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The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
In a brief statement, the Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch thanked Carlson for his service but said that he had been “rendered obsolete by swift advances in lying technology.”
A dry run of the Chatbot showed it emitting nine lies per minute, besting Carlson’s average of eight.
News of the Chatbot’s arrival sent shock waves down the corridors of Fox’s midtown Manhattan headquarters. “I’ll be next,” a reportedly shaken Sean Hannity said.
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'I said I'd help him in any way I could': Belafonte and Martin Luther King, backstage at Madison Square Garden. (photo: Courtesy of Harry Belafonte)
Belafonte died Tuesday of congestive heart failure at his New York home, his wife Pamela by his side, said publicist Ken Sunshine.
With his glowing, handsome face and silky-husky voice, Belafonte was one of the first Black performers to gain a wide following on film and to sell a million records as a singer; many still know him for his signature hit “Banana Boat Song (Day-O),” and its call of “Day-O! Daaaaay-O.” But he forged a greater legacy once he scaled back his performing career in the 1960s and lived out his hero Paul Robeson’s decree that artists are “gatekeepers of truth.”
Belafonte stands as the model and the epitome of the celebrity activist. Few kept up with his time and commitment and none his stature as a meeting point among Hollywood, Washington and the civil rights movement.
Belafonte not only participated in protest marches and benefit concerts, but helped organize and raise support for them. He worked closely with his friend and generational peer the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., often intervening on his behalf with both politicians and fellow entertainers and helping him financially. He risked his life and livelihood and set high standards for younger Black celebrities, scolding Jay-Z and Beyoncé for failing to meet their “social responsibilities,” and mentoring Usher, Common, Danny Glover and many others. In Spike Lee’s 2018 film “BlacKkKlansman,” he was fittingly cast as an elder statesman schooling young activists about the country’s past.
Belafonte’s friend, civil rights leader Andrew Young, would note that Belafonte was the rare person to grow more radical with age. He was ever engaged and unyielding, willing to take on Southern segregationists, Northern liberals, the billionaire Koch brothers and the country’s first Black president, Barack Obama, whom Belafonte would remember asking to cut him “some slack.”
Belafonte responded, “What makes you think that’s not what I’ve been doing?”
Belafonte had been a major artist since the 1950s. He won a Tony Award in 1954 for his starring role in John Murray Anderson’s “Almanac” and five years later became the first Black performer to win an Emmy for the TV special “Tonight with Harry Belafonte.”
In 1954, he co-starred with Dorothy Dandridge in the Otto Preminger-directed musical “Carmen Jones,” a popular breakthrough for an all-Black cast. The 1957 movie “Island in the Sun” was banned in several Southern cities, where theater owners were threatened by the Ku Klux Klan because of the film’s interracial romance between Belafonte and Joan Fontaine.
His “Calypso,” released in 1955, became the first officially certified million-selling album by a solo performer, and started a national infatuation with Caribbean rhythms (Belafonte was nicknamed, reluctantly, the “King of Calypso″). Admirers of Belafonte included a young Bob Dylan, who debuted on record in the early ’60s by playing harmonica on Belafonte’s “Midnight Special.”
“Harry was the best balladeer in the land and everybody knew it,” Dylan later wrote. “Harry was that rare type of character that radiates greatness, and you hope that some of it rubs off on you.”
Belafonte befriended King in the spring of 1956 after the young civil rights leader called and asked for a meeting. They spoke for hours, and Belafonte would remember feeling King raised him to the “higher plane of social protest.” Then at the peak of his singing career, Belafonte was soon producing a benefit concert for the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama that helped make King a national figure. By the early 1960s, he had decided to make civil rights his priority.
“I was having almost daily talks with Martin,” Belafonte wrote in his memoir “My Song,” published in 2011. “I realized that the movement was more important than anything else.”
The Kennedys were among the first politicians to seek his opinions, which he willingly shared. John F. Kennedy, at a time when Black voters were as likely to support Republicans as they would Democrats, was so anxious for his support that during the 1960 election he visited Belafonte at his Manhattan home. Belafonte explained King’s importance and arranged for King and Kennedy to meet.
“I was quite taken by the fact that he (Kennedy) knew so little about the Black community,” Belafonte told NBC in 2013. “He knew the headlines of the day, but he wasn’t really anywhere nuanced or detailed on the depth of Black anguish or what our struggle’s really about.”
Belafonte would often criticize the Kennedys for their reluctance to challenge the Southern segregationists who were then a substantial part of the Democratic Party. He argued with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother, over the government’s failure to protect the “Freedom Riders” trying to integrate bus stations. He was among the Black activists at a widely publicized meeting with the attorney general, when playwright Lorraine Hansberry and others stunned Kennedy by questioning whether the country even deserved Black allegiance.
“Bobby turned red at that. I had never seen him so shaken,” Belafonte later wrote.
In 1963, Belafonte was deeply involved with the historic March on Washington. He recruited his close friend Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman and other celebrities and persuaded the left-wing Marlon Brando to co-chair the Hollywood delegation with the more conservative Charlton Heston, a pairing designed to appeal to the broadest possible audience. In 1964, he and Poitier personally delivered tens of thousands of dollar to activists in Mississippi after three “Freedom Summer” volunteers were murdered — the two celebrities were chased by car at one point by members of the KKK. The following year, he brought in Tony Bennett, Joan Baez and other singers to perform for the marchers in Selma, Alabama.
