn’t driving the car, he wasn’t driving the vessel. The problem was,
Hartmann: Right, he was in the back seat.
Palast: He was below decks, sleeping it off. So was the first and second mate, the third mate, he wasn’t exactly expert, but they had the radar. Any 12-year old who’s played a video game would know how to move that ship by following the GPS. That’s all you have to do. It’s a big, giant, wide channel.
Hartmann: But if you’ve got no GPS, you’ve got a problem.
Palast:vYeah. And, by the way, on top of everything else, while Exxon Mobil has run giant, full-page ads for several years about their safe vessels, because they have double hulls. Well, they didn’t. The Exxon Valdez had a single hull because Exxon and BP had successfully fought congressional demands to have every tanker out of Valdez have a double hull. They beat that, said it wasn’t necessary. When the tanker hit, if it had hit the reef and had the double hull, they wouldn’t have lost 12 ounces of oil let alone, you know, we don’t know how many gallons, but about 42 million gallons of oil.
Hartmann: Wow… What was the consequences of this to Exxon, other than bad publicity, which they seem to have been able to greenwash away? And what happened to your clients, the Native Americans there?
Palast: Well, oh boy, I fought Exxon for years on their behalf with the legal team and we uncovered this massive fraud. And they said, if you make the fraud public, if you use the F-word — fraud — we will never give you a penny. So they gave the natives a few shekels. What they did was they basically bought the natives’ land. Why? Cause they actually wanted to use it for oil work staging. You can still go to the Chugach lands, like to Sleepy Bay, and if you stick your hand in the gravel at the beach at Sleepy Bay — I go about every 10 years — if you stick your hand in the gravel, it’ll come up with goo and smell like a gas station.
This fantasy that nature is an endless toilet that flushes itself clean is nonsense. So they’ve still got the hydrocarbon. It killed their seals, it made their sardines that they live off inedible. I was at the Chenega village. They lived 100% off the land. Everything was poisoned. It destroyed their way of life. And a judge ruled that the native way of life, living off the land — which they have lived off for 3000 years — a judge said, look, your native life is just a lifestyle choice, you know, you could always just go to a supermarket (which is a hundred miles away by air). So they got nothing for the destruction of their way of life. It destroyed those villages. It destroyed those villages. It was horrendous, and it’s still there… And Exxon is still putting out the lie that nature cleans itself. Again, it’s just a toilet you can keep flushing. Because who goes up there? This is really remote.
Hartmann: Is any of this still being litigated?
Palast: No. By the way, Exxon told me when I tried to cut a deal with them, they said, you know, buddy, we can wait you out 20 years in a courtroom. And I thought, well, that’s an exaggeration. No, it was 20 years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled and cut out 90% of the jury and court judgment against Exxon — 90% of the court judgment! It was the case that virtually ended punitive damages in America. So I don’t think people understand what happens with these oil spills. It is permanent destruction and you’re finished. These guys lie. The oil industry floats on lies.
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Dr. Deborah Birx served as response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force. (photo: Getty Images/AFP)
Feuds, Fibs and Finger-Pointing: Trump Officials Say Coronavirus Response Was Worse Than Known
Dan Diamond, The Washington Post
Diamond writes:
'That’s what bothers me every day’: Birx and others admit failures that hampered the White House response
everal top doctors in the Trump administration offered their most pointed and direct criticism of the government response to coronavirus last year, with one of them arguing that hundreds of thousands of covid-19 deaths could have been prevented.
They also admitted their own missteps as part of a CNN special that aired Sunday night, saying that some Trump administration statements the White House fiercely defended last year were misleading or outright falsehoods.
“When we said there were millions of tests available, there weren’t, right?” said Brett Giroir, who served as the nation’s coronavirus testing czar, referencing the administration’s repeated claims in March 2020 that anyone who sought a coronavirus test could get one. “There were components of the test available, but not the full meal deal.”
“People really believed in the White House that testing was driving cases, rather than testing was a way for us to stop cases,” said Deborah Birx, who served as White House coronavirus coordinator. Birx also said that most of the virus-related deaths in the United States after the first 100,000 in the spring surge could have been prevented with a more robust response. “That’s what bothers me every day,” she said.
CNN’s special with Giroir, Birx and four other senior physicians was pitched as a tell-all with former Trump officials, who are increasingly speaking out about what went wrong after more than 400,000 people in the United States died with the virus during the Trump administration. An additional 130,000-plus have died of covid-19 since President Biden’s inauguration, according to data compiled by The Washington Post
But the finger-pointing and portrayals of some episodes prompted critics to say that former Trump administration officials who managed the pandemic response have turned to a new project: managing their legacies.
