26 November 21
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Garrison Keillor | Where I Was Last Night and What I Saw
Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
Keillor writes: "The blessed America will survive the festivals of dismay and rise to the challenge of the century, which is to save the planet from ourselves."
Midnight and one a.m. and two, and the mind is racing around the track with lights flashing, me at the wheel but the wheel doesn’t respond, it’s a whirl of thoughts in chain reaction and I know I should turn on a light and read for a while, maybe a math book or Egyptian history, but I lie in the dark and excavate old episodes of my life, and not the happy ones. Playground bullies emerge who, if they’re alive, are ancient old men like me, but in my mind they’re fresh and eager, tormenting sensitive me, daring me to respond. I ignore them, as I tend to do still. Then Hitler appears. The war isn’t over. The Third Reich is in London, my Danish daughter is in danger, the Nazis have the A-bomb, so I drag myself back to the torments of the playground, a sweet slender boy with nicely combed hair and wire-rimmed glasses. And the thought leaps out at me: I was so nice, am I gay? Gay men are terribly nice, you know. By the age of 79, a man should know the answer, but my mind rolls it around. I decide I’m not, having had many girlfriends and no boyfriends. Also, I spill and I have no fashion sense. I could pass for a homeless person.
Now it’s three a.m. I had evacuated the marital bed out of simple courtesy, lest Hitler awaken my wife, and now I return, silently, like a thief, and the silence awakens her. “Can I go back to sleep?” she says. She is the designated worrier in the family. She listens to the radio at night, to drive worry away, but it’s the BBC so she lies awake worrying about codfishermen and Lebanon and Prince Harry and Meghan. I’ve always been a good sleeper but am quite awake at three and so is she, I can tell by the way she sighs. I wonder if insomnia is contagious. I wonder if in her mind it’s 1992 and she’s walking into that restaurant to meet me for the first time and spots me, tall, unkempt and yet pretentious, and thinks, “Oh no. Get me out of here. Not this.”
It’s a wild night, like the bumper cars at the state fair, memories crashing around, I walk down the Mall of the U of M campus and I skip my Milton class and decide to major in folk music instead, the CEO who fired me and was himself dismissed is hitchhiking in the rain and my right front wheel hits the mud puddle exactly right and turns him dark brown from toes to crown, I am offered the Nobel Prize, which I decline with a very noble speech about equality in the arts.
I guess I slept some. I awoke at nine. It’s ten-thirty now. I’ve had breakfast with my wife who is extremely funny describing her niece’s two children, a smart boy and a popular girl, fighting a guerilla war, and then she leaves for Boston where I’ll join her tomorrow. On her way out, she gives me detailed instructions, which I should write down but do not, choosing to live dangerously. And it dawns on me that since nine o’clock, I have been deliriously happy. Insomnia is supposed to leave you exhausted and depressed. I hear my mother saying, “You work too hard, you need your sleep.” She lay awake many a night, worrying about us six kids, she told me so when she was old. Then added, “But you were worth it.”
I think the mind needs now and then to be released from a lifetime of harness and who needs LSD when hallucinations come to you naturally? It was a wild night and as I write it down I’m aware that I’m remembering only a few slivers of it. It makes me wonder about the little defibrillator that the cardiologist installed in my chest a couple weeks ago: is there a secret feature of it that twice a month like clockwork stimulates the brain to take free flight in the universe. If so, I guess I am in favor, though I’d rather the brain did this of its own accord.
It’s good to get off the racetrack and resume normal life. Hitler was defeated. Life is good. The sun shines and we rise from our tangled beds and resume our purposes in the world. The blessed America will survive the festivals of dismay and rise to the challenge of the century, which is to save the planet from ourselves. Thank you, Irving Berlin, for writing that great song.
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Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin. (photo: AP)
On Voting Rights, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema Need to Face Reality
Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
Robinson writes: "The holiday season has just begun, and I already know what I want for Christmas: full and fair voting rights for all Americans. Note that I didn't say please. This is a demand, not a request."
The holiday season has just begun, and I already know what I want for Christmas: full and fair voting rights for all Americans. Note that I didn’t say please. This is a demand, not a request.
I’m talking to you, Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). I’m talking to other Democratic senators who might also value the filibuster over voting rights but haven’t been so public about it. And I’m talking to the brick wall of Republicans in the Senate and the House who once routinely supported guaranteeing the right to vote but who now fear and loathe the basic mechanism of our democracy.
The last time the landmark Voting Rights Act was reauthorized, in 2006, it was approved by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in the House and unanimously in the Senate, with unctuous hosannas from Republicans. But this month, only one Republican — Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) — voted to even allow the Senate to debate the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore and update the “pre-clearance” requirements of the 1965 law that were voided by the Supreme Court in 2013.