When King was assassinated, in 1968, Belafonte helped pick out the suit he was buried in, sat next to his widow, Coretta, at the funeral, and continued to support his family, in part through an insurance policy he had taken out on King in his lifetime.
“Much of my political outlook was already in place when I encountered Dr. King,” Belafonte later wrote. “I was well on my way and utterly committed to the civil rights struggle. I came to him with expectations and he affirmed them.”
King’s death left Belafonte isolated from the civil rights community. He was turned off by the separatist beliefs of Stokely Carmichael and other “Black Power” activists and had little chemistry with King’s designated successor, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy. But the entertainer’s causes extended well beyond the U.S.
He helped introduce South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba to American audiences, the two winning a Grammy in 1964 for the concert record “An Evening With Belafonte/Makeba.” He coordinated Nelson Mandela’s first visit to the U.S. since being released from prison in 1990. A few years earlier, he had initiated the all-star, million-selling “We Are the World” recording, the Grammy-winning charity song for famine relief in Africa.
Belafonte’s early life and career paralleled those of Poitier, who died in 2022. Both spent part of their childhoods in the Caribbean and ended up in New York. Both served in the military during World War II, acted in the American Negro Theatre and then broke into film. Poitier shared his belief in civil rights, but still dedicated much of his time to acting, a source of some tension between them. While Poitier had a sustained and historic run in the 1960s as a leading man and box office success, Belafonte grew tired of acting and turned down parts he regarded as “neutered.″
“Sidney radiated a truly saintly dignity and calm. Not me,″ Belafonte wrote in his memoir. “I didn’t want to tone down my sexuality, either. Sidney did that in every role he took.″
Belafonte was very much a human being. He acknowledged extra-marital affairs, negligence as a parent and a frightening temper, driven by lifelong insecurity. “Woe to the musician who missed his cue, or the agent who fouled up a booking,″ he confided.
In his memoir, he chastised Poitier for a “radical breach″ by backing out on a commitment to star as Mandela in a TV miniseries Belafonte had conceived, then agreeing to play Mandela for a rival production. He became so estranged from King’s widow and children that he was not asked to speak at her funeral. He later sued three of King’s children over control of some of the civil rights leader’s personal papers, and would allege that the family was preoccupied with “selling trinkets and memorabilia.”
He made news years earlier when he compared Colin Powell, the first Black secretary of state, to a slave “permitted to come into the house of the master” for his service in the George W. Bush administration. He was in Washington in January 2009 as Obama was inaugurated, officiating along with Baez and others at a gala called the Inaugural Peace Ball. But Belafonte would later criticize Obama for failing to live up to his promise and lacking “fundamental empathy with the dispossessed, be they white or Black.”
Belafonte did occasionally serve in government, as cultural adviser for the Peace Corps during the Kennedy administration and decades later as goodwill ambassador for UNICEF. For his film and music career, he received the motion picture academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, a National Medal of Arts, a Grammy for lifetime achievement and numerous other honorary prizes. He found special pleasure in winning a New York Film Critics Award in 1996 for his work as a gangster in Robert Altman’s “Kansas City.”
“I’m as proud of that film critics’ award as I am of all my gold records,” he wrote in his memoir.
He was married three times, most recently to photographer Pamela Frank, and had four children. Three of them — Shari, David and Gina — became actors. He is also survived by two stepchildren and eight grandchildren.
Harry Belafonte was born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. in 1927, in Harlem. His father was a seaman and cook with Dutch and Jamaican ancestry and his mother, part Scottish, worked as a domestic. Both parents were undocumented immigrants and Belafonte recalled living “an underground life, as criminals of a sort, on the run.″
The household was violent: Belafonte sustained brutal beatings from his father, and he was sent to live for several years with relatives in Jamaica. Belafonte was a poor reader — he was probably dyslexic, he later realized — and dropped out of high school, soon joining the Navy. While in the service, he read “Color and Democracy” by the Black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois and was deeply affected, calling it the start of his political education.
After the war, he found a job in New York as an assistant janitor for some apartment buildings. One tenant liked him enough to give him free tickets to a play at the American Negro Theatre, a community repertory for black performers. Belafonte was so impressed that he joined as a volunteer, then as an actor. Poitier was a peer, both of them “skinny, brooding and vulnerable within our hard shells of self-protection,″ Belafonte later wrote.
Belafonte met Brando, Walter Matthau and other future stars while taking acting classes at the New School for Social Research. Brando was an inspiration as an actor, and he and Belafonte became close, sometimes riding on Brando’s motorcycle or double dating or playing congas together at parties. Over the years, Belafonte’s political and artistic lives would lead to friendships with everyone from Frank Sinatra and Lester Young to Eleanor Roosevelt and Fidel Castro.
His early stage credits included “Days of Our Youth″ and Sean O’Casey’s “Juno and the Peacock,″ a play Belafonte remembered less because of his own performance than because of a backstage visitor, Robeson, the actor, singer and activist.
“What I remember more than anything Robeson said, was the love he radiated, and the profound responsibility he felt, as an actor, to use his platform as a bully pulpit,″ Belafonte wrote in his memoir. His friendship with Robeson and support for left-wing causes eventually brought trouble from the government. FBI agents visited him at home and allegations of Communism nearly cost him an appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.″ Leftists suspected, and Belafonte emphatically denied, that he had named names of suspected Communists so he could perform on Sullivan’s show.
