Independent News
Two bills could crack down on abuses by New York employers, this week in the war on workers
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Workers in New York could gain new protections through separate bills in New York City and in the state legislature—but the New York City measure was delayed Thursday for five more months, despite having been passed by lawmakers four months ago. That bill would require many job listings to include salary information, a move that could help crack down on pay inequities. It would apply only to employers with four or more employees.
In the state legislature, the newly introduced Warehouse Worker Protection Act “would require employers with at least 50 employees in a single warehouse or 500 workers statewide to share a written description of productivity quotas, how the quotas are developed, and how they can be used for disciplinary purposes with each worker,” Lauren Kaori Gurley reports at Vice. “It would also ensure that production quotas do not interfere with workers’ basic rights such as bathroom breaks and rest periods or health and safety laws.”
● The four most popular anti-union talking points and why they’re wrong.
● This is no way to treat pregnant workers, writes A Better Balance’s Dina Bakst.
● Nurses at two Palo Alto hospitals went on strike Monday:
“We are out here trying to get the hospital to listen to us about getting paid, being willing to make good contract agreements with us that will make nursing more sustainable, and improve our staffing, among other things,” said Kathy Stormberg, a registered nurse at Stanford and Crona Vice President.
● And speaking of nurses, Aparna Gopalan reports on The nurses who wouldn’t come in from the cold:
As 2021’s longest labor action, the St. Vincent nurses’ strike reflects the labor movement’s rapidly expanding horizons. After decades of concessionary bargaining focused on an increasingly narrow set of bread-and-butter issues (such as pay and benefits), more recent labor actions have shifted to “common good” demands that include the broader communities workers are part of, and serve.
● Learn it, do it, teach it: Member organizers turn the moment into a movement.
● One simple trick to protect workers from inflation, via Hamilton Nolan.
● Late disclosures concealed the extent of Amazon’s anti-union campaign, reports Dave Jamieson.
● Noam Scheiber reports on the revolt of the college-educated working class.
● Adjunct professors can work three jobs to make a living wage.
● Workers at Massachusetts hospital vote to unionize despite management’s fierce opposition
●
Connect! Unite! Act! Profiteering is absolutely real
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Imagine being part of an industry bringing in record profits—nearly $174 billion in profits in 2021. You receive incentives to grow through taxes, you have benefits thrown at you through state incentives, you are able to work with people to split their surface and mineral property rights to grow when you need to if you want to find more places that can handle your business. Every indicator is coming up roses for you.
Consumer demand for your product is rising as COVID falls, and you decide now is the time to give back investors $36.5 bilion in compensation and nice bonuses, all while raising the price of your product. Care to take a guess about which industry it is?
Welcome to the oil industry. Over the last few years, we’ve all connected via Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet. With travel resuming, oil and gas demand goes up, and the lack of planning by the industry in face of record profits leads to, well, them making more profits but everyone else feeling the pinch. Cars spin up and so do prices. Conservatives will tell you how much they love Elon Musk this week over his attempt to buy Twitter, while at the same time seemingly hating the sheer concept of electric vehicles. Who knows. The oil industry, though, won’t sweat it, and they aren’t the only ones profiteering right now.
For the American Petroleum Institute, the war in Ukraine has been an absolute gift. They are pushing for greater domestic drilling and more options in the U.S., at one point saying that fracking may be the best weapon the U.S. has against Russia. If you’re curious, you can find out where the oil and gas leases are near you through documents filed with your county, or through a land specialist. It took me minutes to find out that near me, hundreds of wells had been approved for potential drilling and … nothing. There is no movement to drill any of them. In fact, in counties all around me, that number of instilled wells skyrockets.
The United States is full of lease agreements with nothing happening—agreements held and agreed to in states and counties. If you believed the American Petroleum Institute, you would think they have nowhere to go and are all out of options. What may be more desirable is to get similar leases with way, way less oversight. Or maybe no oversight at all while combining it with products that have very little benefit to Americans looking for relief.
Americans will be looking at the ballot boxes this fall and wondering about their pocketbook. That is certainly reasonable. Under Trump, I frequently pointed out the president doesn’t control the price of gas; it is controlled by the industry. The same is certainly true now, and for the oil industry record profits right now are a great way for them to get fat and try to make it harm anyone who sees a more environmentally conscious future. A win-win, if you will.
There is an answer to that, and that is recognizing and talking about it for what it truly is: profiteering.
With that in mind, I hope you join us for our 20th anniversary Cheers & Jeers, 4PM PST on May 20! Just send me a KosMail to attend.
This week, instead of music, let me offer you some trailers for, let’s say, fitting movies:
WTF Roundup: Pay no attention to GOP corruption—stare at this Hunter Biden laptop and buy a pillow
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What is there to say about Fox News and the right-wing-o-sphere that hasn’t been scratched by the nails of demons into the toilet stall walls of hell? Every day, every hour, every minute, Fox News and the propaganda machines it has birthed are either selling their audience lies, misinformation, and disinformation about the world, or selling them pillows, telling them to sell their gold, and saying that the way out of debt is to give Magnum P.I. your home in a reverse mortgage.
The Fox-News-o-sphere has been doing double time sticking its head both up its own behind and also deep into the sand. Impossible to do, you say? You can say a lot of things about Fox News but you can’t say they aren’t willing and able to continue to surprise you when it comes to how low they can go. At this point the fact that a hole hasn’t ripped open in the space-time continuum under the Fox News studios is arguably the most surprising thing.
