TRUMP AGENDA - Corporations Profiting From Immigrant Detainees’ Labor

"Investigation: Corporations Are Profiting From Immigrant Detainees’ Labor.  Some Say It’s Slavery." by Victoria Law, In These Times 5/29/2018

IMHO:  It IS slavery!

Excerpt

At privately run detention centers, immigrants say they're forced to work for $1 a day.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP VOWED IN MARCH, “My administration will focus on ending the absolutely horrific practice of human trafficking.  And I am prepared to bring the full force and weight of our government, whatever we can do, in order to solve this horrific problem.”

Trump is using this specter of human trafficking to justify beefed-up border walls and a vicious crackdown on immigrants.  Experts say his cure has nothing to do with the disease.

“It’s a fantasy, what the President is promising,” says Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an associate professor at George Mason University who studies trafficking in Mexico and Central America.  “People will still come, escaping poverty and violence.  Trafficking happens when they are forced to work along the route—drug smuggling, sex work.  By increasing border enforcement, you’re just making the journey more expensive and longer, and making people more vulnerable to traffickers.”

But some people caught in this sweep say that the federal crackdown itself subjects them to another, pernicious form of trafficking.  They say the corporations that operate immigrant detention facilities illegally force detainees to work.  There’s reason to believe thousands of the roughly 35,000 people in immigrant detention are currently being coerced into labor.

Under federal law, human trafficking is defined as subjection to involuntary labor through “force, fraud or coercion.”  Within the past year, four lawsuits have been filed by seven people who say they were victims of trafficking at the hands of the nation’s two largest private detention center operators: CoreCivic and GEO Group.  The suits charge that at five CoreCivic facilities and one GEO Group facility, the corporations violated the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act by threatening solitary confinement or withholding basic necessities, such as food, toilet paper and soap, if detainees refused to work.  According to the lawsuits, the companies did so to reduce labor costs and maximize profits.

The four new suits join one already wending its way through the court system.  Filed in 2014 against GEO Group, the suit was certified as a class action this February.  Approximately 62,000 people currently or previously detained in a GEO Group facility in Colorado might have been affected.

Each of these five lawsuits concerns the Voluntary Work Program, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) program that puts detainees to work for $1 a day.

“The name ‘Voluntary Work Program’ is misleading since, in most cases, it actually means forced labor,” says Liz Martinez, director of advocacy and strategic communications at Freedom for Immigrants, a nonprofit working to abolish immigrant detention.  Noting that detained people are wholly dependent upon detention staff for basics such as food, toilet paper and even time outside, “the detention facilities create an inhospitable atmosphere that incentivizes people to join these Voluntary Work Programs,” she explains.

Asked about the size of the Voluntary Work Program, ICE spokesperson Danielle Bennett wrote, “Voluntary Work Programs currently exist at the five government-owned Service Processing Centers (SPCs) and at over 25 privately run facilities.”  Bennett would not clarify what “over 25” meant.  A 2014 New York Times investigation by Ian Urbina found that 55 U.S. detention centers had Voluntary Work Programs, 34 of which were run by private corporations.

Though only privately run detention centers have been named in the lawsuits, advocates don’t rule out the existence of forced labor in government-run facilities.  “In county jails and other public facilities, they’re also put to work,” says Martinez.  Not all of that labor falls under the Voluntary Work Program.  Urbina found that Butler County Jail in Ohio, for instance, is not a formal participant, but approximately 50 of the 300 immigrants detained under the jail’s contract with ICE clean and perform maintenance.  A county representative told Urbina that utilizing unpaid immigrant labor means the jail does not need to hire outside janitorial workers, saving the county hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

However, lawsuits have targeted privately run detention centers because of the number of reported violations, as well as the outrage surrounding the fact that corporations and shareholders are profiting from this labor.

