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In response, Republicans threw a fit and announced they’ll be forming their own 1/6 investigative panel.
ver since Donald Trump incited a mob to lay siege on the U.S. Capitol in the hopes of blocking Joe Biden from becoming president, Republicans have pulled all manner of bullshit out of their asses in a sad attempt to explain why the failed insurrection wasn’t really that bad. Senator Ron Johnson has suggested he never feared for his life because the rioters were white. Rep. Paul Gosar has called the individuals who violently broke into the Capitol “peaceful patriots” and said the Department of Justice is “harassing“ them. Rep. Andrew Clyde has boldly and insanely claimed that “There was no insurrection and to call it an insurrection, in my opinion, is a bold-faced lie. Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall showed people in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes taking videos and pictures…if you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”
Obviously, Republicans have taken this tack because deep down inside, they know they‘re partially responsible for the events that took place on January 6, thanks to their promotion of the lie that Trump actually won the election. Hence, why they refused to support an investigation into the attack on Capitol Hill, knowing the results, for them, would look really, really bad. Unfortunately for the GOP, Nancy Pelosi wasn’t just going to sit back and let her colleagues across the aisle pretend as though the failed coup, which left five people dead, never happened; after the legislation to form a January 6 commission was blocked in the Senate, the House speaker announced that she would form a select committee to investigate the events surrounding the attack.
Realizing at that point that this thing was going to happen with or without them, Republicans decided they‘d better get some of their own on the panel. But instead of appointing, say, lawmakers who hadn‘t whipped Trump’s supporters into a frenzy over the lie that the election was stolen, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tried to place Reps. Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, two of the biggest Big Lie–pushing congressmen in the House on the committee. Which would basically be like if O.J. Simpson was appointed to a board investigating the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. To which Nancy Pelosi effectively responded: Go f--k yourself.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday rejected two of the five Republican choices for a select committee that is set to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, citing concerns about preserving the quality of the probe and asking that the GOP choose two replacements. “With respect for the integrity of the investigation, with an insistence on the truth and with concern about statements made and actions taken by these Members, I must reject the recommendations of Representatives [Jim] Banks and [Jim] Jordan to the Select Committee,” Pelosi said in a statement.
Because Republicans rejected the chance to form a bipartisan commission that would have been evenly split between five Democrats and five Republicans, Pelosi’s next option was to create a select committee to investigate the riot. Unlike the bipartisan commission, which would have given Republicans the opportunity to appoint whoever they wanted from outside Congress or any other branch of government, the select committee was set up by Pelosi and the rules for it were determined by her office as well. Pelosi, a California Democrat, reserved veto power over the five members appointed by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. And she used that power to boot Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Rep. Jim Banks, R-Indiana, from the committee.
While Pelosi said Wednesday that she was happy to accept McCarthy’s three other choices (Reps. Rodney Davis, Kelly Armstrong, and Troy Nehls), the minority leader—who himself voted to overturn the 2020 election results and rewritten history in Trump‘s favor since the Capitol attack—chose instead to throw a hissy fit, suggesting he‘d be taking his toys and going home. “Unless Speaker Pelosi reverses course and seats all five Republican nominees, Republicans will not be party to their sham process and will instead pursue our own investigation of the facts,” McCarthy said in a statement. In other words:
Anyway, we look forward to the results of the GOP’s “own investigation of the facts“ which will presumably conclude that Hunter Biden was behind the attack and that the only way to save democracy moving forward is to appoint Trump president for life.
Liz Cheney also thinks Kevin McCarthy is a despicable hack
...and suggests that Jim Jordan should be hauled before the 1/6 committee for questioning
A protest in front of a McDonald's restaurant in support of a $15 an hour minimum wage. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Motherboard spoke to economists and historians about why fast food and retail workers around the country are suddenly quitting en masse.
omething remarkable is happening in fast food establishments, retail stores, and restaurants across America. You may have seen photos of it go viral. You may have even experienced it in real life if you've dined at a Chili's or Applebee's and the hostess apologizes for extra-long wait times.
“WE ALL QUIT, SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE,” disgruntled employees posted in giant letters on a sign outside a Burger King in Lincoln, Nebraska earlier this month.
"Almost the entire crew and managers have walked out until further notice," Chipotle workers wrote in Philadelphia on a sign posted on the glass doors of their restaurant.
