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Andrew Perez | The Progressive Pieces of the Budget Reconciliation Bill Are Quickly Disappearing
Andrew Perez, Jacobin
Perez writes: "0ver the past few days, Democrats dropped a pair of brutal news dumps indicating they intend to fully gut many of the progressive elements in president Joe Biden's health care, climate, and anti-poverty reconciliation spending bill."
Democratic leaders are moving to gut the parts of the budget reconciliation bill that would aid workers and fight climate change. House progressives like Pramila Jayapal shouldn’t vote for an empty husk of a bill.
Over the past few days, Democrats dropped a pair of brutal news dumps indicating they intend to fully gut many of the progressive elements in president Joe Biden’s health care, climate, and anti-poverty reconciliation spending bill.
Now, it’s up to progressive lawmakers to ensure the final Biden agenda bill doesn’t end up a hollowed-out shell that won’t meaningfully help anyone.
Late on Friday, Politico reported that “congressional Democrats are watering down — and may entirely drop — a plan to have the government directly negotiate some Medicare drug prices in order to help clinch a deal on their sweeping social spending package.”
Yes, you read that right: In order to secure a deal with their own pharma-bankrolled party members, Democratic leaders are now insisting they need to water down or kill the drug pricing provisions that survey data show voters most want, and that the party has been promising those voters for fifteen years.
Politico further reported on Saturday that Democrats may also axe their plan to add dental, hearing, and vision benefits to Medicare, and may fully eliminate their already watered-down proposal to guarantee US workers have paid family and medical leave. The news follows reports that the Biden White House is ready to remove its clean electricity program from the reconciliation package in order to appease Democrats’ coal-baron senator, Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
None of these developments should come as a surprise — thanks to all the leeway progressives have provided to their conservative Democratic colleagues and their corporate masters.
Yes, progressives in the House recently stood firm against holding a vote on the lobbyist-sculpted bipartisan Senate infrastructure deal, a maneuver that kept the broader Biden agenda bill alive. But it was only a narrow victory, in part because progressives have steadfastly refused to make specific, public demands about what must be in the broader reconciliation bill to secure their votes — giving corporate Democrats all the space they’ve needed to gut the legislation.
And when you look at the demands that progressives have made more quietly in press releases, it’s clear that party leaders believe they are not at the table but are instead on the menu.
The Husk Point
In August, Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) leaders said they would not vote for the bipartisan infrastructure deal “until the Senate adopted a robust reconciliation package.”
As we noted at the time, progressives did not define what they considered “robust” to mean.
“This is a problem because while words like ‘lower’ and ‘comprehensive’ and ‘expanded’ and ‘robust’ sound nice, they are also fungible,” we noted. “And fungibility is how seemingly good legislation can get watered down to nothing.”
We subsequently warned that progressives’ failure to make specific demands
has created the political space for corporate Democrats to try to whittle down the bill to barely anything at all. If that effort is successful, it would force progressives to choose between voting for an empty husk of a bill that is at least called “reconciliation,” or risk getting nothing at all. Corporate Democrats would be betting that under enough pressure, progressives will eventually choose the husk and calculate that they’d be able to sell it to voters back home as a spectacular victory.
Unfortunately, we are now nearing that husk point, and progressives will have to decide whether they want the Biden agenda bill to mean something, or if they’ll just go along for the ride, like they did earlier this year when Democrats axed their $15 national minimum wage as part of Biden’s COVID-19 relief bill. The CPC did lay out some demands for the reconciliation bill in April, but what we’ve seen in public has been vague.
Last month, for instance, the Washington Post described the “five planks of the CPC’s economic priorities — which are climate, housing, expanding health-care access, lowering drug prices and immigration.”
The CPC whip, representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, similarly said in July: “We’ve said, you know, we’ve got the five priorities — investing in the care economy, addressing the climate crisis, obviously addressing things like immigration and expanding health care so that more people are covered.”
None of those statements tells anyone a whole lot. And when you drill into the actual details of the CPC’s economic priorities, as noted in caucus materials, and compare it to the news coming out of Washington, their promised agenda appears to be very much on the chopping block.
Nevertheless, last week, Jayapal heaped praise on Biden after a recent White House meeting. “The president is the inspirer, he is the closer, he is the convincer, the mediator in chief,” she said, adding, “He really is doing a phenomenal job.”
While corporate Democrats have successfully whittled the reconciliation bill down from a top-line number of $6 trillion down to $4 trillion, then to $3.5 trillion, and all the way down to $2 trillion, Jayapal has remained confident that her caucus’ priorities would make it into the final reconciliation bill. Just a few days ago, Jayapal told NPR she was “really proud that our five priorities are largely going to stay in here.”
The Five Priorities
Let’s look at how the CPC’s five priorities are actually faring.
The Washington Post reported Saturday that Biden’s “$300 billion housing plan . . . could shrink to as little as $100 billion in the final version of the legislation.” The Post noted that “Biden’s proposed $40 billion to repair public housing — long maligned as a symbol of government mismanagement — may be vulnerable to downsizing in negotiations.” The CPC had asked for “$70 billion to address the public housing repair backlog.”
The CPC demanded “$450 billion in Medicaid home and community-based services.” While the bill will likely include some spending for eldercare, the American Prospect reports it will likely be “less than the $250 billion seen as the absolute minimum to meet the twin goals of expanding affordable access and improving pay and conditions for workers.”
CPC’s list of demands included making “access to child care a universal benefit.” But as Matt Bruenig of People’s Policy Project points out, the subsidies in Democrats’ proposed child care program are means-tested, creating what’s known as a benefits cliff. Under the current proposal, he writes, “in years 1, 2, and 3 of the program, children are only eligible if their parents have incomes that are at or below 100 percent, 115 percent, and 130 percent of the state median income respectively.”
The upshot, according to Bruenig, is that “there will be many dual-earning couples who cannot afford childcare if both of them continue to work but could afford childcare if one of them quit their job and thereby brought their family income below the eligibility cutoff.” This is not how you design a universal program.
On climate, the CPC demanded a “strong national clean energy standard” that would “create millions of clean jobs in the renewable energy sector to help meet emissions reductions through binding, enforceable federal clean-energy standards.” To meet these goals, Democrats proposed a $150 billion Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP) that would push electric utilities to transition to renewable energy sources.
Manchin has demanded that Democrats cut the CEPP entirely from their bill. The Wolf of West Virginia has a massive conflict of interest here — his family’s coal brokerage sells dirty waste coal to a Mountain State power plant — but Democrats seem to be willing to go along with his demand, anyway. A final bill could end up losing the CEPP and spending just $300 billion over ten years to fight the climate crisis, as compared to more than $8 trillion for the regular Pentagon budget over the same time period.
Progressive lawmakers seem resigned to losing their clean energy program, with many of them signing onto a new letter to Biden saying that
if the package does not contain a strong CEPP, we will need your unwavering support for significant additional investments in climate priorities to close the resulting emissions gap, create new jobs and support transitioning workers, support environmental justice priorities without worsening inequities, and meet the climate test in the coming days and weeks as we approach the United Nations climate negotiations.
On immigration, meanwhile, the CPC wanted the reconciliation bill to “provide a roadmap to citizenship for essential workers, [temporary protected status] recipients, and Dreamers,” children of immigrants who are brought to the United States as children.
The Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, has advised Democrats that they cannot accomplish their immigration goals under budget reconciliation rules. Democrats could overrule MacDonough or replace her at any time, but they typically defer to their unelected parliamentary adviser, as she regularly offers them a convenient excuse to avoid passing legislation that might help people.