By the 1950s, Belafonte was also singing, finding gigs at the Blue Note, the Vanguard and other clubs — he was backed for one performance by Charlie Parker and Max Roach — and becoming immersed in folk, blues, jazz and the calypso he had heard while living in Jamaica. Starting in 1954, he released such top 10 albums as “Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites″ and “Belafonte,″ and his popular singles included “Mathilda,″ “Jamaica Farewell″ and “The Banana Boat Song,″ a reworked Caribbean ballad that was a late addition to his “Calypso″ record.
“We found ourselves one or two songs short, so we threw in `Day-O’ as filler,″ Belafonte wrote in his memoir.
He was a superstar, but one criticized, and occasionally sued, for taking traditional material and not sharing the profits. Belafonte expressed regret and also worried about being typecast as a calypso singer, declining for years to sing “Day-O″ live after he gave television performances against banana boat backdrops.
Belafonte was the rare young artist to think about the business side of show business. He started one of the first all-Black music publishing companies. He produced plays, movies and TV shows, including Off-Broadway’s “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” in 1969. He was the first Black person to produce for TV.
Belafonte made history in 1968 by filling in for Johnny Carson on the “Tonight” show for a full week. Later that year, a simple, spontaneous gesture led to another milestone. Appearing on a taped TV special starring Petula Clark, Belafonte joined the British singer on the anti-war song “On the Path of Glory.″ At one point, Clark placed a hand on Belafonte’s arm. The show’s sponsor, Chrysler, demanded the segment be reshot. Clark and Belafonte resisted, successfully, and for the first time a white woman touched a Black man’s arm on primetime television.
In the 1970s, he returned to movie acting, co-starring with Poitier in “Buck and the Preacher,″ a commercial flop, and the raucous and popular comedy “Uptown Saturday Night.” His other film credits include “Bobby,″ “White Man’s Burden,″ cameos in Altman’s “The Player″ and “Ready to Wear,″ and the Altman-directed TV series “Tanner on Tanner.″ In 2011, HBO aired a documentary about Belafonte, “Sing Your Song.”
Mindful to the end that he grew up in poverty, Belafonte did not think of himself as an artist who became an activist, but an activist who happened to be an artist.
“When you grow up, son,″ Belafonte remembered his mother telling him, “never go to bed at night knowing that there was something you could have done during the day to strike a blow against injustice and you didn’t do it.″
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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy holds an event to mark 100 days of the Republican majority in the House at the U.S. Capitol, April 17, 2023. (photo: Francis Chung/POLITICO)
Democrats are preparing to fight House Republicans’ plan for Medicaid work requirements.
The projections are both a warning about the potential consequences of the strict reporting requirements Republicans are contemplating and ammunition for Democrats in the upcoming negotiations over raising the federal debt limit.
The House’s work requirement proposal — dubbed a “community engagement” requirement in the bill’s text — would mandate that many Medicaid recipients work, look for work, or participate in another kind of community service for at least 20 hours per week (though some conservatives want that number to be even higher).
According to Punchbowl News, these work requirements for social programs are, along with spending cuts and permitting reform, a top priority for the House GOP in talks over raising the federal debt ceiling.
Children under the age of 18, adults over 56, people on Medicaid with mental or physical disabilities, and parents of dependent children would largely be exempted. However, that exemption is not ironclad.
For one, states would have the ability to subject more people, such as parents, to the requirement, based on the Georgetown Center for Children and Families’s read of the bill’s text. Second, people with disabilities could still be required to submit information to receive an exemption — which raises the possibility that a snag in their paperwork could lead to them losing benefits.
In their new projections, the Biden administration estimated the number of Medicaid recipients who would be required to meet the work requirement or submit information to prove they should be exempted. Those are primarily people living in 40 states that have expanded Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act. Most of the expansion population is childless non-disabled adults, but some parents and some people with disabilities could also be subject to the reporting requirements depending on the state in which they live and their specific circumstances.
Several independent experts told me that they found the administration’s figure to be “plausible.” A recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) analysis had estimated that at least 10 million people on Medicaid would face a “significant” risk of losing coverage under the proposal. (The CBPP estimate cautions that it is likely an undercount and did not include parents nor several of the most recent states to expand Medicaid in coming up with its projection.)
Not everyone subjected to a work requirement would lose coverage. The Congressional Budget Office estimated last year that requiring non-disabled, non-elderly childless adults to work in order to receive Medicaid benefits would lead to more than 2 million Americans losing coverage annually for failing to meet a work requirement. That would lead to a $135 billion cut in Medicaid spending over 10 years — the stated goal of House Republicans.
The available evidence suggests many of those people would lose coverage not because they are failing to work but because of administrative problems in verifying their eligibility. A new KFF analysis found that more than half of adults on Medicaid are already working full or part time, and most of the rest are either caregivers, have a disability, or are in school.
When Arkansas briefly instituted Medicaid work requirements during the Trump administration, before being stopped by a federal court order, about 17,000 Medicaid beneficiaries lost their health coverage with no discernible impact on employment. Experts expect the same story would play out if work requirements were implemented nationally.
“The savings here would mostly come from the paperwork burden that a work requirement adds to Medicaid, with people falling through the cracks of the verification process,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president at the nonprofit think tank KFF, told me.
So why are Republicans still pursuing Medicaid work requirements? Part of it is a genuine conservative belief that income-based eligibility discourages people from working, despite the evidence that most adult Medicaid recipients are either working or should be eligible for an exemption. Conservatives in the House want an ideological win in the debt-limit deal and work requirements would give them one they have long sought.
