A writer must “know and have an ever-present consciousness that this world is a world of fools and rogues… tormented with envy, consumed with vanity; selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions… He should free himself of all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, politics…” —Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?). “The nobility of the writer's occupation lies in resisting oppression, thus in accepting isolation” —Albert Camus (1913-1960). “What are you gonna do” —Bertha Brown (1895-1987).
Labels
- pensions
- drumpf
- IL politics
- COVID-19
- brown favorites
- Mammon
- elections
- teachers' letters
- Retrumplicons
- social justice
- sundry
- eco/genocide
- HCR
- TRS
- pension analyses
- Ukraine
- American Racism
- college adjuncts
- ed reform
- healthcare
- unions
- Alzheimer's
- self-defense
- Schooldemic
- God
- poets
- Domestic Terrorists
- fair solutions
- Scotus
- songs
- fair taxation
- speeches
- books
- COLA
- January 6th
- animal injustice/justice
- higher ed
- miss you
- humor
- poisoning children
- Hartmann
- mcconnell
- Joyce Vance
- Israeli Palestinian War
- Buyer Beware
- CPS/CTU
- Pharma Greed
- blogging
- GB Photographs
- charter schools
- GPO/WEP
- scams
- Lists
- grandsons
- masks
- DB v. DC
- baseball
- curricula
- poetry
- space
- Dylan
- Giroux
- Injustice
- Camus
- Roe v. Wade
- Beatles
- CBF v. BK
- sculpture
- Censorship
- MP
- USPS
- Priest Abuse
- United Nations
- Zimet
- Boycott
- granddaughter
- Christmas
- Kamala
- cats
- zorn v. brown
- Lightfoot
- Poems
Sunday, December 31, 2023
Tuesday, December 26, 2023
Looking for something positive to celebrate on New Year’s Eve? Consider lifting a glass to the hardworking people behind these inspiring victories of 2023
1. The ‘Year of the Strike’
More than half a million American workers
walked off the job this year. In October, companies lost more workdays to
strikes than in any month during the past 40 years.
Big 3 auto workers, Hollywood writers
and actors, Las Vegas and Los Angeles hotel staff, and Kaiser Permanente health
care employees were among those who used strikes to score big bargaining table
wins. For UPS drivers, the mere threat of a Teamsters strike
was enough to secure historic wage hikes and safety
protections.
After renewing contracts with
Ford, GM, Stellantis, and UPS, the UAW and the Teamsters doubled down on
efforts to organize the unorganized. The Teamsters picketed outside 25 Amazon warehouses, demanding a fair contract for
unionized drivers at a California-based delivery service for the notoriously
anti-union retailer. The UAW set their sights on non-unionized car companies,
causing so much indigestion among Nissan, Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai
executives that they immediately hiked wages for their U.S.
employees.
2. Black worker organizing in the south
To move the needle on the country’s
dismally low 6 percent unionization rate, the
labor movement will need to make inroads in tough territory, particularly in
historically anti-union southern states that have been magnets for
investment.
Two union victories in 2023 are the
latest proof that this goal is not impossible. The United Steelworkers won an
election at a Blue Bird bus factory in Georgia with
nearly 1,500 predominantly Black workers. In three Alabama cities, AT&T Mobility workers at In Home
Expert hubs joined the Communications Workers of America.
3. A crack in the anti-union tech sector
The past year also saw union progress
in another historically union-averse territory: the tech sector. Earlier this
month, Microsoft forged an agreement with the AFL-CIO
to remain neutral in organizing drives among their U.S.-based workers.
This will make it easier for about 100,000 Microsoft employees to
unionize, with potential ripple effects across the industry.
4. New trifecta states
In Michigan and Minnesota, pro-worker
state legislators hit the ground running after Democrats won state trifectas in
2022.
Minnesota passed a blizzard of pro-labor reforms, including paid
sick leave for most workers, minimum pay and benefits for nursing home staff,
and wage theft protections for construction workers. Teachers will be able to
negotiate over class sizes and nurses will have a greater say in staffing
levels. The new laws also ban non-compete agreements and “captive audience”
meetings designed to undercut union support.