“It’s ridiculous,” said Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s public health school and a prominent pandemic commentator. “Brett Giroir knew we had a problem with testing. With PPE. With vaccine distribution. He told me as much. But he felt he needed to say what the administration wanted to hear publicly.”
The CNN special is among the first of a slew of in-progress books and other projects plumbing the Trump administration’s oft-chaotic response to the coronavirus, providing former officials an opportunity to air their side of the story — often in a far more favorable light than previously reported. Some of those officials also have compared notes and aligned their recollections, a dynamic detailed by Politico last week, as they work to rehabilitate their reputations and shape future perspectives on the pandemic.
“I was marginalized every day. I mean, that is no question. The majority of the people in the White House did not take this seriously,” said Birx, who increasingly broke with the administration on its testing strategy and mitigation efforts as the year progressed. Birx said she was personally rebuked by Trump after warning in an August interview that Americans needed to take strict safety precautions because the virus was “extraordinarily widespread.”
“He felt very strongly that I misrepresented the pandemic in the United States, that I made it out to be much worse than it is,” she said. “I feel like I didn’t even make it out as bad as it was.”
Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that political meddling with his agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports — the vaunted scientific reviews that researchers use to detail their findings — went further than had been reported last year. Redfield alleged that Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar personally intervened to try to change reports that political officials did not like.
“I was on more than one occasion called by the secretary and his leadership, directing me to change the MMWR. He may deny that, but it’s true,” Redfield told CNN. Azar has denied the claim, and several former senior HHS staff said in a joint statement that the secretary and his deputies “always regarded the MMWR as sacrosanct.”
One of the disputes between Azar and Redfield centered on CDC’s decision to publish an advisory committee’s recommendations on which Americans should be prioritized for the coronavirus vaccine, said two former officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Stephen Hahn, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, told CNN interviewer Sanjay Gupta that his relationship with Azar deteriorated after the health secretary revoked the agency’s ability to regulate some coronavirus tests. Hahn framed the issue as a “line in the sand” that put patients at risk and, responding to Gupta’s questions, implied that Azar had berated him during the dispute.
“There is definitely that sort of pressure, Sanjay. You know, it’s true. At the end of the day, someone’s trying to ask me to do something that I don’t think is right,” Hahn said. Azar told CNN that he disputed Hahn’s recollection of the conversation, and said the then-FDA commissioner threatened to resign on their call, which Hahn denied.
Birx used her CNN interview to criticize Scott Atlas, a radiologist who was installed as a high-level White House adviser in August 2020 despite his lack of infectious-disease experience. Atlas caught the White House’s attention after defending the administration’s response and arguing concerns about the virus were overblown, and Trump quickly came to favor him over Birx and other officials.
“I told people I would not be in a meeting with Dr. Atlas again. I felt very strongly that I didn’t want an action that legitimized in any way his position,” said Birx. The Post last year reported on Birx’s clashes with Atlas and her efforts to warn about the pandemic’s risks that conflicted with the White House’s more optimistic response. CNN said Atlas didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Robert Kadlec, the former assistant secretary for preparedness and response, told CNN that early plans to ramp up coronavirus supplies by invoking the Defense Production Act — which would have compelled manufacturers to prioritize the administration’s supply requests — were slowed down by an administration fight over funding that dragged on through February. “The thing is, is that in order to invoke the Defense Production Act, you have to basically have a contract. That didn’t happen till April because we didn’t get our money till March,” Kadlec said.
While tell-alls are a regular Washington phenomenon as officials exit government and offer more candid personal perspectives on White House policy battles, some longtime hands noted the stakes are elevated in this case because of the historic importance of the coronavirus — and the United States’ unexpectedly poor performance.
“I think what makes the urgency greater is that the event was a once-in-a-100-year pandemic when more than half a million people died” in the United States, said William Pierce, a senior director at public-affairs firm APCO Worldwide and a former senior health official during the Bush administration. “Histories are going to be written about this for the next 100 years.”
Several former Trump officials defended the growing number of tell-all interviews, saying they are important to understand what went wrong.
“It could be a very valuable exercise to tell their stories and let people evaluate them so we’ll be better prepared next time,” said Joe Grogan, who led Trump’s domestic policy efforts and was part of the White House’s coronavirus task force before leaving the administration in May 2020.
