I will be in House Judiciary this morning, and House Health & Human Services tomorrow.

Looking forward to representing my constituents in both of these hearings. pic.twitter.com/veoqTkdriR

— Rep. Zooey Zephyr (@ZoAndBehold) May 1, 2023

A 2010 Fed self-assessment stated that supervisors were good at identifying deficiencies but not good at demanding corrective action or holding bank executives accountable. That’s exactly what went down in the SVB collapse 13 years later. https://t.co/g9VwqQAXQ7

— David Dayen (@ddayen) May 1, 2023

A class-action lawsuit that was settled on Monday will expand New York’s Medicaid rules to cover common but costly dental procedures for low-income people. The suit argued that dental health was essential to psychological well-being and finding a job.https://t.co/vAxXD5OMKO

— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 1, 2023

More info on the Texas school that cancelled its field trip to see a theatrical production of "James and the Giant Peach" after one parent complained about an actor playing both male and female parts. According to the parent, this constitutes drag.
https://t.co/EjBaPxwuMQ

— Jeffrey Sachs (@JeffreyASachs) May 1, 2023

‘A carbon bomb’: Biden is backing another Alaska fossil fuel project https://t.co/Am8DR40S1C

— POLITICO (@politico) May 1, 2023

Graduate student workers at the University of Michigan have been on strike since March 29th—their second in three years. "We are fed up and ready to fight."https://t.co/KQAIpNdvJk

— The Nation (@thenation) May 1, 2023

David Sirota

The Democrats think centrism will re-elect Biden. That’s a dangerous
assumption

The Democratic party’s political class has developed a rote formula over the last decade: ignore rather than channel discontent among the party’s rank-and-file voters, prevent competitive primaries where those voters can act on their dissatisfaction, and then hope to eke out general election victories on a wave of voter disgust with the Republican party’s outlandish nominees.

This isn’t just a fleeting tactic. This is now The Formula of Democratic Politics™, one with mixed results. In 2016, the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, publicly bragged that the Formula would result in flipping enough moderate voters to secure a victory – just before the Formula’s epic failure handed Donald Trump the presidency.

Four years later, though, the Formula seemed to work – Democrats united to quash the primary against the quasi-incumbent Joe Biden, and Trump’s horrific first term allowed Biden to eke out a win with a flaccid campaign based on a meaningless platitude about “the soul of America”.

Now Democrats seem intent on using the Formula again – only this time, it’s even more risky because this is not a race against a sitting Republican president. In 2024, Biden is the incumbent playing defense, and data suggest that there’s not much enthusiasm for his re-election campaign, even among his own party.

A stat from the Washington Post illustrates this larger problem: “Biden has less support for renomination among Democrats than Trump, Obama and Clinton had from their parties,” the newspaper reports, noting that surveys show just 38% of Democrats want Biden to be the party’s nominee in 2024. CNN’s polling shows that right now, just one-third of Americans believe Biden deserves to be re-elected – lower than where Trump was at around this stage of his first term.

If there was a healthy, genuinely democratic culture among the Democratic party’s political class, the response to the prospect of depressed voter enthusiasm might be a serious primary challenge. There might be a traditional top-tier candidate – maybe a senator, a governor, or even a member of the House – who is both ambitious enough to run for president and worried enough about a Biden failure in a general election against Trump.

Such a primary would serve the additional benefit of testing Biden’s own re-election viability, and making sure he can handle the rigors of a campaign before he’s already the nominee.

But that hasn’t happened. The response has been the Formula.

First, Biden and Democratic leaders have rejected the FDR strategy of winning elections by making a show of delivering for the working class. They have instead made a show of putting their boots in the eye of dissatisfied voters as a way to brandish their “centrist” (read: corporate) credentials.

After a very good American Rescue Plan momentarily helped millions of people and boosted Biden’s standing among voters, Democrats cut off pandemic aid, jacked up taxes on the working class, stomped out a rail strike, expanded fossil fuel drilling amid the climate emergency, demagogued the crime issue, and reappointed Trump’s worker-crushing Federal Reserve chair – all while abandoning the minimum wage and healthcare promises they made in 2020. And then they spiked the football by bailing out Silicon Valley Bank tech moguls while the government moved to force up to 15 million people off Medicaid.