There has been a lot of news lately about audio of GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy saying all kinds of relatively sober things about how much of a disaster Donald Trump and the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol were. He even happened to mention how crappy people like Florida man Matt Gaetz are. The problem is: The GOP is nowhere near sober in their public-facing acceptance of the fascism being called for by the MAGA wing of the party. McCarthy has one thing going for him—being craven and a liar seems to work just fine with the MAGA crowd, regardless of how much evidence is laid before their feet.
RELATED STORY: Kevin McCarthy is in large trouble with his fellow Republicans after more recordings released
Let’s see what Fox News is doing to facilitate the dissemination of news and information to its audience.
Later on, Fox News’ Howard Kurtz had Glenn Greenwald on to talk about Elon Musk and how great his ideas on free speech are. Surprisingly (see: not surprisingly) they didn’t discuss any of Elon’s stated mentions of what he thinks “free speech” is. They didn’t because this …
…doesn’t make much sense.
Any-the-ways! Kurtz brought up and defended Fox News’ lack of coverage, instead opting to continuously discuss the media’s lack of luster over Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop leak in the days leading up to the November 2020 election. Kurtz’s argument, the one he laid out to his interviewee Greenwald, is that the McCarthy story isn’t a “big story.” Greenwald, who has been spending most of his time recently talking about Hunter Biden’s laptop, had to admit that it showed clearly that Kevin McCarthy is lying, but made sure to offer up the defense (while saying he wouldn’t know why one would want to defend McCarthy) that “it’s a very hard job to manage a Republican caucus with 250 very disparate voices with Donald Trump hovering over you. There was a lot of emotions surrounding 1/6, but we should demand from our political leaders the basic obligation not to tell lies to the public, and the fact that he got caught red-handed should be a pretty significant event for him.”
But, was it a big story? Greenwald, who has spent a considerable amount of the past year talking about Hunter Biden’s laptop, said that he thinks what happened was that “emotions were high” after the “Jan. 6, riot,” and it is definitely a “news story,” but guess what he says next? “If we did flood-the-zone coverage every time a politician lied we would never do anything else as journalists.” Greenwald ended by telling the Fox News host—on the network that continues to cover the Hunter Biden laptop and insist that President Joe Biden is maybe lying about something for the last year and a half—that “covering it is reasonable, but excessively covering it is what happened because obviously there’s a partisan agenda involved.”
Wild stuff. You see what Greenwald did there? He conflated a politician lying about wanting to ASK THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES TO RESIGN FROM OFFICE with “politicians lying.”
That first Fox News story count was from like April 22. I’m sure things picked up a few days later.
Wrong again!
What does Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin have to add?
Gotcha! But Walter, you say, this is Ron Johnson talking out of his ass two weeks ago; surely things are different now?
“Highest level.” In an unrelated story, Sen. Ron Johnson is a corrupt, racist, lying, POS.
Daily Kos Turns 20: We're showcasing the 'best' Community stories over the last two decades
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Around these parts, we’ve been fighting for progress for a long time. Twenty years, to be (almost) exact. Daily Kos might have started with seven sentences from one man, but my goodness, it’s become so much more, and done so much. And each of you have been a part of that, with your action, your donations, and yes, your writing on our open platform.
As our May 26 anniversary looms, we’ve been celebrating the best of the millions upon millions of stories written here, by Staff and Community alike. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been challenging everyone—including you, dear Community—to ponder our writings here on Daily Kos over the last 20 years and pick a personal best.
It’s been a blast collecting submissions from the Community Contributors Team, our Daily Kos staff (part one and part two), Kos himself, and you, dearest Community. And now, it’s time for another installment of This Is My Best (TIMB)—focused again on Community writing.
For those who are new to this series, here’s a quick recap:
Some years ago, I’m told, there was a wonderful series called This Is My Best (TIMB), which encouraged Community members to share their own writing that they were most proud of, rather than the writing of others. One part self-promotion, one part self-confidence, all parts awesome, TIMB encourages writers to press pause on their role as their own worst critics and take some time to toot their own horns.
Let’s dive right in. As noted last week, these stories are intimate and reflective, deeply researched, and political. And they mean a lot to the people who wrote them. So give ‘em a read!
And remember: If you don’t see your story below, we’ll be keeping the party going right up until our joyful 20th anniversary on May 26!
GARY NORTON
Why the debt limit fight will be a political face-off with no gimmicks or constitutional crisis (2013)
The title of this article is certainly long-winded. But it was an attempt to quell some of the hyperbolic and somewhat frantic arguments and concerns surrounding the debt limit face-off between President Obama and the Republicans in Congress.
For people who were not here at the time the Republicans were threatening to have our government default on its obligations by refusing to raise the debt limit. This was a major issue at the time. Raising the debt limit had always been done as a matter of course until the Republicans decided they could weaponize the issue, first with Bill Clinton and later with Barack Obama. By 2013 the Republican threats reach their zenith the president Obama stared them down ending not only that crisis but also republican attempts to use at in later dates.
I am highlighting this article because it attracted many informed comments and seems to have been appreciated by a large number of readers. It gave me an opportunity to talk about a subject that I had some familiarity with from my work in government and that enabled me to weave together politics and the law. Sometimes otherwise dry subjects can really be interesting when they are explained with sufficient detail and are made accessible to people with no background in the subject. I thought this article hit that sweet spot pretty well.
CFK
Resistance and joy: The story of Jacques Lusseyran (2006)
This is the first story I ever wrote for Daily Kos and I still think despite writing 771 stories over the years, it is my most heartfelt one. We are still here and we are still a vital community who gets things done. I celebrate us!
ALGEBRATEACHER
WYFP: Marry me (2013)
This is from a time when I hosted WYFP nine years ago, almost to the day. Mrs. algebrateacher and I are doing fine. I am retired now. We have been fixing up the house in preparation for the next lots-and-lots of years together because that’s what married people do.