“Closed indefinitely because Dollar General doesn’t pay a living wage or treat their employees with respect," retail workers scribbled in Sharpie outside a Dollar General in Eliot, Maine, after the entire store quit en masse.
In recent months, these mass resignations have been part of a national reckoning over a so-called "labor shortage." On one hand there are the businesses that want to continue to pay workers what they've always made (which is very little). On the other, workers and those who support them say there needs to be a fundamental reassessment of what work looks like in the United States.
Why are low-wage workers quitting their jobs now?
For the first time in more than two decades, fast food, retail, and hospitality workers have the leverage to resign from their jobs in protest of decades of deteriorating working conditions, which often include stagnant wages, unpredictable schedules, and no health care or paid sick leave.
A better social safety net during the pandemic and a tight labor market in the fast food, leisure, and hospitality industries is allowing this to happen. Historically, these sectors are among the least protected by labor laws and the most precarious workers in the country; many of them were deemed "essential" during the worst parts of the pandemic.
"It's an act of protest against abuses and exploitative conditions," said Patricia Campos Medina, executive director of the Worker's Institute at Cornell University. "It’s a sense of empowerment that workers don’t have to tolerate that kind of abuse."
For decades, large swaths of low wage service work have proved difficult to unionize because of fissured workplaces and aggressive union-busting by employers. Now these workers, many of them women of color—have taken the next best option, protesting through mass resignation.
Many conservative pundits have blamed unemployment and stimulus checks for the labor shortage. In 2020, a relief bill added $600 per week to state unemployment benefits. This year, that has fallen to $300 per week, and is set to expire on September 4. But recent academic studies show that extra stimulus money and unemployment insurance doesn't seem to have kept low-wage workers from reentering the job market more than usual. Many workers have just found other jobs, retired early, and even died.
Employment benefits have given workers a little more time to find jobs and higher expectations in their job search. "Workers have seen during the pandemic that when lawmakers choose to step in and act and protect people [via stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, healthcare], work doesn't have to suck as much. When workers are asked to do tough jobs, they want to be paid more," David Cooper, senior policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute said. "For the first time since the late 1990s, low wages workers have the leverage to demand higher pay. The workers who walk out of Burger King are using this to their advantage."
Historians say this is one of the few moments in modern US history when precarious, low-wage workers have really had this leverage. "The other really obvious example of this was World War II when you had even more government payments to people," said Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor at UC Santa Barbara. "It was money to [use to] go out and find jobs that pay better wages." Then—as today—those fleeing their jobs in the greatest numbers were people of color and women.
"Real wages for Black people in Mississippi went up four times," Lichtenstein continued. "Some left for jobs in the ports of California. Women also left lousy jobs and white collar work opened up which was better. Domestic workers fled their jobs as maids and cleaners and got steady jobs in hospitals. When you give people an alternative, they seize the opportunity."
The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 grants workers in the United States the right to form unions and bargaining with their employers for better wages and working conditions, but fast food and retail workers have long faced enormous barriers to forming unions thanks to franchised, contracted, and high turnover jobs. For example, there have been concerted efforts to unionize McDonald's and Walmart, but these have failed. McDonald's, for example, maintains that the vast majority of its workers are not employees of McDonald's but work instead for franchises, and unionization would have to go franchise by franchise, or McDonald's would have to agree to sit down at the bargaining table.
"The workers who are walking out today are at the margins of formal labor law and standards," Jennifer Klein, a professor of labor history at Yale University said. "They don't have access to bureaucratic mechanisms of the state and law to resolve grievances and they don't have collective power through a union. Low wage workers have so often been rendered invisible but now they're making themselves incredibly visible through informal means."
Where are workers going and are they actually getting paid more?
While some professionals are quitting because of burnout or existential crises, according to a New York Times article about the phenomenon from April, low wage workers don't have the savings or other financial cushion to leave the job market for extended periods of time to explore passion projects and travel, Cooper says.
But people are finding better jobs in the same industries, or entirely new ones. Cooper says the expanded social safety net has left workers wanting and expecting more, and has allowed them to spend a little more time out of the workforce looking for the right job. "In general, unemployment benefits give workers the ability to wait for better jobs and better working conditions," said Cooper. "They're taking time to pick the right jobs. Those jobs might be closer to their interests, closer to what they studied, jobs that are a career rather than a means to pay the bills."
Still, while employers in certain regions may in fact be offering higher wages than they usually do, there's no data yet showing that employers across the board are paying workers more.