Others were more critical of their former colleagues’ comments, saying that they had waited too long to speak out and are now attempting to rehabilitate their reputations.
For instance, Birx had praised Trump’s response after being installed as White House coronavirus coordinator in March 2020, commending his attentiveness to scientific literature — even as the then-president was pushing anti-malaria drugs such as hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus treatment over the objections of his scientific advisers.
“They were all complicit in a narrative to downplay the threat because they felt that’s what Trump wanted,” said another former senior Trump administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They manipulated their statements to please Trump right up until the point that it was painfully clear they had made a bad personal trade.”
Asked why they didn’t speak out sooner, some officials said they calculated that by staying in the administration, they were better able to influence the response, said eight people involved in the coronavirus response, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss still-confidential conversations.
But the damage to their reputations appears to have lingered, as many have gone to relatively low-profile roles since leaving the Trump administration. Birx this month joined an air-cleaning company and is serving as a senior fellow at the George W. Bush Institute. Hahn joined the board of a small therapeutics company, and Redfield is serving as an adviser on Maryland’s coronavirus response. Others like Giroir and Azar have yet to announce their next roles.
It’s a contrast to their predecessors in previous administrations, who often announced prominent positions shortly after leaving government. Margaret Hamburg, who served as Barack Obama’s FDA commissioner before stepping down in April 2015, was named five days later as foreign secretary of the National Academy of Medicine, an influential advisory group on health and science issues. Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who led HHS until the end of the Obama administration in January 2017, was announced six days later as the new president of American University in Washington, D.C.
CNN also interviewed Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert who’s now advising Biden and who was publicly critical of aspects of Trump’s response last year — unlike some of his political counterparts. The career civil servant has continued to speak out since Biden’s inauguration, recently lamenting the “lost opportunity” when Trump chose to get vaccinated in private rather than in public, and defending his own decision to stay in government service last year.
“When people just see you standing up there, they sometimes think you’re being complicit in the distortions emanating from the stage,” Fauci told the New York Times. “But I felt that if I stepped down, that would leave a void. Someone’s got to not be afraid to speak out the truth.”
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Joe Biden spoke as a candidate at a forum hosted by the gun groups Giffords and March For Our Lives. He pledged to devote $900 million to community gun violence intervention efforts in cities with high rates of gun violence. (photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
White House Causes Frustration in Private and Public Responses to Gun Violence
Juana Summers, NPR
Summers writes:
s President Biden called on senators to quickly pass legislation to tighten the nation's background checks system, he said that he did not need to "wait another minute" to address the epidemic of gun violence.
Biden's comments the day after 10 people were killed in a mass shooting at a Boulder, Colo., grocery store were welcome news for gun violence prevention advocates after seeing no action so far on an issue the president campaigned on tackling seriously. Those same advocates were dumbfounded to hear Biden say later in the week that infrastructure, not reforming the nation's gun laws, would remain his administration's next priority.
Manny Oliver, whose son was killed in the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., recalled speaking to Biden after his son's death and discussing their shared experience of grief. He addressed Biden directly during a press conference on Friday.
"Now, Mr. Biden, you are the president of the United States. I am still the father of Joaquin, carrying my pain. And I will be the father of Joaquin regardless of who is the president of the United States" he said. "But as long as you are inside the White House, I need to go to you and ask you to go back to that conversation that we had and start doing something."
Before the shootings in Boulder and the Atlanta-area turned the nation's attention to gun control, the Biden administration was already holding meetings with key stakeholders focused on the issue — an attempt to deliberately plan action to prevent gun violence, rather than reacting to tragedy. But grassroots violence prevention advocates have raised questions about the way the administration initially convened those meetings.
Data underscore the urgency they feel. According to the Gun Violence Archive, gun violence killed nearly 20,000 people across the United States in 2020. Another 24,000 people died by suicide with a gun. And yet, the only major debate about gun policy in the last year came after two mass shootings grabbed major headlines.
The fleeting, reactive nature of these debates has been a particular frustration of some gun violence prevention advocates.
"For too long our policy has been reactive. Only serving as a measure to react whenever gun violence occurs, react whenever another shooting happens, whether it be on our streets and in our schools," said Luis Hernandez, a co-founder of Youth Over Guns. "But there hasn't been strong policy that actually prevents what's going on."
