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‘Not Gonna Fly’: Jayapal Warns Democrats Against Using Advice of Unelected Parliamentarian as Excuse Not to Pass $15 Wage

With the Senate parliamentarian expected to issue advice as soon as Thursday on whether increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour complies with the rules of budget reconciliation, top congressional progressives stressed that the official’s decision is merely advisory and should not be used by Democrats to concede defeat on the push for a long-overdue pay raise for tens of millions of workers.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), said in an appearance on MSNBC late Wednesday that Democrats “made a promise to people across this country that we were gonna raise the minimum wage, that we were gonna put money in people’s pockets.” The House has included the $15 minimum wage proposal in its version of the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, and is expected to pass the sweeping measure on Friday.

“It’s been 12 years since we’ve raised the minimum wage, and if we’re going to make those promises, we have to be able to deliver on them,” Jayapal said. “Because, I’ll tell you what, in two years… when people vote in the midterms, you’re not gonna be able to say, ‘Well, I’m sorry, we couldn’t raise the minimum wage because the parliamentarian ruled that we couldn’t do it.’ That’s not gonna fly.”

Jayapal’s comments came after Democratic and Republican senators met with Elizabeth MacDonough—the unelected official tasked with interpreting and offering advice on Senate rules—to present arguments for and against a number of major provisions in the emerging coronavirus relief package, including the $15 minimum wage measure.

MacDonough—who was first appointed to her role in 2012 by then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)—is expected to rule before the end of the week on whether the minimum wage increase qualifies under reconciliation, a filibuster-proof process that requires all provisions to have more than a “merely incidental” impact on the federal budget.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), chair of the Senate Budget Committee, has pointed to two recent analyses by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to make the case that the proposed wage hike would have a substantial impact on federal revenue and spending, and should therefore be deemed eligible for the reconciliation process.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday afternoon, Sanders said, “Obviously we’re a little bit biased, but we think we made a convincing case that raising the minimum wage to a living wage is consistent [with Senate rules].”

The Gig Economy Is a Vampire That We Shouldn’t Make Peace With

hen organized labor frets about the future of worker power in America, they usually focus on the decline of organized labor itself — a half-century of plummeting union density has reduced unions from a powerhouse institution to a niche. That’s a problem. There is an even larger underlying issue, though, that the labor movement now has to factor into everything it does: Not just the disappearance of unions, but the eradication of jobs as we know them.

That doesn’t mean mass unemployment. It means the ​“gig economy,” a friendly name for a force of capitalist nature that systematically seeks to set everyone’s nice, traditional full-time job on fire and blow the ashes into the wind. Though we are told an inspiring story of how the rise of the gig economy has been driven by the entrepreneurial genius of people like Uber founder and frat boy dumbass Travis Kalanick, the truth is that all of it is an inevitable response to the basic insight that there is money to be made by being able to command a huge work force while minimizing the number of them that you actually call ​“employees.” Thanks to our nation’s wretched labor laws, any company that is able to designate a worker as an ​“independent contractor” rather than as an employee can avoid paying for the high cost of benefits, and get the added bonus of ensuring that those workers are legally barred from unionizing, a right which is only afforded to employees. Thus the entire gig economy can be seen as corporate arbitrage of labor law, in which a company is able to stick all the money it would have spent providing for employees into its own pockets by relying on the legal fiction that its workers are not its responsibility.

All of the arguments about the ​“flexibility” and ​“freedom” that gig work provides might have merit in a vacuum, but they are utterly cynical in the real world of the United States, where we have foolishly chosen to tie enormous parts of our social safety net to people’s jobs. Here in the richest and most powerful country on earth, all of that freedom and flexibility just means that you do not get health insurance or legal workplace protections or the right to a union. We should not allow the companies, whose primary goal is to minimize labor costs and legal responsibilities by reclassifying employees, to act as if this whole conversation is taking place in Happy Fairyland, where nobody has to worry about health insurance. We must live where we are. And where we are, the growth of the gig economy is a flat out battle between labor and capital.

Taxi drivers become Uber drivers. Grocery workers become Instacart workers. Delivery workers become DoorDash workers. The effect is that the workers must work even harder to make a living without receiving the standard suite of benefits that full time employees get, savings which are then funneled to Wall Street and Silicon Valley. It’s a system that mints tech billionaires and makes thousands of regular people live in their cars. This is called ​“progress.” It’s not.

No one understands this dynamic better than the companies themselves, although they inevitably lie about it. Beyond the familiar app-based companies are a slew of more anonymous staffing firms that exist to allow companies everywhere to lay off portions of their full time work force and then rehire ​“contractors” for those same roles. It’s the same economic impulse that has propelled outsourcing, but for jobs that can’t be moved overseas. The unavoidable financial logic of this impulse means that every employer has an overwhelming incentive to gig-ify as many jobs as possible. It won’t stop with drivers and delivery workers. The gig economy is coming for all of us. It is an inequality multiplier, an existential threat to the structure of work, and to the flawed and delicate system we have that provides the basic necessities for Americans to live.

Indigenous Water Protectors Face Off Against the “Pandemic Pipeline”

Members of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa gather periodically at Grandma’s Table, a sacred site on the tribe’s northern Minnesota reservation, to perform moon ceremonies, teach their children how to build fires, sing and dance. Grandma’s Table is where Taysha Martineau first learned to proudly speak their name in the Ojibwe language. In December, Martineau could only watch as Canadian oil giant Enbridge (authorized by the Fond du Lac tribal chairman) began digging up the site to make way for its Line 3 oil pipeline.