Instead, many companies have resorted to offering hefty sign-on bonuses and other perks, such as free meals or cash for interviewing. In recent weeks, Amazon—where workers too are quitting—has offered enormous sign-on bonuses to warehouse workers across the country. For example, an Amazon warehouse in the Hudson Valley, New York recently offered a $3,000 sign-on bonus if workers start before August 1 and work certain shifts.
"Employers are smart too," said Lichtenstein, the history professor at UC Santa Barbara. "What they don’t want to do is establish a permanent higher norm, so instead of $15 an hour, they say here’s a bonus. You can have free lunches. We'll pay for your tuition. Employers will do anything to not improve wages in a permanent fashion."
The myth of at-will employment
Conservative pundits love to belabor the point that in America, employment is at-will, and workers and employers alike have the right to call it quits at any moment. "If you hate your job so much, why not leave? This is a free country after all," they say.
In reality, for decades saying "take this job and shove it" to McDonald's or Burger King has become increasingly hard thanks to the stagnant wages, a lack of benefits, non-compete clauses, and long stretches of economic recession that make it very difficult for workers to build up the kind of savings or emergency fund needed to quit without going through serious financial distress.
For the last 40 years, low wage workers across the United States have seen their pay, benefits, guaranteed hours, and schedules get progressively worse. Unemployment benefits have been harder to access. Companies such as Jimmy John's, McDonald's, Carl's Jr., and Amazon have required workers to sign non-compete clauses and no-poach agreements that extend for months that legally bar workers from going to competitors in search of higher wages. Low-wage workers don't have the luxury to quit and wait six months to start working again, as a recent executive order from the Biden Administration is attempting to address by banning and limiting such clauses.
"Flexibility to look for better jobs has been eroded intentionally through policy choices and campaigns to undermine workers' leverage and ability to expect more from employers," said Cooper.
Raising expectations?
When Ieshia Townsend signed up to work at a McDonald's on the South Side of Chicago in 2015, it wasn't because she loved the idea of flipping burgers and working the take out window. She had just had a baby, and was caring for her mother who had Alzheimer's disease and a brother with epilepsy. It seemed like the best job she could get. "I couldn't pay rent," she said. "I couldn't pay lights or gas or cable, so I went into McDonald's and I said, 'God please make a way to provide for my mom, son, and brother.'"
Fast forward six years to this spring, after a year of working in a pandemic, Townsend quit her job after a bout of panic attacks that landed her in the emergency room and a recommendation from her doctor that she quit McDonald's to take care of her health. "It was the anxiety and the heat. I worked all the way through the pandemic. It was very stressful knowing I can’t touch my kids when I get home," she said.
Part of the mass resignations can be attributed to the fact that the pandemic has raised expectations for safety and benefits in the workplace. Jobs that don't offer health insurance and paid sick days have never been desirable, but now some workers are saying they're done putting up with them.
"I think the most fundamental fact is that the fast food and restaurant industries are having a structural shift in how people see the jobs and what workers and consumers expect of the industry," said Campos Medina at Cornell University. "Fast food has always been portrayed as the job of teenagers, not women sustaining families, but that is what it is. The pandemic revealed that people in these jobs have no job security, or health insurance, and couldn’t qualify for Medicaid."
Townsend, the McDonald's worker in Chicago who resigned, said she's found now work in the gig economy—which also has its drawbacks—and is testing out different food delivery apps, UberEats, DoorDash, and Instacart, to see which she prefers.
"It got to the point where I was having chest pains, my chest was throbbing and my manager would say 'you're fine' and wouldn't let me leave, so I just quit," she continued. "I would never work at McDonalds ever again."
A record 93,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2020. (photo: MediaNews Group/Getty Images)
ess than two weeks after the Sackler family paid $4.5 billion to settle claims brought against Purdue Pharma for the opioid epidemic, four other drug distributors reached a deal Wednesday with the attorneys general of 14 states to release the firms from all claims for $26 billion. It’s the largest corporate settlement since Big Tobacco.
Once the settlement is finalized, billions of dollars will be distributed to opioid treatment and addiction-prevention programs around the country.
In exchange, 14 state attorneys general will drop their cases against Johnson & Johnson and the distributors AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson. In exchange, these four firms will not face any future legal actions from thousands of local governments and the states involved.
The agreement — which comes a week after new CDC data showed that a record 93,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2020 — still needs the formal approval of the states and municipalities that made the deal. It requires that Johnson & Johnson pays $5 billion over nine years and the other three firms pays $21 billion over 18 years.