Those provisions required states with a history of electoral discrimination against African Americans and other minorities to obtain approval from the Justice Department before changing laws about voting. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the 5-4 majority that “history did not end in 1965,” indicating he believed the kind of discrimination we suffered back then no longer exists.
Boy, was he wrong.
Republicans have practically fallen over themselves in a rush to enact laws that limit or dilute the voting power of Americans of color — who, not coincidentally, tend to vote for Democrats. They limit the number of polling places in selected neighborhoods so that voters of color have to wait in long lines. They try to structure rules on early and absentee voting in ways that disadvantage minorities. They draw congressional district boundaries to dilute the Black and Hispanic vote — and do the same with state legislative districts so that Republicans can continue to be the ones who make, and distort, election rules.
This year, with GOP voters bewitched by the “big lie” about purported voter fraud, some Republican-held states are going even further to seek control over how votes are counted. Georgia, for example, has given its GOP-controlled state legislature a role in deciding who won an election and who lost. In January, the state elected two Democrats to the U.S. Senate, and Republicans seem determined not to let anything like that happen again.
All attempts by Congress to guarantee that all qualified citizens in every state have the right and ability to vote have been stymied by the Senate filibuster. The John Lewis Act is no radical departure; essentially, it would just return us to the status quo before 2013. If there are not the necessary 10 Republican votes to do even that, the prospects for stronger and more comprehensive pro-democracy legislation are nonexistent.
The right to vote should not be a partisan issue. But it is.
The Republican senators who voted in the past for the provisions of the John Lewis Act should vote for them again now. But they won’t.
It is past time for Senate Democrats to deal with reality as it is, not as they wish it to be. The Senate is not the comity club it used to be. It has become basically a smaller, less efficient version of the House, where members vote along party lines rather than being guided by conscience. Democrats need to recognize that preserving our democracy is much more important than Senate tradition, and at a minimum they need to change the rules so that the John Lewis Act can be passed by simple majority.
The argument against eliminating the filibuster — even for the one fundamental issue of voting rights — is that Democrats will regret such a move when Republicans are back in charge of the chamber. Imagine what they would do if Democrats have no power to use the filibuster to stop them.
My response: But look at what Republicans are doing right now. This very minute. As we speak.
Manchin and Sinema have said they are unwilling to eliminate or circumvent the filibuster. But they have also said they understand the importance of guaranteeing voting rights, and surely they see what Republicans are doing to unfairly tilt the political playing field in the GOP’s favor.
This isn’t about saving the Democratic Party. It’s about giving all Americans a vote, and thus a voice, in electing our leaders. Senators, do the right thing.
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People reacting outside the Glynn County Courthouse after the jury reached a guilty verdict in the Ahmaud Arbery murder case. (photo: Nicole Craine/The New York Times)
Justice Prevailed in the Trial of Ahmaud Arbery's Killers. In America, That's a Shock.
Moustafa Bayoumi, Guardian UK
Bayoumi writes: "The jury reached the right verdict - even as the criminal justice system did everything it could to exonerate the three men."
The jury reached the right verdict – even as the criminal justice system did everything it could to exonerate the three men
It’s shocking that Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan were found guilty of murdering Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia. Yet the shock doesn’t stem out of any miscarriage of justice. On the contrary, the jury in Glynn county deliberated and reached the correct decision. Stalking an innocent Black man, chasing him, cornering him, and then killing him must come with criminal consequences in this country, and each of the three murderers now faces the possibility of a life sentence.
But the shock is that justice was served in a case where it seemed the criminal justice system and substantial portions of media coverage were doing all they could to exonerate these men. In fact, everything about this case illustrates how difficult it is to get justice for Black people in this country, starting with how often Fox News and other media outlets referred to the case as “the Arbery trial”, as if Ahmaud Arbery were the perpetrator here and not the victim.
The facts of the case have never been in dispute, and yet they were also often distorted or ignored to aid the defense. The McMichaels claimed they were trying to make a citizen’s arrest of Arbery, an avid athlete who had been out jogging a mere three miles from his home that day. Father and son McMichael found Arbery suspicious, they told police, because there had been “several break-ins in the neighborhood”. This statement has been repeated so often in the last year that it has assumed the status of fact.
And yet, according to the local Brunswick News, there had been just one burglary reported to county police between 1 January and 23 February 2020, the day of Arbery’s murder. That singular incident referred to property taken from a Satilla Shores vehicle – Travis McMichael’s truck. (McMichael reported a theft because, after he left his truck unlocked, his gun had been taken, he said at trial.) While surveillance video also captured an unidentified white couple possibly taking some property belonging to Larry English, a man building a home in the area, English testified that nothing had been stolen from the construction site of his second home, where Arbery stopped directly before being chased by the McMichaels. And during the trial, we heard that in all of 2019, there had been only four reported car break-ins. So, yeah, hardly a runaway crime spree.