PTOLEMY
Saving the republic: The Star Wars prequels finally make sense in the 2016 election (2016)
This piece on the looming authoritarian threat in 2016, as seen through the Star Wars prequels [is my best]. Because I was right. And because the Sith always return.
1BQ
R.I.P., Dad (2008)
[It’s my best] because I cried while writing it.
MAGNIFICO
Hugs (2012)
[It] may not be the best thing I’ve ever written, but I think it really captured the joy we had with Obama’s re-election in 2012.
SOLLACE
The futures of the GOP (2021)
Honestly, I think my first post is my favourite. I like it because 1) it helped me organize my thoughts for the video dialogue on which I was working at the time; and 2) it resulted in some interesting discussion.
My only regret is that I didn’t stick around right after posting so that I could have interacted with the commentariat. I posted it with the expectation that it would sink without trace, and wandered off for the rest of the day, but I woke up the next day to find a good discussion going on, with some thoughtful comments. I had wanted to be more of a participant and less of a lurker, and I’d blown it!
Oh well. Anyway, despite losing that chance for interaction, it remains my favourite. It’s a reminder that I shouldn’t underestimate myself. 🙂
APPY
Pow Wow (Commemorative for Matthew Gives Plenty) with my many feathered friends (2021)
Although it did not attract a lot of attention when originally published, I feel Pow Wow is an impactful diary on several counts. There is the obvious significance of the occasion on which it is based. For another, it is a different approach for my cultural activism by encouraging readers to participate in an interactive way and on their own level. It also helps bring focus to the importance of better understanding and protecting Indigenous culture. I defer to Meteor Blades’ comment that it “needs more eyes..
CAMERON PROF (as BKSKINNER)
A white Jewish male: My perspective on why we all need to pay for slavery reparations (2020)
I have been lucky enough for a pretty dumb guy, to have been blessed with people on here that for some reason enjoy my writing. I have written many thousands of diaries on here first under my old handle of BFSkinner and now under my current one. Some diaries get 500 plus comments, I give myself a pat on the back and go on for another day.
The one diary, though, that I am most “proud” of writing reached far fewer eyeballs: 66 diary recs with 27 TJ recs. The diary was written in a topic I no longer broach on here, for multiple reasons: being Jewish. It talked about how I as a Jewish guy could find no other reason to not favor giving reoperations, it is a situation of a no-brainer. For all the work and the vast majority of that forced and undetpaid and underappreciated made by the black community we owe them.
OCEANDIVER
The Daily Bucket: Friendly Seal is a mom!! (2016)
Everything I write is about nature and the environment. To me, humans are just a minor part of the world but the twisted perception we have of our importance is what’s led to pretty much all the problems that have emerged, from environmental to political to pandemic, you name it. My little diaries describe what I pay attention to in the natural world; I post them in the nature community groups Backyard Science (Daily Buckets) and Birds and Birdwatching (Dawn Choruses). We invite readers to join us daily and weekly—the comment threads are a great way to focus attention on Mother Earth and to honor her.
Here’s one diary dear to my heart, about a friend in my local bay. I call her Friendly Seal.
HARICOT BLUE
The Unfathomable Stupidity of Rich White Men (2020)
This was a fun one to write and obviously touched a nerve at the time (in the heat of the BLM protest movement) but I’m afraid my optimism about the BLM protests presaging a genuine revolution against our Pasty Plutocratic Patriarchy has proved unfounded.
P CAREY
Books That Changed My Life: The Brothers Karamazov (2014)
Though published years ago and when I was fairly new at posting on Daily Kos, this is (if not my best) the diary I would single out. And while the writing is rough and I have learned much since, the energy of the piece still moves me. Ostensibly about a book that changed my life, it is more a requiem on the death of my youngest, dearest brother.
NONLINEAR
The handbook for dissenting voices here on Daily Kos (2021)
I think it is my best because I believe it addresses a question that is at the very heart of why Daily Kos is unique. It asks how can we encourage writers to express ideas and feelings outside the Daily Kos mainstream. It doesn’t do it by asking the question directly but rather by providing an answer.
OCCAMS HATCHET
Calling bullshit on the fear mongers (2006)
I really kinda like this one, because it’s timeless: Republicans are still all and only about fear (which begets hatred), so most of this still applies. (Plus ngl, I loved it when we could drop f-bombs around here and nobody said boo, lol.)
CLIO2
LGBTQ Literature: Nonbinary ways of being (2021)
DK writers and commenters greatly aided my own gender exploration. This diary reviews four volumes of personal accounts by a variety of nonbinary individuals, with some reference to my own life. And with a coda in—how DK!—cat pix. 😉 Both a thank you and the piece of writing here I’ve been most proud to own.
GREG DWORKIN
Mr. Roosevelt’s social insurance (2011)
I stumbled on this exhibit and the visuals were just so evocative of a long gone era, while the story still hits home.
That’s it for this week, so get to reading!
It’s not too late to submit your own TIMB story, of course. To make my job easier (and data entry much faster—give some love to Christopher Reeves for his help on that front), please use this format for your submission:
Linked title of story (year published)
A sentence or two in your own words—not an excerpt from the story—about why it’s your “best.”
See you in the comments!
RELATED: Daily Kos Turns 20: Let’s showcase our best work! Up next: The man who started it all—Kos himself
One more thing: If you’ve already submitted, there’s no need to do it again, and we are only accepting one story per person. And if you simply can’t narrow down your choice before comments close, we’ll be back with another installment (and opportunity to submit) next week, when I’ll have even more Community submissions.