As the New York Times notes, the distributors have been accused of “turning a blind eye for two decades while pharmacies across the country ordered millions of pills for their communities,” including towns where more bottles were being prescribed than there were residents living there. Johnson & Johnson, meanwhile, has been accused of overstating the benefits of prescription opioid use and trivializing the risk of addiction. In the settlement, the firm’s general counsel said they had “deep sympathy for everyone affected.” The three distributors issued a statement saying that while they hope the settlement delivers “meaningful relief,” they “strongly dispute the allegations made in these lawsuits.”
DACA recipients and their supporters rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Immigration reform has long been elusive in Congress. Democrats may have a workaround.
fter years of failed bipartisan talks on immigration reform, Democrats in Congress are pushing to go it alone and legalize millions of undocumented immigrants.
They’re hoping to provide a path to citizenship to several key groups: undocumented “DREAMers” who came to the US as children; people with Temporary Protected Status, a form of humanitarian protection typically conferred on citizens of countries suffering from natural disasters, armed conflict, or other extraordinary circumstances; farm workers; and other essential workers.
Though the specific legislative language has yet to be announced, Democrats are planning to include the proposal in their 2022 budget reconciliation package, which they could pass with a simple majority in Congress and without a single Republican vote.
It’s a risky strategy, but one Democrats believe is worth trying in order to break the yearslong immigration reform deadlock and improve the lives of millions who would otherwise continue to live in the shadows as a kind of permanent underclass, vulnerable to exploitation and to removal from a country where many of them have put down roots.
Budget reconciliation may be the Democrats’ best and only option in President Joe Biden’s first term to enact the most significant legalization program since 1986. And a recent federal court ruling halting new applications to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which has shielded more than 800,000 DREAMers from deportation, has only increased the pressure on Democrats to act.
Biden had unveiled his own broader proposal for comprehensive immigration reform shortly after taking office, which would have aimed to legalize the entire population of more than 10.5 million undocumented immigrants living in the US.
Despite Democrats’ attempts to use that proposal as a starting point for bipartisan negotiations, there has been little interest from Republicans, who have sought to exploit Biden’s perceived weakness on border policy as a potential midterm strategy.
So Democrats are going it alone. But there is no certainty for now that reconciliation will work, as there are limitations on what kind of legislation can be passed through the process. As Biden acknowledged on Monday, the Senate parliamentarian will be the ultimate arbiter of whether it is allowed under budget rules.
“That’s for the parliamentarian to decide. Not for Joe Biden to decide,” he told reporters.
Democrats believe they have a good case for using budget reconciliation to pass immigration reform, given precedent from a 2005 reconciliation bill and what would be a significant economic windfall resulting from legalizing the groups of immigrants under discussion. But that might not be enough to convince the parliamentarian — and the price of failure could be meaningful progress on immigration reform in Biden’s first term.
“Focusing so heavily on reconciliation is a risky maneuver, since it relies entirely on the decision of the parliamentarian,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, managing director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “I think that all avenues should be explored, and no one should put all their eggs in one basket.”
Democrats are targeting sympathetic groups of undocumented immigrants
Democrats’ proposal would legalize immigrant populations perceived as sympathetic by at least some members of both parties. Indeed, there have been bipartisan efforts to legalize DREAMers, immigrants with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and farm workers with legislation that passed the House as recently as March.
Many of those immigrants have been waiting for years, if not decades, for Congress to deliver them assurance that they can continue to live and work in the US free of fear of deportation — and Democrats’ efforts to deliver that through budget reconciliation are long overdue.
The first version of the DREAM Act, which would have offered a path to citizenship to DREAMers, was introduced in 2001, but time and time again, the legislation has failed to attract the necessary Republican votes to pass. The Obama-era DACA program has so far shielded them from deportation, despite being the target of attacks from immigration restrictionists since it was enacted in 2012.
For four years, President Donald Trump unsuccessfully sought to dismantle DACA and, for a time, halted new applications to the program. It revealed just how vulnerable DREAMers were to an administration with an anti-immigrant agenda.
Friday’s court decision from a federal judge in Texas is just the latest way in which DACA recipients’ legal status has come under threat. Under the decision, US Citizenship and Immigration Services cannot process or approve any new applications for DACA. That could affect a significant portion of the more than 1 million people eligible for DACA. People who currently have DACA can still apply for renewals, though that could change as the court case goes through the appeals process.
