Biden administration expands Ukrainian TPS eligibility to thousands more people
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it is changing the cutoff date for Ukrainian Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a welcomed decision that stands to greatly increase the number of immigrants eligible for relief.
The Biden administration initially announced that Ukrainian immigrants who are already in the U.S. as of March 1 would be eligible to apply. But this week, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced a new eligibility date of April 11.
“The cut-off date change could make thousands of additional Ukrainians who have managed to reach the U.S. following the Russian invasion, including those who have been allowed to enter the U.S. through the Mexican border on humanitarian grounds, eligible for TPS,” CBS News reported. The first Ukrainian families to flee for the U.S. through Mexico began arriving in early March.
RELATED STORY: Biden administration designates Ukraine for Temporary Protected Status, citing ‘humanitarian crisis’
Mayorkas said this week that “extraordinary and temporary conditions, including destroyed infrastructure, scarce resources, and lack of access to healthcare, prevent Ukrainian nationals from returning to their homeland in safety.” This announcement could come to the relief of Volodymyr Bobko and his family in Massachusetts. He said his mother-in-law missed the initial March 1 cutoff deadline by just two days.
The new eligibility criteria comes as U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) opened the application period for Ukraine and Sudan on Tuesday. “USCIS estimates 3,090 individuals may be eligible for TPS under the designation of Sudan,” the agency said.
However, the Biden administration did not similarly adjust Sudan’s March 1 cutoff date, which “[s]hows once again how differently Ukrainians are being treated,” tweeted American Immigration Council Senior Policy Counsel Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. As noted earlier this week following the designation of Cameroon for Temporary Protected Status, Black-led groups, organizers, and affected individuals spent years fighting for this relief. But for comparison, Ukraine’s designation for Temporary Protected Status came within 10 days of Russia’s unprovoked invasion.
Additionally, Mayorkas last month reminded U.S. border officials that they have authority to make “case-by-case” decisions to exempt Ukrainians from Stephen Miller’s anti-asylum Title 42 policy. But when it comes to Haitian asylum-seekers, only about 14% of their humanitarian requests have been approved, VICE reported.
Black-led organizations and advocates welcomed the recent news of Cameroon’s designation and urged relief for other Black immigrants facing imminent risk. “The current conditions in Cameroon made it a textbook case for TPS designation,” the UndocuBlack Network said. “Other majority-Black countries, with very similar conditions, must also receive TPS designation immediately. We hope Mauritania with the widespread practice of enslaving its Black population and Ethiopia with the armed conflict and humanitarian crisis in its Tigray region will also receive TPS designation soon.”
“While I applaud the Department’s decision to designate TPS for Cameroon—which many of us have been imploring DHS to do for over a year—the agency must do more,” House Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship co-chair Joe Neguse said this week. “As made clear in our letter last September, both Mauritania and Ethiopia plainly qualify under the statute.”
The Biden administration’s expansion of relief for Ukrainian immigrants already here comes as U.N. data indicates more than 5 million Ukrainians have fled their homes since the end of February. The vast majority, more than 2.8 million, have fled to Poland. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said last month that Russia’s brutal invasion was sparking the most rapidly growing refugee crisis in roughly 80 years. “President Biden last month pledged to welcome up to 100,000 Ukrainians displaced by the war, but the U.S. has yet to announce any programs or policy changes to accomplish the ambitious objective,” CBS News reported.
20-year-old Harvard University student Nika Rudenko told the Associated Press last month that she’s looking at her TPS options. She’s missed class in recent days, incredibly distraught over Russia’s invasion. But that could risk her student visa. Her family is currently in hiding.
“My mental state is not very stable and it’s just very difficult to keep up with work and at the same time to try to do something for my country,” she said in the report. “It feels very weird to understand that everyone else’s lives just carry on, but my life has completely changed. People just cannot feel what you’re going through, and it hurts.”
RELATED STORIES: Putin’s invasion of Ukraine causing fastest-growing refugee crisis in decades, U.N. says
DHS tells U.S. border officials that Ukrainians can be excluded from anti-asylum Title 42 order
Black immigrants welcome Cameroonian TPS, continue urging relief for Ethiopia and Mauritania
Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA signals its surrender to white nationalist Groypers by embracing them
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The Groyper War—the internecine battle among far-right groups vying for the college-age audience, pitting Charlie Kirk’s slick Turning Point USA operation with Nick Fuentes’ America First and its white nationalist Groyper Army—seems to be over. With barely a whimper, the Groypers are the victors.