Then why did it keep getting reported this way?
There’s more, of course. It took almost three months for the Georgia bureau of investigation, which took over the case, to arrest Travis and Gregory McMichael. (Bryan was arrested months later.) The elder McMichael had been a police officer and investigator for the district attorney’s office. The favoritism shown the men ran deep, so deep that the Brunswick district attorney, Jackie Johnson, who first oversaw the case, was later indicted on charges of violating her oath as a public officer and obstructing a police officer, as she was accused of “showing favor and affection to Greg McMichael during the investigation”, according to the indictment.
Like Johnson, the next prosecutor, George E Barnhill, was also forced to recuse himself from the case. His son had previously worked with McMichael in what again was a clear conflict of interest. Barnhill wrote a letter to the police department explaining his recusal. “It appears Travis McMichael, Greg McMichael, and Bryan William [sic] were following, in ‘hot pursuit’, a burglary suspect, with solid first-hand probable cause, in their neighborhood,” he wrote. We now know just how completely and utterly false this account of events was.
By the time the trial began, jury selection was also looking highly problematic. The population of Glynn county is over a quarter Black, and yet the seated jury for the trial was overwhelmingly white, with only one Black juror selected. Even the judge acknowledged the appearance of “intentional discrimination” in this outcome, as defense attorneys struck virtually every Black potential juror from serving on the jury.
Defense attorneys also used every tool at their disposal to dehumanize Ahmaud Arbery. Laura Hogue, lawyer for Greg McMichael, characterized Arbery as a “recurring night-time intruder” whose presence was “frightening and unsettling”, as if adopting every stereotype of “the dangerous young Black man” she could find. It got even worse when she told the jury that Arbery had “long, dirty toenails”.
What a morally bankrupt and shameless statement, but such are the lengths that this system will go to preserve its ill-gotten power. Any honest student of the history of this country will recognize what was happening in this case and in this trial. On display was nothing short of an American fear in all its guises.
First, there is the irrational and racist fear of Black people that has motivated so much white vigilantism. It’s no mere coincidence that Georgia’s (now-defunct) self-defense statute dates to the civil war era. As Carol Anderson, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and many others have shown, the violence at the heart of the American system begins with a fundamental fear of Black and Indigenous people.
Then there’s the establishment’s fear that its power will be exposed for what it too often is, a precarious system that serves and protects not the public but its own interests through its prejudices and favoritisms. And finally, there’s the fear that those who don’t look like us will stand in judgment. Thus a system of power built on racial hierarchy will seek its own self-preservation.
The good news, heard in the courtroom, is that the rest of us are not afraid. The mostly white jury was not afraid to return the proper verdict. The assistant district attorney Linda Dunikoski was not afraid (and was completely convincing) in her prosecution. The attorney S Lee Merritt was fearless and eloquent in his advocacy for justice. But the bravest, most fearless, most admirable person in this saga has to be Wanda Cooper-Jones, Arbery’s mother.
It’s hard to believe that justice would have prevailed here were it not for Cooper-Jones’ indefatigable efforts to push and challenge prosecutors like Johnson and Barnhill and the whole damn system at every turn. She pushed Georgia’s legislature to pass a hate crimes bill. She filed the federal lawsuit against the men now convicted of killing her son. She even met with the then president Donald Trump to discuss police reform.
Cooper-Jones is a real hero, both for her son and in the fight for a truly just society. She was willing and able to fight a system that, if the past be a guide, was more than willing to exonerate itself.
But here’s the problem: what happens when there is no Cooper-Jones? Why should our rights depend on grieving mothers fighting for the rights of their murdered children? What kind of justice system is that?
I’m thankful that people like Wanda Cooper-Jones exist, but what we really need is more than that. We need a justice system that isn’t afraid of power. We need a justice system that isn’t afraid of doing what’s right. What we really need is a justice system that doesn’t depend on grieving mothers at all.
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Employees work behind plastic screens at an Amazon fulfillment center in Swindon, UK, on Tuesday, November 23, 2021. (photo: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg)
Black Friday Strikes and Protests Target Amazon in 20 Countries
Alex N. Press, Jacobin
Press writes: "On Black Friday, workers around the world are targeting Amazon under the banner of Make Amazon Pay. The actions span the supply chain and traverse borders - just like Amazon itself."