They also have limited options to find significant spending cuts. By taking Medicare and Social Security off the table — and presuming Republicans don’t want to cut spending on the military and veterans — roughly half of the federal budget is off-limits. Medicaid is the biggest federal program they are comfortable proposing cuts for, in part because their base still (narrowly) views it as a welfare program.
Republicans also think they can sell Medicaid work requirements politically. Punchbowl News reported that internal House GOP polling showed that work requirements were popular among voters in the competitive districts that will determine future House control.
But public polling suggests it’s a little more complicated than that. As I wrote in 2018, Americans are of two minds about work requirements. When asked if they support requiring work in order to receive certain government benefits, the public will generally say yes. But when those policies are framed differently, and particularly when they are portrayed as cuts, their popularity drops.
Most Americans say they approve of the Medicaid program, which has played a critical safety net role in the Great Recession and the Covid-19 pandemic, and has also expanded its rolls significantly since the ACA’s passage. Most also say they oppose spending cuts to the program.
The Biden administration’s new projections will help Democrats make their case if House Republicans continue to insist on Medicaid work requirements as part of any future debt-limit deal — and it is a signal that they are prepared to fight hard over one of the GOP’s top priorities.
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Prosecutors say Enrique Tarrio (pictured) made public comments and social media posts that encouraged his men as they entered the Capitol on Jan.6, 2021. (photo: Allison Dinner/AP)
A lawyer for Enrique Tarrio told jurors that prosecutors are using him as a “scapegoat” for the former president.
“It was Donald Trump’s words. It was his motivation. It was his anger that caused what occurred on January 6th in your amazing and beautiful city,” said Nayib Hassan, Tarrio’s lawyer, during closing arguments in a seditious conspiracy trial stemming from the Jan. 6 attack.
Hassan leaned heavily into the role Trump played in ginning up the crowd at his rally the morning of Jan. 6, just minutes before rioters began breaching police barricades at the Capitol. Trump urged his supporters to “fight like hell” just 36 minutes before the first wave of the mob charged at police, Hassan noted.
“It was not Enrique Tarrio. They want to use Enrique Tarrio as a scapegoat for Donald Trump and those in power,” Hassan said.
Trump has loomed in the background of Tarrio’s trial, the most significant to emerge from the Jan. 6 assault on Congress. He’s charged alongside four other Proud Boys leaders — Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola — with orchestrating a violent effort to derail the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden. The jury is expected to receive the case and begin deliberating Tuesday afternoon.
Prosecutors say the leaders, loyal to Trump and fearful of the Proud Boys’ survival in a post-Trump America, devised plans to keep Trump in office. And throughout the four-month trial, the Justice Department repeatedly emphasized how Tarrio and the Proud Boys keyed off and drew energy from Trump’s own bid to subvert the 2020 election. The group’s plan went into overdrive, prosecutors said, after Trump’s Dec. 19, 2020 tweet calling on supporters to descend on Washington on Jan. 6, 2021 to challenge the election results.
In tandem with their effort to support Trump, the Proud Boys also soured on their once close relationship with law enforcement, prosecutors say, becoming enraged at cops — particularly in Washington — after they failed to apprehend a man who stabbed four Proud Boys outside a bar on Dec. 12, 2020. That anger at police carried over into the Proud Boys’ posture toward law enforcement on Jan. 6, they say.
Hassan, though, said it was Trump pulling the strings and driving events ahead of Jan. 6 — not Tarrio. He noted that Trump contributed to a surge in Proud Boys recruitment after invoking the group — and urging members to “stand back and stand by” during a televised debate against Biden in September 2020. That membership boom harmed the group’s vetting and led to undisciplined members provoking unconstrained violence and street clashes in Washington in November and December 2020.
That led Tarrio to form a new Proud Boys chapter — dubbed the “Ministry of Self Defense” — to select Proud Boys who could be trusted to follow rules and obey orders. That chapter, which grew to hundreds nationwide, became the core of the group that Tarrio helped assemble in Washington on Jan. 6.
Prosecutors say the Ministry of Self Defense — or MOSD — was really a “fighting force” that Tarrio mobilized to attack the seat of government in service of keeping Trump in power. Hundreds of members joined Proud Boys leaders in Washington and were prominent parts of the crowd that breached the barricades in the first wave of the riot. In numerous cases, Proud Boys in this group were among those who helped topple barricades or tussled with police in ways that helped clear a path for the riot to advance closer to the Capitol.
But Hassan emphasized that Tarrio’s role in the entire sequence of events was tenuous. He was arrested in Washington on Jan. 4, 2021, for burning a Black Lives Matter flag after the Dec. 12, 2020 pro-Trump march. After he was released from police custody, he was ordered to leave Washington and went to a hotel in Baltimore, from where he observed the events of Jan. 6.
Prosecutors say Tarrio made public comments and social media posts that encouraged his men as they entered the Capitol, at one point saying “Don’t fucking leave,” as rioters occupied the Capitol. These comments, prosecutors say, prove the real purpose of the Proud Boys’ presence. As their handpicked members helped overwhelm police — and even after Pezzola used a stolen police riot shield to smash a Senate window and ignite the breach of the building — Tarrio and the other leaders never rebuked them or urged them to pull back.
“Make no mistake,” Tarrio told a group of national Proud Boys leaders in a private chat after the attack. “We did this.”