Susan Rice, who heads up the Domestic Policy Council, and Cedric Richmond, in charge of the Office of Public Engagement, have been leading the administration's outreach to gun control groups.
After an initial meeting in February that included groups like Everytown for Gun Safety, Moms Demand Action, Giffords and Brady, a number of leaders of groups who were not included wrote to the White House expressing their concerns.
"Some of these advocates were amazing organizations. I don't discredit them, I think they're doing some great work. But the challenge for us was that they were all white and they didn't bring a lived experience, and didn't represent the urban communities persay," said Eddie Bocanegra, who heads up an initiative run by the Heartland Alliance called READI Chicago.
Bocanegra had also been a part of a group that came together during the Biden transition to work on gun violence related policies.
"We felt very disrespected by that, it was kind of a blow," Bocanegra said. "Who and what's informing the president's decisions in the next 100 days."
While the administration did ultimately hold several meetings with grassroots violence prevention groups, they say the initial exclusion speaks to a familiar pattern of being overlooked during the debate over how to best address gun violence.
"If we only talk about gun violence when there's a mass shooting, then we're going to have a certain perspective of what gun violence looks like and what the remedies are," said Antonio Cediel of Faith in Action.
Kina Collins of the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence, pointed to the proposed assault weapons ban as an example, something Biden championed as a senator and spoke forcefully in favor of renewing after the Boulder shooting.
"That's not what we're dealing with in communities that deal with everyday gun violence," she said. "We're dealing with hand guns. We're dealing with straw purchases, we're dealing with illegal guns floating across the borders into states. That's what we're dealing with."
Collins also pointed out the racial disparities in gun violence. In Cook County, Ill., there were 875 gun-related homicides in the year 2020. Most of those killings happened in the city of Chicago.
"Seventy-eight percent of those people were African Americans," Collins said. "I don't know any place in the country if we saw that many white folks dying of gun violence that we wouldn't call it a state of emergency."
During the campaign, Biden said gun violence was an epidemic. During a 2019 candidate town hall organized by Giffords and March For Our Lives, Alycia Moaton of Good Kids Mad City asked Biden about his plan to reduce gun violence in inner cities.
Biden pledged to dedicate $900 million to community-based violence prevention programs in 40 cities with the highest rates of gun violence. In his response, he tried to relate to Moaton in describing the racial disparities in who is killed.
"There is a mass shooting in my city of Wilmington, your city of Chicago, all of the cities that have large black and brown populations every single day," Biden said. "What gets the headlines, and it should, are the mass shootings."
These groups are now calling on the administration to go further, and dedicate more than $5 billion dollars to these efforts over the next eight years.
"Trillions of dollars were given to businesses to bail them out, and we're just saying put a fraction of that into our children's lives," said LIFE Camp founder Erica Ford. "How do you think people feel when nobody cares about their children? When every day Black children are being shot in the street and we're acting like it's not even happening?"
Community violence intervention programs are among the areas that the White House is considering addressing by way of executive action. The White House has released no details on how it might fund community violence prevention programs, or at what level, and declined to comment when asked by NPR.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said at a press briefing on Friday that Biden understands the frustration of gun control advocates at the pace of action, but added that their frustration "should be vented at the members of the House and Senate who voted against the measures the president supports, and we'd certainly support their advocacy in that regard."
Psaski did not provide a timetable, but said that there would be "more efforts" by Biden and the administration to move on the issue, including executive actions.
Some advocates have said that the fact that two senior officials who are both Black are taking a leading role in engaging on gun policy adds a more nuanced understanding of the issues.
"The reality is that Susan Rice and Cedric Richmond are both Black people," Hernandez said. "They're folks that know too well what the Black experience is in America and so they bring that lens to the work."
But they say this also means that gun violence is wedged in between all of the other priorities within Rice's portfolio, and a number of gun control groups have called for the White House to appoint a director of gun violence prevention, a recommendation that the White House has not committed to.
"Until we do so, we're just going to have Susan Rice and the rest of the domestic policy team that's focusing on every other domestic policy trying to also address gun violence when we are in the middle of a public health crisis that requires someone's full attention," he said.
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Activists appeal for a $15 minimum wage near the Capitol in Washington DC on 25 February. (photo: J Scott Applewhite/AP)
'You Will Not Have Your Seat Again': How the Fight for $15 Movement Gained New Momentum
Lauren Aratani, Guardian UK
Aratani writes: "Congress's failure to raise the federal minimum wage last month dealt a blow, but advocates are pressuring lawmakers to bring the issue back."
or Terrence Wise, a McDonald’s employee from Kansas City, Missouri, the battle for a raise in the federal minimum wage is far from over.