WORKING FOR $1 A DAY AND SANITARY NAPKINS

Martha Gonzalez was already a trafficking survivor.  Fleeing an abusive relationship in Mexico, she hired coyotes to bring her and her daughter across the border, and was forced into sex work after the coyotes threatened them with violence.

In October 2017, after 14 months in ICE custody, Gonzalez was released and issued a T-1 visa, reserved for trafficking victims.  Now, she is demanding restitution from CoreCivic.  In February, she sued the company for labor trafficking.

Gonzalez spent those 14 months being shuttled through three of CoreCivic's Texas detention centers, in La Salle County, Hutto and Laredo.  At both Hutto and Laredo, she says, prison officials verbally abused detainees, threatened them with solitary confinement and deprived them of basic necessities in order to coerce them into working seven days a week.  For instance, Gonzalez tells In These Times, if she tried to take a day off, detention center staff refused her toothpaste and other essentials.  When she was menstruating, they limited her sanitary napkins to two per day unless she worked.

5,532:
DAILY POPULATION IN U.S. IMMIGRANT DETENTION CENTERS IN 1994
39,322:
DAILY POPULATION IN U.S. IMMIGRANT DETENTION CENTERS IN 2017
Though the suit doesn’t specify how many others were allegedly threatened into working, Gonzalez says she wasn’t the only one who suffered retaliation for refusing to work.  She also alleges that the paltry wages sometimes went unpaid, thus depriving her of the means to stay in touch with her family.  In 2016, she filed a formal complaint about not being paid for some of the days she had worked.  In retaliation, she says, staff didn’t allow her to work at all.  Without that $1 a day, Gonzalez could not afford phone cards to call her daughter and mother.  Calls from CoreCivic’s Texas detention centers typically cost 50 cents per minute.

Gonzalez and her attorney are seeking class-action status on behalf of every detainee who worked for no pay or $1 or $2 per day at any CoreCivic detention facility from February 2007 onward.  It’s not yet known how many people could become part of this lawsuit if the court agrees, but her complaint estimates the number to be in the thousands or tens of thousands.  Gonzalez wants the court to force CoreCivic to stop the practice.  She and her attorney are also seeking minimum wage payments for labor performed while detained.

ECONOMY - The Rot at the Core

"The Stock Market Crash Reveals the Rot at the Core of Our Economic System" by Matthew Cunningham-Cook, In These Times 2/13/2018

Feb. 5 saw the steepest stock market decline in six and half years, and the largest one-day point decline in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.  Last week saw the worst week on Wall Street in two years.  The precipitous fall follows the recent so-called “Trump rally,” where stock market values inched to their highest level since World War II.

While this downturn may not spell an immediate crisis for capitalism, it does further reveal the rot at the core of the system.  The largest financial firms can profit from sudden fluctuations in the market—while ordinary investors such as those with pension funds and 401(k)s are left holding the bag.  This volatility in the market has allowed for more Wall Street ticks to suck at the hog of the roughly $27 trillion in retirement assets held by Americans.

There are a few principles that guide how traders and speculators on Wall Street operate: Buy low and sell high.  Liquidity in the market generates profits.  And use information to your advantage.  Within this framework, a small group of powerful banks dominates Wall Street trading, including JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Many of these powerful financial institutions have been betting that volatility will rise.  The Wall Street Journal reported in April that “banks would suddenly be sitting on huge profits from their volatility insurance” were volatility to increase.  Low volatility in the stock market has hurt the revenue of trading desks such as those at Goldman Sachs by reducing opportunities to exploit spreads in prices.  The largest banks have discretionary control over hundreds of billions of dollars in assets that, through selective buying and selling, can create added volatility in the market.

Goldman, in particular, has a long history of benefiting handsomely from rises in volatility.  During the 2008 financial crisis, Goldman's former Chairman Hank Paulson served as Treasury Secretary while another former Chairman, Stephen Friedman, served as head of the New York Fed—Goldman's primary regulator.  Goldman's former chief lobbyist in London, Joshua Bolten, was White House chief of staff, and another Goldman vet, Neel Kashkari, was a top deputy to Paulson.