Hassan spent much of his closing argument urging jurors not to convict Tarrio because they disliked him. Tarrio was brash, said offensive things and often acted like an “entertainer,” Hassan said.
“Do not let your dislike for Henry Enrique Tarrio affect your judgment in that jury room,” Hassan said.
Dislike of the defendants was a theme in the Proud Boys’ closing arguments. Pezzola’s attorney, Steven Metcalf, urged jurors not to confuse their dislike for Pezzola with his potential guilt of the crimes he’s charged with.
“Even if you hate him … put that aside in judging these facts,” Metcalf said.
Metcalf agreed that Pezzola broke the law — as Pezzola largely did when he took the stand last week — but said he’s not guilty of seditious conspiracy, which he called a “fairy tale, fairy dust conspiracy created out of nowhere.”
Metcalf contended that Pezzola’s relationship with the other defendants was nearly nonexistent, even on Jan. 6. But he said prosecutors needed to link him to Tarrio and the other defendants to prove that violence, destruction and anger were part of the conspiracy.
“What did they need Dom for? You needed Dom to muddy up these guys. They needed dirt,” Metcalf said.
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Drivers in California have joined the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, in one of the first driver-specific unionization efforts in the company. (photo: Teamsters Twitter)
Drivers in California have joined the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, in one of the first driver-specific unionization efforts in the company.
On the same day, workers marched on Amazon’s management offices at the warehouse to demand that the company respect their right to unionize. This is the first time the Teamsters have successfully organized an Amazon-related facility.
The group of 84 delivery drivers in Palmdale, California work at Amazon’s DAX8 delivery station. They’re not Amazon employees, but rather employees of an Amazon Delivery Service Partner (DSP) called Battle-Tested Strategies. The delivery company, not Amazon, is responsible for dispatching and planning routes for drivers—but it dispatches out of DAX8 and delivers Amazon-branded packages, often with Amazon-branded trucks or vans.
This is a significant development in the unionization effort across Amazon, one of the biggest employers in the country, because its large network of DSPs is how it’s able to deliver packages so quickly.
“We want fair pay and safe jobs, to be able to provide food for our families,” said Rajpal Singh, one driver in Palmdale, in the press release. “We want to know we will make it home to our families at night after delivering Amazon packages in the extreme heat. We organized with the Teamsters to change our working conditions for the better.”
The Teamsters union is responsible for organizing UPS, one of the biggest package delivery companies in the country. UPS drivers also faced extreme heat conditions last summer, which the union responded to.
The drivers have joined Teamsters Local 396 and won “neutrality and voluntary union recognition,” the press release states. The local union organizing officials have negotiated a tentative agreement with the DSP, which members will vote on in the upcoming weeks. The agreement proposes “immediate pay increases, substantial hourly raises in the fall, provisions that hold Amazon accountable on health and safety standards, a grievance procedure, and other benefits.”
“We deliver in an Amazon van, wearing an Amazon uniform, but when we petition Amazon, they ignore us. We have a mass of support, we are a union, and now they need to listen,” Singh said.
“Amazon delivery drivers at DAX8 have made history by organizing their union with Teamsters Local 396 to demand dignity and respect at work,” said Victor Mineros, the secretary-treasurer of the local. “I commend these workers for their courage to take on this greedy multibillion-dollar corporation. We are confident this will lead other Amazon workers nationwide to organize with the Teamsters.”
“Whether the Teamsters are being intentionally misleading or they just don’t understand our business, the narrative they're spreading is false,” Amazon spokesperson Eileen Hards told Motherboard. “This group does not work for Amazon. Our delivery network is made up of thousands of independently owned and operated small businesses who provide delivery services for our company. This particular third party company had a track record of failing to perform and had been notified of its termination for poor performance well before today’s announcement. This situation is more about an outside company trying to distract from their history of failing to meet their obligations.”
The Teamsters organize UPS and DHL, two massive U.S. delivery companies, as well as workers in warehousing, trucking, and construction jobs. Currently, the union is in the throes of bargaining a contract renewal with UPS, as the current contract is set to expire on July 31. Workers are gearing up for a strike, Teamsters officials have been posting on social media.
The Teamsters also recently opened an Amazon division, which is responsible for overseeing unionization efforts at Amazon and preventing the company from getting a bigger foothold in rural communities. In one town on Long Island, New York, Teamsters organizing helped prevent Amazon from building a warehouse that would destroy a community’s only access to greenspace. The union says it intends to improve pay and working conditions in Amazon to match the industry standard, as Amazon’s injury rate has frequently been reported to be double the industry rate. Motherboard has previously extensively reported on the dangerous conditions both warehouse workers and drivers have to endure.
“We will be victorious in this fight,” Teamsters president Sean O’Brien wrote on Twitter. “Teamsters set the standard and are just getting bigger, faster and stronger.”
Battle-Tested Strategies did not respond to a request for comment.
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Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) speaking in Little Rock on Feb. 7. (photo: Drago Alexander/Shutterstock)
The Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida-based think tank and lobbying group, drafted state legislation to strip child workplace protections, emails show
At 4:52 a.m., Tuesday, the state’s Senate approved a bill to allow children as young as 14 to work night shifts and 15 year-olds on assembly lines. The measure, which still must pass the Iowa House, is among several the Foundation for Government Accountability is maneuvering through state legislatures.