With voters now understandably ticked off, here comes the Formula’s primary-crushing phase.

There was the decision to move the first Democratic presidential primary to South Carolina – a state widely seen as a place where the party machine has the best chance to control the outcome against insurgent candidates.

More recently, there’s the effort to shut down the discourse: though a Fox News survey shows 28% of Democrats already saying they will vote against Biden in a primary contest, the Washington Post reports: “The national Democratic party has said it will support Biden’s re-election, and it has no plans to sponsor primary debates.”

So far, this phase of the Formula has been successful. Though Marianne Williamson and Robert F Kennedy Jr, are promising primary challenges, no elected official in the party seems willing to vigorously support even the concept of a primary, much less run in one.

No doubt every Democratic officeholder is deterred by the cautionary tale of Senator Bernie Sanders, who was shamed for the crime of momentarily considering a primary challenge to Barack Obama while the incumbent was bailing out banks amid the foreclosure meltdown. For his part, Sanders provided an early Biden re-election endorsement, not even holding out for any policy concessions.

So far, this part of the Formula has been successful in manufacturing a sense of inevitability and creating the illusion that there is no other path – even if voters might want one. As the Washington Post’s headline put it: “Democrats reluctant about Biden 2024, but they see no other choice”. Or as Sanders told MSNBC about his Biden endorsement: “I don’t think one has many alternatives here.”

Assuming Biden is the nominee, the Formula’s final phase will probably be anchored in Schumer’s 2016 assumption. Democrats will presume that come general election time, disgust with the Republican nominee will cure all the discontent, demoralization and disillusionment sown by a feeble left-punching incumbent and by the party’s heavy-handed primary suppression tactics.

Maybe that’s what ends up happening. Maybe voters will see the Republican nominee as so flagrantly grotesque that Biden will get four more years. But there’s mounting evidence that the opposite could happen, and that 2024 could be more like 2016 than 2020.

That’s hardly surprising. As gross as Republican politicians are, Democrats’ formula may not be sustainable over the long haul. There may be only so long that a party can ignore and suppress mass discontent and then just hope the other party’s extremism generates revulsion.

As FDR once warned: “The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.”

Happy #MayDay. Today we recognize workers and labor rights organizers in the push for better wages & working conditions.

Together, we remain persistent in our movements to achieve worker justice.

— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) May 1, 2023

One of the things I noticed from Wallace’s interview with Bernie, Bernie did not say the infrastructure bill provided jobs. He said (paraphrasing) that many people now have very important work to do.

In 2023, Everyone Who Can Go Union Is Doing Just That

Here’s a Q-and-A to begin the week:

Q: Is today’s American labor movement a working-class movement?

A: Less and less so with each passing day.

Consider the numbers, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports on every January. Of the 14.3 million union members in 2022, 5.3 million were professionals, with a little over 3 million of them teachers and a little over 1 million healthcare professionals. There were 200,000 architects and engineers, and just shy of 200,000 software nerds and out-and-out mathematicians.

By contrast, there were roughly 900,000 production (mainly factory) workers, 300,000 retail sales workers, 1.1 million construction workers, 577,000 maintenance and repair workers, and 1.4 million transportation workers (truckers, plus rail and airline workers).

This is a far cry from the years of union power, when the largest unions in the land were the United Auto Workers and the United Steel Workers, both of which have shrunk by well more than half in recent decades, and the Teamsters, who’ve managed to maintain somewhat more of their membership, but partly through their success in organizing workers who’ve never driven a truck. (The UAW has also supplemented its dwindling ranks with non-auto workers).

This epochal shift in the class composition of American labor has never been more apparent than it’s been in the last couple of years, which have seen many thousands of professionals and proto-professionals successfully organizing and winning contracts, while organizing efforts in non-professional occupations has yielded precious few victories (and even when it has, as with Starbucks and Amazon and Chipotle and elsewhere, these courageous efforts have yet to result in any contracts).

The basic reason for this shift has little to do with unions themselves, and everything to do with the different levels of worker-replaceability that American employers confront when their workers want to go union. Teachers and grad student TAs and RAs, or doctors and nurses, can’t easily be fired and replaced. Workers on assembly lines or at cash registers commonly are, though when employers do this when those workers are trying to form a union, that’s illegal—though with negligible penalties for the scofflaw bosses.