This year Michigan became the first state in six
decades to roll back anti-union “right-to-work” laws. They also restored a
“prevailing wage” law requiring construction contractors to pay union wages and
benefits on state-funded projects.
5. Cities lead the way on low-wage worker protections
The federal minimum wage for tipped
workers has been stuck at $2.13 since 1991. In that vacuum, states and cities
are taking action. This year, restaurant servers and other advocates in the
nation’s capital successfully beat back last-ditch industry attempts to
undercut a victorious 2022 ballot initiative to phase out the local subminimum
tipped wage. After a multi-year, hard-fought campaign, DC’s tipped workers got
their first raise this past summer, putting them on track to earn the full
local minimum wage by 2027. The Chicago City Council also passed a five-year
tipped wage phaseout plan, set to begin in 2024.
App-based delivery drivers in New York
City had to fight back in 2023 against Uber, DoorDash,
and other corporations’ efforts to block introduction of the nation’s first
minimum wage for their occupation. Gig companies finally lost their legal
challenges to the pay rule in late November. Delivery driver pay rose to $17.96
an hour on December 4 and will increase to $19.96 when the legislation takes
full effect in 2025.
6. College campuses as labor hotbeds
Organizing among graduate and medical
students continued to explode in 2023, with the highest number of union elections among
these groups than in any year since the 1990s. In the first four months of 2023
alone, over 14,000 graduate students on five
campuses voted to join the United Electrical union — all by margins of over 80
percent. Campuses across the country coordinated organizing efforts through a
series of teach-ins and other events under the banner of Labor
Spring, an initiative that will continue in 2024.
7. Stock buyback blowback
Many of the labor battles of 2023
skewered corporate executives for underpaying workers while blowing money on
stock buybacks, a financial maneuver that artificially inflates CEO stock-based
pay. Two precedent-setting federal policies to rein in buybacks also took
effect in 2023. For the first time, corporations faced a one percent excise tax on buybacks. The Biden
administration also began giving companies a leg up in the competition for new
semiconductor subsidies if they agree to forgo all stock buybacks for five years.
This important precedent should be expanded to all companies
receiving any form of public funds.
8. Collective bargaining requirements on federally funded construction
projects
With megabillions in new public
investment flowing into infrastructure projects, it’s critical that the
administration ensure these taxpayer dollars support good jobs. This week,
Biden officials took an important step forward by finalizing regulations requiring the use of
“project labor agreements” between employers and workers for large federal
construction projects. The terms of these pre-hire collective bargaining
agreements must cover all parties — contractors, subcontractors, and unions. This
important rule should be expanded beyond construction to
contractors that provide goods and other services.
9. Trashing “junk” fees
Working class Americans fork out tens
of billions of dollars every year on deceptive, hidden charges that raise the
cost of banking and internet services, concerts and movies, rental cars and
apartments, and more. In October, President Joe Biden announced a plan to put these “junk fees” where they belong —
in the trash.
Under the plan, the Federal Trade
Commission aims to force companies to disclose the total price of goods and
services up front and slap violators with big fines. This will mean no hidden
fees — and more money in working families’ pockets.
10. NLRB rulings on Amazon and Starbucks
Anyone wondering whether our labor
laws need fixing need look no further than the fact that Starbucks and Amazon have been able to get
away with refusing to negotiate with workers who voted to unionize for well
more than a year. (Two years for the path-breaking Buffalo, New
York Starbucks workers). On the positive side, Biden appointees at the National
Labor Relations Board seem to be making the most of their current authority and
capacity.
In August, the labor board
issued a ruling that will make union-busting
harder in cases where a majority of workers have signed union cards but the
employer still demands an election. Under the ruling, bosses who engage in
unfair labor practices in these situations will now be forced to recognize and
bargain with the union without an election.
In the meantime, the NLRB is
continuing to try to hold Starbucks and Amazon accountable for rampant labor
rights violations. The board has 240 open or settled charges against Amazon in
26 states and they’ve issued more than 100 complaints against Starbucks, covering
hundreds of accusations of threats or retaliation against union supporters and
failure to bargain in good faith. Most recently, the NLRB ordered the reopening
of 23 Starbucks cafes, alleging the company had closed them to suppress union
activity, in violation of federal law.