Walmart loses court case over an Americans with Disability Act violation, but doesn't want to pay
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Walmart, the original big-box vendor based in Bentonville, Arkansas, has always looked for ways to promote its wholesome family image. Sure, there are plenty of stories about Walmart killing communities and small businesses. Boy, though, one thing they did do was offer people with disabilities an opportunity to work as a greeter, right? It was a job that put Americans with disabilities out front and made them visible. Well, it was until 2019; that’s when Walmart cut the greeter position at over 1,000 stores, leaving many disabled staff members without a job.
Before all of that, though, Walmart was a champion for those with disabilities, right? Not if you ask the jury that heard the case of Marlo Spaeth. Spaeth has Down syndrome. After working for almost 16 years at her Walmart location with high performance evaluations for her work, Spaeth was switched to a new position. Because she had difficulty adjusting to her new schedule, Walmart fired her in July 2015. Spaeth asked for a 60-minute adjustment to her new schedule to match her prior work schedule, but the company refused. She asked to be rehired in a similar role, and the company refused to consider her application. That was the moment that Spaeth decided to fight back.
Then, after nearly 16 years of working there, Walmart abruptly fired her in 2015. Spaeth, who has Down syndrome, was devastated.
Her sister and legal guardian, Amy Jo Stevenson, said that Spaeth quickly “receded into a shell” and lost the sense of purpose she got from the job at the Walmart Supercenter in Manitowoc, where she had thrived on interacting with customers and had received praise from supervisors in performance reviews.
Devastated. Sixteen years of her life seemed to have been snatched away from her. After hearing a four-day court case brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a jury in Green Bay, Wisconsin, came back quickly with a record judgment of $125 million dollars. The verdict was meant to be a symbol of the level of her pain and suffering, as well as a reflection of the deliberate action that Walmart had taken to seemingly move an employee with a disability around internally in a way that set them up to fail so they could be fired.
In 2020, Walmart reported $129 billion in profit, not counting other businesses where Walmart heirs have ownership stakes. The ownership group is reported to be worth roughly $240 billion, with each family member sitting on around $62 billion. For Walmart, though, Spaeth’s case isn’t over.
While the judge reduced the verdict to $300,000, the maximum allowed in the state, according to Spaeth’s sister, she was still excited about the possibility of going back to work at Walmart.
Walmart makes an interesting claim in its appeal, according to Disability Scoop:
“So while Walmart knew that Ms. Spaeth had requested a return to her prior fixed schedule, nothing in Walmart’s knowledge suggested that this request was linked to her Down syndrome,” reads the court filing, which requests a new trial. “Walmart did not act with malice or reckless indifference towards Ms. Spaeth’s rights.”
There is an interesting thing to note here: Walmart is effectively going to contend that it had no way of knowing that Down syndrome impacts a person’s ability to adjust to a schedule and that after a schedule has been the same for almost 16 years, it is not surprising that changes to that schedule would be exceptionally difficult for that person.
Walmart simply wasn’t aware that Spaeth had Down syndrome, it seems, or they never took it into consideration. Walmart just didn’t see her, or her disability. They knew her for 16 years, but never saw Spaeth for this part of who she was. So they must be blameless, right?
Note: this article originally had an incorrect profit margin pulled which has been corrected.
'Because I have COVID,' and other good responses to rude questions about your mask-wearing
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Polling shows a majority still support mask mandates on airplanes and public transit, but as has been the case throughout the pandemic, the intensity is with the opposition. The people who previously were having violent temper tantrums over being required to wear masks now get their way thanks to a decision by a single Trump-appointed judge … and some are shifting quickly to trying to impose their preferences on their mask-wearing neighbors.
Because it’s not just about personal freedom for people who have bought into the Republican culture war on masks. (Never mind that the freedom they’re ostensibly seeking is to dismantle the concept of public health and spread a dangerous virus.) It’s about dividing the nation and defeating opponents. And, as many of the tweets about how this divide has played out in the days that followed the judge striking down the mandate show, it’s about the feelings of anti-maskers taking precedence over the comfort and safety of people who still wear them.
RELATED STORY: An unqualified Trump judge strikes again, voids CDC mask mandate at airports, transportation hubs
This one is from Donald Trump’s surgeon general, so, uh, I’d think he’d have had plenty of experience with this phenomenon.
In response to a taunting reply, Adams added, “My wife is being treated for cancer, and people like you got WAY more upset about being asked to wear a mask than ive gotten about being asked not to wear one to protect my wife’s life.”
Here’s someone who had a great response:
Many people in the replies to that one suggested answering that you have COVID but will take the mask off if your neighbor really wants. Here’s a little twist on that:
Last week a tweet asking what people would say if they got that question drew a lot of good responses:
If you plan to fly or ride public transit while masked in the near future, do you have a response planned to rude questions? What is it?
RELATED STORY:
There is no ‘return to normal’ for disabled people in a pandemic
Ukraine update: 'Filtration camp' may be the most disgusting euphemism since WW II
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Russian media is now bragging about the one aspect of the Ukraine invasion where Russia is actually demonstrating an ability to conduct operations on a frighteningly large scale. That thing doesn’t involve standing up to the Ukrainian military; it involves the wholesale processing of Ukrainian civilians for torture, kidnapping, and enslavement.
Back in early April, Yahoo News took a look at the filtration camps Russia had created at that point, and at the degrading conditions faced by Ukrainians who found themselves placed in one of these camps.
“The filtration camps, described as large plots of military tents with rows of men in uniforms, are where deported Ukrainians are photographed, fingerprinted, forced to turn over their cellphones, passwords and identity documents, and then questioned by officers for hours before being sent to Russia.”