Although it’s been clear that Kirk has been nudging TPUSA in a white nationalist direction over the past year, in recent weeks he has removed the barriers between the groups altogether. This week in California, two unrepentant white nationalists affiliated with America First are scheduled to appear as invited speakers at a TPUSA event at University of California-Santa Barbara—one month after having appeared at a similar event at Fresno State hosted by the school’s College Republicans.
Thursday’s UCSB event sponsored by TPUSA is two-person panel featuring John Doyle, the host of the popular YouTube channel “Heck Off, Commie!,” and another far-right TikTok influencer named Kai Schwemmer, whose account is called Kai Clips. Both are closely associated with Fuentes and America First, and both specialize in outrageously and unapologetically racist discourse promoting white-supremacist eugenics.
Doyle, for instance, viciously smeared Martin Luther King Jr. on one of his recent shows.
“Without the assassination, he wouldn’t have a legacy, and I guarantee you he wouldn’t have a holiday,” Doyle said. “He would have become someone like Al Sharpton, or Jesse Jackson. Like, eventually the information about the scandals would have gone public—his infidelity, his Communist ties, his plagiarism—but now, because he was assassinated, nobody cares about that. Because the story goes that he died fighting for equality and he was killed by a racist white man. … So in terms of the legacy of Martin Luther King, being assassinated was, like, the best thing that could have happened to him.”
He will be joined onstage at Santa Barbara by Schwemmer, a 19-year-old Groyper influencer whose TikTok account, as Ben Lorber reports, launders stylized takes on white nationalist ideology for a Gen Z audience. Schwemmer appeared in a video promoting Fuentes’ “White Boy Summer” speaking tour in 2021, and lamented on Twitter that “the white population is globally declining and we are being treated terribly by the incoming populations, the acceleration of mass immigration is one major part of this.”
A couple of years ago, this kind of embrace of Fuentes and his Groypers would have been unthinkable for Kirk, largely because of their unrelenting attempts to disrupt his events and humiliate both Kirk and his speakers, insisting that their positions failed the white nationalist acid test, especially when it came to “the J Question”—that is, their innate antisemitism—and not just LGBTQ rights, but any kind of tolerance for that community.
Kirk and some of his more mainstream but still Trumpist allies like Sebastian Gorka (who demanded Fuentes be removed from Twitter) and Congressman Dan Crenshaw pushed back hard on the Groypers. The latter, in turn, were joined in the white nationalist trenches by onetime Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin, who burned her bridges with mainstream conservatives in order to become the “Groyper Mommy.”
But in more recent months, Kirk—who in fact has always flirted with extremist rhetoric and ideas, but has tried to keep one foot in the Republican establishment mainstream, which is much of the source of his funding—has shown signs of giving in to the wave of white nationalist and conspiracist extremism that is currently inundating the American right generally.
At an October event in Idaho, one audience member asked him: “When do we get to use the guns? … How many elections are they gonna steal before we kill these people?” Kirk’s response amounted to chagrined agreement, saying that the query was just “overly blunt” and agreeing that “we are living under fascism.”
In December, a TPUSA event in Phoenix turned into a meeting ground for an array of far-right extremists, including several with ties to the Groypers. They included Greyson Arnold, a prominent Groyper influencer who posts memes lamenting the American victory in World War II, calling Adolf Hitler a “complicated historical figure,” and lauding Nazis as the “pure race.” He has also posted the logo for the neo-Nazi site Stormfront on his Instagram account.
Fuentes, who was subpoenaed by the House Jan. 6 committee to discuss his active role in the 2021 Capitol insurrection, has been gaining ground among mainstream Republicans in the past year. While only a handful of elected Republicans—notably Congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona—came to his America First PAC convention in 2021, it was a different story this year, when an array of GOP candidates showed up to speak, headlined by Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.
Fuentes also has been an ardent supporter of Russia and Vladimir Putin in the Ukraine invasion, encouraging the audience to chant “Putin, Putin” at the convention, adding: “And now they’re going on about Russia and ‘Vladimir Putin is Hitler,’ you know, they say that’s not a good thing.” More recently, Russia Today—the Kremlin-financed media entity that has been mostly shut down in the U.S. and Europe—invited Fuentes on to discuss how “Western rhetoric can be described as Russophobia.”
