Independent News

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In the news today: No matter how grotesque the behavior of House Republicans has gotten—or how dangerous—they continue to have the apparent full support of their party leaders. Ever-odious Rep. Paul Gosar was nearly giddy in promoting a new animated clip depicting him attacking and killing a fellow member of Congress; that sort of thing would get you fired and quite possibly arrested in any other workplace in America. Republican leadership is also ignoring attacks by House Republicans on House Republicans who voted for the so-called “bipartisan” infrastructure bill—attacks with rhetoric that’s already led to death threats against their targets. A highly sought Republican candidate, in the meantime, was remarkably blunt in turning down his party’s calls to trade in his day job for a post in the current do-nothing hellscape that is the U.S. Senate.

Here’s some of what you may have missed:

• Paul Gosar isn’t as funny as he thinks after tweet prompts calls for censure

• McCarthy refuses to act as his deplorables try to get their colleagues killed

• New Hampshire governor declines Senate bid, crushing McConnell’s hopes

• Texas town’s first Black principal fired over CRT, which school district admits was never taught

• Secret recordings after Columbine show how the NRA developed its school shootings playbook

Community Spotlight:

• Q-Anon in Dallas and space aliens in Iceland

• For Progressives to win we must learn enough about Racism to stop using Republican talking points

Also trending from the community:

• Hospitalized for a month with COVID-19, man returns to apologize to ICU staff for being unvaccinated

• Daily Bucket: The sheltering beauty of Plum Island, Massachusetts

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It can be tough to separate the art from the artist, particularly when the artist has separated his own brain stem from his cerebral cortex. Such is the case with Irish rock legend Van Morrison, who’s embraced the COVID-19 death cult with the kind of vigor Donald Trump might embrace a big slab of rotisserie gyro meat in the bathroom stall of a Coney Island Greek restaurant at 3 AM on a random Tuesday.

Sadly, Morrison has followed in the footsteps of fellow rocker Eric Clapton, who has gone out of his way to denigrate basic public health measures in the wake of the worldwide COVID-19 crisis. And now Morrison appears to be in a wee bit of legal trouble for it. In other words, he just received some not-so-”Glad Tidings.”

Damn, I still love that song.

The Associated Press:

Northern Ireland’s health minister is suing Van Morrison after the singer called him “very dangerous” for his handling of coronavirus restrictions.

The Belfast-born singer opposes restrictions to curb the spread of the virus, and has released several songs criticizing lockdowns. He denounced Northern Ireland Health Minister Robin Swann during a gathering at Belfast’s Europa Hotel in June after a Morrison concert was canceled at the last minute because of virus restrictions.

The defamation suit relates to three incidents in which Morrison criticized Swann, calling him “a fraud” and “very dangerous.”

After Morrison released three songs criticizing public health restrictions—“No More Lockdown,” “Born to Be Free,” and “As I Walked Out”—Swann wrote an opinion piece for Rolling Stone last September. In the piece, Swann called Morrison’s claims about COVID-19 mitigation measures “bizarre and irresponsible.”

For example, in the song “No More Lockdown,” Morrison sang, “No more lockdown/No more government overreach/No more fascist bullies/Disturbing our peace/No more taking of our freedom/And our God-given rights/Pretending it’s for our safety/When it’s really to enslave.”

As a result of those lyrics and more, Swann accused Morrison of giving aid and comfort to the “tin foil hat brigade,” and encouraging the spread of their dangerous disinformation: 

Governments across the world are struggling to find the right path through this pandemic. It’s entirely right and proper to debate and question policies. It’s legitimate to ask if the right balance is being found in what is being done; if the right steps are being taken. None of this is easy or straightforward.

But Van Morrison is going way beyond raising questions. He is singing about “fascist bullies” and claiming Governments are deceiving people and wanting to “enslave.”

It’s actually a smear on all those involved in the public health response to a virus that has taken lives on a massive scale. His words will give great comfort to the conspiracy theorists – the tin foil hat brigade who crusade against masks and vaccines and think this is all a huge global plot to remove freedoms.