At the time of that report on April 7, the Bezimenne camp in the Russian-occupied area of Donetsk had processed over 40,000 Ukrainians to be “exfiltrated” to Russia. That number can be expected to be much higher now, as Russia continues to send Ukrainians to unknown locations in Russia. On April 11, the Russian military gave an astounding number of 723,000 Ukrainians “evacuated” from Ukraine since the beginning of the invasion. That number could now be much higher.
For those who have any association with the Ukrainian military, the Ukrainian government, as well as foreign journalists, or for anyone so unfortunate as to be suspected of any connection to the Azov Regiment, the situation is much worse than being fingerprinted and robbed before being stuck on a bus for who knows where.
“The filtration camps are like ghettos,” she says. “Russians divide people into groups. Those who were suspected of having connections with the Ukrainian army, territorial defence, journalists, workers from the government – it’s very dangerous for them. They take those people to prisons to Donetsk, torture them.”
How many people have been executed and buried in mass graves outside Mariupol isn’t clear, but based on the size of those graves and the numbers already exhumed in Bucha and other locations around Kyiv, these graves are expected to contain thousands, if not tens of thousands.
Mariupol is far from the only place where people are being rounded up and shipped to these camps. Prisoners have been taken from their homes in other occupied areas like Kherson, and the some of those who have managed to escape have reported Russia is holding civilians from as far north as engineers from Chernobyl.
The term “filtration camp” goes back to World War II, when the USSR held people, including Russians, in these camps to filter out those who didn’t have “appropriate” political beliefs, and to distribute people where the government felt they were needed. The term resurfaced following Russia’s two wars with Chechnya, where at least 200,000 people were held in the first war alone. Human Rights Watch published a report on these camps appropriately titled “Welcome to Hell” in which they recorded accounts of widespread torture, beatings, and executions. Many Chechens were simply “disappeared” from these camps, either to be murdered to shipped to labor camps elsewhere in Russia. Another aspect of these camps that was reported to be common was rape and sexual abuse of women and girls. And reports of rape by Russian soldiers were not restricted to women.
In case there was any doubt, detention and deportation of civilians is a war crime. But, as with the other war crimes Russia has already committed, punishing the guilty, much less any restitution for those individuals and families destroyed by this process, may be difficult to obtain.
Whether camps like Bezimenne will be ultimately remembered with the same kind of enduring disgust as those as Buchenwald or Bergen-Belsen remains to be seen. Right now, the biggest question may be: If Russia says they have exported over 700,000 Ukrainians to Russia, where are they?
There are reports on Saturday of fairly extensive fighting northeast of Kharkiv in what may represent a serious Ukrainian counter offensive.
On this map, the blue markers are villages and towns recently recaptured and secured by Ukrainian forces. The yellow markers are locations where Russian troops are reportedly facing a Ukrainian counter-assault.
Parents are happy with their kids' schools, actually, despite what Fox News tells you
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Republicans are flogging a culture war focused on public schools, but it doesn’t seem to be landing with the parents of actual schoolchildren. A new NPR/Ipsos poll of parents of school-aged children finds people generally happy with their kids’ schools and teachers, and not foaming at the mouth over race and LGBTQ issues.
Education rated as the third-highest concern of parents in the poll, but 88% of respondents agreed with the statement, “my child’s teacher(s) have done the best they could, given the circumstances around the pandemic,” and 82% agreed that “my child’s school has handled the pandemic well.” Republicans have largely moved on from trying to whip up rage about how schools have handled the pandemic, though, focusing more on demonizing marginalized groups and arguing that parents should be allowed to micromanage the curriculum. (Right-wing white parents, anyway.) But that’s not getting a lot of traction, either.
RELATED STORY: From ‘critical race theory’ to ‘grooming,’ the real Republican agenda is ending public education
Three out of four of the parents polled agreed that “my child’s school does a good job keeping me informed about the curriculum, including potentially controversial topics.” Small minorities said the ways their children’s schools taught about the issues being pushed by Republicans actually conflicted with their own family’s values: 18% for gender and sexuality, 19% for race and racism, and 14% for U.S. history.
And those numbers, small as they are, don’t mean that 19% of people think their kid’s school is too liberal on race and racism or 14% on U.S. history—the people who said the schools’ teachings clashed with their family’s values were as likely to be Democrats as Republicans. A Native American parent in Texas, for instance, told NPR, “It’s more of a water-down effect … [the teachers] kind of whitewash the way that history is taught to their kids.” That parent wants his kid taught more about the French and Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, and about slavery during the Revolutionary War, NPR reports. By contrast, a white parent in Wisconsin who thinks the schools are too liberal on these issues cited her son being asked to identify his pronouns and a teacher making “snarky comments about white privilege.” Equally valid and serious concerns about the quality of education, amiright?
If you listen to Christopher Rufo, one of the right wing’s major gurus on waging culture wars in the schools, critical race theory is a “two to one issue,” a surefire winner for Republicans. Go figure, though: The main poll he cites was conducted by the right-wing Manhattan Institute. But what about Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s victory in November after he campaigned against critical race theory? Well, recent data has suggested that Youngkin’s advantage came from senior citizens, not from the parents of school-aged children, and it’s not the first data undermining the narrative that enraged parents turned the election to Youngkin.
Demonizing LGBT people and foaming at the mouth that teaching about racism or the contributions of Black and brown people oppresses white kids by making them feel “humiliated” might energize the Republican base, but it’s not a majority message. Banning books because they have LGBT characters or depict slavery as the brutal system of kidnapping, torture, and rape that it was is not a majority message.