The final indignities arrived over the weekend, in typical Washington news-dump fashion — in which politicians unload their bad news at a time when the public is too busy to notice — with Politico reporting that Democrats are getting ready to axe their plans to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices and to include dental, vision and hearing benefits under the traditional Medicare program.
The CPC, of course, wanted Democrats to improve on their existing drug-pricing plan, and use the “savings to pay for lowering Medicare eligibility age and expanding benefits to include dental, vision and hearing.” Now, both ideas could be cut from the reconciliation bill entirely.
If the drug pricing plan does remain in the bill, Politico reports that senators “are discussing exempting drugs produced by small biotech companies, phasing in what negotiations remain over a longer period, and only applying the lower negotiated prices within Medicare and not to private insurance, as progressives and advocates wanted.”
The CPC had said that “everyone — including the uninsured and private plan participants — should benefit not just from lower negotiated prices, but from inflationary caps on drug prices.” They also wanted Democrats to “expand the numbers and types of drugs eligible for negotiation, launch prices, and inflation caps.”
When all of these developments are taken together, the reality becomes clear. Democratic leaders clearly expect progressives to once again fold without a peep when they inevitably cast a gutted reconciliation bill as the only realistic measure they are able to pass.
The only way to change those expectations — and to actually wield power — is for CPC members to pledge to vote no on a hollowed-out shell, and finally make their demands clear. If they don’t, they’ll likely get rolled, and no barrage of tweets or press releases or email blasts will hide that avoidable outcome.
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Bernie Sanders. (photo: Antonella Crescimbeni)
Bernie Sanders Vows to Stand Firm on Medicare Expansion: "It's Not Coming Out!"
Julia Conley, Salon
Conley writes: "Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday was quick to push back on reporting that two of the most popular provisions in President Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan - an expansion of Medicare benefits and guaranteed paid family leave - are poised to be dropped from the proposal due to objections from right-wing Democrats."
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday was quick to push back on reporting that two of the most popular provisions in President Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan — an expansion of Medicare benefits and guaranteed paid family leave — are poised to be dropped from the proposal due to objections from right-wing Democrats.
"It's not coming out," Sanders said of a measure that would expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing, and vision care for tens of millions of older Americans — a proposal he has pushed for years and which is supported by 84% of Americans including nearly nine in 10 Democratic voters.
"Politico" reported late Saturday that amid negotiations between the White House and Democrats which left the president announcing at a town hall on Thursday that the package may include only four weeks of paid leave instead of 12 as well as leaving out tuition-free community college and a clean electricity program, further discussions have led the White House to consider dropping paid leave and the Medicare expansion entirely.
A Democratic aide told the outlet that the inclusion of the two programs were "in flux" Saturday while the White House denied that they may be cut.
"It is inconceivable and unconscionable to me that there is any risk for a paid leave being on the chopping block, considering the ongoing pandemic, the women's jobs crisis, the care tsunami, the birth rate issues — all of the combined and overlapping crises deepening racial and gender inequality," Dawn Huckelbridge, director of Paid Leave for All, told "Politico". "The fact that something this administration has run on and Congress has championed would not be a priority to me is unbelievable."
Sanders and other progressives have spent months defending the provisions in the $3.5 trillion, 10-year investment in climate action and social supports for lower- and middle-income families.
Despite saying in January that he would back a $4 trillion infrastructure package, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., is holding up passage of the bill, insisting he will now only support $1.5 trillion in social spending.
Sanders has harshly criticized Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema D-Ariz., — another conservative Democrat who is refusing to join the rest of the party in backing Biden's agenda — comparing their conduct to his hypothetical refusal to support the Build Back Better plan unless it included Medicare for All.
"My strong criticism is it is wrong when the American people, when the President of the United States, when 96% of your colleagues want to go forward — it is wrong to obstruct," Sanders said earlier this month.
Thanks to Manchin and Sinema, author and activist Don Winslow tweeted, the party is prepared to drop two of the most widely supported measures from the president's agenda.
"They work for Mitch McConnell and big corporations," said Winslow of the senators.
One paid leave expert questioned whether the White House is doing enough to defend the priorities that have been gradually weakened during negotiations with Manchin, Sinema, and other conservative Democrats.
"I want to know whether [Biden] is putting his weight behind [paid leave] when he's behind closed doors with Sen. Manchin and others that he's negotiating with," Vicki Shabo, a senior fellow at the think tank New America, told "Politico".
The reporting about the status of the negotiations, which were ongoing Sunday, came as the "New York Times" echoed the warning repeated for months by progressives regarding the potential failure to pass an agenda that provides far-reaching support for the voters who sent Biden to the White House and gave the Democratic Party control of the House and Senate last year.
"Strategists say enthusiasm among core Democratic voters is critical to defeating the Republican Party in the midterm elections of 2022 (and perhaps [former President Donald Trump], its leader, two years later)," reported the Times. "If crucial parts of the president's coalition remain unhappy because they are disappointed in the compromise bill, that could threaten Democratic hopes to remain in power in Congress and the White House."
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Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. (photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Kyrsten Sinema Takes Thousands in Campaign Contributions From Pharmaceutical Giants While Stalling Prescription Drug Pricing Reforms
Morgan Keith, Business Insider
Keith writes: "Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona is said to be opposed to the current prescription drug pricing proposals in bills put forth by both the House and Senate, as well as an alternative from House centrists that would limit the drugs subject to Medicare negotiation, according to unnamed sources cited by Politico."
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona is said to be opposed to the current prescription drug pricing proposals in bills put forth by both the House and Senate, as well as an alternative from House centrists that would limit the drugs subject to Medicare negotiation, according to unnamed sources cited by Politico.
Sinema's stance has stalled the passage of the $3.5 trillion spending bill crafted by the Biden administration and fellow Democrats, even though it could jeopardize her own bipartisan infrastructure bill. Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington has previously said the majority of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which she chairs, would not vote for Sinema's infrastructure bill without first passing the spending package.
If passed, the $3.5 trillion spending bill would lower the cost of certain prescription drugs by instituting reforms and allowing Medicare to negotiate prices, which would save the federal government "hundreds of billions" on health care spending, according to a memo for Democratic senators.
Sinema is a "pharma favorite in Congress"
Since launching her political career, Sinema's campaign committee has received more than $500,000 in donations from the pharmaceutical and health product industries, according to OpenSecrets.
Kaiser Health News dubbed Sinema a "pharma favorite in Congress" after her campaign received $98,500 from PACs run by employees of drug companies and their trade groups during the 2019-20 election cycle.
One of her largest financial backers has been Amgen, a biotechnology company that manufactures prescription drugs for individuals with illnesses that have limited treatment options, such as cancer patients and chronically ill individuals.
Insider reached out to Sinema and her team but has not received a response.
Many prescription drugs made by Amgen have hefty price tags. Overall, the company made $24.24 billion in global product sales in 2020.
Amgen did not respond to inquiries about whether it lobbied Sinema on prescription drug pricing reforms or how the bill's passage would impact the company's bottom line. In 2021, Amgen has spent $4.72 million on lobbying Congressional representatives over 17 bills, the majority of which address issues related to prescription drug pricing, according to OpenSecrets.
A super PAC with pharmaceutical industry ties funded a recent Sinema ad
According to Google's Transparency Report, a September 9 political ad for Sinema was paid for by Center Forward, a super PAC dedicated to supporting the election of centrist Democrats, according to The Washington Post.