On Black Friday, workers around the world are targeting Amazon under the banner of Make Amazon Pay. The actions span the supply chain and traverse borders — just like Amazon itself.
This Black Friday, a coalition of unions, nongovernmental organizations, and grassroots groups joined under the name of Make Amazon Pay is staging a day of strikes and protests targeting Amazon across twenty countries, demanding the company pay a living wage, taxes, and compensation for its environmental impact.
The action takes place at the level of Amazon’s operations: the planet. While the tech and logistics company is based in the United States, it operates globally, employing some 1.3 million people worldwide, a number that doesn’t include its many workers who are employed by subcontractors. So, too, must resistance to Amazon traverse borders.
The Make Amazon Pay coalition launched last year with a Black Friday day of action, but this year, the coalition’s reach will be broader, with protests and strikes planned in twenty countries. The coalition says that the day of action will range from “oil refineries, to factories, to warehouses, to data centres, to corporate offices,” highlighting Amazon’s far-reaching, less-visible arms.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), for instance, generates the bulk of the company’s profits and works with both the fossil fuel industry and the military, but its data centers are far less visible than its warehouse and delivery operations. With its protests outside of oil refineries, Make Amazon Pay hopes to begin to change that. As Kelly Nantel, director of national media relations at Amazon, told Motherboard, which first reported on the Black Friday actions, “These groups represent a variety of interests.” Indeed, that is the point.
“The Make Amazon Pay coalition is a very diverse group of workers and their allies in a lot of different activist silos,” says Casper Gelderblom, the Make Amazon Pay coordinator for the Progressive International, a transnational organization of left-leaning activists that is helping to coordinate the day of action along with UNI Global Union, a labor federation that is affiliated with some 150 unions representing 20 million workers. “The way the campaign was born was by recognizing that Amazon is both a transnational and cross-sectional entity. If you want to take a stand against a huge entity like Amazon, you have to mirror its own structure.”
“On global action days like Black Friday, we are seeing how the movement pushing to change the rules of our economy and challenge corporate power is growing bolder and stronger,” said Christy Hoffman, UNI Global Union’s general secretary. “More and more people are asking more questions about Amazon’s brutal anti-union behavior, antisocial tax-dodging practices, and obsession with control.”
The actions traverse Amazon’s supply chain, ranging from garment workers in Bangladesh and Cambodia to delivery drivers in Italy to the River Club development site in Cape Town, South Africa, where Amazon hopes to build Africa Amazon’s headquarters. In addition to worker actions, Make Amazon Pay is highlighting eight locations “to represent the depth of Amazon’s abuse and the scale and unity of resistance to it.” These are an oil refinery in Latin America, a factory in Asia, a container ship in Latin America, a warehouse in North America, a trucking depot in Europe, a regional office in Africa, and a finance ministry in Europe.
At issue in Bangladesh and Cambodia are poor treatment of workers by companies that produce clothing for Amazon’s consumer lines — while Amazon is a marketplace for third-party sellers, it also produces quite a few of its own private-label products. Garment workers in the cities of Dhaka and Chittagong will stage demonstrations over union busting by Global Garments, and in Cambodia, workers from the now-shuttered Hulu Garment factory will continue their campaign demanding Amazon and other companies that the factory supplied pay them the $3.6 million they are owed in severance.
“There have been union-busting campaigns in Bangladesh that Amazon has, at the very least, turned a blind eye to, which in their form are reminiscent of the struggles we see in, for example, Bessemer, Alabama,” says Gelderblom. “Working-class destinies are connected — generally, but also specifically in this struggle.”
Amazon workers in Italy have proven to be some of the most organized members of the company’s workforce: Last month, warehouse workers engaged in a one-day strike that led the company to agree to some level of recognition of the workers’ unions on the issues of job openings and training. This Black Friday, thousands of delivery drivers will engage in their own one-day strike, demanding lower workloads and a more sustainable pace. While these drivers do not work directly for Amazon — as in the United States, they work for third-party contractors —they are nonetheless a key component of the company’s operations.
The day of action comes as organizing against Amazon continues in the United States, where the company is on track to soon become the country’s largest employer. US-based groups involved in the Black Friday protests include the Athena Coalition, Oxfam, and the Sunrise Movement. While the path to reining in the company is riddled with obstacles, there are hopeful signs even here. Earlier this month in California, Amazon was fined $500,000 for hiding COVID-19 cases from its warehouse workers. Organizing efforts by the independent Amazon Labor Union continue in Staten Island (as does the company’s union busting, both in New York and in Bessemer, Alabama, where a rerun of the recent union election looms).