Republicans are attacking teachers. They’re attacking vulnerable kids. They’re trying to micromanage what all kids can learn according to their very specific values, to the active exclusion of all others. These things matter—they are actively harming people—and they’re also not the political winners Republicans are confidently portraying them to be. The media needs to internalize these things in shaping its coverage, rather than allowing the Republican operatives regularly billed as “concerned parents” in their Fox News appearances to define what the parents of schoolchildren look like or think. And equally, Democrats need to fight back, vigorously and boldly, because Republicans really are overstepping on this.
RELATED STORIES:
A look inside banned Florida math textbooks suggests Republicans simply lied about what’s in them
Citing ‘humiliated’ white people, Mississippi governor signs anti-critical race theory law
Forget CRT—new poll shows what Republicans really don’t want taught in schools
Democrats can gerrymander too, but should they?
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As a progressive, I hate gerrymandering on principle. The idea of elected officials drawing up legislative boundaries and putting one type of voter on one side of a line and a different type on the other side to benefit particular parties and/or incumbent candidates is antithetical to the notion of government based on the consent of the governed. As the saying goes, voters are supposed to pick their representatives in a democracy, not the other way around.
There are powerful reasons to get rid of gerrymandering, and Democrats in Congress are on record supporting a ban for federal elections. Unfortunately, a couple of senators (you know which two) won’t support the filibuster reform necessary to make it a reality. Furthermore, there’s a powerful argument for Democrats to simply wash their hands of the gerrymandering practice today and refrain from it 100%. But should they?
I abhor war. I hope our country never has to fight another one. What does that have to do with gerrymandering, you ask? Well, if another country’s tanks and planes come pouring across our border, I certainly don’t want my side to stand down. I want them to stand up and defend my community, just as Ukraine’s government and armed forces are doing right now. Then, after the other side has learned it can’t just steamroll its way to conquest, maybe we can talk peace, and maybe, someday, even mutual disarmament. But putting up an active defense has to come first in order to ensure survival. That makes it a moral imperative. Gerrymandering itself does not involve bloodshed, thankfully, but the analogy applies.
This isn’t a fight Democrats can win, unfortunately, by just setting an example and hoping we can win elections on the basis of our ethical superiority. If that was going to work, it’d have done so already given the vastness of Republican gerrymandering in the once-a-decade redistricting process that followed the 2010 census—that was the REDMAP (Redistricting Majority Project) plan, carried out to perfection. Voters in states that have seen the worst gerrymandering by Republicans have not expressed their revulsion by rising up to sweep them out of office in landslides that can overcome unfair district-drawing. I wish that would happen, but it hasn’t.
Democrats have to be able to do two things at the same time: 1) say that we want to ban gerrymandering across the board, and 2) say that we aren’t going to unilaterally disarm before that happens. I’m not arguing that gerrymandering is okay when our side does it, and Nancy Pelosi was right to condemn the practice as “unjust and deeply dangerous” back in 2019. I’m arguing that Democrats gerrymandering is terrible, but not doing it is even more dangerous.
And gerrymandering is terrible, for multiple reasons. The Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive policy institute, explained how gerrymandering works and described its corrosive effects. There are actually different ways to gerrymander. The party with control over drawing districts might choose to “pack” as many voters as possible from the other party into a single district, thus rendering multiple other districts easier to win. Another approach is to “crack” an area with lots of voters from one party into multiple districts so that each one still contains a solid majority from the other party.
Republicans have often engaged in so-called cracking and packing in order to dilute the power of communities of color—most often Black communities, who are most likely to be geographically concentrated for various reasons, including patterns of segregation and redlining. For an example of how the party of Fuck a l’Orange carried this out in three disproportionately African American counties in Ohio—Cuyahoga, Franklin, and Hamilton—check out this analysis (behind a paywall unfortunately). Additionally, Daily Kos’s Rebekah Sager covered this issue in Georgia, while Joan McCarter discussed how it is playing out in Alabama.
Sometimes, Republicans will pack Black voters into a district, virtually ensuring victory for a Black Democratic candidate, because it will reduce the number of Democratic victories in the state by removing those Black voters from surrounding districts. Republicans will tolerate Black faces in the legislature, as long as those faces are in the minority party and can’t pass legislation that, you know, actually helps Black communities.
To be sure, gerrymandering is not a new phenomenon. It goes back over two centuries—it’s named after Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry, who approved this monstrosity (above) of a district back in 1812. It has, however, become much more sophisticated in recent years. Exponentially so, as per the Brennan Center: “Intricate computer algorithms and sophisticated data about voters allow map drawers to game redistricting on a massive scale with surgical precision. Where gerrymanderers once had to pick from a few maps drawn by hand, they now can create and pick from thousands of computer-generated maps.”
So gerrymandering is wrong, and it’s only getting worse. How can we get rid of it? Well, the Supreme Court is no help, unfortunately, having decided in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) that they had no authority to intervene in the drawing of gerrymandered legislative districts by declaring them a violation of citizens’ right to an equal vote. The authority of the Voting Rights Act, which at one time could come into play if redistricting was found to discriminate racially, was gutted in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, which rendered it toothless on that front. The only way to get rid of gerrymandering is for those who want to ban it to gain enough power to do so through legislation—even if that means employing that very tactic in order to win such power.