In its registration with the Washington, DC, Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, Center Forward lists Libby Greer and Cindy Brown from the lobbying firm Forbes Tate Partners as governors on its board. Greer and Brown are lobbyists for several pharmaceutical companies, including Bayer, Gilead Sciences, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Amgen, and Merck … Co, according to documents obtained by the Daily Poster and reviewed by Insider.
Greer and Brown did not respond to inquiries about the scope of their involvement in the Sinema political ads. Center Forward Executive Director Cori Kramer Smith said that day-to-day activities, programming, and messaging do not fall under the board's responsibilities.
Merck was the second-highest pharmaceutical industry contributor to Sinema's campaign, donating $20,500 to her campaign committee and leadership PAC between 2015 and 2020, according to Kaiser Health News' "Pharma Cash to Congress" tracker.
Eli Joseph, the husband of Sinema's chief of staff, Meg Joseph, worked as the executive director of federal policy and government relations for Merck … Co. from 2012-2015, according to his LinkedIn. Meg Joseph's LinkedIn also shows that she worked as a lobbyist from 2007-2008 at Clark … Weinstock, which lobbied on behalf of several pharmaceutical companies and major industry trade groups during her tenure, Salon reported.
Neither of the Josephs responded to inquiries about their previous work as lobbyists or connections to the pharmaceutical industry. Merck spokesperson John Cummins said Eli Joseph handled Senate affairs and was not involved in decisions surrounding House contributions.
In addition to Sinema, four House Democrats are also opposed to direct government negotiation of drug prices. Reps. Scott Peters, Kurt Schrader, Stephanie Murphy, and Kathleen Rice voted against advancing a drug-pricing provision on September 15, although it would be approved later in the day by the Ways and Means Committee, the Los Angeles Times reported.
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A visitor holds a pistol at a gun display during a National Rifle Association outdoor sports trade show in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. (photo: Dominick Reuter/AFP)
How the US Fails to Take Away Guns From Domestic Abusers: 'These Deaths Are Preventable'
Jennifer Gollan, Reveal
Excerpt: "Every 16 hours, a woman is fatally shot by a current or former intimate partner. Many of the offenders were legally prohibited from having guns."
Every 16 hours, a woman is fatally shot by a current or former intimate partner. Many of the offenders were legally prohibited from having guns
Paige Mitchell and Bradley Gray forged a bond over tragedy. Late one Sunday in October 2009, Mitchell’s husband borrowed a motorcycle from a neighbor on a whim, rumbled down a back road in rural Moundville, Alabama, and careened to his death. Almost exactly a year later, at almost precisely the same time of night, Gray’s wife died on the same county byway when her car crashed into a tree. Fate seemed to push Mitchell and Gray together, making their relationship hard to sever even as it descended into dysfunction.
Mitchell treated Gray’s son, Bradley Jr, like one of her own children, bringing him on outings with her daughters, Kayla and Kaci. Gray, who worked for a construction company, mowed Mitchell’s lawn and did repairs around her house. They went to concerts and cruised the Black Warrior River in Gray’s boat. Mitchell, a hairdresser with a gregarious personality, was glad to have someone to laugh with. But a darkness hovered over their relationship. Gray drank – a lot. And when he drank, his temper exploded. After beating a friend with a baseball bat in 2014, he was charged with felony assault, though the case was eventually dismissed.
Gray tried rehab, but he couldn’t stay sober, Mitchell’s family said. Many of the people who loved him gave up. Mitchell felt sorry for him, her family said; like the German shepherd she rescued and the foster children with disabilities she took in, she thought she could help him heal.
After Gray hit her in the chin with a metal hand-grip exerciser, bruising her face and and leaving her worried she would lose her tooth, Mitchell began to give up, too. But Moundville is tiny, and they kept running into each other. On the night of 9 July 2015, she went to Gray’s home to pick up her car and collect her belongings after another split. This time, according to the police, he showed her a Glock in a holster and threatened to use it: “I will blow you away.” Police arrested Gray at his house and confiscated his gun, evidence of a potential crime. Prosecutors charged him with third-degree domestic violence, punishable by up to a year in jail.
Then Gray bumped into Moundville’s police chief, Ken Robertson, in a convenience store and started “really ranting”, Robertson recounted in a deposition five years later. Gray called Robertson and his officers “you sons of bitches” and demanded that they return his gun. “Let me see what’s going on and we will rectify the situation,” Robertson told him.
Back at the station, Robertson read Gray’s arrest report – and, over the objections of another officer, he handed back the gun. The former police chief, who is now a sheriff’s deputy for Hale county, didn’t respond to requests for an interview. But in his deposition, he offered an explanation of sorts: police didn’t have a search warrant for the weapon, he said. In his view, “there was zero legal reason to keep it”.
In fact, under Alabama law, police could have – and should have – sought a court order to retain the gun through a process known as condemnation, said the Hale county district attorney, Michael Jackson, whose jurisdiction includes most of Moundville. Giving back the gun, Jackson told Reveal, “was a big mistake”.
That error was compounded a few weeks later after Gray pleaded guilty to the domestic violence charge. Along with a 30-day suspended jail sentence and a year’s probation, he was ordered to enroll in anger management classes. The timing was crucial: under a state law that had taken effect the previous week, on 1 September 2015, Gray’s domestic violence misdemeanor conviction meant he was no longer allowed to possess a firearm or have one “under [his] control”. As a convicted abuser, Gray was now also permanently barred from possessing a firearm under federal law.
If Robertson’s department had held on to the Glock, the rest of the story might have been different. But Gray had his gun – and the new Alabama statute didn’t spell out a procedure for him to surrender it. Nor was there any requirement for law enforcement to seize it. In his deposition, Robertson acknowledged that Gray was no longer allowed to have a firearm, but he said he didn’t follow up on the case: “We don’t have the authority to go and start checking everybody that’s been convicted.” He also admitted that he’d never notified Mitchell that he’d given back the Glock. The law didn’t require it.
A little more than a year later, Mitchell, then 37, ran into Gray unexpectedly at a friend’s place and made it clear one more time that the relationship was over. “Brad was trying to convince her otherwise, and she was moving on,” said Sylvia Ray, Mitchell’s aunt and adoptive mother.
Hours later, just before dawn on 26 January 2017, Gray broke in to Mitchell’s house through the back door, according to her family. When Mitchell’s foster child woke and went to check on the noise, Gray told her to go back to bed. In the living room, he found 14-year-old Kaci, who had been asleep on a couch by the front door, and shot her in the neck, according to her autopsy.
Next he turned the Glock on Mitchell, firing a single bullet into the back of her head.
The shooting was over so quickly that 10-year-old Kayla slept through it. She discovered the bodies of her mother and sister when she woke the next morning to get ready for school.
As officers waited on his front porch soon after to question him, Gray fired one last shot with the gun he wasn’t supposed to have. He died at a hospital three days later.
Preventable deaths
Every 16 hours somewhere in the US, a woman is fatally shot by a current or former intimate partner. The numbers have been soaring: gun homicides by intimate partners jumped 58% over the last decade, according to never-before-published FBI data analyzed for Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting by James Alan Fox, a professor and criminologist at Northeastern University. The pandemic has been an especially lethal period for abuse victims, Fox found; gun homicides involving intimate partners rose a stunning 25% in 2020 compared with the previous year, to the highest level in almost three decades. Women accounted for more than two-thirds of the victims shot and killed by intimate partners last year.
Many of these killings involve offenders, such as Bradley Gray, who were legally prohibited from having guns, a Reveal investigation has found. From 2017 through 2020, Reveal identified at least 110 intimate partners and others who were fatally shot by offenders using weapons they weren’t allowed to possess under federal and, in some cases, state law.