Joe Biden campaigned on a raise, the first since 2009, and the majority of Americans of both parties support an increase. And yet, last month, Congress blocked an increase from the paltry $7.25 an hour where it has been stuck since 2009. Now there are signs of new momentum for change.
If Washington can’t find a solution, Wise had a warning for politicians of both sides. “If you’re not going to make $15 a reality for workers, if you’re not going to create an environment for workers to join a union and make that possible, you will not be re-elected. You will not have your seat again,” Wise said, an organizer with the Fight for $15 movement. “We will not continue to choose representatives who are truly not representing us or who are out of tune with the working class.
“We say don’t take it as a threat – take it as a promise.”
High hopes that the federal minimum wage would be lifted for the first time in over 10 years came with the introduction of Biden’s $1.9tn stimulus package. The wage hike, which Biden tucked into his original stimulus plan, would have been the largest victory for the Fight for $15 movement since it started to mobilize fast-food workers in 2012.
But when the bill hit the Senate, the wage increase faced two major hurdles: moderate Democrats who said that $15 was just too high and a ruling from the Senate’s parliamentarian on whether including an increase in the spending bill would break Senate rules.
Ultimately, both factors stopped the increase from going into law.
While Congress’s failure to raise the minimum wage dealt a blow to the Fight for $15 movement, advocates say there is still enough momentum behind the issue to build pressure on lawmakers in DC to bring a $15 minimum wage back to the table. Activists also say the Democratic party risks losing the support of some of its base if a new minimum wage fails to pass.
“It’s such a core priority for so many organizations, for so many people, so many of the voters that put a lot of these elected officials into office,” said Tsedeye Gebreselassie, director of work quality at the National Employment Law Project. “It’s the top economic policy priority this year.”
Multiple polls have shown there is broad support for a $15 minimum wage. One Pew Research poll from 2019 found that 67% of Americans support a minimum wage increase. An Amazon/Ipsos poll released this month found approximately the same percentage of support.
With inaction from Congress, 29 states have increased their own minimum wage above the federal rate. Seven states have passed legislation increasing their minimum wage to $15 gradually, Florida being the most recent state to pass the measure by a ballot initiative. A few companies have also taken things into their own hands, with Costco, Amazon and Target increasing their minimum wage to at least $15 in recent years.
The increase in positive public opinion and the adoption of a $15 minimum wage by states and companies are hard-fought achievements for the Fight for $15, but federal legislation would force states and companies who refuse to increase their minimum wage to adapt.
In recent weeks, the White House and Democrats in Congress have said they will continue to push the issue forward, though how the party plans to get legislation through the Senate remains unclear. Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, told MSNBC on 14 March “we’re in the fight for $15”.
“We are going back at it to try to find a legislative strategy to get the votes together to pass the minimum wage,” Klain said. “We are going to talk to our allies on Capitol Hill, our allies in the broader Fight for $15, and try to figure out how we get the votes.”
Reports have indicated that Democratic senators who pushed for the $15 minimum wage are meeting with their colleagues who voted against it to talk about next steps to increase the minimum wage.
All Republicans and eight Democrats voted against the inclusion of the wage increase in the stimulus bill. Most of the Democratic senators who voted against it voiced concerns over the rushed way the raise was being passed and its potential impact on small businesses and restaurants, but indicated they were open to some kind of increase.
One Democratic senator, Joe Manchin, who is considered the most conservative Senate Democrat, was the star holdout during the minimum wage debate. Manchin said that he supports an increase that is “responsible and reasonable”, citing an $11 figure as something he would support.
In addition to getting all party senators on the same page, Democrats will either have to overrule the Senate parliamentarian, who in February ruled that a wage increase cannot be included in a bill passed with a simple majority, or get support from at least 10 Republican senators to pass the bill.
Support to overrule the parliamentarian as the stimulus bill went through Congress was weak, with Biden saying that he was “disappointed” in the decision but that he would “respect” it.
Another way to bypass the parliamentarian’s ruling would be if Democrats agree to do away with the filibuster, which would allow them to pass legislation with a simple majority. Legislation protecting voting rights has recently shed a more prominent spotlight on the debate over the filibuster, though some Democrats have voiced hesitancy over getting rid of the procedure.