Two other factors have intensified this disparity. The first is the proletarianization of professionals. More and more doctors, for instance, find it difficult to compete as independent practitioners against investor-owned medical groups and, not being able to beat them, then join them. The second is the surge of union support among the young, which has been apparent both on university campuses and at Starbucks. The difference is that universities ultimately can’t afford to dispense with their student employees (who themselves save their employers money by enabling them to have fewer tenured faculty), while Starbucks can routinely engage in illegal suppression of its disproportionately young employees who’ve voted to unionize. Starbucks has been withholding company-wide raises from those who’ve gone union, while refusing to bargain any contracts. These are tactics that university administrators couldn’t pull off.

Accordingly, the past two years have seen a host of union victories among workers on campuses, in museums, in foundations, at all manner of enterprises staffed by workers not easy to replace. Even when you know that polling shows record-high levels of union support among millennials and Gen-Zers, the results of the union recognition elections at universities are still stunning.

The starkest challenge for unions as their memberships morph into these cross-class institutions will be reconciling the needs of their production workers with the imperatives of going green.

Since the start of 2022, the National Labor Relations Board has conducted elections at 17 colleges and universities. (All of them are private; what happens in public higher education depends on whether the individual states have legalized collective bargaining for public employees. Where they have, you can be sure the grad students have unionized.) Those 17 include MIT, Yale, Northwestern, USC, the University of Chicago, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Grinnell and Rensselaer Polytech. At all 17, the vote was overwhelmingly to unionize. Adding up the total votes, we find that 15,631 of the students voted to be represented by a union, while just 1,698 voted not to be, which comes out to 89.1 percent support.

Is there any reason to think that today’s young workers in blue-collar or retail jobs wouldn’t also vote to go union if their employers didn’t use the gaping loopholes in labor law to threaten them if they did? What polling we have suggests: not much.

The newly organized workers on those 17 campuses are represented by nine different unions, including UNITE HERE (at Yale; otherwise, it’s the union of hotel workers), SEIU, CWA, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Office and Professional Union (originally, the union of office workers at unions), the Teamsters, the United Electrical Workers, the AFT (the only union of the nine that represents K-12 teachers, more than 1.5 million of them), and the UAW. The grad-student employees at USC followed the lead of the nearly 50,000 grad students at the University of California’s ten campuses by voting by a 1599-to-122 margin to unionize with the UAW. As an old Angeleno who remembers the USC that was a bastion of Republicanism and whose alums dominated Richard Nixon’s dirty-tricks operation, it’s particularly gratifying to see today’s Trojans affiliating with a union that once was the nation’s most powerful social-democratic institution.

With the UAW adding its new members at USC to its members at UC and other campuses, roughly one-quarter of its current members are academic workers. The specific effects that might have on the union’s campaigns outside academia remain to be seen. With the union set to strike one of the Big Three legacy auto manufacturers later this year, it’s at least possible that some of its California campus members could form picket lines at that company’s dealerships.

More broadly, the rising share of professional workers in American labor could portend an acceleration of the ongoing shift to liberal professional worker causes and concerns within labor, on a host of social, cultural and environmental issues. Historically, a number of blue-collar unions took progressive stances on such issues long ago, even when more middle-class organizations rejected them. Those unions strongly backed civil rights despite the opposition of many of their white members, embraced the pro-choice cause, and moved from opposing immigration to supporting it. (The AFL-CIO reversed its longstanding opposition to more immigration at its 1999 convention.) Some of these shifts were accelerated when John Sweeney became AFL-CIO president in 1995, backed by a coalition of progressive unions that ousted his predecessor, Lane Kirkland, and the ancien régime that had steered clear of potential allies in the feminist, antiwar, environmental and other presumably untrustworthy movements.

The starkest challenge for unions as their memberships morph into these cross-class institutions will be reconciling the needs of their production workers with the imperatives of going green. There’s no question that the academic members of a union like the UAW will strongly support “just transition” measures for workers who lose their jobs in the course of going green, but there’s also no question that employers and conservative lawmakers will oppose such measures. A wave of unjust transitions could inflict some very hard choices on a union like the UAW. For its part, the Biden Administration is trying to make those choices less hard by its efforts to make green jobs union jobs—an uphill climb, but one that, if successful, could reduce these potential intra-union conflicts.