As if to underscore what loathsome characters the Groypers are, Fuentes recently unleashed an anti-military rant on his podcast: “They’re creating this mercenary army of, uh, N-words, and homosexuals, that’s the story … they’re creating a mercenary army of Blacks, browns, Hispanics, as well as women, and homos and trans people as some kind of equity initiative … I mean, they’re making a mercenary army of people that’s gonna obediently murder whites when the time comes, that’s what this is about.”
Charlie Kirk’s fan in Idaho would probably agree. As Left Coast Right Watch observed: “The Groypers won the Groyper war. It doesn’t matter if Nick Fuentes himself being there makes anyone look bad all his influencer acolytes just get the red carpet from TPUSA now.”
Tulsi Gabbard returns to her anti-LGBTQ roots by supporting Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill
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Tuesday, former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard appeared on Fox News’ The Sean Hannity Show and offered her unmitigated support for Florida’s insane “Parental Rights in Education” bill, aka the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. In fact, the renowned conspiracy theorist and failed presidential candidate added that she didn’t believe the restrictive bill goes far enough.
The bill (HB 1557) that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed on March 28 bans teachers from teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade.
When Hannity asked Gabbard about the Florida law, she began by declaring that she isn’t “a political pundit.” Then what is she? She’s not a congresswoman any longer. She’s not running for office. All she is, in truth, is a political pundit.
She added that she “very clearly” supports the “bill passed in Florida,” and she believes “it probably didn’t go far enough.”
RELATED STORY: Tulsi Gabbard called ‘Russian asset’ after tweeting about ‘biolabs’ in Ukraine
In early April, Ohio proposed a similar “parental rights” bill designed to limit teachers from education around gender and sex education. Texas Republicans have also ramped up efforts for a bill limiting classroom discussions around sex and gender, but school officials in the state say it’s not worth the time, as students K-12 aren’t getting that education in classrooms.
Gabbard then pivoted to discuss the “role of government,” saying it’s to “teach reading, writing, civics, the Constitution, Bill of Rights, math, actually raise the literacy rate in our kids. Schools and the government should not be getting in the way of parents raising their kids and imparting their values to them.”
But in the past, Gabbard herself worked to ensure that government could dictate people’s lives. According to CNN, in the early 2000s Gabbard worked with The Alliance for Traditional Marriage, an organization run by her father, Mike Gabbard, advocating against same-sex marriage and promoting conversion therapy. In the years that followed, Gabbard claimed to have changed her views. She was a member of the House LGBT Equality Caucus and, as Politico reported, she received a score of 100 on her voting record from the Human Rights Campaign.
In 2019, she offered a public apology, writing online in part, “I know that LGBTQ+ people still struggle, are still facing discrimination, are still facing abuse and still fear that their hard-won rights are going to be taken away by people who hold views like I used to … I regret the role I played in causing such pain, and I remain committed to fighting for LGBTQ+ equality.”
More recently, Gabbard made headlines after she received a donation to her 2020 campaign from an alleged Russian agent and then announced a bizarre conspiracy theory about U.S.-funded biological laboratories in Ukraine.
“Like COVID, these pathogens know no borders,” Gabbard said. “If they are inadvertently or purposely breached or compromised, they will quickly spread all throughout Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world, causing untold suffering and death.”
“Her treasonous lies may well cost lives,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), tweeted in response.
Gabbard then responded to Romney with a long and winding road of tweets with her evidence of the Ukraine lab conspiracy, ending with a demand he “apologize” and “resign.”
FBI sends flawed email in response to media inquiry about the status of Leonard Peltier’s clemency
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In a strange turn of events, when HuffPost recently asked for the status of an inmate’s petition for clemency, instead of receiving a response from the federal Office of the Pardon Attorney, the FBI sent an email.
But as the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. The inmate in question is Leonard Peltier, a Native American rights activist who supporters say has been wrongfully imprisoned for the past 46 years. Now 77 years old, he has been locked up since 1975, making him the longest-serving political prisoner in U.S. history.
HuffPost reports that in late March they emailed the Office of the Pardon Attorney to check on the status of Peltier’s review process, filed by his attorney in July. They received an email response from the FBI office.
Peltier was convicted for the deaths of two FBI agents who died during a 1975 shoot-out on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Peltier has denied being involved in the shooting.