Immigrant advocates have argued that the decision has made a legislative solution for DREAMers all the more urgent. “Now, the responsibility rests entirely with the US Senate, and they need to take action,” Adonias Arevalo, national organizing director at the Latino rights group Poder Latinx, said in a statement.
Though budget reconciliation could be that solution, it might not come soon enough for people affected by the decision in the Texas case. An alternative might be a bipartisan bill that at least codifies the current DACA program, which “seems to be possible and may even be necessary sooner” given the more than 50,000 new applicants now in limbo at USCIS and the monthslong timeline for any possible reconciliation bill, Cardinal Brown said.
“There seems to be bipartisan support for doing at least that much, and I think it should be possible to do that and still push for larger legalization in the future,” she said.
TPS holders have similarly been waiting for Congress to offer them protection. About 400,000 citizens of El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti have also been able to live and work in the US with TPS, but Trump tried to terminate their status, among nationals of other countries, starting in November 2017, against the advice of senior State Department officials. He argued that conditions in those countries have improved enough that their citizens can now safely return. But many of them have resided in the US for decades and have laid down roots, making it difficult for them to return to countries they no longer call home.
The push to legalize other essential workers began during the pandemic, as Democrats recognized that they not only deserve to remain in the US but that America’s ability to recover, both from a public health perspective and economically, demands that they do. There are more than 5 million undocumented essential workers living in the US — almost three in four undocumented immigrants in the workforce. That includes an estimated 1.7 million workers in the nation’s food supply chain, 236,000 working as health care providers, and 188,000 who are responsible for keeping hospitals, nursing homes, and labs running.
It’s not yet clear exactly how many of these workers Democrats are seeking to legalize. California Sen. Alex Padilla and Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro, among other Democrats, have previously proposed offering a path to citizenship to 2 million of essential workers’ family members as well, but the reconciliation proposal might not be that broad.
The bill could also legalize the nation’s estimated 1.1 million to 1.7 million undocumented farmworkers. The US agricultural industry has relied on immigrant labor for decades, dating back to the Bracero Program in the 1940s that allowed millions of Mexicans to come to the US as farm workers. Another large influx of unauthorized workers came during the 1990s before a slowdown that started around 2008, leaving agricultural employers unable to replace an aging workforce.
Congress has been wrestling with how to respond to labor shortages in agriculture and reduce the industry’s reliance on undocumented workers ever since. That mission took on new urgency under Trump, following his administration’s immigration raids targeting the agricultural sector. At one raid in August 2019, 680 workers were arrested at two poultry plants in Mississippi.
Can Democrats pass immigration reform through reconciliation? It’s complicated.
The Democratic caucus seems to be presenting a unified front in supporting the inclusion of provisions to legalize some undocumented immigrants in a reconciliation package. West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a key moderate, has said he supports it, just as he did a 2013 comprehensive immigration reform package that passed the Senate but ultimately failed in the House. It’s likely that other moderates will follow suit.
“I’m a 2013 immigration supporter. I thought that was a great bill. If we had that bill then, we wouldn’t have the problems we’d have today,” he told reporters last week.
But even if Democrats are comfortable using reconciliation to pass immigration reform, the Senate parliamentarian, an unelected official, might not be. That has raised concerns among some immigrant advocates on the left:
But barring a bipartisan breakthrough that has been elusive for years or the elimination of the filibuster, there isn’t any way around the parliamentarian’s ruling. It’s what ultimately doomed Democrats’ proposal earlier this year to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025.
Democrats have argued that precedent is on their side. In 2005, the then-Republican-controlled Senate passed its own reconciliation bill including several immigration provisions that would have effectively increased the number of green cards issued annually. It would have allowed any unused green cards under the annual caps set by Congress to be issued the following year, as well as excluded the family members of foreign workers from counting toward the caps.
The provisions didn’t ultimately make it into the final version of the bill that was passed by the House, but the fact that they passed the Senate without objection from the parliamentarian or members of Congress arguing that it violated budget rules could indicate that Democrats’ latest proposal will pass scrutiny. The late Sen. Robert Byrd, who authored the rules about legislation that can be passed via reconciliation, didn’t even challenge the provisions on that basis at the time.