In a sense, the shifting class composition of American labor mirrors the shift in the Democratic Party, and in center-left parties throughout the West. There is a very obvious and growing working-class (particularly white working-class) hole in the universe of Democratic voters, as there is in those of the historic parties of the left in France and the UK and elsewhere. In fact, the class shift in labor is one of the primary causes of the class shift in those parties. Since the early 1970s, unionized blue-collar workers have been voting for Democratic candidates at a rate that’s roughly ten percent higher than their non-union counterparts. Assuming that a union has an effective political/economic messaging system—which requires an active and skilled steward system, something that only some unions have managed to preserve or create—a union member can receive a drumbeat of factual information that can counter the likes of Fox News.

Had unions been able to organize non-professional workers with the same rate of success they’ve had in organizing professional workers, the working-class hole in the Democratic Party wouldn’t be as large, and as damaging, as it is today. It’s great that unions are organizing so many workers on campuses and in like institutions, but building a center-left powerful enough to win enough elections to dominate politics requires working-class organizing, too. That, in turn, requires changing labor law so that employers are actually forbidden by law, as they were before the courts and Republicans weakened that law, from firing workers seeking to organize—those “disposable” workers who can be replaced. That’s why making working-class workers as non-replaceable as their counterparts on campuses is the linchpin of any efforts to build a majoritarian American left.

Shaky Ground: How the United States Uses the Law to Steal Indigenous Land

n Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples, Peter d’Errico exposes the capriciousness and hostility with which the United States uses the law to apply — or deny — justice to the original peoples of this land.

“When we enter a realm called ​‘federal Indian law’ … we are entering a semantic world created by the United States to control Native peoples and claim their lands,” writes d’Errico, an attorney and professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Despite its confusion and contradictions, federal Indian law — in d’Errico’s terms, ​“anti-Indian law” — has long had an unchanging purpose. By destroying Native individuals and communities, it has helped the rich and powerful scoop up vast lands and resources. This landgrab is accomplished in part because what’s typically called federal Indian law is hardly a systematic set of statutes. Instead, according to d’Errico, it’s what mid-20th-century U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter called ​“a vast hodge-podge” and covers all areas of Indigenous life and activity with a massive array of U.S. court decisions, laws, executive orders and agency regulations that have piled up over the years in a disorderly and improvised fashion.

Kent McNeil, a professor emeritus at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto, calls d’Errico’s Federal Anti-Indian Law ​“a frontal attack on the whole field of American law pertaining to Indigenous peoples.” He lauds it as a ​“must-read” for those wanting to understand what motivates any claims that the dispossession of Indigenous people has been legally sound. Similarly, Robert Maxim, a senior research associate at the Brookings Institution and a Mashpee Wampanoag tribal citizen, hails the book as ​“important and enlightening for all people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike.”

Throughout the chaos, the application of U.S. law to Indigenous people has had an unflinching goal: theft.

By marginalizing Indigenous peoples and their rights under their treaties — and, since 1924, as full citizens of the United States — federal anti-Indian law has served the rich and powerful. These include the earliest American leaders. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and many others profited handsomely. And they knew they had to work fast: According to Washington, anyone ​“who neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good lands … will never regain it.”

The United States, writes d’Errico, is ​“a land office business,” all about profiting off land. Or, as Washington warned: You snooze, you lose.

Our first president’s maxim is still true today. When I wrote ​“How the U.S. Government Is Helping Corporations Plunder Native Land” for In These Times in 2016, the article was about a Navajo family that was struggling to shut down an oil pipeline that had been crossing its land for decades. Meanwhile, non-Native companies and individuals throughout Indian country were profiting off Native land to the tune of billions of dollars as they grazed animals, planted crops, felled timber, dug up minerals, extracted oil and gas and more.

D’Errico’s writing is informed by his experiences starting in the late 1960s as an attorney for the primarily Navajo clients of the nonprofit legal service, Diné be’iiná Náhiiłna be Agha’ diit’ahii, which was located on the Navajo Nation at the time. He continues to this day to litigate Indigenous cases, including on behalf of Native prisoners’ freedom of religion, Mashpee Wampanoag fishing rights and Western Shoshone land rights. A graduate of Yale Law School, he co-founded the legal studies department at UMass-Amherst and taught there for 30 years.