Perhaps most importantly, a reform slate just won the Teamsters leadership election on a platform of organizing Amazon workers and taking on the United Parcel Service (UPS) when the union’s contract, which covers some quarter million workers, is up for negotiation. The two planks are related: It will take a fight at UPS, up to and including a strike that would be the largest private-sector work stoppage in my lifetime, to win a contract better than the weak one Teamsters leadership undemocratically pushed through in 2018, and it is by strengthening UPS workers’ position that the Teamsters can take on Amazon, too.
“This movement is increasingly succeeding in becoming international in its outlook,” says Gelderblom:
Many of the defining issues of our time, be they income inequality or climate destruction, are intrinsically international in nature. If you want to challenge power at a fundamental level, you need to find each other, coordinate together, and effect broad-based transformative change at that transnational level. We need to meet capital at its level, which is global.
If the boss is the best organizer, as we sometimes say in the labor movement, then Jeff Bezos may end up being a big part of the story of how the international labor movement gets rebuilt.
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Families, parents, and caregivers rally in front of the U.S. Capitol to call on Congress to include paid family and medical leave in the 'Build Back Better' legislative package on November 2. (photo: Paul Morigi/Getty)
Why Democrats Shouldn't Cut Paid Leave From Their Social Spending Bill
Li Zhou, Vox
Zhou writes: "If passed, it would be transformative for women's workplace participation and economic growth."
If passed, it would be transformative for women’s workplace participation and economic growth.
The need for paid leave has only become more clear during the pandemic.
In the last two years, workers have been forced to juggle caregiving, sick leave, and professional responsibilities, often facing impossible choices among all three. Many women, who’ve borne the brunt of these demands, have reduced their involvement in the workforce or left it altogether.
Democrats hope to tackle these issues with a new measure included in their Build Back Better Act. It passed the House of Representatives last week, and would guarantee US workers four weeks of paid family and sick leave, a major protection that millions of people don’t currently have. At the moment, however, the provision’s chances of passing the Senate are uncertain given pushback from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) — and the narrow margins the party has to advance legislation.
The US’s recent loss of women workers has been striking. At the start of the pandemic, 3.5 million moms of school-age children temporarily or permanently left their jobs, according to the Associated Press. As of this fall, one in three women said they’ve considered leaving the workforce or “downshifting” their jobs, according to a McKinsey study. And per data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, thousands of women still haven’t returned to the labor force after departing during the pandemic.
There’s a host of reasons for these departures, but as Vox’s Rani Molla has reported, women are far more likely than men to have significant caregiving responsibilities. And these responsibilities have surged during the pandemic, when many women have taken on caregiving for their school-age children and sick family members.
The Build Back Better Act tries to help workers balance caregiving responsibilities, and sick leave, with work. The $1.85 trillion legislation boosts funding for child care, and makes a roughly $205 billion (over 10 years) investment in a new federal paid family and sick leave program.
By itself, the program is far from enough to address the needs that workers face, and it won’t go into effect until 2024, but if enacted it could eventually help keep more women in the workforce.
The US is the only industrialized country without a comprehensive federal paid leave program, meaning workers only have access to such protections if their company or state happens to offer them. According to 2020 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 20 percent of workers have access to paid family leave, and just 75 percent have access to paid sick leave, numbers that are even lower for low-wage workers. Among lower-wage workers, 8 percent have access to paid family leave, and 49 percent have access to paid sick leave.
The effects of this federal program could be substantial: In addition to boosting women’s participation in the workforce, existing paid leave programs have been found to reduce families’ food insecurity, improve children’s health outcomes, and reduce worker turnover.
For it to become a reality, however, the legislation still needs to make it through the Senate.
How people would be able to access paid leave under BBB
The program, which would officially launch in 2024, would guarantee four weeks (or 20 workdays) of paid family and sick leave for most workers each year.
To qualify for the program, workers will need to have made at least $2,000 over the two years prior to their application for the leave. It’s a threshold that could exclude low-wage workers unable to work consistently because of caregiving responsibilities or other reasons, but New America paid leave expert Vicki Shabo notes that it would include the overwhelming majority of workers.
The program also aims to cover workers left out of the existing Family and Medical Leave Act program, which guarantees the ability to take unpaid leave. Because of the way it’s written, FMLA doesn’t currently apply to a swath of smaller employers and certain part-time workers, exceptions this new proposal would avoid. The House paid leave policy is also accessible to people who are self-employed and members of the gig economy, as long as they meet the earnings eligibility requirements.
“Anybody that satisfies that earnings and work history requirement would be eligible, and that would be critical because the very people that are left out of FMLA are the ones in the most precarious position,” Shabo says.