RELATED STORY: ‘He doesn’t deserve this,’ activist says after learning Leonard Peltier has COVID-19
The FBI’s email to HuffPost:
“The FBI remains resolute against the commutation of Leonard Peltier’s sentence for murdering FBI Special Agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. We must never forget or put aside that Peltier intentionally and mercilessly murdered these two young men and has never expressed remorse for his ruthless actions.
“Peltier’s conviction, rightly and fairly obtained, still stands, and has withstood numerous appeals to multiple courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. No amount of prison time changes the facts surrounding Coler and Williams’ deaths and commuting Peltier’s sentence now would only serve to diminish the brutality of his crime and the suffering of their surviving families and the FBI family.”
Justin Mazzola, deputy director for research at Amnesty International USA, told HuffPost the email from the FBI is not only outdated but also factually incorrect.
“Forty-five years later, this statement does not even come close to aligning with what we now know about the environment and events leading up to and on Pine Ridge that fateful day, let alone all of the information we now know about the trial and case against Leonard Peltier,” Mazzola said.
“It denies the FBI’s own role in using perjured testimony to secure his extradition from Canada, the suppression of potentially exonerating evidence by the [Department of Justice] attorneys in his case. … Even the prosecutors subsequently admitted that they have no idea who shot the agents at point-blank range,” Mazzola adds.
In 2020, Peltier’s attorney Kevin Sharp told the Tennessee Lookout that what happened to Peltier equals a “mountain of constitutional violations.” He added that the government eventually dropped the murder conviction because, through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, it turned out the FBI had withheld “damning exculpatory evidence” showing that the gun used to shoot the two agents did not belong to Peltier. Additionally, according to Sharp, several witnesses recanted their testimonies, saying, “We were threatened by the FBI. So we said we saw things that we did not see.”
And it seems it has been the fear of the FBI that has kept Peltier behind bars for so long. Sharp says at one point former President Clinton was considering Peltier’s case, but did nothing. Hope sprung again during former President Obama’s terms in office, but again, nothing was done.
In an early February White House press briefing, press secretary Jen Psaki was asked whether President Biden knew about or had been briefed on Peltier’s case. Psaki said at the time she had no idea whether or not the president had been spoken to or about his case.
International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee (ILPDC) co-director Carol Gokee told Daily Kos in February that she was worried about Peltier after learning he’d tested positive for COVID-19.
“Leonard has been begging and pleading for years and nothing has been accomplished,” Gokee told Daily Kos. “He just keeps saying, ‘Get me home so I don’t die here.’”
ILPDC has been demanding that Peltier either be released or placed in a more adequate facility.
“If Leonard Peltier dies in prison, God help us,” Gokee said at a recent press conference. “Because America is watching. Joe Biden, this is up to you,” she added.
Peltier’s last chance for clemency is from Biden. Dozens of people have signed petitions in support of his release. With Deb Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet secretary, leading the Interior Department, there’s a sliver of hope to save Peltier from dying in prison.
Gokee told Daily Kos that after a press conference ILPDC gave, “Joe Biden decided to ask Senator Jon Ossoff to lead up the judiciary committee with Dick Durbin on prison conditions, misconduct and Covid. We have been giving them all kinds of information. Let’s see if they do a good job with this. “
Ginni Thomas' texts to Meadows reveal connection to another highly placed conspiracy theorist
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Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was truly part of a web of efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Among her dozens of text messages with then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, CNN reports, was one passing along thoughts from her friend Connie Hair. But Hair wasn’t just a personal friend. She was also chief of staff to Rep. Louie Gohmert—and Gohmert joined or supported two lawsuits seeking to overturn Donald Trump’s election loss. Those lawsuits went to the Supreme Court, though the court didn’t take up either of them.
Clarence and Ginni Thomas have long made a mockery of the weak Supreme Court ethics rules allowing justices to decide, on their own, when to recuse themselves from cases in which they have conflicts of interest. Ginni is a far-right activist who has worked with groups actively advocating for specific outcomes in major Supreme Court cases, cases that Clarence never recuses himself from. It’s not just a matter of Ginni’s stated opinions, it’s also often a matter of her professional interests. But Team Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election have brought the corruption of the Thomases’ inside-outside act into renewed attention, because it’s noteworthy when a Supreme Court justice’s wife texts a White House chief of staff: “Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for [Trump’s] back,” and later the Supreme Court justice in question is the only member of the court dissenting on allowing Trump’s documents relating to Jan. 6 to be handed over to investigators.