That was, for me, the final straw,” says Martineau, co-founder of the Indigenous community support group Gitchigumi Scouts. ​“It was as if someone had stormed into church and left the broken body of your grandmother on the altar.”

In early January, Martineau and other water protectors — the activists opposing the pipeline— set up a resistance camp on nine acres of land they bought with $30,000 from a GoFundMe campaign. In defiance of their chairman’s decision, six water protectors live permanently at Camp Migizi (“bald eagle” in Ojibwe), and dozens gather there daily to join direct actions against the pipeline. Six demonstrators had been arrested at press time.

Though President Joe Biden revoked the federal permit for the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office, construction continues on Line 3. Like Keystone, Line 3 would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada. If completed, the $4 billion expansion project will replace an older, smaller Enbridge pipeline and deliver 760,000 barrels of oil per day to a transportation terminal in Superior, Wis.

Camp Migizi’s campaign is the latest obstacle for the embattled pipeline, which has been planned since 2013 but slowed by legal challenges, petitions and Indigenous-led resistance.

Biden urged to back water justice bill to reverse decades of underinvestment

Democratic lawmakers and advocates are urging Joe Biden to back legislation proposing unprecedented investment in America’s ailing water infrastructure amid the country’s worst crisis in decades that has left millions of people without access to clean, safe, affordable water.

Boil advisories, leaky lead pipes, poisonous forever chemicals, bill arrears and raw sewage are among the urgent issues facing ordinary Americans and municipal utilities after decades of federal government neglect, which has brought the country’s ageing water systems hurtling towards disaster.

The majority of water and wastewater systems nationwide are also unprepared to cope with the climate crisis which is causing increasingly frequent unpredictable extreme weather events like the Arctic freeze that disrupted water and energy supplies across Texas last week.

After decades of underinvestment, a water justice bill will be introduced on Thursday in Congress that proposes a massive injection of federal dollars over the next two decades in order to overhaul the ageing infrastructure, create decent jobs and address longstanding inequalities in access to water and sanitation.

The Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity and Reliability (Water) Act, which will be introduced by Bernie Sanders in the Senate and Brenda Lawrence and Ro Khanna in the House, is backed by at least 70 other Democratic lawmakers and more than 500 advocacy, labor and faith-based organizations from almost every state.

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“It’s clear we have a water crisis in every corner of the United States, and if we don’t act soon it will be a disaster,” Lawrence told the Guardian. “What happened in Texas and Flint, Michigan, and so many other places shows us what happens when we don’t take care of our water infrastructure. I want to scream from the rooftop and shake America awake: safe, clean affordable water is necessary to live – without it you will die.”

Who will clean up the ‘billion-dollar mess’ of abandoned US oilwells?

Jill Morrison has seen how the bust of oil and gas production can permanently scar a landscape.

Near her land in north-east Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, where drilling started in 1889, more than 2,000 abandoned wells are seeping brine into the groundwater and leaking potent greenhouse gasses.

The problem is getting worse. As the oil and gas industry contracts owing to the pandemic, low prices and the rise of renewables, more than 50 major companies have gone bankrupt in the last year. Joe Biden’s recent order to pause drilling on federal land could drive that number higher. Morrison, a rancher and the head of the Powder River Basin resource council, said the crash was exacerbating the abandonment issue.

“They drill baby drilled themselves right out of business,” Morrison said. “We’re seeing something we’ve never seen before in the oil and gas industry, in terms of the downturn, and there’s going to be a billion-dollar mess to clean up.”

Unplugged wells, either orphaned well, which have no liable party, usually due to bankruptcy, or idle, abandoned ones, where the company has walked away, but could still be liable, cause rampant methane emissions – up to 8% of US total according to a 2014 analysis. They also leak brine, oil and fracking fluid into the groundwater, and carcinogenic gases, like benzine, into the air, and as their numbers increase the impacts grow.

“Methane is a strong greenhouse gas, it’s a precursor for ozone, and harmful for human health,” said Mary Kang, a McGill civil engineering professor who conducted the study. “Even just a few wells can be responsible for big emissions, and there are all the other associated risks, and impacts to wildlife and ecosystems.”

The impacts aren’t just here in the rangy fields of Wyoming. There are unremediated wells in Los Angeles neighborhoods and Pennsylvania farms. There could be as many as 3.2m abandoned wells in the US, according to a 2018 EPA report

If you cannot make a case for raising taxes on the richest Americans during a pandemic that has caused their revenues to soar while average people are struggling day to day.. you might as well be a republican.

Democrats hesitant to raise taxes amid pandemic

President Biden declared during the campaign that he would repeal the Trump tax cuts on “day one,” but after more than a month in office, some key Democratic lawmakers say they are reluctant to raise taxes during an economic slowdown.

Democratic leaders are more focused on sending out $1,400 stimulus payments to qualifying adults and children by the middle of next month and following that up with a jobs and infrastructure package that could cost as much as $3 trillion.

There’s been little discussion, however, on finding ways to raise revenue for Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan or his Build Back Better proposal, which may cost even more. While some in the Democratic caucus, such as Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), want to raise taxes for corporations and wealthy individuals, getting the votes to do that would be extremely challenging. But if Democrats punt, they potentially would be trying to raise taxes in 2022, an election year when both chambers of Congress will be up for grabs.

Democratic leaders have a razor-thin 50-50 Senate majority and a five-seat House majority, leaving them little room to maneuver at a time when centrist Democrats are reluctant to raise taxes while unemployment is high and the economy is still shaky.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a key swing vote, told The Hill in early January that it would be “ridiculous” to repeal the Trump tax cuts while the COVID-19 pandemic is still a burden on the economy and Congress has a lot of other legislative priorities on its plate, such as addressing the need for more vaccines.