Reflecting on 2023, Starbucks barista and union organizer Shep Searl marveled
at how diverse workers, “from Teamsters to actors,” demonstrated that there are
many ways to win through collective action.
“Every day, we’ve been absorbing that
information and utilizing it in our mobilization and escalation plan,” Searl
told Inequality.org. “We aren’t going anywhere and so much of that is inspired
by the other campaigns. If we stand together, there’s no mountain we cannot
climb.”
Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project and co-edits
Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Source URL: https://portside.org/2023-12-25/10-victories-working-class-2023
Friday, December 22, 2023
Readers of Today’s World View may agree that it’s been a grim year
In Ukraine, a grinding counteroffensive against Russia’s
invasion lurched into a bleak stalemate. In the Middle East, a
decades-old conflict exploded into an unprecedented, high-intensity war in the
Gaza Strip. The bulk of the territory’s inhabitants have been driven from their
homes, some 20,000 Palestinians have been killed in a matter of weeks, and a
quarter of Gaza’s population is “starving,” according to the United Nations, which warned Thursday that the risk of
famine in the territory is “increasing each day.”
“It doesn’t get any worse,” Arif Husain, chief economist
for the United Nations World Food Program, told reporters. “I have never seen
something at the scale that is happening in Gaza. And at this speed.”
While
these two wars consumed the attention of major global news outlets (and this
daily newsletter) for much of 2023, other crises smoldered on. In Sudan and
Myanmar, ruinous
civil wars, marked by myriad atrocities and reports of war crimes, are collapsing
already dysfunctional states and provoking spiraling
humanitarian crises. Over a wide swath of sub-Saharan Africa, coups
and power grabs roiled the
region. Social instability and post-pandemic economic pressures fueled
surges in migration across the world.
2023
will probably be
the hottest year on record, with heat waves scourging every continent,
accompanied by other extreme climactic events. Droughts and floods were both
more acute — the most viscerally shocking moment came arguably in September,
when heavy rains led to the failure of dams and flash floods that killed more
than 11,000 in northeastern Libya. “This disaster is of mythic proportions,” a
Libyan health official told my
colleagues at the time.
In the face of such calamity, one would hope that the new year
would bring better news. But, as your humble harbinger of bad tidings, I have to
apologize: There’s a lot that can go wrong in 2024, and many crises that will
get worse.
The
war in Gaza is reaching a dangerous tipping point. While Israeli officials vow
a long campaign, the current fighting is pushing Gaza’s 2.2 million people to
the brink. The territory is the deadliest place in the world to be a civilian.
Before Oct. 7, when the militant group Hamas launched its strike on southern
Israel, 80 percent of Gaza’s population required humanitarian assistance. Now,
everyone does, and barely a trickle of what’s needed is getting into the besieged
territory. Aid organizations and myriad world leaders are calling for a
cease-fire and a surge of relief aid into Gaza. But absent a cessation of
hostilities, the war could convulse the region, bringing in anti-Israel
factions based in Lebanon and Syria, and spawning an unprecedented flow of
Palestinian refugees into Egypt.
In its annual
“emergency watch list” published this month, the International Rescue
Committee ranked the conflict in Israel and the occupied Palestinian
territories as the second most glaring crisis to watch in 2024. The first was
the far-less-discussed civil war in Sudan, where eight months of fighting
between the country’s military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have
left more than half the country in need of humanitarian aid and forced some 6
million people from their homes. Some 19 million children are without education
as the conflict has shuttered thousands of schools.
“Sudan
has become the world’s largest displacement crisis,” the IRC’s Elshafie Mohamed
Ahmed said in the
report. “The ability to deliver aid is hindered by the lack of
humanitarian access and funds. The ethnic, tribal and regional polarization of
the current war is further threatening the limited access currently available.”