RELATED STORY: The Supreme Court can’t be untouchable. Congress needs to investigate Thomas
Hair turns up in a Nov. 14, 2020, text from Ginni Thomas to Meadows, reading, “This war is psychological. PSYOP. It’s what I did in the military. They are using every weapon they have to try to make us quit … It is fake, fraud and if people would take a deep breath and look at things through that filter we will see this through and win.”
The text to Meadows mentions Hair in a context suggesting she was the author of those words, and a source told CNN that Thomas had cut and pasted Hair’s comments from other texts. Ginni Thomas does not have a military background, while Hair’s Twitter profile includes “#veteran.”
Publicly, Hair tweeted things like, “Was on a call with the Trump campaign manager and legal folks for a briefing this morning. WE ARE SEEING THIS THROUGH TO THE END OF THE COURT/COUNT BATTLE,” and “Massive amounts of voter fraud in big cities throughout the contested states.”
Hair’s boss, Gohmert, sued Mike Pence in an effort to get him to interfere in the certification of the Electoral College count, and endorsed a Texas lawsuit challenging the votes of four other states.
According to CNN’s source, Hair didn’t know about Gohmert’s involvement in those cases, and Thomas and Hair didn’t discuss them. But Hair has been friends with the Thomases for years, including dinners and a Colbie Caillat concert as well as photos from inside Clarence’s judicial chambers. So what we have is the Supreme Court justice’s wife texting her good friend the congressional chief of staff, then passing along words of wisdom from the latter to the White House chief of staff, while the member of Congress is involved in lawsuits headed to the Supreme Court.
It’s all a little suspicious.
Clarence Thomas should not be allowed to pick and choose which of the legal matters in which his wife is deeply involved he will take as a member of the Supreme Court—particularly as his answer to that question has been “all of them.” A Supreme Court justice whose wife was strategizing with someone actively engaged in a coup attempt, telling them “Do not concede,” and sending along conspiracy theories and advice about which lawyers should lead the effort in the courts should perhaps not be one out of nine votes on which of those efforts will succeed in court. If Thomas won’t start recusing himself where his wife has been actively involved—and he won’t—it’s another strong argument for, at a minimum, imposing a strong set of judicial ethics on the Supreme Court, and beyond that, investigating Thomas and expanding the court so that one corrupt justice will not loom so large.
RELATED STORIES:
Texts between Ginni Thomas, Meadows reveal an extraordinary effort to destroy democracy
Ginni Thomas wanted to overturn the election. About Clarence Thomas’ Jan. 6 documents dissent …
Union posts a rare loss at Starbucks, then roars back with five wins
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Late last week, the union organizing campaign at Starbucks suffered a rare loss—just its second in more than 20 elections—with an election in Springfield, Virginia, that went against unionizing, 10 to 8. That did not signal a reversal of momentum, though: On Tuesday, five Starbucks stores in the Richmond, Virginia, area voted to unionize.
The Richmond votes weren’t close, either. The closest was 13-8 in favor of unionizing. One was unanimous, 19-0. In between, they racked up victories at 17-1, 22-3, and 11-2. Across the five stores, that’s 82-14. For context, Virginia is a state where less than 5% of workers are in unions.
RELATED STORY: Starbucks CEO whines that companies are being ‘assaulted … by the threat of unionization’
“It was jump started by the fact that a lot of us were out sick during the beginning of the Omicron surge, so we were really understaffed then,” Iman Djehiche, a worker at one of the stores, told VICE News. “And we realized exactly how strenuous it can be without the support of corporate on our side… our safety was being put second to profit, and we weren’t being treated with any sort of dignity and respect.”
Tim Swicord, an 18-year-old worker at the Springfield Starbucks, told DCist he had expected to win, but, in the wake of the vote, thinks the company’s anti-union campaign intimidated workers while turnover took a toll on support.
”Our district manager started coming in and we had these scheduled ‘connects,’ which is what corporate called them,” he said. “But they are really the same kind of one-on-ones … except ours were more frequently than not two-on-ones with our store manager and our district manager. They were saying things like, ‘you could lose your ability to transfer stores. You could lose some benefits.’”
He continued, “From what I heard, the things that were being said in these one-on-ones were definitely influencing people’s votes. And at least in my mind, I definitely felt that that two-on-one aspect was very kind of intimidating. And I really think it’s unfair.”