The money paid to workers would be distributed through a couple different channels. The federal government would set up a new program run by the Social Security Administration, through which people could submit applications if their states and employers don’t already provide paid leave. To apply through the federal program, workers would have to submit their leave requests up to 90 days before they take leave, or up to 90 days after they do so.
Workers whose state or employer already have paid leave programs in place would continue to receive benefits through these channels. The federal government would then reimburse those states and companies.
This policy design is intended to fill in current gaps while making sure companies and states that already offer paid leave programs aren’t disincentivized from doing so. The availability of these programs is pretty inconsistent right now: Nine states and the District of Columbia have implemented some form of paid family and sick leave, and roughly 25 percent of employers offer paid family leave while 68 percent provide paid sick leave, according to 2019 and 2017 Kaiser Family Foundation surveys.
The benefits a worker on leave would receive depends on their prior wages, and could be as much as 90 percent of what they were making. Workers would receive 90 percent of the first $290 they make per week, 73 percent of their next $290 to $659, and 53 percent of any additional wages between $659 and $1,192. Democrats designed the policy this way to ensure low-wage workers received the support they needed — and the highest proportion of wage replacement.
Overall, the maximum amount that a worker is able to receive is capped at $814 a week, or $3,256 for all four weeks.
While past Democratic proposals have paid for this benefit using a payroll tax, the House’s program will be fully covered by revenue raisers like a new corporate minimum tax rate and a new tax on stock buybacks. The program currently isn’t slated to sunset, and could run indefinitely if the revenue raisers proposed continue to cover its costs.
Four weeks of paid leave would put the US at the lower end of the spectrum relative to other countries: Although programs vary, the global average is 29 weeks of paid maternity leave and 16 weeks of paid paternity leave, according to the New York Times.
Previous research of other country’s programs found around six months to be the ideal period of time for family leave, specifically, because it allows parents to bond with their children without facing the professional backlash that a longer duration of leave can result in.
The economic effects of a federal program could also be considerable. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, women who take paid family leave are 40 percent more likely to return to work after a new child than those who do not, meaning these programs could keep a whole group of people in the workforce, boosting economic growth. The Center for American Progress has estimated that the longer-term effects of women’s departures during the pandemic could be as much as $64.5 billion in lost wages and economic activity each year.
“New mothers, in particular, and caregivers to seriously ill loved ones are more likely to return to work if they have access to paid leave,” Shabo says.
Opposition from the Senate could wind up killing the paid leave plan
Paid leave is facing a steep challenge in the Senate. Joe Manchin, a key moderate, has repeatedly questioned whether this policy should be included in the budget bill.
His concerns have led Democrats to pare down their original plans of a 12-week paid leave program modeled after one Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has been pushing for years.
Part of Manchin’s problem with the policy is that he feels reconciliation isn’t the process that should be used to pass this measure. As the bill contains so many social and climate spending proposals that Republicans are against, Democrats are trying to pass it through reconciliation, which requires only majority support in both houses of Congress. Because Democrats have 50 votes in the Senate, with Manchin aboard, they could pass paid leave, and everything else in the Build Back Better Act, without a single GOP vote.
“I don’t think it belongs in the bill,” Manchin said in a CNN interview in early November. “We can do that in a bipartisan way. We can make sure it’s lasting.”
Up to this point, attempts to find a bipartisan approach for paid leave have failed.
Historically, there have been disagreements over how to pay for the legislation, with Democrats advocating for a payroll tax to cover its costs, while Republicans have pushed for people to borrow from their future Social Security benefits. Additionally, there have been conflicts over whether the program should require employer participation or whether it should be voluntary. During the Trump administration, Ivanka Trump’s attempts at a paid leave program wound up largely floundering as well, though they did contribute to Congress approving paid leave for federal employees.
Because of Manchin’s concerns, paid leave may well be removed from the Build Back Better Act or cut significantly. And that would be a great loss for millions of workers.
Gillibrand has said that she’s hopeful a paid leave provision will wind up in the legislation — even if it’s a narrower one than the House included.
“I think Sen. Manchin and I can come together hopefully in the next couple of weeks on something that could be included in this package that would be a Democratic-only proposal that we could start with, something modest, perhaps,” Gillibrand said in a CBS interview last weekend.
One way lawmakers could curb the program further is to limit how long it would last, perhaps setting a specific deadline for the program to sunset, for example. They could also slash the number of weeks the benefit would cover, or apply means testing to exclude workers making over a certain amount.
Were the proposal to be removed, it would leave millions of workers exactly where they are now: forced to choose between caregiving and their own health and income, even as the US continues to navigate a devastating pandemic.