Africa
is home to the bulk of the other potential hot spots, as listed by the IRC. Three “coup belt” nations
in West Africa — the junta-led states of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger — are all
in the rankings. The Burkinabe military is floundering in the face of a surge
in Islamist militancy, with renegade factions controlling more than half the
country. In Mali and Niger, where similar dynamics are on show, growing food
insecurity and the drying up of foreign aid are plunging millions toward
greater peril.
The
IRC’s 10 “watch list” nations account for 86 percent of all people in
humanitarian need globally. Lurking behind the political instability consuming
these societies is the specter of a warming planet, as droughts and other
climate shocks affect some of the world’s most vulnerable communities. “What
were once separate circles of crisis are now a Venn diagram with an expanding
intersection,” wrote IRC
President David Miliband. “Three decades ago, 44% of conflicts happened
in climate-vulnerable states. Now that figure is 67%.”
The
Biden administration has most successfully held the line in shoring up Western
support for Ukraine’s resistance to Russian aggression. But its scope for
action will be constrained in a divisive election year, and even Washington’s
capacity to fund Kyiv is in doubt — let alone its ability to get its arms
around myriad crises elsewhere, from Somalia to Afghanistan to gang-dominated
Haiti, teetering on the verge of state collapse.
In
Asia, an election in Taiwan may be marked by new provocations from China at a
time when the Biden administration is trying to bring some stability to its
relationship with Beijing. But the biggest conflagration could take place in
Myanmar, where the ruling junta is reeling from an offensive launched by a
coalition of rebel militias and seeing mounting desertion in its ranks.
The current trajectory, however, “does not point towards a near-term regime collapse on the battlefield, absent unforeseen developments,” noted Morgan Michaels, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “Myanmar is instead headed towards a new phase of the conflict, marked by a weakened but still dangerous regime, more intense violence and greater uncertainty.”
-Ishaan Tharoor and Sammy
Westfall for the Washington Post
Wednesday, December 20, 2023
Why 14th Amendment bars Trump from office: A constitutional law scholar explains principle behind Colorado Supreme Court ruling
In 2024, former President Donald Trump will face some of his
greatest challenges: criminal court cases, primary opponents and constitutional
challenges to his eligibility to hold the office of president again. The
Colorado Supreme Court has pushed that latter piece to the forefront, ruling on
Dec. 19, 2023, that Trump cannot appear on Colorado’s 2024 presidential ballot because of his involvement
in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
The
reason is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868,
three years after the Civil War ended. Section 3 of that amendment wrote into
the Constitution the principle President Abraham Lincoln set out just three
months after the first shots were fired in the Civil War. On July 4, 1861, he
spoke to Congress, declaring that “when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.”
The
text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states, in full:
“No person
shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and
Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States,
or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of
Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State
legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support
the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or
rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But
Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
To
me as a scholar of constitutional law, each sentence and sentence fragment captures the commitment
made by the nation in the wake of the Civil War to govern by constitutional
politics. People seeking political and constitutional changes must play by the
rules set out in the Constitution. In a democracy, people cannot substitute
force, violence or intimidation for persuasion, coalition building and voting.
The
power of the ballot
The first words of Section 3 describe
various offices that people can only hold if they satisfy the constitutional
rules for election or appointment. The Republicans who wrote the amendment
repeatedly declared that Section 3 covered all offices established by the Constitution.
That included the presidency, a point many participants in framing, ratifying
and implementation debates over constitutional disqualification made
explicitly, as documented in the records of debate in the 39th Congress,
which wrote and passed the amendment.
Senators, representatives and
presidential electors are spelled out because some doubt existed when the amendment was debated in
1866 as to whether they were officers of the United States,
although they were frequently referred to as such in the course of
congressional debates.
No one can hold any of the offices
enumerated in Section 3 without the power of the ballot. They can only hold
office if they are voted into it – or nominated and confirmed by people who
have been voted into office. No office mentioned in the first clause of Section
3 may be achieved by force, violence or intimidation.
A
required oath
The next words in Section 3 describe
the oath “to support [the] Constitution” that Article 6 of the Constitution requires
all office holders in the United States to take.