An 18-year-old barista being sat down by a store manager and a district manager, the latter of whom sat around the store when she wasn’t in forced two-on-ones, and told they would lose benefits? Yeah, that seems intimidating, especially coming from a company that has fired a series of union leaders among its workers, most on the flimsiest of pretexts. Meanwhile, founder and interim CEO Howard Schultz made a public speech whining that “We can’t ignore what is happening in the country as it relates to companies throughout the country being assaulted in many ways, by the threat of unionization.” Strong words from a man whose company is out here threatening teenagers as a matter of policy.
The company is also laying the groundwork to refuse to bargain in good faith as workers at the newly unionized stores seek to negotiate first contracts.
”Developing a contract that meets or exceeds what we already offer to our partners is going to be difficult for them to do,” Reggie Borges, a Starbucks spokesperson, was recently quoted in HuffPost. “These contracts don’t start at the baseline of the benefits that our partners get. That is the full-stop rule. The contract negotiations start at zero.” Borges quickly backtracked after Dave Jamieson’s story was published, because that very explicit threat is actually an illegal one. But it wasn’t an accident—it was in fact similar to what Swicord reported that managers are telling workers in their two-on-one intimidation sessions.
These contract fights will be long and hard and fought store by store, just as the union elections have been. Workers are planning, Jamieson reports, to develop a first contract framework that leaves significant room for workers to bargain based on the specific conditions in their stores.
By the time serious bargaining is going on across many stores, though, many more may have voted to unionize. According to a new Starbucks unionization tracker from Law360, workers at 219 Starbucks have taken steps to organize and votes have been scheduled in 82.
RELATED STORIES:
Two things keep happening at Starbucks: Union wins, and union supporters facing retaliatory firing
Starbucks workers are racking up win after win after win, despite vicious anti-union campaign
Climate change is killing workers, but it doesn't have to be this way
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Way back when I was splitting my working time freelance writing and working live events, I signed on with an audio-visual company that provides services to hotels. It was considered the retirement gig for production folks, as there was no touring involved and very little stress. As a lighting designer, my job consisted of gussying up a ballroom in corporate colors and making sure the lights I used to illuminate a podium made presenters look good. All that gear came from a warehouse, run by a cherished coworker who used to lovingly chide me for wearing ballet flats on show days because they weren’t exactly as safe as steel-toes. He stood up for me when there did come an opportunity to work out of town and I was the only woman on the gig. And he was known for his relentless work ethic, which was just as strong as his belief in the people around him. That relentlessness may have cost him his life.
A lawsuit has been brought on behalf of this friend, who likely succumbed to heatstroke one blazing summer day in the New Orleans metro and ultimately passed away. The company claimed it was heart-related. Rumblings from his friends and colleagues made it clear: It was likely heat-related.
There’s little recourse for workers who die from extreme temperatures, which have been made much worse due to climate change. As Mother Jones notes in a recent report, median penalties for on-the-job deaths stand at just $12,144 for federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) plans. State OSHA plans typically penalize companies with median fines of just $6,899 for worker deaths. For companies like the one I worked at, with revenues in excess of $40 million, a penalty like that certainly wouldn’t inspire a whole lot of change. Not that enforcement has even come close to allowing for such penalties to be incurred in the first place: As the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) notes, underreporting of such tragedies is altogether too common.
Amazon is guilty of underreporting when it comes to COVID-19 cases, as are meatpacking plants and farm operations. The entire state of Texas is guilty of underreporting workplace incidents like injuries, as it’s the only state without universal workers comp, which means companies have even fewer incentives to do the right thing since they’re ostensibly setting their own rules. As workplace tragedies—like the eight lives lost to a tornado at the Mayfield Consumer Products plant in Kentucky—continue to mount, legislation has been introduced to at least address some of the issues. The Asuncion Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act, named for a worker who died of heatstroke in 2004, was introduced last year to address heat-related deaths in the workplace. And, last week, OSHA finally announced the launching of what it dubs a National Emphasis Program on heat-related hazards.
“Tragically, the three-year average of workplace deaths caused by heat has doubled since the early 1990s. These extreme heat hazards aren’t limited to outdoor occupations, the seasons, or geography. From farmworkers in California to construction workers in Texas and warehouse workers in Pennsylvania, heat illness—exacerbated by our climate’s rising temperatures—presents a growing hazard for millions of workers,” Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh said in a statement.