The Florida-based think tank and its lobbying arm, the Opportunity Solutions Project, have found remarkable success among Republicans to relax regulations that prevent children from working long hours in dangerous conditions. And they are gaining traction at a time the Biden administration is scrambling to enforce existing labor protections for children.
The FGA achieved its biggest victory in March, playing a central role in designing a new Arkansas law to eliminate work permits and age verification for workers younger than 16. Its sponsor, state Rep. Rebecca Burkes (R), said in a hearing that the legislation “came to me from the Foundation [for] Government Accountability.”
“As a practical matter, this is likely to make it even harder for the state to enforce our own child labor laws,” said Annie B. Smith, director of the University of Arkansas School of Law’s Human Trafficking Clinic. “Not knowing where young kids are working makes it harder for [state departments] to do proactive investigations and visit workplaces where they know that employment is happening to make sure that kids are safe.”
That law passed so swiftly and was met with such public outcry that Arkansas officials quickly approved a second measure increasing penalties on violators of the child labor codes the state had just weakened.
In Missouri, where another child labor bill has gained significant GOP support, the FGA helped a lawmaker draft and revise the legislation, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.
The FGA for years has worked systematically to shape policy at the state level, fighting to advance conservative causes such as restricting access to anti-poverty programs and blocking Medicaid expansion.
But in February, the White House announced a crackdown on child labor violators in response to what activists have described as a surge in youths — many of them undocumented immigrants — working at meat packing plants, construction sites, auto factories and other dangerous job sites.
The administration’s top labor lawyer called the proposed state child labor laws “irresponsible,” and said it could make it easier for employers to hire children for dangerous work.
“Federal and state entities should be working together to increase accountability and ramp up enforcement — not make it easier to illegally hire children to do what are often dangerous jobs,” Labor Solicitor Seema Nanda said. “No child should be working in dangerous workplaces in this country, full stop.”
Congress in 1938 passed the Fair Labor Standards Act to stop companies from using cheap child labor to do dangerous work, a practice that exploded during the Great Depression.
But today those rules, which restrict the hours and types of work that can be performed by minors, are not strictly enforced, and the issue has become more polarizing since the pandemic began — when a labor shortage created a huge need for workers and large numbers of undocumented minors entered the United States looking for work.
The Labor Department has seen a 69 percent increase in minors employed in violation of federal law since 2018, officials reported. Between 2018 and 2022, federal regulators opened cases for 4,144 child labor violations covering 15,462 youth workers, according to federal data.
On the surface, the FGA frames its child worker bills as part of a larger debate surrounding parental rights, including in education and child care. But the state-by-state campaigns, the group’s leader said, help the FGA create openings to deconstruct larger government regulations.
Since 2016, the FGA’s Opportunity Solutions Project has hired 115 lobbyists across the country with a presence in 22 states, according to the nonpartisan political watchdog group Open Secrets.
“The reason these rather unpopular policies succeed is because they come in under the radar screen,” said David Campbell, professor of American democracy at the University of Notre Dame. “Typically, these things get passed because they are often introduced in a very quiet way or by groups inching little by little through grass-roots efforts.”
Minnesota and Ohio have introduced proposals this year allowing teens to work more hours or in more dangerous occupations, such as construction. A bill in Georgia would prohibit the state government from requiring a minor to obtain a work permit.
The FGA-backed measures maintain existing child labor safety protections “while removing the permission slip that inserts government in between parents and their teenager’s desire to work,” Nick Stehle, the foundation’s vice president, said in a statement.
“Frankly, every state, including Missouri, should follow Arkansas’s lead to allow parents and their teenagers to have the conversation about work and make that decision themselves,” said Stehle, who is also a visiting fellow at the Opportunity Solutions Project.
The FGA declined to make Stehle and other representatives available for interviews.
It’s one of several conservative groups that have long taken aim at all manner of government regulations or social safety net programs. The FGA is funded by a broad swath of ultraconservative and Republican donors — such as the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation and 85 Fund, a nonprofit connected to political operative Leonard Leo — who have similarly supported other conservative policy groups.
The youth hiring or employment bills, as they are often titled, represent growing momentum among conservatives who contend that parents and not government policy should determine whether and where 14- and 15-year-olds should work.
“When you say that a bill will allow kids to work more or under dangerous conditions, it sounds wildly unpopular,” Campbell said. “You have to make the case that, no, this is really about parental rights, a very carefully chosen term that’s really hard to disagree with.”
Making it easier to hire 14-year-olds
Some employers grappling with a tightening labor market and pressure from inflation have turned to younger workers, rather than increasing wages or benefits to attract older applicants, experts say.
The employment rate among 16- to 24-year-olds is down compared with previous years, though, according to federal statistics.
Supporters of the child worker proposals say they reduce red tape around the hiring process for minors. A spokeswoman for Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a rising Republican star, said her state’s law relieved parents of “obsolete” and “arbitrary burdens.”
“The main push for this reform didn’t come from big business,” Stehle, the FGA vice president, wrote in an essay for Fox. “It came from families like mine, who want more of the freedom that lets our children flourish.”
The Arkansas bill sponsors, Burkes and state Sen. Clint Penzo (R), did not respond to requests for comment.
Child welfare advocates and some business leaders said the new legislation could endanger children on the job and entice others to leave school to join the workforce.
Those risks are especially acute for undocumented minors who arrive in the United States without their parents. Close to 15 percent of those children are released from federal custody to distant relatives or nonrelative sponsors, Robin Dunn Marcos, the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, testified to a House panel on Tuesday. That makes them more vulnerable to labor trafficking, experts say.