The people who wrote Section 3
insisted during congressional debates that anyone who took an oath of office,
including the president, were subject to Section 3’s rules. The
presidential oath’s wording is
slightly different from that of other federal officers, but
everyone in the federal government swears to uphold the Constitution before
being allowed to take office.
These oaths bind officeholders to
follow all the rules in the Constitution. The only legitimate government
officers are those who hold their offices under the constitutional rules.
Lawmakers must follow the Constitution’s rules for making laws. Officeholders
can only recognize laws that were made by following the rules – and they must
recognize all such laws as legitimate.
This provision of the amendment
ensures that their oaths of office obligate officials to govern by voting
rather than violence.
Defining
disqualification
Section
3 then says people can be disqualified from holding office if they “engaged in
insurrection or rebellion.” Legal authorities from the American Revolution to
the post-Civil War Reconstruction understood an insurrection to have occurred
when two or more people resisted a federal law by
force or violence for a public, or civic, purpose.
Shay’s
Rebellion, the Whiskey Insurrection, Burr’s Rebellion, John Brown’s Raid and
other events were insurrections,
even when the goal was not overturning the government.
What
these events had in common was that people were trying to prevent the
enforcement of laws that were consequences of persuasion, coalition building
and voting. Or they were trying to create new laws by force, violence and
intimidation.
These
words in the amendment declare that those who turn to bullets when ballots fail
to provide their desired result cannot be trusted as democratic officials. When
applied specifically to the events on Jan. 6, 2021, the amendment declares that
those who turn to violence when voting goes against them cannot hold office in
a democratic nation.
A chance at clemency
The
last sentence of Section 3 announces that forgiveness is possible. It says
“Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability” –
the ineligibility of individuals or categories of people to hold office because
of having participated in an insurrection or rebellion.
For
instance, Congress might remove the restriction on office-holding based on
evidence that the insurrectionist was genuinely contrite. It did so for
repentant former Confederate General James
Longstreet.
Or
Congress might conclude in retrospect that violence was appropriate, such as
against particularly unjust laws. Given their powerful anti-slavery commitments
and abolitionist roots, I believe that Republicans in the House and Senate in
the late 1850s would almost certainly have allowed people who violently
resisted the fugitive slave laws to hold office again. This provision of the
amendment says that bullets may substitute for ballots and violence for voting
only in very unusual circumstances.
A clear
conclusion
Taken
as a whole, the structure of Section 3 leads to the conclusion that Donald
Trump is one of those past or present government officials who by violating his
oath of allegiance to the constitutional rules has forfeited his right to
present and future office.
Trump’s supporters say the
president is neither an “officer under the United States” nor an “officer of the United States” as
specified in Section 3. Therefore, they say, he is exempt from its provisions.
But
in fact, both common sense and history demonstrate that Trump was an officer,
an officer of the United States and an officer under the United States for
constitutional purposes. Most people, even lawyers and constitutional scholars
like me, do not distinguish between those specific phrases in ordinary
discourse. The people who framed and ratified Section 3 saw no distinction.
Exhaustive research by Trump supporters has yet to produce a single assertion
to the contrary that was made in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Yet scholars John Vlahoplus and Gerard Magliocca are
daily producing newspaper and other reports asserting that presidents are
covered by Section 3.
Significant
numbers of Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate agreed that Donald Trump violated his oath of office immediately before, during and immediately after the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
Most Republican senators who voted against his conviction did so on the grounds
that they did not have the power to convict a president who was no longer in office. Most of them
did not dispute that Trump participated in an insurrection. A judge in Colorado also found that Trump “engaged in insurrection,”
which was the basis for the state’s Supreme Court ruling barring him from the
ballot.
Constitutional
democracy is rule by law. Those who have demonstrated their rejection of rule
by law may not apply, no matter their popularity. Jefferson Davis participated
in an insurrection against the United States in 1861. He was not eligible to
become president of the U.S. four years later, or to hold any other state or
federal office ever again. If Davis was barred from office, then the conclusion
must be that Trump is too – as a man who participated in an insurrection
against the United States in 2021.
-Mark A. Graber,
University System of Maryland Regents Professor of Law, University of Maryland