Looking forward, Democrats were predicting that the decennial redistricting process taking place right now, after the 2020 census, would leave them even worse off than they had been. However, so far it’s going better than expected. The Brennan Center summarized the overall situation earlier this year:
Democrats have tried to counteract Republican gerrymandering with aggressive line drawing of their own, but the playing field is not level. Republicans control the drawing of 187 congressional districts in this redistricting cycle; Democrats just 75. If, in the end, the cycle does not end up a wholesale disaster for Democrats, this will largely be attributable to three factors: the unwinding of gerrymanders in states like Michigan with reformed processes, court-drawn maps in states where the redistricting process has deadlocked, and litigation in states where state courts, unlike their federal counterparts, will hear partisan gerrymandering claims.
That still doesn’t mean everything is hunky-dory. But it does show that unless Democrats fight back against extreme Republican gerrymandering, there’s little to no chance of getting a House of Representatives that accurately represents the will of the people—kind of important in a democracy, dont’cha think?
Perhaps the most aggressive Democratic line drawers are in my home state of New York (although Illinois is a close second at this point). Daily Kos’ David Nir provided a detailed breakdown of the changed legislative district lines (the, ahem, amateurs at The New York Times did so as well). Long story short: They gerrymandered the fuck out of them.
New York currently has a House delegation of 19 for Team Blue, and eight for Team TFG. The Empire State is losing a seat (by a schnozz, as they’d have avoided the loss if only 90 more people were counted as New Yorkers in the most recent census). Among the remaining 26, the new maps—passed by the state legislature and signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul—would give Democrats a strong chance of picking up three more seats: on Staten Island (NY-11), Long Island (NY-1), and in Central New York (NY-24). Another Republican seat (NY-22), located upstate, would be the one to disappear. The delegation would likely end up 22-4 in favor of the Democrats.
New York has had, since 2014, a bipartisan commission tasked with redrawing the district lines after each census. However, the commission—composed of an equal number of members of both parties—failed to come together around a new map, throwing the process to the state legislature. The aforementioned outcome came as little surprise given that Democrats have control over both houses.
Even less of a surprise was the Republicans squealing like a stuck pig in response. At the New Republic Matt Ford went through the hypocrisy of Republicans complaining about Democratic gerrymandering being unfair, given their previous support not only for what they were doing in red states, but for the tactic in general. He wondered, facetiously, whether the GQP “suddenly had an epiphany about its corrosive, anti-democratic effects on American politics.” Not.
New York Republicans sued to block the new maps. The New York Times explained the grounds on which the suit rests:
Any court case would likely hinge on how judges interpret language included in the same 2014 constitutional amendment that created the defunct redistricting commission and how Democrats actually arrived at their lines. The language has not previously been tested in court and says that districts “shall not be drawn to discourage competition” or boost one party or incumbent candidate over another.
Jeffrey Wice, who serves as a senior fellow at New York Law School’s Census and Redistricting Institute, offered his take as to the likely outcome: “The question is whether the court will reject 50 years of precedent and reject the plan.” However, Wice turned out to be incorrect. In a 4-3 ruling, the New York Court of Appeals on Wednesday upheld a lower court decision that threw out the Democrats’ map for violating the state constitution. In fact, courts have blocked aggressive gerrymanders in a number of states so far this cycle.
Some in the mainstream media—famous for bothsidesing issues left and right (no pun intended)—clutched their pearls and lamented that, heaven forfend, Democrats were actually playing hardball. Pat Kiernan, anchor on local channel NY1’s morning news, intoned solemnly that “Democrats have given up any high ground they had over Republicans on gerrymandering.” He’s talking about the moral high ground. Meanwhile, Republicans are charging ahead trying to claim the physical high ground, from which they can move forward to achieve total victory. Paul Waldman at The Washington Post opined that New York Democrats had acted “ruthlessly.” Unlike Kiernan, Waldman meant it as a compliment.
Most recently, Five Thirty Eight’s tracker finds that Democrats have been able to add seven seats that lean in their direction compared to the 2020 map, while the number of Republican-leaning seats has increased by one; the number of competitive seats has dropped accordingly. These numbers could become more favorable to the Democrats if Florida’s extreme Republican gerrymander—which saw Gov. Ron DeSantis override his own Republican colleagues in the state legislature—gets blocked or altered by state courts there.
Some states have moved toward truly independent redistricting commissions, the largest of which is California. Other states have different mechanisms that, to some degree, seek to take the process out of the hands of elected officials. In an ideal world, all districts would be drawn without regard to politics, with no party able to gain an advantage. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in right now.
Colorado Democratic Party chair Morgan Carroll told Russell Berman of The Atlantic that nonpartisan redistricting commissions are “the right thing to do.” However, it’s not as simple as that, he pointed out: “But as a matter of politics, if across the country every Dem is for independent commissions and every Republican is aggressively gerrymandering maps, then the outcome is still a Republican takeover of the United States of America with a modern Republican Party that is fundamentally authoritarian and antidemocratic. And that’s not good for the country.” Carroll added “If the result is that we have 10 years of Republican majorities under this current party, then I think the institution of Congress is dead.”
Independent commissions are great, and I look forward to the day when every state has a robust one that takes the drawing of districts out of the hands of elected officials. For more on both the strengths and potential pitfalls of independent commissions, please check out this terrific piece from Frances Nguyen at Prism. Overall, as per Nguyen: “advocates believe that public hearings provide the best forum for voters to influence the redistricting process, and commissions provided more direct access than legislatures did this cycle, for the express reason that their design intentionally provides for more public input.”
Let’s be clear: Gerrymandering is not good. It is toxic and encourages more and more extremes—on both sides in theory, although in particular among Republicans in practice—because it eliminates so many competitive districts. Marjorie Taylor Greene befouls the halls of Congress because extreme gerrymandering carried out by Republicans in Georgia enabled someone with her level of wackadoodlery to win a seat. We should absolutely get rid of it at the state and federal level.