Missing are requirements instead of guidance for natural disasters or grievous workplace incidents, like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which occurred 12 years ago today in the Gulf of Mexico. The largest oil spill in American history, it led to the deaths of 11 workers, irrevocably damaged the environment, and has continued to impact the Gulf South today. Damning reports following the incident found that safety regulations were regularly flouted for the sake of expedience. These problems persist to this day. Despite establishing new oversight in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill, journalists found that offshore worker deaths remain underreported.
As the president pushes for bold, sweeping changes to reach net-zero, so too should the Biden administration push for a country in which workplace deaths rarely, if ever, occur. Committing to a greener future means ensuring those who play key roles in reaching that goal are protected from exploitation, paid a livable wage, and protected from entirely preventable disasters. The Department of Labor has indeed issued reports touching on environmental justice but, like its guidance-over-rules approach to handling such matters, it is altogether lacking. The time to act is now, especially given the fact that it takes years for OSHA to fully adopt a regulation. The agency must act before more are senselessly lost for the sake of profit.
Praise and relief: Responses come in after Sen. Mallory McMorrow's powerhouse speech goes viral
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On Tuesday, video of Michigan Democratic state Sen. Mallory McMorrow giving a powerhouse speech on the floor of the state Senate went viral. It was a breath of fresh air to watch a Democratic representative bring the hard-hitting dose of reality our political discourse sorely needs. Sen. McMorrow was responding to a fundraising email Republican sate Sen. Lana Theis had sent out days earlier that name-checked Sen. McMorrow as someone “grooming” children. It was the natural progression of the profound moral perversions that have been powering the conservative bigotry movement over these past many decades.
Sen. McMorrow’s speech was four minutes of calling Theis and other conservatives out for their bigotries as well as the ultimate hypocrisy: their “protection of children” by way of attacking marginalized children. Saying, “I want every child in this state to feel seen, heard, and supported, not marginalized and targeted because they are not straight, white, and Christian,” McMorrow repeatedly drove the point home that true “Christian values” are shown with action and service, not “performative nonsense, like being seen in the same pew every Sunday or writing Christian in your Twitter bio and using that as a shield to target and marginalize already marginalized people.”
McMorrow’s words have been seen and heard by millions and the reactions to her righteous indignation are coming in from all over.
RELATED STORY: Watch what happens when you pick the wrong Democrat to lie about
Let us first read a brief analysis.
Then let us give the proper congratulations.
Hear, hear.
Fellow Democrats in the Michigan legislature responded as well.
And some perspective on history and how it’s taught or not taught:
And then a visual representation.
Oh, snap!
And then a hometown favorite!
Daily Kos community! Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noticed, as well.
And finally:
If you can, please give a dollar or two to help Democrats hold the House this coming election.
Here’s the whole speech, if you want to experience it all over again.
In now-deleted tweet, Arizona lawmaker boldly lies about 1 billion migrants at border
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There are right-wing politicians using extremist talking points to attack Democrats on immigration and the southern border, and then there’s Debbie Lesko. The Arizona representative lied in a now-deleted tweet on Tuesday that “more than 1,000,000,000 migrants”—that’s billion with a b!—were apprehended by U.S. border officials in a span of six months.
That’s a lot of people—about one in seven of all living human beings, to be more specific, noted The Washington Post’s Philip Bump. “If you have a spare bedroom, you probably would have had a knock at the door from someone from Customs and Border Protection. No wonder she eventually deleted the message.”
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In her now-deleted tweet, Lesko pointed to a report from The Wall Street Journal that claimed more than 1 million—not billion—arrests by U.S. border officials. But this too needs more explanation: Immigration policy experts have long stressed the Stephen Miller’s anti-asylum Title 42 policy “has had the counterproductive effect of significantly increasing the number of arrests at the border.” This is because desperate people unjustly blocked from their asylum rights will again try to seek safety.
”Before the pandemic began, just 7% of people arrested at the border had crossed the border more than once, but by October 2020, 40% of all people arrested had crossed the border multiple times that year,” American Immigration Council said last October. “Throughout Fiscal Year 2021, 1 in 3 people apprehended at the border had already crossed the border at least once that year.”