Swann’s lawyer, Paul Tweed, said legal proceedings “are at an advanced stage with an anticipated hearing date early in 2022.” Morrison’s attorney, Joe Rice, responded that “the words used by him related to a matter of public interest and constituted fair comment.”

I’m not sure how this kind of nonsense has seeped into the brains of people who I once admired, but it’s a disturbing development. Of course, it could be worse. If Donald Trump had succeeded in stealing the 2020 election, Dr. Anthony Fauci might have been fired and replaced with Joe Rogan’s podcast producer. I’m only sort of kidding. 

Let’s make sure that never happens, eh? 

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

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In the final vote count for the so-called “bipartisan” infrastructure bill now sailing towards President Joe Biden’s desk to become the law of the land, there were six Democratic “no” votes—all from a subset of House Democrats who Fox News considers equally interchangeable whenever it’s time to demonize the Democratic Party. They were Reps. Jamaal Bowman of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan—collectively known as “The Squad.”

I admit it’s almost impossible to fathom what these folks could possibly have in common that might raise the blood pressure of the average Fox News viewer, but after much deliberation I’ve tentatively concluded it must be their fiendish political skills. As it turns out, their refusal to vote for the “socialist” (BiF) bill on principle has apparently driven the remainder of the GOP caucus over the edge with apoplexy. Because by withholding their votes in a display of unison, they helped lure in 13 GOP House members to vote for the bill, rescuing the beleaguered Democratic president from floundering in the eyes of the American public.

In their rush to condemn the now-expanded Squad for its apparent apostasy in failing to support the bipartisan bill, many Democrats apparently overlooked a subtle but unmistakable consequence: The votes were obvious trade-offs that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had pocketed in full knowledge that enough Republicans who actually supported its provisions would end up supporting the bill, risking fallout to themselves and their own party in the process.

As reported by Aaron Blake, writing for The Washington Post:

Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill passed late Friday night and is headed for his signature after months of intense wrangling over the details — particularly whether it would be tied to a larger spending plan that progressives insisted upon passing alongside it. But in the end it wasn’t really those progressives who provided the key votes, but rather the 13 Republicans. The final vote count was 228 to 206, meaning if no Republicans had voted for the bill, it wouldn’t have passed.

The reaction from the vast majority of House Republicans was as predicable as it was vehement; Florida Man Rep. Matt Gaetz was no exception.

Others, such as Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, called the 13 Republican defectors “traitors” to their party. Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina declared that he would “primary the hell” out of anyone who voted for the infrastructure legislation. It’s not entirely clear how Cawthorn would carry out his threat, but since many of the defectors—such as Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania—occupy moderate “swing” districts, Democrats are doubtlessly applauding Cawthorn’s stated intentions.

The final vote also proved an embarrassment to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who had confidently predicted last week that he expected very few Republicans to vote for it, and that it would most certainly “fail” as a result. Blake quotes the right-wing National Review, which excoriated those Republicans for their “betrayal,” and accused them of “rescu[ing] Biden’s failed agenda.” That publication also suggested that the Republican caucus consider ousting McCarthy for his failure to keep his colleagues in line.

Meanwhile, the Squad can relax in the knowledge that each of its members voted exactly the way they always said they would. It’s not that they didn’t trust President Biden or Speaker Pelosi. It’s the simple fact that the understanding all along was that both infrastructure bills—the so-called “bipartisan” bill as well as the Build Back Better (BBB) bill—were always conceived as being executed in tandem, in order to prevent certain Democratic senators from backing out of the reconciliation package. This suspicion was amply confirmed early on by two Senate Democrats, Joe “Maserati” Manchin and his corporate sidekick, Kyrsten Sinema, both of whom broke faith with the original agreement (with Manchin in particular insisting that the bipartisan bill be voted on first and separately). After months of moving the goalposts at regular intervals, neither of those two erstwhile Democrats has ever committed themselves to the broader “human infrastructure” package, and there is legitimate speculation that both may still abandon it altogether. 