“I think it’s a fairly strong precedent, and other folks who worked on the 2005 package agree,” said Philip Wolgin, managing director for immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-wing think tank. “But I do know the parliamentarian hasn’t ruled on this. So it is still an open question.”
What’s more, Democrats think they can argue that the immigration provisions have direct budget impacts — not ones that are “merely incidental” to the policy goal — as required under budget rules. Though the federal government would have to incur $126 billion in costs at the outset to process new green card applications, the provisions would carry massive economic benefits.
Just providing DREAMers, TPS holders, and undocumented essential workers with a path to citizenship would increase GDP by a cumulative total of $1.5 trillion over 10 years and create 400,800 new jobs, not even accounting for the potential economic windfall for those immigrants’ children, according to estimates from the Center for American Progress. The same analysis notes after 10 years, those workers would see their annual wages increase by $13,500, and all Americans would see higher wages by an annual $600.
“There’s a pretty small short-term cost to the government, but really big economic benefits to ordinary Americans all across the country in the form of higher wages and new jobs,” Wolgin said.
Still, some budget experts aren’t convinced that the kind of immigration legislation that Democrats want to pass would have direct budgetary impacts. For example, raising fees associated with applying for visas or green cards to raise revenues at the immigration agencies would qualify, but increasing the number of people eligible for green cards probably doesn’t, said Bill Hoagland, senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
“This whole process was intended to be a fiscal exercise — not one in which major public policy was to be implemented through this fast track,” he said. “This is not what the authors of the Budget Act had ever envisioned.”
With the federal moratorium on evictions set to expire, the United States is on the verge of a massive housing crisis. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
Opinion by Kathryn Reynolds and Abby Boshart for CNN Business Perspectives
fter the CDC’s national eviction moratorium expires on July 31, millions of renters could lose their homes.
Congress has allocated almost $47 billion toward emergency rental assistance to help renters stay stably housed and help property owners cover their costs. But it’s very unlikely the money will reach most renters and landlords before courts resume judgments in eviction cases in August.
Rental assistance is reaching households very slowly, with renters waiting months after applying. Some states and localities started their programs in May or June and are still ramping up their emergency rental assistance programs. The good news, though, is that some states and localities are rushing to institute short-term eviction prevention policies that could help renters and landlords access assistance, including time-limited safe harbors from eviction for tenants who apply for rental assistance, local eviction moratorium extensions, and eviction diversion programs that offer services to landlords and tenants.
These short-term efforts shouldn’t end when the current crisis subsides. But more structural and enduring eviction reforms are needed to address longstanding inequities, ensure millions of families have housing stability, and avoid unnecessary costs to households, communities and the nation.
A crisis long in the making
An eviction crisis affected American families long before the pandemic. On average, 3.6 million evictions were filed each year in the US before Covid-19, with evictions disproportionately affecting women of color and single parents and their children. Families who have been evicted are more likely to enter a homeless shelter and spend more time experiencing homelessness than their peers, but the costs and impacts don’t stop there. Research has also found links between evictions and diminished physical and mental health outcomes for parents and children, reduced earnings and job instability for parents, and negative effects on children’s education attainment.
Landlords also face costs from evictions, including legal fees and lost rent while re-leasing their units, because they have few other avenues besides evictions to collect missed rent or solve other disputes. And governments at every level, particularly local governments, bear high costs to provide services to families experiencing housing instability.
Long-term strategies can reduce evictions and promote housing stability
Changing national eviction policy and local court practices is critical to address the nation’s long-term eviction crisis. To start, researchers, policymakers and advocates need better and more uniform data on evictions. This data is notoriously uneven and incomplete, making it hard to track evictions over time, identify communities hardest hit and design effective solutions. One proposal gaining traction is to create a federal database of eviction filings and completed evictions.
As a first step, the federal government could provide funding and technical assistance to help states and local communities create their own eviction databases.
A national right to counsel would also give renters a fairer shot in the justice system. Most landlords in eviction cases are represented by counsel, but renters can rarely afford lawyers and often aren’t aware of their rights. In response, local governments, like Maryland and San Francisco, have adopted policies and funded programs that guarantee representation for every renter facing eviction. Early data from these programs show promising results in preventing evictions, and many landlords are more likely to participate in mediation with tenants when they are represented.