The true numbers aren’t known; the federal government doesn’t track fatal shootings by intimate partners who shouldn’t have firearms, and state data is incomplete, inaccessible or nonexistent. To find these cases, Reveal amassed information on hundreds of gun homicides around the US from domestic violence coalitions, news accounts and state agencies, then vetted each shooter using criminal background checks and thousands of pages of police and court records. The number of cases we found is almost certainly a vast undercount, in large part because we were able to obtain limited information from only 21 states, and crucial records in many cases were missing.
The victims of these cases, nearly all of them women, represent a cross-section of race and class. They include a 26-year-old factory worker from Arkansas whose boyfriend shot her in the back of the head in front of her two infants. A nurse in Washington state who was about to move to Missouri when her estranged husband gunned down her and her mother. Seventeen people in the database were killed during the pandemic, including a Milwaukee mother and four teenagers killed by a convicted felon with a 12-gauge shotgun. Four of the victims were pregnant. Also killed were bystanders, police officers and a 4-year-old girl.
“Every one of these deaths is preventable,” said Natalie Nanasi, an associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University who specializes in gender-based violence. “It’s absolutely outrageous that we’re losing people in this way, because we know what we need to do in order to prevent it from happening. We have laws on the books. We’re just not actually enforcing them.”
Guns are the No 1 weapon in domestic violence killings in the US – just owning a firearm makes an abuser five times more likely to take a partner’s life. People with a history of violence against a partner, including stalking or strangulation, are also far more likely to go on to commit more heinous acts. Earlier this year, researchers reported that more than two-thirds of recent mass shootings in the US involved perpetrators who killed partners or relatives or had a history of domestic abuse. There’s an obvious antidote, said David Martin, who supervises the domestic violence unit for the King county prosecuting attorney’s office in Seattle. “The lowest-hanging fruit in this entire conversation is making sure that people at high risk do not have access to firearms,” he said. “This is the easiest thing that anybody can do.”
But in a country with some of the highest levels of gun ownership in the world, deeply divided by politics and culture and increasingly hostile to the rights of women, enacting comprehensive gun safety measures – universal background checks, licensing and permitting bans on military-style weapons, and national databases to track who owns firearms and how they’re used – has been politically unfeasible. Indeed, Robyn Thomas, executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, sees an opposite trend: “We’re going in the wrong direction in some states and repealing gun regulations.”
Thus, the US relies on an amalgam of narrower laws and policies that often end up working against the abuse victims they’re supposed to protect, creating not just gaps in protection, but gaps in accountability.
The Gun Control Act of 1968, enacted in the aftermath of political assassinations that roiled the country in the 1960s, makes it illegal for people convicted of a felony to possess a firearm. A quarter-century later, as part of the Violence Against Women Act (Vawa), Congress barred people subject to family violence protection orders from having firearms. Two years after that, lawmakers led by the then New Jersey senator Frank Lautenberg expanded federal gun restrictions to include some people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors, a critical change given that many abusers avoid more severe charges through plea deals. The passage of the latter two bills helped drive down the number of women shot and killed by their partners starting in the 1990s, said Fox, the Northeastern criminologist.
But the number of domestic violence homicides has climbed again in recent years, exposing the system’s fundamental weaknesses.
Every state has passed some version of the federal ban on felons having firearms. In addition, in 33 states and the District of Columbia, it’s illegal for people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors to possess guns. But federal gun laws and the vast majority of state statutes share a glaring flaw: they don’t address how to get the guns away from people who aren’t supposed to have them. They don’t say how offenders who are banned from possessing firearms should surrender them. They don’t spell out procedures for confiscating them. They don’t create the legal infrastructure that is essential for keeping abuse victims, their families and communities safe from dangerous offenders.
Instead, around much of the country, these gun laws are on an honor system that relies on people who are prohibited from possessing firearms to disarm themselves.
“You are trusting somebody who is not worthy of being taken at their word,” said Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell, who spent seven years working as a prosecutor in Alameda county, California. “And that has been to the peril of domestic violence victims.”
The notion of leaving it up to offenders to turn in their guns of their own volition is absurd, law professor Nanasi added. “It’s a fairy tale.”
Intimate partner violence is, by its nature, the most local of crimes; and states and local jurisdictions are where the vast majority of domestic violence cases are handled. But 17 states do not make it illegal for people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors to possess guns. Even in states with misdemeanor bans, the restrictions can be significantly weaker than federal law. For example, South Dakota bars people from possessing a firearm for just a year after they’re convicted of a domestic violence misdemeanor; in South Carolina, the length of the ban depends on the crime’s severity. In Arizona, the gun prohibition applies only while offenders are on probation.
And local and state officials can’t enforce federal gun laws. “It’s a jurisdictional thing,” said Jackson, the Alabama district attorney. “As a general rule, the feds are the ones who enforce their own laws ... We’re the prosecutors for the state, and we enforce state law.”
But the federal criminal justice system is inundated, and the volume of cases just involving felons caught with guns is staggering. Part of the problem is that it’s easy to obtain a weapon, even for felons, through private gun transfers that don’t require background checks.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives investigates federal firearms violations when it learns of them – for instance, when local police respond to a domestic abuse incident and discover an offender has a gun illegally – but none of its agents focus exclusively on domestic violence. “A lot of the time, firearms violations are only detected when they have resulted in violent crime,” said Thomas Chittum, the ATF’s acting deputy director.
Nor does the ATF or any other federal agency track the number of people prohibited from possessing firearms who go on to kill their intimate partners.
“Oh, I don’t know that number,” Chittum said. “I’m not sure anyone knows that number with precision.”
‘Who is that girl?’
Taris Ford-Dillard was a former community college basketball team captain who, at 6ft 3in, towered over his partner, Jazmine Willock. But in every other way, it was clear that she was the one with the gigantic spirit and he was the one who felt small.
Willock was a gifted artist whose high school self-portrait won the Congressional Art Competition and hung in the US Capitol. She had a green belt in taekwondo and a kick so powerful that it earned her a spot on the US Virgin Islands Women’s National Soccer team, playing for the island territory where she grew up. She went to college at 17, moving to Arizona, where her mother and siblings lived, to finish her degree. She bought a house at 21; to pay the mortgage, she juggled a server job at the Cheesecake Factory with a gig as a physical therapy assistant in Tucson. Her mother, Annette Sisson, can’t recall how the two met, but Willock thought Ford-Dillard was handsome, smart and charming. Sisson was less impressed: “Narcissistic people are always charming.”
From early in their romance, Ford-Dillard showed signs of having a jealous, controlling personality, Willock’s family said. He seethed if she glanced at another man, tagging along wherever she went, even insisting on driving her to work. He also had a worrisome history of abuse; he was convicted of a misdemeanor domestic violence assault charge after punching his previous live-in girlfriend in the face and shoving her to the ground. Ford-Dillard was ordered to undergo domestic violence counseling and sentenced to a year of probation. This 2014 conviction meant he was permanently prohibited from possessing a gun under federal law and barred under Arizona law while he was on probation.
By July 2017, it was clear the relationship with Willock had turned abusive as well. During one especially terrifying incident, she told police, Ford-Dillard flung her across the bed and onto the floor, ripping her shirt, squeezing her neck in a headlock and smashing her face with a shoe.
Then, Willock recounted, he grabbed the handgun he always seemed to carry despite the federal ban.
“I should, I should,” he said, pointing the gun at her.
“Please stop, please stop, please stop,” Willock begged.
“Who’s going to save you?” Ford-Dillard taunted.