The Supreme Court has long provided legal cover for those who wish to wrest land and resources from Indigenous peoples. In the early 1800s, the court declared in three opinions—Johnson v. McIntosh, Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia and Worcester v. State of Georgia—that Native peoples did not, in fact, own their land but were mere ​“occupants” if Christians had ​“discovered” it; that Native nations were ​“wards” of the United States; and that the United States had ​“ultimate dominion” over all Native land and peoples.

The opinions’ primary author was Chief Justice John Marshall. A devout Christian, he ignored the Constitution’s imperative to separate church and state. He pointed to Christianity as the rationale for dominion and — after religious conversion of ​“heathen” Natives — the compensation for their losses.

Marshall knew he was on shaky ground. D’Errico quotes him conceding that the claims of one opinion were ​“pretensions” that existed ​“nowhere else.” This was not ordinary law, but the suspension of law, d’Errico says. Marshall had carved out an exception to property law, proclaiming that Natives, as inferior people, had ​“diminutive rights”: They might inhabit land but did not own it.

The opinions had an historical model. Fifteenth-century papal bulls directed Christian monarchs to ​“invade, conquer, fight, subjugate” lands owned by non-Christians and reduce the inhabitants to ​“perpetual servitude.” The bulls described colonization as a transaction: salvation for those Christians who contributed money or combat skills and excommunication for those found taking anything ​“except expenses and salaries.” The bulls also described map coordinates establishing which nations owned what discovered, or ​“hitherto undiscovered,” land.

Marshall knew he was on shaky ground. D’Errico quotes him conceding that the claims of one opinion were “pretensions” that existed “nowhere else.”
In March 2023, the Vatican tried to wriggle out of accountability for colonization’s devastating and ongoing effects on Native communities. Two Vatican departments — for Culture and Education and for Promoting Integral Human Development — announced in a joint statement that the papal bulls ​“were manipulated for political purposes by competing colonial powers in order to justify immoral acts against Indigenous peoples.”

No way, says d’Errico: ​“The bulls were explicit marching orders to conquer and convert.” Nevertheless, he welcomed the attention the Joint Statement brought to Indigenous issues — despite the problematic claims.

The Vatican’s press office responded to In These Times’s request for comments and clarifications by pointing to a Vatican News interview in which Cardinal Michael Czerny expressed sorrow for the ongoing effects of colonization, saying that ​“the Holy Father condemned in the strongest terms any imposition by one culture over another.” Czerny also dismissed the church’s historical violent language about Indigenous people as comparable to what the church was saying at the time about women, Jews and others.

Indigenous peoples have forcefully criticized Marshall’s doctrine. In a 2019 court filing, the Yakama Nation, in Washington State, called it racist, genocidal and ​“a manufactured authority.” In a 1996 brief written by d’Errico, Western Shoshones said it was ​“nowhere sanctioned in the United States Constitution” and ​“wholly contradictory to basic principles of human rights.”

Olivia Maliszewski, a member of the Rappahannock Tribe, who has “Land Back” painted on her face, on November 25, 2021 in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
PHOTO BY BRYAN R. SMITH/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Though Marshall admitted his opinions were ​“opposed to natural right,” he also called them ​“indispensable,” d’Errico writes. The federal government depended on the lawlessness that the opinions authorized in order to burnish its authority over Native lands and peoples.

Tribal citizens died by the thousands after Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, ordering certain tribal nations to trek from their homelands to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. Congress’s 1887 General Allotment Act broke up numerous reservations and transferred portions of them to settlers, destroying age-old communal and seasonal land-use practices. The mid-1800s to the late 1900s featured another kind of annihilation: Native youngsters were required to attend notoriously violent boarding schools where staff tried to beat their languages and cultures out of them.

Decades after the Marshall opinions, Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock and other high court decisions went even further, proclaiming Congress’s plenary — or absolute — power over Native peoples. As a result, Native peoples were not just subordinate to the federal government but also dependent on politicians’ unpredictable ambitions and deal-making. This was not because their treaties or the Constitution said so, but because the Supreme Court did.