“I don’t know that we have good handle on how many kids are being released to a non-parent and then exploited,” said Reid Maki, director of advocacy at the Child Labor Coalition.
Randy Zook, president of the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce, said in an interview that his state’s law was “a solution looking for a problem.”
The work permits — more than 2,700 of which were issued by Arkansas officials in 2022, according to state government data — required proof of age, parental permission and an employer’s signature. They left an “important paper trail ” of where children were employed and reminded businesses of the rules, said Laura Kellams, from the nonprofit Arkansas Advocates For Children And Families.
“This wasn’t burdening parents or children who want to work,” Kellams said. “This wasn’t burdening business that followed the law. It would only be a burden to an employer who didn’t want to follow the rules about work hours and the types of work that kids that age are able to do.”
Funded by conservative political network
The FGA and Opportunity Solutions Project frequently maintain that state and federal regulators are holding back the size and quality of the U.S. workforce. The FGA has called for reforming home-based business laws, fast-tracking permitting processes, cutting social safety nets and creating other incentives to work — including youth employment with little to no oversight from the government.
A January 2022 white paper previewed talking points that lawmakers would go on to use while discussing the legislation.
The paper called teenagers “a critical source of labor,” and linked the conservative backlash to pandemic-era education policies to alleged overreach by school officials charged with protecting children in the workforce.
“Now is the time for state lawmakers to eliminate unnecessary hurdles to teenage work and leave the decision-making to parents,” the paper declares.
Shortly after publishing the paper, the groups were in contact with a leading state legislator to implement that policy agenda. In May 2022, Opportunity Solutions Project lobbyist James Harris forwarded two draft child worker bills to Daniel Wilhelm, the chief of staff to Missouri state Sen. Andrew Koenig (R), chair of the chamber’s committee on education and workforce development, according to emails obtained through open records laws.
Koenig introduced the measure as one of the first bills filed for the Missouri legislature’s 2023 session. Harris then testified in support of the legislation in a February hearing. “Really nothing to add,” Harris said, referring to Koenig’s opening remarks touting the bill, “other than, you’re right.”
Wilhelm in a statement said Koenig “learned about this legislation and after reviewing it decided that he wanted to file a bill because he supports the concept.”
In an interview, Harris said child labor protections in many states are based on “atrocious labor practices” of more than a century ago.
“Maybe there was a time and need for a lot of that,” he said. “Today’s work environments are the safest they’ve ever been.”
A surprising (and growing) gender gap in the most dangerous jobs
Tarren Bragdon, a former Maine state legislator, founded the FGA in 2011 with a focus on cutting social safety net and anti-poverty programs. It quickly tapped into conservative political fundraising networks and grew from $50,000 in seed funding to $4 million in revenue by its fourth year, according to tax filings and the group’s promotional materials.
In 2020, the most recent year for which the FGA and its funders’ full financial disclosures are available, more than 70 percent of its $10.6 million in revenue came from 14 conservative groups.
The FGA joined the State Policy Network, a confederation of conservative state-level think tanks that practice what leaders call the “Ikea model” of advocacy, its president said during the group’s 2013 conference. Affiliates such as the FGA display prefabricated policy projects for state officials, then provide the tools — including research and lobbying support — to push proposals through legislative and administrative processes.
In 2021, for example, Arkansas legislators passed 48 measures backed by the FGA, according to the foundation’s end-of-year report. It identified Arkansas, Missouri and Iowa among its five “super states” where it planned to increase its advocacy presence.
In 2022, the FGA claimed 144 “state policy reform wins,” including 45 related to unemployment and welfare, across a slew of states.
“Success in the states is critical for achieving national change, as it often opens the door to federal regulatory reform,” Bragdon wrote in the group’s 2021 report. “Once enough states successfully implement a reform, we can use the momentum and proven results to build pressure for regulatory change.”
Yet even legislators who support the FGA’s policies expanding child labor have found their limits.
Missouri’s bill was amended to require a parental permission form for children aged 14 to 16 who want to take a job. The original legislation, edited by the FGA, did not contain any such provision.
READ MORE 
Algae blooms on Lake Erie, 2011. (photo: Brenda Culler/ODNR Coastal Management)
The oceanic phenomenon could lead to more pathogen-carrying mosquitoes, bacteria, and toxic algae.
That seismic shift could have major implications for human health, and specifically the spread of disease. El Niño will increase temperatures and make precipitation more volatile, which in turn could fuel the spread of pathogen-carrying mosquitoes, bacteria, and toxic algae. It’s a preview of the ways climate change will influence the spread of infectious diseases.
“The bottom line here is that there are a range of different health effects that might occur in the setting of an El Niño,” Neil Vora, a physician with the environmental nonprofit Conservation International, told Grist. “That means we have to monitor the situation closely and prepare ourselves.”
As with La Niña, the effects of an El Niño extend far beyond a patch of above-average warmth in the Pacific. Parched regions of the world — like Chile, Peru, Mexico, and the American Southwest — are often bombarded with rain and snow. Some other parts of the world, including the Northeastern U.S., the Amazon, and Southeast Asia’s tropical regions, on the other hand, don’t see much rain at all in an El Niño year. The planet could temporarily become 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer, on average, than in preindustrial times — a threshold scientists have long warned marks the difference between a tolerable environment and one that causes intense human suffering.