To escape that night, Willock told police, she bolted out the sliding back door, leaped over a cinderblock fence and sprinted through overgrown bushes across a dry, rocky riverbed into the desert, until she reached a shopping center, where she flagged down someone who called for help. She urged police to contact her mother, because Ford-Dillard had threatened to hurt her, too. When Tucson officers arrested Ford-Dillard the next day, they recovered a gun magazine from the trunk of his Pontiac Grand Prix, but no weapon. A little over a week later, a grand jury indicted him for felony aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and domestic violence kidnapping.
At his initial hearing after his arrest, the Tucson magistrate Nikki Chayet, who’d been a magistrate judge for almost 30 years, laid out the conditions of Ford-Dillard’s release on $7,500 bail: “You’re to commit no acts of domestic violence, possess no firearms, have no contact with Jazmine of any sort, except for legal proceedings, and you’re not to go back to within three blocks of her residence. Do you understand that?”
His response was a forceful “yes”.
But that was it. Chayet didn’t ask him about the gun. She didn’t order him to turn it over. Chayet declined to answer questions for this story.
The reality is that nothing in Arizona law prohibits someone convicted of a domestic violence misdemeanor from possessing a firearm once he completes his probation. Nor do Arizona judges have the authority to require offenders to provide proof that they surrendered their guns. Local laws in Pima county don’t require proof either.
“I see this all the time, where the way the law currently works, we’re trusting abusers will relinquish their weapons,” said Negar Katirai, a clinical law professor and director of the Domestic Violence Law Clinic at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “It just doesn’t make sense. It leaves victims extremely vulnerable.”
Meanwhile, fearing for her own safety, Willock’s mother sought a protection order that same day in Pima county court in which she urged a second judge to explicitly prohibit Ford-Dillard from having any firearms. “He made a verbal threat against my life, to my daughter,” Sisson wrote in her petition. “He also threaten (sic) and hurt her as well. Always has a gun.”
But when the justice of the peace Charlene Pesquiera issued an injunction against harassment, it didn’t include a firearm prohibition.
Pesquiera declined an interview with Reveal, but noted in an email that Chayet already had ordered Ford-Dillard not to have a gun at his initial appearance that day. Willock’s mother scoffed at that excuse.
“I think she’s passing the buck and blaming someone else,” Sisson said. “She fell short because it was her job to protect me and Jazmine at that moment.”
The next time Willock and Ford-Dillard came to the attention of police, nearly four months had passed. A video from a neighbor’s Ring doorbell camera captured Willock running naked from her home late one night in early November, screaming, “Help me! Help me!” as Ford-Dillard grabbed her and steered her back inside.
Still under a felony indictment in the earlier incident, Ford-Dillard was quickly charged with three additional misdemeanor domestic violence offenses. But he didn’t surrender to police until just before Christmas, and once again, no police officer, prosecutor or judge intervened to try to take away his weapon – or even acknowledged that he was already under indictment for assaulting Willock with a gun. On a form releasing him from custody, the Tucson magistrate Susan Shetter ordered Ford-Dillard to stay away from Willock and her home and not to commit any more acts of domestic violence. But the judge didn’t check the “possess no firearms” box on the form. Shetter declined to comment on the case.
A month later, when Willock didn’t show up at work for two days, her boss called police, who notified Sisson, who raced to her daughter’s house. No one answered the door, so Sisson broke in through the living room window. Then she opened Willock’s bedroom door.
“Who is that girl?” Sisson wondered at first, peering through the darkness.
Then she recognized her 22-year-old daughter, lying naked on the floor. The beige carpet beneath her chest was crimson. A gunshot at close range had seared a black muzzle imprint into her chest. At least five other bullets had ripped through her head, hand and thigh. Ford-Dillard was slumped on the floor, too, dead from a self-inflicted wound. Between them on the floor was the pistol no one in law enforcement had taken away from him.
Still tacked to the back wall of the garage were two paper targets riddled with practice shots from Ford-Dillard’s gun. A large can on the floor brimmed with spent shell casings.
‘I can help him’
A recording of Willock’s interview with Tucson police after the November incident shows why making sure abusers surrender their weapons is crucial. The two officers were sympathetic toward Willock and disdainful of Ford-Dillard, gently probing her about why she didn’t push him out of her life. Willock gave an answer that police and victims advocates hear over and over. “I keep thinking I can help him,” she sobbed, adding: “I know he loves me, but it’s just – he’s messed up.”
What do you think is going to happen after this incident?
“I feel like I can’t escape, I feel like I can’t leave. … I want to help him and I want to be here, but I just, like, I feel like I just keep digging a bigger hole and I don’t know what to do now.”
Well, you need to do what’s going to make you happy.
“I’ve thought of moving, and I don’t know how to do this.”
It’s a scenario that plays out all the time in police stations and courtrooms and among family members and friends: victims are asked, “Why don’t you just leave?” Yet the question fails to acknowledge the complexities of domestic violence – the crimes are deeply intimate, unseen and easy to mask; the victim and the abuser are often emotionally and financially intertwined. It’s a question that “makes us feel better, that we would be different. It is victim blaming,” said April Zeoli, an associate professor at Michigan State University’s school of criminal justice. “Why didn’t the justice system use the tools available to it to remove the guns they knew were illegal?”
What’s more, fighting back often intensifies the abuse. At its core, intimate partner violence is about power and control. Disrupting this power dynamic – for example, by reporting the abuse to police or trying to leave – can make the situation far more volatile and dangerous, ample research shows.
“It is an incredibly difficult and challenging and high-risk moment in (an abuser’s) life,” said David Martin, the King county prosecutor. “And when they have a firearm in their hand, the likelihood that they’re going to terribly harm that person or terribly harm themselves is exponentially greater.”
Removing a gun greatly reduces the chances that an episode will escalate, he said. “You’re putting barriers in place. … You’re making it harder to act on an urge to kill someone.”
But just seven states require the surrender of firearms. Of those, only California, Connecticut and Nevada explicitly order offenders to prove to courts or law enforcement that they’ve turned in their guns. Another half-dozen local jurisdictions require proof of surrender, including Seattle/King county, Denver and Harris county, Texas, where Houston is located.
Federal gun laws are also silent on relinquishment. Swalwell has reintroduced legislation, the No Guns for Abusers Act, which would direct the federal government to develop best practices for states to use for firearm relinquishment in domestic abuser cases. But the legislation has already died in Congress – twice. Even if the current version passes, neither the federal government nor states would be required to adopt any of the recommended procedures.
“Today in America, the right for an abuser to own a gun is greater than the right of a victim to be safe,” Swalwell said in an interview. “We are truly flying in the blind.”
Without national leadership, some local officials have tried to come up with solutions suited to their own communities. In 2015, after a rash of domestic violence homicides in the Dallas area, then-Judge Roberto Cañas and a few of his colleagues grew tired of doing only what Texas state law required: verbally warning people with felony and misdemeanor domestic violence convictions that they couldn’t possess a firearm.
“Even if everyone knew that a guy had an arsenal of guns he shouldn’t have, there was no follow-up,” Cañas said.
So they launched a gun surrender program, requiring judges to press defendants on whether they had any firearms and, if they did, to turn them over. The goal: to collect 2,400 guns over four years. But the result was disappointing, netting fewer than 200 weapons. After Cañas left the bench in September 2018, the program largely petered out.
“Part of it is courage,” he said. “You have to put yourself out there to do something a little different. It’s going to take a little drive from elected officials and the criminal justice system.”