Marshall was a land speculator as well as a judge, according to d’Errico. Thanks to a passage concerning Kentucky in one of Marshall’s opinions, he and his family established ownership of 600,000 acres there. Navajo attorney Roberta Carol Harvey looks at the merciless application of domination to timber resources in another book published in 2022, The Iron Triangle: Business, Government, and Colonial Settlers’ Dispossession of Indian Timberlands and Timber. Meticulously researched, Harvey’s book details a litany of crimes — forgery, lies, bribery, collusion, massacres, private wars of extermination and much more — that business and political leaders committed as they amassed colossal sums by deforesting enormous expanses.

Decades after the Marshall opinions, Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock and other high court decisions went even further, proclaiming Congress’s plenary—or absolute—power over Native peoples. As a result, Native peoples were not just subordinate to the federal government but also dependent on politicians’ unpredictable ambitions and deal-making.
“Corruption was part and parcel of the extravagant pretension of Christian discovery,” d’Errico writes. Another way to think about it: Moneychangers are welcome in this temple!

Liberals have been as eager as conservatives to utilize Marshall’s views of domination and the resultant dispossession of Native peoples. The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg referenced the Marshall canon in writing a 2005 opinion on an Oneida Nation matter. Like many contemporary justices, she left out Marshall’s original assertion that Christianity was the justification for dispossession. The 15th century religious foundations of U.S. ownership of its lands are now ​“embarrassing” and are typically ​“concealed” by judges and attorneys, d’Errico writes.

The Supreme Court is still at it, according to d’Errico. He recounts the court’s recent decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma, a dispute about jurisdiction over crimes that had occurred on the Muscogee Nation, which is within Oklahoma’s borders. The state claimed it had jurisdiction because, in its view, the United States had acted over the years to disestablish the Native nation, breaking up its original communal land ownership in favor of individual ownership, eliminating portions of its government and more. The Muscogee Nation countered that it had suffered ​“insults” but still existed.

The case made its way to the Supreme Court, which found, in 2020, that the Muscogee Nation did exist but only because Congress had not explicitly disestablished it. So, the tribal nation had jurisdiction over the crimes in question. Curiously, reports d’Errico, ​“lots of people were thrilled.” They apparently did not understand that McGirt was not a win for Native sovereignty but a warning: The Muscogee Nation existed because Congress had not yet exercised its absolute power to demolish it.

“Congress could do the dirty deed whenever it wished,” d’Errico writes.

Schumer announces Senate hearings to ‘expose’ GOP debt limit bill starting this week

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Monday announced the Senate will hold hearings to “expose the true impact” of House Republicans’ proposal to lift the debt ceiling.

Schumer in a letter to lawmakers called the Default on America Act (DOA), which passed the Republican-majority House last week, “hastily drafted” and a “hard-right ransom note to the American people.” The bill is dead-on-arrival in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

“The Senate will show the public what this bill truly is. Beginning this week, our Committees will begin to hold hearings to expose the true impact of this reckless legislation on everyday Americans,” Schumer said.

The Budget Committee will hold a hearing on the DOA on Thursday, titled “The Default on America Act: Blackmail, Brinkmanship, and Billionaire Backroom Deals.”

The Republicans’ proposal offers just two choices, Schumer argued: “either default on the debt or default on America, forcing steep cuts to law enforcement, veterans, families, teachers, and kids. Democrats will not allow it.”

Republicans and Democrats are locked in tense debate over how to address the debt ceiling and the threat of a default, which could hit as soon as June if the borrowing limit isn’t raised.

Haley calls for Feinstein to resign: ‘Prime example’ of need for mental competency tests
The White House has insisted on a “clean” increase — while the House Republican bill would raise the debt ceiling and cut spending.

“Speaker McCarthy has surrendered to the far-right extremist members of his caucus and the DOA is their crown jewel. In backrooms, they pulled together a slew of unpatriotic and harmful policies that would take the country backwards,” Schumer said in the letter.

“Lets be perfectly clear: The Republican Default on America Act does nothing to actually resolve the looming debt crisis, and it has no hope of ever becoming law. If anything, the MAGA House Republicans’ actions have increased the likelihood of default.”