These patterns are a boon for certain vector-borne illnesses — defined as infections transmitted by an organism (usually an arthropod, a category that includes insects and arachnids). Regions of the world that will experience longer wet seasons because of El Niño, many of which are in the tropics, may see an increase in mosquito-borne illnesses, according to Victoria Keener, a senior research fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, and a coauthor of the U.S.’s upcoming Fifth National Climate Assessment. “El Niño will mean a longer breeding season for a lot of vectors and increased malaria potential in a lot of the world,” she said.
A 2003 study on the intersection of El Niño and infectious disease showed spikes in malaria along the coasts of Venezuela and Brazil during and after El Niño years. The study looked at more than a dozen cycles between El Niño, La Niña, and the cycle’s “neutral” phase, which taken together are known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. The researchers, who analyzed data dating back to 1899, also found an increase in malaria during or post-El Niño in Colombia, India, Pakistan, and Peru. Cases of dengue, another mosquito-borne illness, increased in 10 Pacific islands.
The manner in which El Niño impacts mosquitos and the diseases they carry is varied and often difficult to accurately calculate, said Christopher Barker, an associate professor in the Department of Pathology, Microbiology, and Immunology of the University of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. Mosquitos breed in warm, wet conditions. But too much water in the form of flooding rains can wash away mosquito larvae and ultimately contribute to a decrease in mosquito populations. As the planet shifts into an El Niño year, Barker said the areas to keep a close eye on are ones where moderate or heavy rains are followed by dry, warm months. If the past is any indication, countries like India and Pakistan are especially at risk.
So is California. After years of drought, recent storms in the Golden State have generated a lot of flooding and cooler-than-normal conditions. If that leads into a hotter-than-normal summer, “that may set things up for bad conditions for West Nile virus,” Barker said of the mosquito-borne illness that is becoming more prevalent in the U.S.
El Niño is projected to bring unusual warmth to the Pacific Northwest and the northern Great Plains. Kristie L. Ebi, a professor of global health at the University of Washington, said warmth is often the determining factor in how far north vectors of disease move. “We know that mosquitoes don’t control their internal temperature,” she said. “When it’s hotter they’re going to see opportunities to move into new ranges. If the El Niño lasts long enough they get established and find habitat, then you can see an expansion in geographic range.” A study on the link between infectious disease in the U.S. and El Niño, published in 2016, found a link between tick-borne illnesses such as rickettsiosis — an infection that can damage the brain, lungs, and skin — and El Niño in the Western U.S.
Vibrio cholerae, the water-borne bacteria that causes cholera, is another area of concern, experts told Grist — both in areas that see more rain during El Niño and those that see less rain. Flooding aids the spread of the cholera bacteria from open sewers and other waste containers — still prevalent in many underdeveloped parts of the world — into drinking water systems. Drought also leads to an uptick in cholera cases in poor countries, because restricted access to fresh water forces people to use less water for personal hygiene practices like handwashing and turn to unsafe sources of drinking water. “Cholera can be a devastating infectious disease that causes a very severe diarrhea that can dehydrate people so badly that they die,” Vora said. “In the setting of an El Niño extreme weather event, there might be impacts on sewage systems or on access to clean water, and that can lead to the spread of water-borne diseases such as cholera.”
Research shows El Niño has had an impact on the transmission of cholera in Bangladesh and eastern India. Water-borne illnesses writ large increase in the western Pacific islands during an El Niño year, Keener said, because El Niño in that region is associated with drought. “People start conserving water and using it for drinking instead of hygiene, so you see an increase in things like pink eye, gastrointestinal issues, just a whole host of health issues,” she said.
Poisonous algae is a consideration in regions where El Niño spurs above-average sea-surface temperatures. Algae thrive in warm water, where their poisons accumulate in water-filtering organisms such as shellfish. Humans who consume that shellfish or are otherwise exposed to the algae can develop symptoms like abdominal cramping, rashes, vomiting, and even, in extreme cases, death. A study from 2020 links El Niño to a pair of harmful algal blooms in the southern hemisphere, commonly referred to as the “Godzilla-Red tide event,” which poisoned four people and led to massive economic losses in Australia and Chile.
The study noted that these blooms, sparked by high sea-surface temperatures brought on by an El Niño, were a “dress rehearsal” for future outbreaks of poisonous algae influenced by climate change. The coming El Niño may bring about a Godzilla round two. “I wouldn’t be surprised with warmer temperatures if you see an association with harmful algal blooms,” Ebi said, noting that El Niño’s signature high temperatures are one of the phenomenon’s most widespread and impactful health-related consequences.
The premise that El Niño years offer a glimpse of what a future permanently altered by climate change might look like is one governments should take seriously. Public health institutions are doing a subpar job of monitoring infectious diseases, pinpointing where they’ll crop up, and preparing communities for an uptick in environmental pathogens. The coming ENSO shift may further illuminate those weaknesses. “We have few ideas about what will move and what will pop up when there is any kind of climate or weather perturbation,” Daniel R. Brooks, coauthor of The Stockholm Paradigm: Climate Change and Emerging Disease, told Grist.
Even public health agencies in the U.S., one of the richest countries in the world, do a poor job of assessing infectious disease risk, monitoring pathogens as they move through the environment, and testing individuals for increasingly common diseases such as West Nile virus, especially when they’re asymptomatic. “This means the real threat is unpleasant surprise,” Brooks said. “We know a bit about some already known pathogens, but that is not good enough.”
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