Dave Keck, project director for the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence and Firearms, has seen a similar pattern in many communities considering relinquishment programs: initial enthusiasm gives way to excuses and inertia. “Relinquishment should be automatic,” he said. “But there is a general reluctance to do it.”
Some law enforcement officials cite practicalities, telling Keck, “We can’t store all those guns.” Others argue that their area has a “gun culture”.
“Are they trying to say it’s OK to shoot your wife or your girlfriend with a gun?” Keck said. “If you’re violent, particularly toward people you love, you (shouldn’t) have a firearm. Gun culture doesn’t change that.”
One of the biggest obstacles, Keck says, is the gender bias that pervades the criminal justice system. “The whole ‘he said, she said’ implies that women lie. Society expects women to take the fall,” he said. “The very thought of taking someone’s gun away from them, and at the same time doing it because of domestic violence, inflames a lot of people.”
A felon with a gun
There’s no doubt that Chad Absher should never have had the rifle he is accused of using to kill Ashlee Rucker in October 2017. Police and prosecutors in Jacksonville, Florida, knew that better than almost anyone else. What’s more, they had a clear opportunity to take away Absher’s weapon after a domestic battery call six months before Rucker died.
But instead, they did what so many law enforcement agencies around the US do when confronted with an offender illegally possessing a firearm: next to nothing.
Absher’s propensity for violence was evident at a young age. So was his fascination with firearms: by 20, he had a tattoo of a clown gripping a pistol emblazoned on his chest. When his teenage girlfriend broke up with him in February 2006, he threatened to “kill her and throw her in the river so no one could have her”, according to a police report. He demonstrated his rage by decapitating a teddy bear, throwing the head onto her family’s driveway and dumping the body next to her car in the high school parking lot.
Four days later, as his ex-girlfriend and her family slept, he took a handgun to their house and opened fire. Three bullets pierced the walls of the girl’s bedroom. Absher was convicted of two felony charges and was sentenced to four years in prison and two years of probation.
As a felon, under both federal and Florida law, Absher was prohibited from having a firearm. But that didn’t seem to deter him, recalled Tiffany Johnson, whose best friend, Rucker, started dating Absher eight years after his conviction.
Rucker was a single mother in her late 20s working as a medical assistant. Absher, then 28, ran a lawn care business and ingratiated himself by taking her young son, Joseph, for a ride on his mower. Within a few months, they were living together and socializing with Rucker’s family and friends. “Anytime they came to the house, he would have his gun and put it on my refrigerator and let it be known that he had it,” Johnson said. It was a macho thing, she added: “He just always acted like he was a man and carried a gun.”
According to her family, Rucker didn’t know the details of Absher’s conviction – at least not at first. “And I don’t think, specifically, she cared at that point,” recalled her younger sister, Lisa Rucker. “You know, she saw him at face value, basically.”
But about a year and a half into the relationship, alarms went off. One Sunday in August 2015, Absher called Lisa Rucker in a panic, claiming her sister had tried to kill herself. “(She’s) going crazy,” Lisa Rucker remembered him saying. “We were arguing and going back and forth, and she stabbed herself in the stomach.”
As Absher was phoning police, Ashlee Rucker managed to get to her car and drive away. Police found her on the floor in the back of her vehicle and rushed her to the hospital, where surgeons sewed up her abdomen, then leveled with her sister. “It’s almost physically impossible for you to stab yourself through your abdominal wall,” Lisa Rucker recalled the doctor telling her. The staff was worried enough about Ashlee Rucker’s safety to register her under a pseudonym. But because the incident had been reported to police as a suicide attempt, Absher wasn’t arrested, Lisa Rucker said.
In April 2017, the couple got into another fight, this time about one of her relatives who was staying with them. Ashlee Rucker later told police that Absher whipped her with a phone charger cord, and when she fell to the ground in the fetal position, he forced her mouth open to prevent her from screaming. When police pounded on the door, Absher grabbed a rifle. “I’m gonna die for you,” he told her. She barricaded herself in the bedroom and escaped by climbing out the window, where police were waiting to take her to safety. One officer noted Rucker had abrasions to her eye and scratches across her face. She warned them that Absher was still inside and had a weapon.
In their report, police noted that Absher was a felon with a gun, an offense punishable under Florida law by up to 15 years in prison.
But instead of trying to arrest him on the spot, officers remained outside and tried to reason with him. “We made multiple attempts to get the suspect to leave his residence with negative results,” they wrote in their report. The officers didn’t try to seize the weapon, even though they knew Absher was prohibited from possessing it. After about an hour and a half, police decided to leave the scene “due to the suspect not making any threats with the weapon to harm himself or the victim.”
Only then did police seek a warrant for Absher’s arrest for misdemeanor battery and felony possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, forwarding the case to the local state attorney’s office. But they didn’t take the obvious step of getting a search warrant for the gun. A month later, prosecutors denied the arrest warrant and declined to charge Absher, citing insufficient evidence – and shifting the blame to Rucker. “The only evidence that the suspect was in possession of a gun is the testimony of V, who is uncooperative,” prosecutors wrote in their disposition statement, referring to Rucker as V for “victim”.
It’s one of the most common excuses prosecutors give for dropping domestic violence charges – yet women are often reluctant to cooperate out of fear of antagonizing their abusers. In Ashlee Rucker’s case, Absher had threatened to kill her when she tried to leave, her sister said. If police had obtained a search warrant and seized the gun, they wouldn’t have needed Rucker’s help. But as so often happens with intimate partner abuse, law enforcement put the onus on the victim.
The Jacksonville sheriff Mike Williams turned down an interview request and refused to answer detailed follow-up questions about how his department handled the case. The local state attorney, Melissa Nelson, also declined to discuss the case and her office’s policies on domestic violence cases more broadly.
If police and prosecutors didn’t seem to understand the urgency of the situation, Rucker did. She tried to break off the relationship for good; she and her son moved in with her sister and her young son. She covered up the tattoo she’d gotten of Absher’s name.
But Absher kept coming around, and sometimes he brought his rifle, friends and family said. One night, he refused to leave, even after Lisa Rucker called 911. She told dispatchers that he didn’t have a gun; she didn’t realize his rifle was hidden behind a cushion. A few minutes after 2am on 31 October 2017, Absher shot both sisters, according to police reports. Their sons, 9-year-old Joseph and 4-year-old Colten, cowered in a bedroom nearby.
“I looked over and I saw my nephew standing over my sister, and he was crying,” Lisa Rucker said in an interview. “And I guess Colten noticed that I was awake, because he came over to me and he said, ‘Mommy, please, don’t die.’”
The bullet pierced the back of Lisa Rucker’s head, nicked her carotid artery and shattered the mandible bone on the left side of her face. She was in a coma for two days and underwent multiple surgeries. Ashlee Rucker was pronounced dead at the scene.
Two days later, police found Absher hiding at a friend’s house and recovered a rifle.
Lisa Rucker remains outraged that law enforcement failed to prosecute Absher before or confiscate his gun.
“My sister would still be here,” she said. “I wouldn’t have to live with the trauma, the scars, the heartache and everything that goes along with it. … My nephew would still have his mother.”
Absher and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment. He is scheduled to go on trial for first-degree murder and attempted murder in mid-December. He also faces an additional charge, one that comes too late for Ashlee Rucker: possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
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Nurses at a hospital. (photo: PA Media)
The Ridiculous Practice That Stopped Some Nurses From Working in a Pandemic
Timothy B. Lee, Full Stack Economics
Lee writes: "On Oct. 8, 2020, three Wyoming nurses got a nasty shock: A judge ordered them to stop providing home health care to patients in the southwest corner of the state, where all three worked."