Ultimately, with Pelosi’s help, the Squad members are the ones who stood on principle, honoring the original agreement and doing exactly what they’d spent months telling their constituents they would do. They succeeded in bringing 13 Republicans under fire from the rest of the GOP caucus, while carefully allowing enough votes from the rest of the Progressive Caucus for the BiF to pass. In fact, one Republican House member who voted for the BiF expressly said she did it in order to see the Squad “sidelined:”

“I weakened their hand. They have no leverage now,” said Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.), who had shaped a GOP-friendly spin on her vote by the time she exited the chamber: “I voted against AOC and the squad tonight.”

Uh-huh. Meanwhile, President Biden has a huge win, and the GOP is going berserk at its own membership. If Manchin and Sinema continue to betray the Democrats on BBB, those six Squad members are going to look mighty prescient, and if the two conserva-Dems actually decide to come on board, the House has already extracted commitments from enough members to vote for BBB after the Congressional Budget Office scoring. If anything, the Squad should be getting high fives rather than criticism from the rest of the Democratic caucus. 

It was very, very well played.

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The Washington Post has published a quasi-profile of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. It is a halfhearted attempt at pretending that the man who led the Republican Party to do nothing except deregulate and lower taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations while fostering the rabid bigotry of a disenfranchisement-fearing white voter base (which led to electing Donald Trump) is somehow in a weird place now. He’s the head of the minority party but the GOP’s base dislikes him now more than ever, in no small part because Donald Trump likes using him as a punching bag.

The story hinges on this concept: “Yet in the months since the Jan. 6 attack, a different portrait of McConnell has taken shape. At 79, safely reelected last year to a seventh term and in his 16th year as the Senate’s top Republican, McConnell is nonetheless increasingly playing the role of a conflicted and compromised booster of Trump’s interests — not a leader with his own vision.” What is this grand McConnell vision? According to the Post, it was his abilities at “leveraging chamber rules to thwart much of President Barack Obama’s agenda and to block judicial nominees, including a key Supreme Court seat.” Funny. That’s not a “vision,” that’s just an individual’s power grab using the most nihilistic machinations to achieve … what, exactly?

Buried in this strange profile is one interesting nugget of information. It points to McConnell’s greatest failure through the years: his 180-degree turnaround on the Voting Rights Act.

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McConnell has reportedly rewritten his ideological history. During an anniversary celebration for the Voting Rights Act in 2008, instead of speaking about how he had voted for Lyndon Johnson and had supposedly been frustrated by anti-civil rights political operatives in the late 1960s, he told the audience that what he had learned from Lyndon B. Johnson was how to “amass power and how to use it.” At least he has rewritten it to reflect that craven person he has become.

But probably the most telling tidbit about Mitch McConnell is the social media back-and-forth within his own family. His youngest daughter, Porter McConnell, a liberal-leaning, campaign director for Take on Wall Street, had this to say about the For the People Act (H.R. 1) in February.

“We need to pass #HR1 & fight like hell against these bills. Because if they win, we can kiss democracy goodbye for another generation.”

Two weeks later McConnell gave his response: “This is the worst bill I’ve observed in my time in the Senate.” 

Since that time, McConnell has done his best to try and take apart any meaningful voting rights legislation. Besides his normal fundraising schedule and frequent calls to Sen. Joe Manchin, McConnell’s biggest public statements in the past few months have attacked any attempts at coming to a nonpartisan agreement … on voting. The only end game here is oligarchical rule. 

The story points out how McConnell, who may or may not have been very angry about being the target of the MAGA mobs trying to take over the government on Jan. 6, 2021, received nothing in return for protecting Donald Trump. In fact, Trump described McConnell like this: “He’s a stupid person. I don’t think he’s smart enough.” Trump was reportedly talking about McConnell’s refusal to completely end the filibuster during his administration. Is Mitch McConnell not “smart enough”?

No, Mitch McConnell is just smart enough. But what the Post misses is that Mitch McConnell’s greatest blindspot, in his craven crawl to the top of his party, is that he has never had any true vision for anything more than his power. Because to have true vision as a leader, one must be able to see a world in which one no longer exists. 

In creating a world that demands individuals look out only for themselves with no regard for anyone or anything else, Mitch has helped to create a base of voters who don’t care about anyone but themselves. In fostering a fear-mongering and anger-baiting platform of completely impotent policies, Mitch has just created a voting base that will blindly follow whoever tells them it’s not their fault, and will attack whomever that false idol points at. McConnell is just reaping what he’s sown.