There’s only one thing worse than both parties gerrymandering everywhere they can, and that’s when one party gerrymanders and the other doesn’t keep up. That’s what happened in the post-2010 round. At the state level, there are no state legislatures where Democrats used gerrymandering to lock in wide legislative majorities in states where they lost the popular vote, or even where it was closely divided—as Republicans have done recently in Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Although it’s not pictured in the graphic above, Wisconsin’s 2018 results represent the starkest example. The Democrats won 53% of the popular vote for state legislative elections, and just over 50% of the gubernatorial vote (and every statewide office), yet Republicans won 63 out of 99 seats in the state legislature. Even though some legislative races were not competitive, in a fair system Democrats should have come in at least within striking distance of a 50-50 legislature.
At the federal level, if only Republican-controlled states gerrymander, Congress will continue to tilt more in that party’s direction (as noted previously, gerrymandering affects state legislative district lines as well, a whole other issue). Don’t forget what North Carolina Republican Rep. David Lewis stated flat out about the district lines he helped draw in his state: “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”
The Brennan Center estimates that gerrymandering netted Republicans an extra 16-17 seats in the current U.S. House—whose legislative districts have been in effect since 2012. That harms democracy even more than when both parties gerrymander aggressively because voters’ voices are reduced only on one side, and in particular among voters from disadvantaged groups. This is why what Democrats in New York and elsewhere are doing is necessary.
Separate from the effect gerrymandering has, Congress already skews disproportionately Republican because white rural voters are overrepresented in both the House and the Senate. Look at the difference between the rural share of the U.S. population overall, at 25%, and the rural share in the average state, a whopping 35%. Since every state gets two senators, rural voters—mostly Republican—get a disproportionate share of power, and voters in big cities—more of whom are Democrats—get screwed. The rural bias also affects the House.
The Trumpist Republican Party uses the power it has gained at least in part through gerrymandering state legislative districts to pass laws at the state level that suppress votes among members of disadvantaged groups. Likewise, Republicans use that same power in Congress to prevent reforms that would ban the gerrymandering of congressional districts as well as protect voting rights—and damn Sen. Joe Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema for enabling them to get away with it. Republicans employ these tactics in order to win more power than they could in a truly fair election—and then subsequently use that power to make elections less and less fair.
Their actions only make it more imperative that Democrats do what they can within the law to ensure that the results in Congress look a little bit more like the actual will of the voters. Doing so is nothing more than basic political self-defense. They can and must gerrymander where they are able to, even while pushing hard to ban it across the board.
Disarming unilaterally in the middle of a fight is neither moral nor ethical. Doing so might just lead to the demise of our democracy.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)
Democratic leadership seizes on Warren's idea to fight price gouging by oil companies
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren has lots of plans for how Democrats can use the next 200 days before the election to fight for people. Congressional leadership is ready to take her up on one of them. Warren has advocated for legislation giving the Federal Trade Commission authority to investigate price gouging. Put the bill on the floor, she says, and “dare the Republicans to vote against it. A clean, simple bill.”
“Let’s put it to the Republicans. Do they care about price gouging from the perspective of helping the consumers? Or from the perspective of letting the big corporations continue to get away with it?” Democratic leadership indicated Thursday that they’re all for it.
“There’s no excuse for big oil companies to profiteer, to price gouge or exploit families,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday. “Congress must do more to beef up the FTC’s ability to crack down on potential gas price manipulation and price gouging,” added Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. “Republicans will face a dilemma: Which side are they on?” Schumer said. “On the consumer and lowering gas prices? Or on the side of the big oil?”
Sen. Maria Cantrell (D-WA), who chairs the Commerce Committee, wants the FCT to have this power. She explained that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has authority to investigate and punish energy market manipulation—and has had for a few decades. That same regulatory power needs to exist for transportation rules, as well. “We need to make sure that there is a policeman on the beat,” Cantwell said. “It doesn’t seem right that we should have more transparency on a product like wheat or corn than we would on oil.’’
Draft legislation would create a unit within the FTC to monitor transportation fuel pricing and which would have the authority to levy fines and penalties. The idea in the draft is to double the maximum penalty for wholesale oil market manipulation to as much as $2 million/day for each violation.
While leadership didn’t say, moving forward with the bill will also force Joe Manchin to take a side, because his buddies in the industry are really unhappy with the idea. “Using the power of the FTC to undertake political investigations of American energy companies will not lower gas prices by a penny,″ Anne Bradbury, CEO of the American Exploration and Production Council, said of the proposal. “At a time of historic inflation and economic contraction, Americans deserve real policies that boost domestic oil and gas production,’’ she said.
Which is kind of a problem for them—why would they be protesting the idea so much if they weren’t right now engaged in price gouging? If they had nothing to worry about, why would they be worried about being investigated?
“Here’s the bottom line: They’re not using the money for domestic energy production,” Schumer said of the $77 billion in profits the big U.S. producers made last year. “They’re using it for stock buybacks. They’re using it to make their shares go up. We wouldn’t be here if the oil companies were using it to make the American consumer’s price cheaper.”
“Oil companies last year made record profits on these tragedies almost like vultures,” Schumer said. “We have the Ukraine tragedy. We have the COVID tragedy. And did they try to make things better? No, they come in and made record profits.”
“In this time of war and any time, there’s no excuse for big oil companies to pretend to profiteer, to price gouge or exploit families,” Pelosi added. “That is why Democrats are moving forward with forceful action that will stop and hold accountable oil and gas companies for profiteering and manipulating markets. This is a top priority for all of us.”
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