Even health care has noncompete agreements now. It’s time to ditch them for good.
On Oct. 8, 2020, three Wyoming nurses got a nasty shock: A judge ordered them to stop providing home health care to patients in the southwest corner of the state, where all three worked. Their previous employer, Best Home Health and Hospice, said the women had signed noncompete agreements. After they switched jobs, Best Home sued to enforce the contracts.
One of the nurses, Jennifer Brown, told me she had to commute more than two hours to find a job outside the noncompete zone. She had sole custody of her granddaughter, who was then just 1 year old. Brown struggled to find child care with hours long enough to accommodate the 12-hour workday created by her long commute. The new job also came with a big pay cut, from $36 per hour to $21.
“I burned through all my savings, and I got to the point where I had a roommate to pay the bills,” Brown, who is 47, told me in a phone interview. After about three months, she reluctantly moved to Pennsylvania, where she had family to help with child care. She has since moved to Michigan to work as an operating room nurse.
“Not only did they take away my means to support myself—they took away my means to feed my granddaughter,” Brown told me. “As a nurse, I should never have that problem.”
Another woman, Carol Wolfe, became a traveling nurse in North Carolina, according to her attorney, Clark Stith. ”Being a traveling nurse is hard,” Stith told me. Wolfe had been working as a nurse for “30-some years,” Stith said. “You’re getting toward retirement, then suddenly you’re living out of a motel, traveling around wherever you can find work.”
Stith agreed to represent all three women in a case that went all the way up to the Wyoming Supreme Court. In July, the state’s highest court reversed the injunction.
But the three nurses are still trying to recover lost wages from Best Home after their court win. And Brown says it will be “almost impossible” for her to catch up from the financial losses of the past year. She describes it as one of the most stressful periods of her life.
Best Home didn’t respond to multiple emails seeking comment about the case.
Stith isn’t just an attorney—he’s also a Republican state representative in Wyoming. And he recently proposed legislation that would ban the enforcement of noncompete agreements in the state. He took his inspiration from California, where courts have refused to enforce almost all noncompete agreements for more than a century. Laws like this have recently been gaining momentum in other states. Earlier this year, the District of Columbia enacted a sweeping ban on noncompete agreements, which will go into effect in April.
Other states have passed more targeted legislation prohibiting the use of noncompete agreements against low-wage workers. In my view, California and D.C. have taken the right approach with near-total bans on noncompete enforcement. Every state, if not the federal government, should follow suit. But the case against noncompete rules is particularly strong when it comes to workers on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.
A decade ago, discussions of noncompete agreements tended to focus on corporate executives, engineers, and others who have access to sensitive technical or strategic information. The case for enforcing noncompete laws is strongest for these types of workers.
But in recent years, we’ve learned that noncompete deals are being used up and down the income spectrum. There have been numerous stories about noncompetes being used against workers with below-average wages:
• In 2014, the Huffington Post reported that Jimmy John’s was requiring its hourly sandwich makers to sign noncompete agreements. (The sandwich chain eventually agreed not to enforce the agreements after a public backlash.)
• In 2015, the Verge revealed that Amazon was making low-paid warehouse workers sign noncompetes. (The company quickly stopped doing that.)
• In 2016, PBS covered a legal battle in which a lampshade maker sued a worker making $9 an hour for switching to a rival.
• In 2019, the Wall Street Journal wrote about companies that ask interns to sign noncompete agreements.
However galling they are, anecdotes like this don’t tell us how widespread these practices really are. But a new analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis provides a systematic look at this question.
The researchers looked at data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a government survey that follows a sample of adults over the course of their lives. Every few years, the government asks the same men and women a series of questions about their lives and careers.
In the most recent round of interviews, conducted in 2017 and 2018, researchers added a new question for the cohort then in their mid-30s: whether respondents had signed a noncompete agreement in their current or most recent job. Overall, 15 percent of workers said they were subject to noncompete agreements.
This is roughly consistent with earlier research; a 2014 online survey found 18 percent of workers said they were bound by noncompete agreements.
Evan Starr, the lead author of that 2014 survey, believes the new results are significant. “This is the first government-collected data on noncompete agreements,” he told me recently. The fact that it’s a large, random, government-sponsored survey gives it extra credibility.
That topline 15 percent figure likely understates how widely noncompete clauses are used in the labor market. Employees don’t always read their contracts carefully or remember what they’ve signed. In a 2019 survey of businesses, more than 30 percent said they required all of their employees to sign noncompete agreements.
As you might expect, higher-paid workers are more likely to be subject to noncompete clauses. The Minneapolis Fed calculated that 21 percent of workers in the top income quintile sign such agreements. But even in the bottom quintile—which tops out at about $12 per hour—8 percent of workers said they’d been asked to sign such agreements.
Why enforce noncompetes at all? Advocates argue that refusing to enforce noncompete agreements could discourage companies from investing in their workers and in new technologies. Companies worry that employees could take valuable strategic or technical information with them when they go to work for a competitor.
Patents and trade-secret laws are supposed to prevent this kind of intellectual theft, but executives and engineers frequently have valuable knowledge in their heads that isn’t covered by patent or trade-secret laws. If this kind of theft happened too frequently, companies might underinvest in new technologies—or they might flee states that fail to enforce noncompete contracts.
This plausible theory has a massive practical problem: California. As I mentioned before, California courts have refused to enforce noncompete agreements for more than a century. And California has not exactly been a laggard when it comes to innovation. California-based tech giants like Apple and Google spend massive sums on research and development and do not seem eager to relocate.
Indeed, there’s a famous argument that California’s refusal to enforce noncompete agreements actually promoted its technology sector. In a 2017 piece for Vox, I examined the rise of Silicon Valley in the 1980s:
The fact that California courts don’t enforce noncompete agreements was a key reason this culture existed. And while this kind of job-hopping is frustrating for employers who lose workers, Saxenian argued that it made Silicon Valley, as a whole, stronger. When someone invented a good idea in one company, it would quickly diffuse across Silicon Valley, improving the performance of other companies nearby. This freewheeling culture seems to have produced a faster pace of innovation than what you got in areas where lifetime employment was the norm.
In other words, Silicon Valley’s success suggests the standard case for enforcing noncompete agreements might be not just wrong but backward. Letting companies tie up their best workers actually slows the pace of progress.
Regardless of which side you take in that debate, enforcing noncompetes makes no sense in low-tech industries and against workers down the income scale. Your average home health care company isn’t developing cutting-edge technologies. Letting health care providers lock up nurses with noncompete contracts doesn’t have any broader social benefits—it just gives them more power over their workers. It’s harder to ask your boss for a raise if your boss knows you’re not allowed to work for other nearby employers.
A study published last year looked at the results of a 2007 Oregon law that banned the enforcement of noncompete agreements against lower-paid and hourly workers. The economists Michael Lipsitz and Evan Starr crunched the numbers and estimated that the law raised the wages of hourly workers by 2 to 3 percent.
That figure is particularly impressive because it’s an average across all hourly workers—and only a small fraction of those workers were subject to noncompete agreements. This suggests that the wage impact on affected workers could be much higher—as high as 14 to 21 percent.
“Low-wage workers are unlikely to have legal help when encountering a noncompete,” said Ryan Nunn, one of the authors of the Minneapolis Fed study. “They are poorly informed about what the noncompete means for them and how it could be enforced against them.”
In July, President Joe Biden signed an executive order asking the Federal Trade Commission (an independent agency) to limit or ban the enforcement of noncompete agreements. Days later, the Uniform Law Commission approved a model statute that restricts enforcement of noncompete agreements—including banning their enforcement against low-wage workers. The ULC doesn’t have the power to change laws in any specific state, but state legislatures often use ULC standards as a starting point for drafting their own laws.