A new bill aims to protect children from companies with a track record of exploitation

NPR Interview with Greg Cassar

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

The Biden administration is making big changes to immigration policies in the country. Last Thursday, they announced measures that include ramping up deportations for migrants entering illegally and new processing centers in Guatemala and Colombia. But some lawmakers also want crackdowns in the U.S. labor market. They say many underage migrant children are being exploited by corporations, especially food production companies.

One of those policy makers is Representative Greg Casar, a Democrat from Texas. On Tuesday, he introduced a bill called the Child Labor Exploitation Accountability Act. He joins us now. Welcome to the program.

GREG CASAR: Thanks so much for having me.

RASCOE: So before we dive into the bill, I want to get your reaction to the Biden administration’s new immigration announcements that they made.

CASAR: I believe that we need more legal pathways for immigrants and immigrants coming to this country. The Biden administration, I believe, has had a mixed record on this. I don’t think that by having more crackdowns against innocent families that are just coming here for a better life, that we’re really going to turn out much better. But some of the Biden administration’s steps to have more legal pathways and orderly ways for folks to come here – I think that that’s a step in the right direction. We need to see a change from top Republican officials if we want to see something happen.

And so I believe that the Biden administration needs to move forward as much as they can on their own to provide legal and safe pathways for immigrating here. If we have legal pathways for immigrants to be able to work not in the underground market, but work on a level playing field with everybody else, then it’ll be easier for them to assert their rights when they’re being exploited like we’re seeing by these big meatpacking companies and other large corporations.

RASCOE: Well, let’s dig into that briefly. Your bill aims to prevent the Department of Agriculture from engaging in contracts with companies that have committed egregious labor law violations, especially employing minors and having them work in dangerous conditions. So how would your bill make sure that that actually happens?

CASAR: Kids belong in the classroom, not on a factory floor. This bill would end U.S. Department of Agriculture contracts with these egregious violators. If they have continued and repeated violations, we could ultimately revoke their licenses. And so if these megacorporations know that their profits could take a hit, then guess what? We’ll see less illegal child labor if the corporations know they’ll actually be held accountable.

RASCOE: But I guess my question is, a lot of these violations will happen off the books. And, you know, we’ve talked to experts, and they say part of the issue is that the government doesn’t necessarily know that these violations are happening. Do we have the resources to even know and police whether these violations are happening?

CASAR: The Department of Labor needs more resources and staffing so that they can go and find out about these violations. But even when they do find out about the violations, the big corporations at the top of the food chain wipe their hands clean and they say that it’s their contractors or subcontractors that are exploiting child labor or have unsafe working conditions.

RASCOE: And so, I mean, I guess – so how exactly would that happen? The contractor would have to be found to have been in violation by some authority, and then they would alert the USDA so that they could take action on the contracts. Is that how that would work?

CASAR: That’s right. We have required in the bill that any labor violation that is found has to be reported to the federal government. And so one of the potential labor violations is intimidating or retaliating against workers that speak out. We need stronger whistleblower protections for those workers. Sometimes folks that exploit immigrant workers say, we’re going to call immigration on you if you speak up about unsafe working conditions. And the Biden administration just announced that we can now provide protections for those immigrant workers to say, no, you’re not going to get deported if you speak up about what’s happening on the job.

RASCOE: In Arkansas last month, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law that’s going to make it easier for teens as young as 14 to work without getting a permit. And other Republicans are looking to loosen child labor laws. They’re citing the tight labor market. Is your bill in response or also in response to these kind of changes?

CASAR: In response to the massive increase in child labor – there’s two ways to respond to that. You could either be on the side of the megacorporations or on the side of the kids. My bill is to protect the kids because these big companies are going to be all right if they have to pay a decent wage, if they have to respect union rights and not put kids in dangerous situations, they’re going to still be able to sell their food products. But they shouldn’t be able to make record profits while using child labor, while having unsafe working conditions.

RASCOE: That’s Representative Greg Casar from Texas. Thank you so much for speaking with us.

CASAR: Thank you so much, Ayesha.

woah! i knew desantis was in trouble, but this is the kiss of death. pic.twitter.com/fNPeT39Ahl

— mike casca (@cascamike) May 1, 2023

I’m not certain if Casca is referring to the WSJ itself for pushing moderation or that Mark Penn wrote that op-ed.