Meanwhile, some moderate Republicans have come out with minimum wage increase plans of their own, showing that there is some support for an increase as the party tries to appeal to more working-class voters, though they are scaled back compared to what progressive Democrats want.
One plan, created by Republican senators Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton, would increase the minimum wage to $10 an hour by 2025 and include a crackdown on employers hiring undocumented workers. Another plan, from Republican senator Josh Hawley, would increase the minimum wage to $15 for corporations who make more than $1bn a year.
Though it appears compromise could be made on an increased minimum wage that is lower than $15, progressive Democrats and advocates for a $15 minimum wage are refusing to budge to anything below that.
Progressive House Democrats, in an attempt to pressure their colleagues in the Senate to take on a $15 wage, have started to renew demands for legislation. On a recent call with the press, a dozen House Democrats, labor leaders and activists demanded that a $15 wage increase be passed by the end of the year.
Representative Ro Khanna, who organized the call, said that Democrats can include the increase in must-pass legislation, such as the annual defense spending bill. Khanna, along with other progressive Democrats, have also advocated for overturning the parliamentarian to raise the minimum wage to $15 if it comes to it.
“[We’re] making the case now that we’ve got to be prepared to overturn the parliamentarian if it comes to that, and that we have to get it done,” Khanna said. “This time we realized that we have to mobilize to make this clear months in advance, so it’s not like we’re doing this a week before the parliamentarian decision or right when the parliamentarian rules.”
Khanna said the number of groups on the call demonstrates the widespread support for a $15 minimum wage in the Democratic party.
“There could be real disappointment if we don’t get it this time,” Khanna said. “The Democratic party is unified around this in the House, among groups and, candidly, [among] the people who helped us win the election.”
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An angry white person. (photo: CNN)
'Jesus Never Condemned Slavery': Florida Board to Rename Robert E. Lee High School. White People Object by Being Racist
Zack Linly, The Root
Linly writes: "For nearly a year now, a community in Duval County of Jacksonville, Fla., has been in the midst of a controversy that is all over one thing as far as I can tell: White people love their slavery symbols."
Thursday marked the final debate in a series of debates over the renaming of Robert E. Lee High School—which of course is named for the Confederate general whose legacy is that he fought valiantly in a war...to keep Black people in chains. A debate like this in a state like Florida is only likely to go one way: Whiny and terrible white adults will quickly show their racism and ignorance and students who actually attend the school will feel ignored and devalued.
Now, because I’m always concerned about the overheating of Black people’s rage-o-meter when writing up reports on aggravated white nonsense, I’m going to start with the least fucked up anti-name change comments before moving on to the more caucacious of flagrant displays of caucasity. Spoiler alert: One of these mother fuckers actually defends the school name by defending slavery.
From News 4 JAX:
“Why should the name be changed, because it’s offensive? If this is a real issue, will it stop here? No,” Don Likens said during the meeting. “This will continue until everything that is offensive to this cancel culture movement is just that. Canceled.”
“We’re here because this situation has been created to promote unrest,” said Cathy Silcox.
CNN live-streamed some of the community meeting so that we could hear more from the lily-white...I mean, lovely color-redacted members of the county.
“Communism destroys a nation by removing all icons,” said one angry white boomer who, like many angry white boomers in America, has no clue what the fuck communism is—a thing this guy makes crystal-clear when he goes on to say— “Such as Aunt Jemima’s face from pancake mix.”
This fool thinks “communism” is why Aunt Jemima was removed; not the fact that the symbol is demonstrably racist—demonstrated by the fact that white people keep using the name as a racial slur against Black women.
Anyway, I’ve already done a whole thing about the largely fictitious thing people call “cancel culture” and the hypocrisy of conservatives railing against it.
Besides, the wilfully obtuse wypipo comments get so much worse than this.
“I was taught that the chiefs of the tribes in Africa sold their people into slavery,” one woman of the Klan-ish Karen variety can be heard saying. “If it had not been that way, there would not been slaves anywhere in America for Robert E. Lee or anybody else to have owned.”
Already this is a display of ahistorical honky-fied hogwash, but this woman takes things even further by telling Black students: “Don’t blame Robert E. Lee; maybe you should be after your ancestors.”
I rue the day that white conservatives discovered the fact that Africans sold their own into slavery—because they only care about the part of that history that they think excuses America. While it’s true that West Africans sold slaves to Europeans, it’s not like they showed up on America’s doorstep like the fucking Avon lady and presented Americans with an array of living products. The western world bought their slaves while colonizing Africa.