”Last month, the Border Patrol recorded 209,906 apprehensions, the third-highest since 2000 (we don’t have monthly records from before then),” Senior Policy Counsel Aaron Reichlin-Melnick tweeted on Tuesday. “I estimate that 61,000 of them—41%—were repeat apprehensions of someone on their 2nd, 3rd, or higher attempt to cross the border.”
It would seem that one way to respond to this would be to end this disastrous policy. But instead, some squeamish Democrats have actually joined forces with Republicans to defend this white supremacist order when all that’s being asked for is a return to the same exact asylum system we had in place on March 19, 2020, the day before Miller used the novel coronavirus pandemic as his excuse to invoke the policy.
But back to Lesko: She’s usually much better at parroting anti-immigrant talking points, like when congressional Republicans echoed the rhetoric of anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The Tanton network group issued a press release just one day after President Biden’s inauguration that accused him of “inducing an immigration and border crisis.” Just one day after getting sworn in! That Biden sure gets shit done.
“Within days of the release, Republicans began to echo the same language in their messages on social media,” The American Independent’s Oliver Willis reported last year, with Republican legislators including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy mimicking FAIR’s “border crisis” term nearly 40 times altogether through March 2021. Listed alongside Lesko were a number of other notorious anti-immigrant loudmouths, including Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn.
Blackburn has used “invasion” terminology to describe immigration at the southern border in Facebook ads several times in 2018, Media Matters reported in 2019. This is the same wording used by the white supremacist terrorist who went to El Paso that year to shoot and kill Mexicans. In Lesko’s state, GOP officials have used the term in asking the state’s governor to invoke war powers against asylum-seekers. Meanwhile, Lesko and Cotton opposed a bipartisan probe of the Jan. 6 insurrection, while Blackburn didn’t vote at all. Let’s also remember how McCarthy tried to sabotage the whole thing. But they continue to push the lie that we should be afraid of asylum-seekers.
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Video shows police detaining 8-year-old boy over a bag of chips
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Anyone who picks up a cell phone or other recording device and proceeds to capture just how police are using their authority against citizens deserves to be applauded in my book. The same is true for Kenneth Jackson, who KKTV identified as the man who captured Syracuse police officers apprehending an 8-year-old boy on Sunday over the alleged theft of a bag of chips, and then advocated for the child.
The boy sobbed as an officer grabbed him and escorted him to a police vehicle. “He look like a baby to me,” Jackson can be heard telling an officer while asking what he was doing. The officer claimed the child was stealing stuff and proceeded to ask Jackson a hypothetical question about if the child was stealing from his home.
“Nah man, what he steal? A bag of chips? So y’all treat him like a whole cold-blooded f–king killer,” Jackson asked.
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The officer told Jackson to keep walking, and that he didn’t know what he was talking about. “I know what I just came up and seen,” Jackson said.
When the officer asked him what he saw, he responded:
“I seen y’all snatching him off the bike like he a f–king grown-a– man, and he saying it wasn’t him.”
Warning: This video contains profanity and disturbing footage of a child being detained, which may be triggering for viewers.
Jackson was repeating the words another child on the scene screamed at officers. He went on to offer to pay for the chips the boy was accused of stealing. “Leave him alone. He a kid,” Jackson said.
His video exploded on social media and led the police department to conduct an internal review, KKTV reported. The footage had been viewed more than 5.3 million times on Twitter alone by Wednesday afternoon. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump tweeted about “how traumatizing” the detainment must have been.
“Syracuse (NY) police officers detained an 8-YEAR-OLD for allegedly stealing a bag of Doritos,” Crump said in the tweet. “Rather than talking to him or handling this incident in a different way, officers chose to escalate this incident and detain an obviously terrified young boy!”
The Syracuse Police Department said in a statement released on Twitter Tuesday that it is aware of the video and is reviewing footage from officers’ body cameras. “There is some misinformation involving this case,” the department said. “The juvenile suspected of larceny was not placed in handcuffs. He was placed in the rear of a patrol unit where he was directly brought home. Officers met with the child’s father and no charges were filed.”
Anthony Weah, the boy’s father, told The Post-Standard he was running errands when police called him to report officers were at his home with his three sons, who were accused of stealing chips. Weah said when he returned home, the officers were friendly, didn’t press charges, and returned his son—even the one featured in the viral video—without a mark on him. Weah still said after seeing a video of the encounter that he wants to file a complaint.
“The policeman, they are not children,” he told The Post-Standard. “They are not boys; they’re men.”