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As chair of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee, Sen. Maria Cantwell has a lot of work to do on nominations and not much time to do it. There are several weeks of purely concentrated hell before the Senate, starting when they return next week (they’re taking this week off) and then resuming again after they take the Thanksgiving week off. There’s the budget reconciliation bill for Build Back Better (BBB), which damn well better pass before the end of the year; the debt ceiling hike, which has to pass, preferably as part of BBB; and keeping the government open after Dec. 3 by funding it.

That’s not much floor time for nominations, and Cantwell has a few in front of her committee right now that can’t wait. Literally, they can’t wait because if she puts it off into next year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could revert to Republican control, which would not only be searingly embarrassing for everyone involved from President Joe Biden on down to her and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, but would be really bad for all of us, the consumers.

The story at the FTC right now is absolutely wild and really not the way any governing should be happening. A month ago, one of the Democratic commissioners on the panel, Rohit Chopra, left for his new job as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one week after he was confirmed in the new role and where he is already being amazing. His departure left the FTC with a 2-2 partisan split, but with his “zombie votes” outliving him.

He cast as many as 20 votes on upcoming commission actions before he left on Oct. 8—votes sent by email, because that’s a thing that can happen on the FTC. Under the FTC’s interpretation of its rules, commissioners can cast pre-votes and then move on, and those votes count toward making new policy. That’s how FTC Chair Lina Khan, who is using Chopra’s zombie votes to keep a Democratic majority, interprets the rules and how the FTC is moving forward with actions. So far just one of those votes has been used to approve a policy statement about mergers.

While the creativity involved in keeping this functional majority in place is to be commended—more Democrats need to act as brazenly in the pursuit of good as Republicans do to steal it all—it really isn’t a sustainable way to operate. There’s an expiration date on the zombie votes, for one thing, according to current and former FTC staffers who told Politico the vote can “remain in effect for up to two months.” Here’s how it works: “Any of the five commissioners can introduce a motion for a vote. If no one responds, the motion fails after a month. But if another commissioner seconds it, the motion can live on for another 30 days.”

That works for relatively inconsequential things, like agreeing to and sending out policy statements. But the FTC Democrats are opening themselves and the administration up to some big legal fights if they try to extend the zombie voting to any important regulatory action. Biden has an ambitious agenda for the FTC, included in his anti-trust executive order from July.

That includes working with the Department of Justice to enforce antitrust laws; protecting workers by banning or limiting noncompete agreements; banning unnecessary occupational licensing restrictions; preventing employers from collaborating to suppress wages or benefits; establishing rules for Big Tech on surveillance and the accumulation of data; and enforcing “right to repair” regulations to limit equipment manufacturers from restricting customers’ ability to either do DIY repairs or take their equipment to independent repair shops. Corporate America hates all this, the Republican-packed courts will hate all this. It’s already under threat from those courts—no point making the unforced error of giving them the excuse of opaque and questionable votes.

Biden nominated Alvaro Bedoya, a privacy expert who worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee and is the founding director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, to that fifth seat in September. His exposés on the harms of facial recognition technology have helped usher the passage of facial recognition restrictions across the country, which led the National Institute of Standards and Technology to conduct the first comprehensive bias audit of facial recognition algorithms and paved the way for a federal law requiring bias testing in airport facial recognition systems, section 1919 of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018. He would be an excellent addition to the commission.

As with the FCC nominations Biden finally made a few weeks ago, getting these nominations processed and appointments completed is essential by the end of the year. Without confirmation, acting Director Jessica Rosenworcel’s term will be over, and between that and a current Democratic vacancy for which Gigi Sohn has been nominated, the FCC would revert to Republicans.

The plans for the FCC are as critical as for the FTC. The broadband components of that sweeping anti-trust executive order called for a restoration of the 2015 net neutrality rules and encouraged the FCC to prevent internet service providers from making exclusive deals or collusive arrangements with landlords to shut out competition from other ISPs, leaving tenants with only one option.