The system of slavery that existed in Africa wasn’t race-based and it wasn’t intergenerational. Slavers in Africa could never have conceived of a system of slavery as high-demand and as cruel as the transatlantic slave trade—where the enslaved were tortured, sold away from their families, and removed from their heritages, and one where the children of the enslaved were born into bondage for generations.
Besides, what the hell does it matter how white people got their slaves when they are still the ones who upheld slavery for hundreds of years and then confined Black people to second-class citizenship for a hundred years (at least) after that?
Somehow, the testimonies of the clueless and hueless got even worse—which brings us to this last guy.
“It says in the bible, Jesus himself never condemned slavery,” one man who clearly has no qualms with his own bigotry said. “In fact, he said slaves have an obligation to obey their master.”
As bad and bigoted as things got during this meeting, I must admit even I didn’t expect “Robert E. Lee defended slavery and so did God” to be a hill anyone was willing to die on.
Who cares what these ignorant wastes of space who don’t even go to the school think anyway? What about the students?
More from News 4:
“Every day I see my African American friends, peers, teachers and administrators walk the halls of a school that is named after someone who oppressed their people and led a war to continue to enslave them,” said a student who supports a name change.
“We need a change, and the people here in this room today are for that change,” said another student. “We have come here five times and we will do it as long as it takes for us to get change.”
18-year-old Senior Class President Deyona Burton said many students simply feel ignored and unheard.
“We weren’t being heard at the community meetings because a lot of students can’t make it,” she said. “We are posting it on social media but they are not really looking on social media. Now, we’re literally not being heard in the school. Now, it goes hand in hand, so yes, tension. Yes, confusion, hesitancy, because we have been threatened with not being able to walk the stage.”
When asked if she was still proud of her school—which recently removed a teacher from the classroom over a Black Lives Matter banner—Burton basically said, “Nah.”
“So I have always told people that I always thought Lee was the students’, but lately, I cannot tell what the school stands for,” she said. “I don’t know if we the current students are the school, if the alumni are the school, if the admin are the school because each of them have a different agenda. So I can’t say I’m proud of the school without knowing what it stands for and that symbolism and definition has been lost or I can’t see it anymore, and definitely not in this climate, but I will always be proud of my peers and my students.”
According to News 4, the “School Advisory Committee will meet on April 5 to finalize up to five name recommendations to include on a ballot.”
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Police officers detain a demonstrator as they prevent an opposition action to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus, Saturday, March 27, 2021. (photo: AP)
Belarus Police Arrest More Than 100 Protesters Calling for President to Step Down
Associated Press
Excerpt: "Police in the capital of Belarus arrested more than 100 people who assembled for a protest march Saturday to call for the resignation of the country's authoritarian president."
The planned event in Minsk indicated that supporters of the political opposition seek to revive the wave of mass protests that gripped Belarus for months last year but were dormant during the winter. During the first sizable anti-government protests of 2021, more than 200 people were detained Thursday.
Five journalists were among those arrested. Four were later released, but it was not clear if the fifth, the editor of the popular newspaper Nasha Niva, faced charges.
Some journalists arrested while covering last year’s protests were sentenced to two years in prison.
Protests broke out in August after a disputed election that gave President Alexander Lukashenko a sixth term in office. Lukashenko, who has been characterized as Europe’s last dictator, has strongly repressed opposition and independent news media during 26 years in power.
The post-election protests were the largest and most persistent show of opposition the former Soviet republic has seen in that time, with some of them attracting as many as 200,000 people.
More than 33,000 people were arrested during the protests, and many of them were beaten by police.
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Not the wolf the governor killed. (photo: Julian Stratenschulte/Getty Images)
The Bizarre Story of the Montana Governor Shooting a Wolf From Yellowstone
Molly Olmstead, Slate
Olmstead writes:
n Tuesday, Nate Hegyi, a reporter for the Mountain West News Bureau, reported that Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte had trapped and killed a radio-collared wolf from Yellowstone National Park. Because the wolf had wandered out of the park, Gianforte was legally allowed to kill it, but the governor was cited for violating state hunting regulations for failing to take a required wolf-trapping education course. The story raised questions about Gianforte’s honesty and about whether the governor violated more serious hunting regulations.
Slate spoke to Hegyi, who lives in Missoula, on Friday to see how the story had gone down in his state. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Slate: How did this story come about?