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Thousands of women participate in a march called by feminist associations in commemoration of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, today in Santiago, Chile. (photo: Alberto Valdes/EFE)
Chile: Thousands of Women March Against Fascism
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Young women, adults and girls gathered at dusk in the central Plaza Italia in Santiago to march - amid chants and music - on Alameda Avenue, the main artery of downtown Santiago, which remained blocked for several hours."
Thousands of women marched this Thursday in the Chilean capital as part of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, rejecting the "fascism" that, according to them, represents the far-right presidential candidate, José Antonio Kast.
Young women, adults and girls gathered at dusk in the central Plaza Italia in Santiago to march - amid chants and music - on Alameda Avenue, the main artery of downtown Santiago, which remained blocked for several hours.
"Today I am very eager to come because of what happened in Chile; just on Sunday a fascist won who wants to violate all our rights and what we have achieved," said to AFP a 23-year-old student who identified herself only with her first name, MarÃa Jesús, and who decided to march alone.
Kast, of the ultra-conservative Republican party, won the first round of Sunday's presidential elections with 27.9% of the vote. On December 19, he will face a second-round run-off against left-wing deputy Gabriel Boric, who obtained 25.8%.
Kast proposes to eliminate the Ministry of Women and is against abortion and equal marriage. He also offers greater benefits only for married women.
"Why are they going to reward us for getting married? It is terrible what is happening," added MarÃa Jesús.
Some 10,000 demonstrators, according to unofficial estimates, chanted against the candidate. They also chanted slogans rejecting sexist and sexual violence: "No is no," they shouted in chorus.
"We are commemorating a very important date for the feminist movement. Also, in this current political moment, that scenario where women's lives are at risk every day, new events put us at greater risk," Gloria Leal, director of the Women's Institute, told AFP.
"With fascism advancing, it means that our lives are in danger," she added.
In Chile, the feminist movement has had a breakthrough in the last two years.
The decriminalization of abortion and an equal marriage law are being discussed in Congress. In the country, abortion is allowed on three grounds: risk of life for the mother, fetal non-viability and rape.
On Thursday, Kast managed to align all the coalition forces of the Chilean ruling party ahead of the second round.
On his part, Boric, 35 years old, the minimum age to run for the presidency, also has the support of the left-wing opposition.
Also, during the day, he received the support of the president of the Medical Association, Izkia Siches, a figure who gained relevance in the country during the pandemic, who resigned from her position this Thursday to join his command.
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Jim Justice speaks during a roundtable discussion at Cabell-Huntington Health Department in Huntington, West Virginia, July 8, 2019. (photo: Alexander Drago/Reuters)
West Virginia Governor Jim Justice Faces Justice for Coal Crimes in Kentucky
Adam Mahoney, Grist
Mahoney writes: "West Virginia Governor Jim Justice used coal to propel himself into public office in the coal-friendly state, but a few hundred miles away his association with coal is not so positive."
Kentucky's newest strategy might stop coal barons from gaming the reclamation system.
West Virginia Governor Jim Justice used coal to propel himself into public office in the coal-friendly state, but a few hundred miles away his association with coal is not so positive. Earlier this month in Kentucky, the billionaire politician and his son-turned-business partner were personally fined $2.9 million by the state for failing to reclaim a set of their Eastern Kentucky mines, a process that makes them environmentally safe for redevelopment.
The proprietor of the Greenbrier Resort owns more than 50 coal mines and businesses and has faced fines before — along with community opposition — for failing to pay taxes and suppliers, inadequately implementing mine safety requirements, and ignoring court-ordered environmental remediation work.
He joins other high-ranking elected officials, such as Senator Joe Manchin and Congressman Michael McCaul, who are in the business of passing climate legislation while having interests in the fossil fuel industry. Justice’s attorneys claim the missed deadline that prompted the most recent fine is not his fault; the coronavirus pandemic made it impossible to safely get the reclamation work in time.
“It’s always been our intent to complete this work,” said Richard A. Getty, who represents the Justices, in a statement following the ruling. However, as the state made clear in its ruling, various deadlines had passed before COVID-19 and at least one site had been left untouched since 2015.
This most recent fine adds to more than $15 million in taxes and safety penalties he has owed state governments for his coal mines across six states, according to a 2016 NPR investigation. That analysis revealed Justice’s mines as a hotbed for workplace injuries, holding the most unpaid safety violations of any American-owned coal operator.
It also comes on the heels of a recent announcement that Justice’s company was attempting to acquire new permits to resume mining and reclamation work at four surface mines that were previously closed. The new fine, however, forces the company to be listed in a federal violator system that will prevent them from getting new permits or amending existing permits until the violations are cleared up — prohibiting the company from cashing in on a 50 percent rise in coal production in Kentucky this year.