It also asks the FCC to revive another Obama-era effort, a “Broadband Nutrition Label” that “provides basic information about the internet service offered so people can compare options,” increasing transparency and requiring providers to report prices and subscription rates to the FCC. The order also asks the FCC to limit excessive early termination fees that ISPs charge for people switching providers.

This stuff needs to happen and it needs to happen soon. 
 

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A court late last month said GEO Group had to pay detained immigrants the minimum wage (or higher) for their forced labor at the Northwest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Processing Center (NWIPC) in Washington state. The private prison profiteer had been forcing them to labor for $1 a day under a so-called voluntary program. The court also ruled that the company owed more than $23 million in unpaid wages and damages. But the Associated Press (AP) now reports that “rather than pay the detainees minimum wage,” the multi-billion dollar company has instead “suspended the Voluntary Work Program while it appeals.”

Immigrants detained at NWIPC had been forced to cook, clean, and maintain the facility under the forced program. But because GEO Group suspended the program, none of that’s getting done, detained immigrants told the AP. “It got really gross—nobody cleaned anything,” Ivan Sanchez said in the report. “We pick up after ourselves, but nobody sweeps or mops. The guards were saying it wasn’t their job to clean the toilets. … It caused a lot of animosity between the detainees and the officers because of that.”

This is a choice. GEO Group has the resources to get that taken care of by professionals. It plainly, shamelessly, admitted so in asking the judge overseeing the case to pause the rulings. “The corporation wrote that it has enough money on hand ‘to pay the Judgments twenty times over,’ but said it disagreed with the decisions,” the AP continued. Immigrants said in the report that GEO Group’s suspension is further hurting them because their wages, even though meager, went to purchasing basic items at the commissary. Now GEO Group has cut them off completely.

“While detainees are looking forward to a potential payout, ‘there’s a lot of people in here that that dollar makes a difference,’ Soares said,” the report continued.

In addition to ordering GEO Group to pay immigrants the state’s minimum wage or higher for their work, the court said the company owed $17.3 million to workers. Several days later, the court ordered GEO Group to pay Washington $5.9 million, saying the company “enriched itself by its unfair and unjust practice.” 

“In 2018, GEO reported $2.33 billion in revenue, an increase from $2.18 billion in 2016,” said Investigate, a project of the American Friends Service Committee. GEO Group’s federal contracts have been by far its most lucrative agreements. “ICE contracts represent GEO Group’s single largest source of revenue accounting for 28 percent, an increase from 18 percent in 2015,” Investigate said. While President Biden pledged an end to the government’s use of for-profit prisons, GEO Group just recently gained a new contract.

Like previously noted, thousands of immigrants have borne the brunt of GEO Group’s greed. “While officials portray the labor program as ‘voluntary’ in light of the 13th amendment of the US constitution, detained immigrants are often penalized for refusing to work,” Project South legal and advocacy director Azadeh Shahshahani wrote in The Guardian back in 2018. Some have been punished with solitary confinement, which is torture, for trying to refuse to work.

GEO Group itself has admitted it has the resources to pay immigrants—again, “the corporation wrote that it has enough money on hand ‘to pay the Judgments twenty times over,’” is what the AP reported—but it refuses to. It’s also lying in the process. “Some detainees were given a GEO memo that day explaining they could no longer perform the work they used to do; the memo falsely said ICE had suspended the work program, according to an image provided to the AP,” the report continued.

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As Daily Kos has continued to cover, Republicans have been more than happy to scapegoat trans Americans and stir faux outrage about trans youth having even the most basic dignities and opportunities, especially while at school. We’ve seen, for example, Republicans push discriminatory sports bills that aim to keep trans youth from participating on teams that align with their gender identity, as well as bills trying to bar trans youth from receiving safe, age-appropriate, gender-affirming medical care.

Some of these bills have fizzled in committee, while some have been signed into law by Republican governors. Either way, however, we know trans youth report disproportionate levels of bullying, discrimination, and harassment when compared to cisgender peers. A recent incident comes to us from the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area,  where a 14-year-old trans girl, Willow Andring, says she was called names and attacked at her school because of her gender identity. According to Willow’s mom, her daughter suffered a concussion from the attack.