Even before this change, a number of states had been passing laws to restrict enforcement of noncompetes. In 2016, Illinois followed Oregon’s lead, passing legislation banning enforcement of noncompetes against low-wage workers. Earlier this year, the state expanded this to cover workers making less than $75,000. Massachusetts banned enforcement of noncompetes against hourly workers in 2018.
While the case against enforcing noncompetes is strongest for low-wage workers, I think it makes sense to ban enforcement across the board. The example of California suggests that these agreements are not necessary for a thriving economy and are probably counterproductive. Companies have other ways to protect their ideas against outright theft by departing employees—see, for example, Google’s trade secrets case against former self-driving engineer Anthony Levandowski.
More fundamentally, choosing where you work is an important freedom. The enforcement of noncompete agreements can impose large financial and emotional costs on individuals, as the story of the Wyoming nurses illustrates. So even if you could demonstrate that Wyoming’s vigorous enforcement of noncompete law modestly improved the performance of the state’s economy, I don’t think that would justify the hardships the law imposes on people like Jennifer Brown, Carol Wolfe, and the people for whom they care. If the effect of a common business practice is that nurses are being kept from their patients in the middle of a pandemic when there’s an ongoing shortage of health care providers, it’s probably time for that practice to go.
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A woman holds a sign with the Colombian flag that reads "Duque, stop the massacre" during a demonstration to welcome the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to the country, in Bogota, on June 6, 2021. (photo: Juan Barreto/AFP)
Colombia: 79 Massacres Registered So Far This Year
teleSUR
Excerpt: "In Colombia, Authorities reported a new massacre in the Valle del Cauca department where three people passed away, including a nine-year-old girl."
On Sunday, Police reported the death of two young men and a minor in the Valle del Cauca department.
In Colombia, Authorities reported a new massacre in the Valle del Cauca department where three people passed away, including a nine-year-old girl.
The events took place in the Santa Barbara neighborhood in the Buga municipality.
Police reported the death of two young men, while the minor was taken to a medical center where she died hours later.
In the Antioquia department, five people were killed on the "La Bogotana" farm in the La Primavera town located in the Betania municipality on Sunday.
Authorities are holding a security council to establish strategies to clarify the homicide that occurred in Buga.
With these incidents, the Institute for Development and Peace (Indepaz) reports the 79th massacre so far this year.
Recently, the Ombudsman's Office issued a warning over the presence of criminal gangs, dissident groups, and narco-paramilitary groups located in the Valle del Cauca.
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Otters scan their surroundings in Singapore, with the Gardens by the Bay development and the Marina Bay Sands and its Sky Park in the background. Wild otters are making a comeback in the city-state. (photo: NurPhoto/Getty Images)
After Pollution and Deforestation Drove Them Away, Otters Return to Singapore in Full Force
Marina Lopes, The Washington Post
Lopes writes: "As the country cleaned up its waters and reforested land in recent years, otters came back in full force."
Standing on a manhole cover in downtown Singapore, dodging double-decker buses and motorcycles, Marjorie Chong sniffs the air and listens for squeaks. "Do you hear that?" she asks.
Chong is searching for otters.
Pollution and deforestation drove away Singapore’s otter population in the 1970s. But as the country cleaned up its waters and reforested land in recent years, otters came back in full force, integrating into urban spaces and learning to navigate one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities.
Today, to the annoyance of some and the joy of others, the island is home to more than 10 otter romps, or families.
In the Marina Bay area, known for architecturally audacious hotels and for one-bedroom apartments that sell for $1.8 million, otters bop in the water and the crunch of fish bones echoes along the boardwalk. Using drainpipes as highways, the carnivorous mammals traverse the city, sometimes popping up in rush-hour traffic, or racing through university campuses.
Otters pushed out of the local rivers and bays by rival families dig homes between buildings. They visit hospital lobbies and condominium pools, hunting for koi fish and drinking from fountains. New families fight for access to food and shelter, in battles that are covered by the local papers and dissected online.
As the otter population has boomed, so has otter mania. Otter watchers like Chong spend days tracking the whereabouts of different families, documenting their rivalries, love stories and territorial clashes on social media.
“It’s like ‘Game of Thrones,’ ” said Chong, a retired editor who runs the Ottercity Facebook group. “You realize everyone is just trying to survive.”
On a recent day, Chong scoured canals behind skyscrapers for “Zouk Aunt,” an otter she had been following for years. Zouk Aunt first served as her family’s “nanny,” chaperoning her sister’s pups to swimming lessons and walks, only to be shunned by the group after the two females got into a fight. Now a mother herself, she has to fend for her pups in the financial district, while avoiding the neighborhood’s ruling family, the powerful Bishan otters.
For weeks, Chong and a team of volunteers, who call themselves otter watchers, helped Zouk Aunt and her mate cross a five-lane road into Marina Bay. The volunteers pushed pedestrian crosswalk buttons on traffic lights and waved down cars to prevent the otters from being run over during twice-daily hunting trips.
The otter watchers have quickly become experts, able to identify an animal by a missing toenail or clipped ear. They work with the country’s parks department and zoologists to help abandoned pups return to their families, or get injured animals medical attention.
But not all residents are smitten.
Lynette Foo, 32, was home with her baby when she heard the squeaks. Over a dozen otters wandered past her house and feasted on the 40 koi fish she kept in her backyard pond, some of which her father-in-law had been raising for decades.
“They were eating like they were at a buffet,” she said, adding that the parent otters would blind the fish with their claws first and then let their pups catch them. “They are becoming a nuisance.”
Frustration with the otters mounted during the pandemic, when lockdown restrictions kept people home and gave the animals free rein in the city.
Last year, after a string of otter attacks on koi ponds, one critic wrote a letter to the Straits Times newspaper to call for the animals to be shot with rubber bullets. The demand proved divisive, and even Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who encountered a family of otters frolicking in the yard of the president’s official residence, took a stand. Singaporeans “must find ways to coexist and thrive with our local flora and fauna,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
For otter experts, the critics are missing the point. Higher fencing and sturdier gates are a small price to pay to keep the otters out of areas where they are not welcome.
Singapore’s otters are the envy of researchers around the world, who sometimes work for years without seeing an otter in the wild. They are also testament to Singapore’s reforestation and anti-pollution efforts.
When the otters resettled here in 2014, they returned to clean waterways with schools of fish untouched by predators for decades. The city has since implemented an ambitious plan to interweave green and urban areas, including creating wildlife corridors so that every resident will live within a 10-minute walk of a park by 2030.
“It doesn’t have to be a concrete jungle,” said Anbarasi Boopal, the co-CEO of Animal Concerns Research and Education Society, Singapore’s wildlife rescue center. “Singapore has a huge potential to be a new model for where greenery, animals and people can learn to live in close proximity.”
Otters are not the only animals that have returned. Wild boars and monkeys have also started appearing in urban spaces. In February, a wild boar jumped out of a bush and attacked a woman, dragging her for a meter before a food delivery driver scared it with a bicycle bell. In June, a family of monkeys was spotted scaling a condominium building.
As animals encroach on metropolitan spaces, and developers dig into forests, Boopal’s organization has created a wildlife management team to respond to altercations between animals and residents and teach people how to handle conflicts.
“There will be resistance. We are so used to having everything presented to us so nicely,” she said. “I tell people, we cannot train the animals. I cannot train the monkey. But I can train you.”
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