Nate Hegyi: I have to protect a source, so I’m going to be vague. I received a tip that the governor had trapped and killed a Yellowstone wolf. And I was like, What? That’s crazy.
The person who tipped me off gave me some pretty critical information that I needed to start my reporting into it. I started asking questions with Montana’s top wildlife agency, and they confirmed that the governor had trapped and killed a wolf near the park, and that he was given a written warning. We decided to do it as a written story first, instead of an audio story. Then it kind of blew up.
How would you say your typical Montanan feels about these Yellowstone wolves?
A typical Montanan, their political views are all across the board. We have these college towns, Bozeman and Missoula, where you’ve got a lot of pretty liberal environmentalists. I’m sure they would be super angry that he killed a wolf so close to the park, and that it was radio-collared. You have animal rights activists. You’ve got people who will spend an entire summer driving around following the wolf packs. And then you have the hunting folks here in the state—who may not be bothered about the wolf trapping itself, because that’s perfectly legal in the state of Montana, but would be bothered by the fact that the governor didn’t take the trapping course, because it’s like taking driver’s ed before you go driving.
And then you have the super conservative contingent in Montana, including a lot of people who have moved here in recent years from places like California or Texas. They’re coming with a much more Trumpian conservatism that we haven’t really seen much in the state prior to, even, the pandemic. A lot of those new folks are not going to care whatsoever that the governor did this. In fact, they might like the governor more because he did this.
And then you have among a lot of other Montanans a general dislike of wolves. Because they do kill sheep and livestock. They are kind of considered a boogeyman out here in the West. And so the idea of killing a wolf, trapping education or not, doesn’t really bother them, because they see them more as a pest or nuisance.
What has been the wider reaction to your story?
If you look at it nationally, there’s definitely an expected rage. That didn’t surprise me. But within Montana, it’s more just like, there are more questions. How did he expect to check his traps every day while also serving as governor? You have to check [traps] at least every 48 hours. But ethically, you should be checking it every day. And those traps were set two and a half or three hours south of the Capitol. It’s a very time-intensive thing to do, to trap. Was that the best use of the governor’s time?
Do you know how long those traps were out?
The governor told a local reporter that they’ve been out since January, which would be at least two weeks prior to trapping that wolf. This is where it gets a little wonky. Gianforte was setting traps on a private ranch owned by a big conservative media mogul. And that guy’s ranch manager (who’s also the vice president of the Montana Trappers Association)—his name was also on these traps. And so there’s a good chance that the ranch manager was actually checking the traps for Gianforte. And maybe Gianforte was lucky enough that he was just down there on a federal holiday, and there was the wolf, after two or more weeks of waiting for the animal to get trapped. Was it just serendipitous? Or was the wolf trapped, and the ranch manager found it and called Gianforte? I don’t want to say either way, but that’s my biggest question. If the ranch manager called Gianforte, and Gianforte drove or flew over to kill it, that would have broken the state hunting regulations. You’re supposed to kill it or release it immediately upon seeing it. It’s the more humane thing to do.
Can you tell me about the debates happening with the wolf management policy?
The state legislature is Republican controlled, and for the first time in a couple of decades, we have a Republican governor. And one of their top priorities is pushing through a slate of bills that would make it a lot easier to hunt and trap more wolves, with the goal of reducing the population of wolves in the state. And there’s talk of reimbursing people for the cost to hunt a wolf, which critics call a bounty.
What else do people from outside the state need to know to understand this story?
Wolves are super controversial. In the West, they do kill livestock. Some people rely on cows and sheep to make a living. On the other hand, Montana relies on a lot of tourism. Maybe you went to Yellowstone National Park to see those wolves. The wolves are a big boon for our tourism industry. And so it’s just kind of a very classic push-and-pull between those two camps. Americans had pretty much eradicated the wolf from the West up until 1995, when they were reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park. And so it’s still very fresh. They’re like a symbol for the kind of culture wars that happen out West.
Were there any major hurdles you encountered when reporting this story?
I was frustrated with the governor’s office for not answering the questions I posed to them and for not making the governor available for an interview. I think that that’s something we’ve noticed since the Trump era.
Gianforte is famously antagonistic towards reporters.
Yeah, absolutely. It’s just a bummer. Because there has been a culture in the past of openness among both Republicans and Democrats. And it’s been frustrating to watch that culture of openness change. It doesn’t feel very Montanan.
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