The fine might also just happen to turn the tide in improving environmental and safety habits in the region, too, says Willie Dodson, a field organizer with the environmental labor group Appalachian Voices. “Regulators have been giving these companies just second chance after second chance for too long,” Dodson told Grist. “It is clear now, that to stop these companies from trying to squeeze more money out these dying mines at the expense of the community and jobs, states need to start revoking permits and going after the full array of personal and corporate assets held by these billionaires.”
Not only will it ease the taxpayers’ burden by forcing the Justices to foot the bill, it’ll also create hundreds of jobs. Kentucky, one of the poorest states in the country, has nearly a dozen counties with a poverty rate above 30 percent, nearly triple the national average. An analysis by Appalachian Voices found that reclamation work at Justice-owned mines alone would employ 220 to 460 workers for five years.
But the problem is hardly limited to Justice-owned mines. There are mines, like Justice’s, which are permitted for coal production, but not up-to-date with environmental remediation processes. Then, there are mines that have been abandoned altogether, are no longer permitted for operation, and also remain unreclaimed. Today, Kentucky is left with the remnants of a dying industry: more than 20,000 abandoned coal mines. According to Appalachian Voices, roughly 55,000 acres of these abandoned mines are unreclaimed — meaning they did not go through an environmental remediation process — and another 139,000 acres are partially unreclaimed.*
A big boost for mine cleanups is expected soon, at the hands of the recently passed bipartisan infrastructure law. According to the Reclaiming Appalachia Coalition, the $11.3 billion earmarked in the law for the cleaning up of decades-old abandoned mines will result in nearly 3,000 jobs and $7.45 billion in economic output across Appalachia. But it won’t make a difference for mines like Justice’s, which are not technically abandoned but remain unreclaimed.
“Companies like Justice’s have been breaking promises for years,” Dodson said. “The way forward is for the regulators to bring down the hammer and hire contractors to reclaim the mines and now they have the support to do so.”
The newly signed law could have quick implications on the environment as unreclaimed mines pose a huge threat to both the environment and the people who live in proximity to them. Unreclaimed mines pose a huge threat to both the environment and the people who live in proximity to them. Mining alters the physical landscape, disturbs ecosystems, increases the likelihood of landslides, and contaminates groundwater with toxic chemicals and heavy metals.
From 2016 to at least 2018, an unreclaimed mine in Pike County, Kentucky owned by Justice’s family, caused multiple flooding incidents, racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage, destroying homes, and depositing potentially hazardous materials from the mine in people’s yards, according to reporting from the public broadcasting collaborative Ohio Valley Resource.
In 2018, then 81-year-old Betty Short slipped and broke her collarbone outside her home as a result of a Justice mine-induced flood, which she told the Ohio Valley Resource continued to haunt her. “You’re really afraid to lay down and go to sleep at night,” she said in 2018. “It’s like a nightmare. You never know what’s going to happen next.” The mine, which was scheduled to be completely reclaimed by 2015, is still not reclaimed as of November 2021.
Justice first inherited ownership of his coal operations following his father’s death in 1993. In 2009, he sold some of his coal business to the Russian company Mechel for nearly $600 million. Then in 2015, the same year he declared his candidacy for governor as a Democrat, following a massive drop in the price of coal, he bought back his business for just $5 million — less than one percent of the earlier price. Two years later, Justice, infamously, rejoined the Republican party at a Donald Trump rally reportedly to get in good with Trump, who favored the coal industry.
From the very beginning, Dodson says, it has been evident that Justice’s agenda was to “squeeze as much money out of his mines by running roughshod over the regulations, externalizing out costs, and then just walking away.”
It’s a process that is widely utilized across the region. Since coal production started its steady decline in Appalachia, beginning in the 1990s, businesses, like Justice’s, have followed a template to profit off of dying mines before abandoning them, often leaving them unreclaimed for years. Due to historically lax relationships with regulators, coal operators have been allowed to cut losses by short-changing workers’ pensions, ignoring relatively-expensive safety procedures, and delaying costly environmental remediation processes before ultimately declaring bankruptcy and sticking taxpayers with the bill. But the impact is felt most intensely on the “spectacularly sick and retired mine workers and their communities,” Carl Pope, the former Executive Director of the Sierra Club, wrote in 2016.
However, with the right attention to ensuring environmental justice with economic opportunities and jobs, the new influx of federal support might just stop the practice in its tracks. “For years, there has been no accountability,” Dodson said. “It has hurt the communities where I work and it’s hurting people that I care about.”
“Now we can work towards taking over any of these mines where it’s appropriate and hiring people to reclaim them,” he added, “focusing our attention on the environmental impacts of mines and the community impacts of needing reclamation.
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