The civil courts that administer evictions also need to work more closely with housing and social service practitioners, including housing assistance and financial counseling administrators, and with case workers who can connect evicted tenants to new housing opportunities. One way to do this is by setting up eviction diversion programs that offer services to landlords and their tenants, including requiring mediation and rental assistance before an eviction can proceed. At least 47 such programs already exist in state and city court systems across the United States. These types of programs can promote judicial fairness by reorienting the goal of court proceedings to promote housing stability while balancing the landlord’s property rights.
Finally, and most importantly, all of these steps are necessary because we don’t have a strong housing safety net. If the government were to expand rental assistance permanently to the many households who qualify, but who normally don’t receive assistance due to a lack of funding to cover the need, there would be fewer evictions for nonpayment of rent and greater housing stability.
The impending end to the national moratorium puts millions of American families at risk of eviction if they cannot access emergency rent relief in time. But this ticking clock shouldn’t keep policymakers and local leaders from addressing the broader eviction crisis affecting the country. Long-term solutions are the only way to guarantee every family has a home, not only during a pandemic, but always.
A military operation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (photo: Fernando Frasão/Agência Brasil)
“There’s not even the littlest doubt,” Jair Bolsonaro said. “I’d stage a coup the same day [I became president,] the same day. Congress doesn’t work. I’m sure at least 90 percent of people would party and clap.”
Now the congressman is president of Brazil, and fears are mounting here that he could be considering how to make good on that idea. Bolsonaro, a former army captain who has frequently lamented the collapse of Brazil’s military dictatorship, has in recent days wondered not only whether he will participate in next year’s elections, but also whether there will even be elections.
“Next year’s elections have to be clean,” he declared this month. “Either we’ll have clean elections, or we won’t have elections.”
Some of the most powerful political voices in the country, including that of former president Michel Temer, are expressing concern that Bolsonaro could try to leverage unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud to derail or overturn a vote he has lost.
“The situation is extremely worrying in Brazil,” said Marcos Nobre, a prominent political scientist at the State University of Campinas. “It’s very, very grave what is happening here.”
Bolsonaro’s increasingly brazen comments escalate a months-long, Trump-style campaign to erode faith in the electoral system and transform its processes into a high-stakes political struggle. Now, as Latin America’s largest democracy girds itself for what is expected to be a tumultuous election, it confronts a paradox that will be familiar to Americans: The man leading the assault on its electoral process is the very person most recently awarded its highest office.
For years, Bolsonaro has lodged unsubstantiated allegations of electoral fraud. Before the 2018 presidential election, he said the only way he would lose would be by fraud. He then claimed he had won by much more than the official tally showed. Last year, he parroted President Donald Trump’s allegations on the U.S. election: “There was a lot of fraud there.”
But in recent months he has increasingly latched onto Brazil’s electronic voting machines, alleging without evidence that the system is pervaded by fraud. He says the country should switch to physical ballots and has repeatedly pushed the congress to make that change.
This week, he cast Brazil’s electoral process as part of a broader conspiracy by unnamed forces to return leftist politician Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the presidency. Lula, who was jailed on corruption charges and later released, is now leading Bolsonaro in presidential polls.
“The same people who took Lula out of jail and made him eligible to run for office will be secretly counting the votes inside the Superior Electoral Court,” he said this week. “Elections that you can’t audit, this isn’t an election — it’s fraud.”
In a statement, Bolsonaro’s presidential office defended Bolsonaro as an “active and tireless defender of democracy and the Brazilian constitution.” The officials said Bolsonaro wants a verifiable process in which every vote is honored.
“Brazil will continue to be a thriving democracy, with total respect given to the constitution and the will of the people to choose their representatives,” the Bolsonaro officials said.
Few think Bolsonaro would have any real chance of undoing an election. If anything, analysts say, his rhetoric betrays his political weakness. His approval ratings have fallen to record lows. The coronavirus has killed more than 545,000 Brazilians, and congressional investigators are probing his government’s hands-off response to the pandemic. He’s being investigated on allegations he failed to report suspicions of government corruption in the purchase of an Indian vaccine.
“I don’t see a possibility of a military coup in Brazil,” said Raul Jungmann, a former defense minister. “There are neither the internal nor the external conditions — not to mention there’s little desire among the armed forces to set out on an authoritarian adventure.”
But in a country freed from the yoke of a military dictatorship only in 1985, and which has warily eyed the military’s involvement in politics ever since, there is also the sense that anything is possible.