Heather Andring, Willow’s mother, told local outlet Pittsburgh Action 4 News she was “shocked and sad and sort of in disbelief” about what happened. “You feel all the emotions as to worried about your kid,” she continued, you have some anger, you’re upset, but then it kind of has sunk in.”

Willow told local outlet CBS Pittsburgh that a male student attacked her at the bottom of the stairs on Oct. 27. “He pulled me from behind and started beating me up,” she recalled, adding that prior to the attack, he called her names and referred to her as “it.” Willow said that the student’s attacks had started as verbal harassment in the lunchroom earlier that same day. A fellow student caught part of the physical attack on video. 

According to Newsweek, Manor Township Police are investigating the incident at Armstrong Junior-Senior High School, but no charges have been filed. And if this school sounds vaguely remember, it’s possibly because students made headlines after chanting offensive remarks toward a competitor’s female goalie during an ice hockey game. 

Willow’s mother attended a school board meeting on Monday night where she urged the community to change the culture at the school and work on important issues.

“We are listening and we are certainly willing to work with the community and the administration to do whatever it takes to be proactive and not reactive to this problem and promote change,” a school board member said in response to Andring’s comments, as reported by LGBTQ Nation.

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Workers at three Starbucks stores in the Buffalo area are seeking to unionize, and Starbucks management is going all out to try to block it. If these workers are successful, it would be a first at a corporate-owned Starbucks store, setting a precedent that raises the stakes for an anti-union company. After all, if workers in Buffalo do it, workers in other places might start getting ideas.

Ballots were supposed to go out to workers on Wednesday, but on Monday, Starbucks asked the National Labor Relations Board to delay the election and, instead of following the NLRB regional office’s decision to hold three separate elections at the three stores where workers have sought union elections, hold a single union election for all Starbucks stores in the Buffalo area. Starbucks couldn’t make it more clear that it thinks it will lose a fair election in the three stores where workers have called for union representation elections, so it wants to change the rules.

That move comes as part of a broader barrage of anti-union activity from Starbucks management. On Saturday, the company closed its Buffalo stores during a talk by former CEO Howard Schultz, giving workers the completely voluntary chance to attend the talk, in which Schultz offered veiled anti-union messaging, including a questionably appropriate story about the Holocaust. In recent months, corporate also sent extra managers to the stores, supposedly to help make sure things were running smoothly. Go figure, they made workers feel surveilled and intimidated. 

At one of the three stores where all 20 of the existing workers wanted a union, there are now 46 workers eligible to vote on the issue. While workers had complained of understaffing, that is an effort to overwhelm pro-union workers, not to respond to worker complaints.

“A recent visit to a Starbucks near the airport, where workers have filed for a union election, turned up at least nine baristas behind the counter but only a handful of customers,” The New York Times’ Noam Scheiber reported in October, while a worker told him, “Even if you’re just trying to run to the back to grab a gallon of milk, you now have to run an obstacle course to fit between all the folks who have no real reason to be there.”

In October, amid both the union effort and a competitive environment for retail and foodservice companies looking for workers, Starbucks announced a pay increase to a minimum of $15 an hour with an average of $17 an hour by next summer.

Even if you don’t count that pay increase as part of the anti-union effort—and it did come as other companies were making similar moves—Starbucks is just pouring money into keeping workers from unionizing. Add it up: They brought multiple corporate managers into Buffalo. They brought Howard Schultz in and closed stores while he was speaking. They have moved workers around and hired more workers to dramatically increase staffing at one of the stores. They’re making a last-minute attempt to change the rules of the election. It’s reasonably safe to assume that lurking somewhere in the background is an expensive anti-union consultant or law firm.

Worker organizing and worker power-building are terrifying Starbucks. It’s pushing back hard, using many of the tried-and-true union avoidance tactics that corporate America has honed over decades, trying to squash the union effort before it can get off the ground and spread. Now the NLRB will decide whether the company gets its last-minute rules change. 

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A former Georgia cop testified on Monday in the high-profile trial of another former cop, his son, and neighbor, who are charged with the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. Former Glynn County Police Officer Ricky Minshew said that, while he saw Ahmaud Arbery lying face-down in a “puddle of blood” and heard him breathing, the officer—who was the first to arrive on the scene—made no effort to render aid. 