Bolsonaro has stacked his administration with a historically large number of military officials. His policies enjoy widespread approval among security forces. A portion of his base has repeatedly called on him to stage a military takeover — pleas he’s fanned by attending their rallies. After Trump supporters in the United States assaulted the U.S. Capitol to try to overturn the election results, Bolsonaro warned that Brazil would “have an even worse problem” if it didn’t change its electoral system. His defense minister, Braga Netto, has also reportedly threatened to cancel the elections if the country didn’t use paper ballots — a newspaper report Netto denied Thursday morning.
“Even if it is just a hypothesis, it would be democratically negligent to not be worried by this,” said Luiz Eduardo Soares, a prominent political analyst. “His behavior has been repeatedly threatening and hostile toward institutions.”
In a country polarized by Bolsonaro’s presidency, a sustained assault on the legitimacy of the election could undermine democracy for years to come. Millions could come away from the election feeling that they had been cheated — as has happened in the United States.
“Elections are a huge leap of faith, and it’s amazing that we’ve taken them as an article of faith for this long,” said Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow for Latin America at the London-based think tank Chatham House.
“The genius of electoral fraud claims is that you don’t even need to demonstrate fraud; you just need to demonstrate the possibility of fraud,” Sabatini said. “Then, in the hothouse environment of social media, it will be picked up with very little fact-checking, really catch fire and be reinforced.”
Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, a University of Sao Paulo anthropologist and visiting professor at Princeton, said Brazil today is haunted by the “specter of a dictatorship.” But it’s not the lingering effect of its decades under a military regime, she said — it’s the fear of Bolsonaro’s apparent authoritarian impulses.
“We have a president who was formed by the military, who talks all of the time about the dictatorship, who has conducted anti-democratic acts,” she said. “He clearly wants to weaken Brazil’s institutions.”
A massive 'heat dome' will settle across the heart of the contiguous U.S. on Monday. (photo: NOAA)
Heatwave to next week roast areas already gripped by severe drought, plunging reservoirs and wildfires
A massive “heat dome” of excessive heat will settle across the heart of the contiguous US from Monday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast, bringing elevated temperatures to the Great Plains, the Great Lakes, the northern reaches of the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific north-west and California.
Places used to more mild summers are set for punishing heat, with temperatures expected to breach 100F (37C) in the Dakotas and Montana, a state in which the city of Billings has already experienced 12 days above 95F (35C) this month. Areas of states including Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma may get “sweltering” temperatures reaching 110F (43C), Noaa said, while cities such as Des Moines, Minneapolis and Chicago will get significantly above-average heat.
The latest, but most expansive, in a parade of heatwaves to sweep the US is likely to bring thunderstorms and lightning to some areas, as well as worsen drought conditions ranked as “severe” or “exceptional” that now cover two-thirds of the US west.
Climate scientists have said the barrage of heatwaves over the past month, which have parched farms, caused roads to buckle and resulted in the obliteration of long-standing temperature records, are being fueled by predicted human-caused climate change – but admit to being surprised at the ferocity of the onslaught.
“It’s been a severe and dangerous summer, some of the heatwaves have been devastatingly hot,” said Michael Wehner, a a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “We certainly expected these type of temperatures as global warming continues but I don’t think anyone anticipated they would be so hot right now. I don’t think we could’ve expected so many heatwaves in the same general region in one summer.”
The most extraordinary of the recent heatwaves occurred in the Pacific north-west in June where the normally mild region was bathed in heat that broke temperature records by more than 10F (5.5C). The heat, which caused hundreds of people to die in cities including Seattle and Portland, where it reached 116F (46C), has caused several scientists to question their previous estimates of how the climate crisis will reshape heatwave severity.
“You expect hotter heatwaves with climate change but the estimates may have been overly conservative,” Wehner said. “With the Pacific north-west heatwave you’d conclude the event would be almost impossible without climate change but in a straightforward statistical analysis from before this summer you’d also include it would be impossible with climate change, too. That is problematic, because the event happened.”
Wehner said the ongoing heatwaves should prompt governments and businesses to better prepare for the health impacts of high temperatures, which range from heatstroke to breathing difficulties caused by smoke emitted from increasingly large wildfires.
“The good news is that heatwaves are now on people’s radars a bit more,” he said. “But these sort of events are completely unprecedented, you expect records to be beaten by tenths of a degree, not 5F or more.
“It’s a teachable moment in many ways for the public that climate change is here and now and dangerous. It isn’t our grandchildren’s problem, it’s our problem. But it’s been a teachable moment for climate scientists too.”
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