“Well, when I got there I did not know any of the people or any of the facts or circumstances to what had happened,” said Ricky Minshew, who CNN identified as a former Glynn County Police officer. “The only thing I knew that I observed was a body laying in the middle of the roadway that had just bled out, and it was by apparent gunfire.”

“So being that I was the only officer on scene,” he continued, “without having any other police units to watch my back, there was no way that I could switch my attention to anything medical and still be able to watch my surroundings and watch after my own safety. I also did not have the adequate medical training.”

Minshew testified that he worked for the Brunswick Police Department for one year before going on to work for the Glenn County Police Department’s patrol division for two years. He then went into retail management for four years before returning to the Glenn County Police Department. He had only been back seven months when he responded to the “suspicious person” call that ended in Arbery’s death.

“When I first come in the neighborhood, I didn’t hear anything,” Minshew testified. “As I go a little further down Satilla Drive, I hear two loud pop sounds. They were within a couple seconds apart.” He said he knew it was either a firearm or fireworks, so he continued driving, and saw someone flagging him down. Minshew said he later stopped at an intersection, got out of his patrol car, and activated his body camera with a double tap.

“I see two males there in front of me, and I observed a Black male laying in the middle of the roadway, and he was covered in blood.” The two unharmed men were pacing, and the bleeding man later identified as Arbery was “laying face down on his stomach in the puddle of blood,” Minshew testified.

“I heard like an agonal breathing. I’ve always heard it being called a death rattle,” Minshew said. He testified that he had heard the sound before when responding to a suicide and multiple vehicle fatalities. but when asked if he attempted “any CPR or anything like that on the deceased male,” Minshew said, “I did not, no ma’am.”

The case centering former Georgia cop and prosecutorial investigator Gregory McMichael, his son Travis, and local resident William “Roddie” Bryan has been hammered with allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, an incomplete police investigation, and more recently, a biased voir dire process leading to a jury with only one Black person on it.

Defense attorneys, however, have claimed repeatedly that it’s their clients who stand to be treated unfairly. They sought in one motion to ban from the trial a photo of a vanity plate with a Confederate emblem that was on Travis McMichael’s truck when Arbery was killed. The McMichaels said through their attorneys in the motion that the state’s goal is to “draw the conclusion the Mr. Arbery saw the vanity plate, that he interpreted its meaning, and that he feared the occupants in the truck because of this vanity plate, which is why he ran away from the truck.”

Prosecutors responded in a motion that “the State will present the facts of this case, and one of those facts is that Travis McMichael purchased a new truck sometime after January 1, 2020, and put this vanity plate on it.”

Watch the trial live below:

RELATED: Trial for Ahmaud Arbery murder begins with brutal video one defendant thought would prove his case

RELATED: Arbery judge: Seating one Black juror seems to be ‘intentional discrimination.’ Same judge: Oh well

RELATED: Travis McMichael is actively trying to keep his Confederate vanity plate out of his murder trial

RELATED: Murder trial in Ahmaud Arbery case is not about Arbery’s past, judge rules in vital decision

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Speaker Nancy Pelosi remains firm on a timeline for passing the $1.75 trillion budget reconciliation bill that contains President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan. She reiterated in a press conference Tuesday from Glasgow, where she is attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference, that the House will vote sometime next week on the bill.

The conservative Democrats in the House who have been holding up progress on that bill vowed last week that they would agree to for Build Back Better “in no event later than the week of November 15th” in an agreement made with Rep. Pramila Jayapal, leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. That agreement resulted in the CPC agreeing to help pass the hard infrastructure bill and delinking the two bills. The conservatives’ agreement, however, was predicated on receiving “fiscal information” from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). That part of the commitment from the group could be dicey, as the CBO released a statement Tuesday, giving no definite timeline for a full cost estimate beyond “as soon as practicable.”

They do, however, “anticipate releasing estimates for individual titles of the bill as we complete them, some of which will be released this week.” So that “fiscal information” will start coming this week, but will that be enough for the Sabotage Squad (thanks again Greg Sargent, for that nickname), or will they hold out for the full cost estimate? They do say they “remain committed to working to resolve any discrepancies in order to pass the Build Back Better legislation,” but that could mean anything. Like continuing to delay its passage to give Senate Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema time to carve more good stuff out of it in the name of “resolving discrepancies” in cost estimates.

“Our colleagues are committed to voting for the transformative Build Back Better Act, as currently written, no later than the week of November 15,” Rep. Jayapal said in a statement Friday night, addressing the agreement they had reached before the vote. “All of our colleagues have also committed to voting tonight on the rule to move the Build Back Better Act forward to codify this promise,” she added. They did do that, they passed the rule to move the bill forward, but there’s still this caveat hanging out there that is the CBO.

As a reminder, here’s some of what’s left in the BBB plan, the one those Democrats keep chipping away at. There’s another year’s worth of expanded, monthly Child Tax Credit payments of as much as $300 per child, that program from the COVID-19 relief bill Biden got passed in March that has reduced childhood hunger. The original plan was to make that permanent, then to extend it through 2025, and now mainstream Democrats are fighting to keep one more year of it.

There’s also universal pre-K for three- and four-year-old children. The goal is to provide $400 billion for pre-K and to lower the cost of childcare, holding family spending on it for most families at no more than 7% of income. A third key family program is paid family and medical leave, which has been dropped from up to 12 weeks of paid leave to four weeks and then dropped entirely by the White House. The House, however, put the program back into their bill at four weeks. It’s on thin ice right now.

One big win, though it’s a small provision, is that it will cap the cost of insulin at $35 a month, for insured people, anyway. That’s for everyone with insurance, both Medicare and private insurance. It would take effect immediately. In addition to that, it includes a cap on out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for Medicare enrollees at $2,000/year, with a smoothing proposal that will allow seniors to pay a monthly installment to cover those costs, rather than each time they fill their prescriptions.

It has a number of other health care provisions that will make insurance under the Affordable Care Act even more affordable and, as of now, provide a means for the 2 million people left in the Medicaid gap in states that refused expansion under the ACA to get free or extremely low-cost Obamacare coverage. It would also punish non-expansion states by reducing payments they get in Medicaid Disproportionate Share Hospital payments and federal funding for uncompensated care pools—the two programs that reimburse hospitals and providers for providing care to the uninsured. That theoretically wouldn’t hurt the low-income people or the hospitals in those states, because they would now have private insurance to cover their care. The bill would also provide health coverage for new moms on Medicaid for a full 12 months after giving birth.

It would permanently fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and require states to keep children in the program for a full 12 months regardless of fluctuations in household income. Families at this income level often teeter in and out of qualifying for the program. This change would ensure stable coverage for kids, even as their families’ income rises above the income threshold throughout the year.

The $400 billion Biden wanted for home- and community-based care for disabled and elderly people has been cut down to $150 billion, but it’s still in there. It would help keep people who don’t need the level of care that requires they be in a nursing home at home, and it would raise wages for those homecare workers, hopefully growing that workforce and thus shortening the waiting list for these services. There’s also Medicare coverage for hearing care, which is new, but coverage for vision and dental is out, although there’s been talk of making the coverage of all three – mandatory under Medicaid, so low-income seniors would at least have that.

The bulk of the spending in the bill, $550 billion of it, goes to fighting climate change, including tax credits for clean energy production and the manufacture of clean energy technology components. It increases tax credits for the purchase of electric cars and clean technology like solar panels, as well as their manufacture. The original mix of carrots (tax credits and grants) and sticks (fines and penalties for delaying the transition to clean energy production) is pretty much all carrots now. However—and this is fairly big—the House text includes a fee for oil and gas operators per metric ton of released methane. It also includes the sweetener of $775 million in grants, rebates, and loans to oil and gas operators to help reduce and monitor methane emissions.

So, yeah. Big, important stuff that would be very good to have passed before the end of the year. If for no other reason than to make sure that the monthly child tax credit payments don’t dry up. The reality for House Democrats, including the Sabotage Squad, is that the Senate is going to make changes anyway and the CBO score will be subject to those changes. Just getting the damned thing moving, building momentum, and not giving Manchin and Sinema time to derail it on the Senate side is going to be the key to salvaging the plan.