At the end of 2006, Goldman began to short the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities market (RMBS).  The eventual collapse of RMBS helped trigger the financial crisis in 2008.

Nearly every bank with exposure to the collapse in the RMBS market was either bailed out by the government or put into an orderly receivership.  The lone exception was the investment bank that was likely the most exposed to the subprime market, Lehman Brothers.  Lehman's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing meant that there would be no aid from the government, and investors holding Lehman RMBS could expect to get just pennies on the dollar.

Every other major bank was deemed by Paulson, Friedman, Bolten, and Kashkari to be 'Too Big To Fail' because of the mortgage crisis, except for Lehman, whose collapse would trigger massive profits for Goldman.  While the pension funds that had purchased Lehman securities lost billions, Goldman made out swimmingly.

Then there's LIBOR, or the London Interbank Offered Rate, which was tied to the value of $800 trillion in securities worldwide.  In 2012, nearly all of the world's major banks were found to have manipulated LIBOR by artificially distorting the data they submitted to set the rate.  Andrew Lo, a professor of finance at MIT, said in 2012 that the scandal “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”

These gambits demonstrate how concentrated power in financial markets allows for the largest institutions to manipulate these markets for their benefit.  And under President Trump, even the most basic levels of securities law enforcement have decreased dramatically.  Law360 reported in November 2017 that enforcement activity had “plunged” since the Trump administration began.

In January, Trump installed Robert Khuzami, a former Deutsche Bank general counsel, as the number-two U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which commonly leads securities prosecutions with the Securities and Exchange Commission.  And Goldman alum Steven Mnuchin is currently serving as U.S. Treasury Secretary.  This regulatory rollback, overseen by individuals with strong ties to the financial industry, allows bad actors in the market to ensure that they can operate unscathed.

When the markets fall precipitously, as recently happened, it's generally not the “invisible hand” at work.  Every bet has a winner and a loser, and in the casino of Wall Street, the house always wins.  The up-and-down jumps of the market benefit those with inside or privileged information.  And on the other side are the millions of ordinary investors with little understanding of the intricacies of how the market actually works, and with little control over how their wealth is actually invested.

In July, Simon Derrick of BNY Mellon complained to CNBC that the “lack of volatility leads to a lack of trading profits."  And the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday in an article entitled “Banks Cheer Return of Wild Markets” that banks “have blamed placid markets for lackluster returns in their big trading operations” but that “they're cheering the big market swings, seeing hope for a boost in fees that dropped off a cliff last year."  The paper also quoted a financier saying “anything that brings back volatility would be good.”

Besides the big banks, another prominent beneficiary of the rise in volatility is billionaire Vincent Viola's Virtu Financial, a high-frequency trading firm that handles 20 percent of all equity trades in the U.S. stock market every day—that saw its profits plummet alongside the reduction of volatility in the markets.  After this past week, Virtu now “rides high” with its share price jumping 40 percent in two days.  Viola, the founder and “Chairman Emeritus” of Virtu, has significant ties to Donald Trump, who briefly nominated Viola as Secretary of the Army in 2017.

While it's impossible to prove that the level of manipulation that occurred with LIBOR and the 2008 financial crisis is happening now, there is motive and opportunity: Wall Street's largest trading desks were negatively hit by low volatility, and the same banks and hedge funds have control over hundreds of billions of dollars that can influence price swings in the markets.  And for their bets on price swings in a volatile market to pay off, Wall Street has to have someone on the other side of that bet; the dumb money of pension, 401(k)s, and mutual funds.  The rise of high-frequency trading firms like Virtu come at the expense of everyone else.

So what needs to happen to protect these ordinary investors from such fluctuations?  In a February In These Times cover story, Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood lay out one smart solution—a massive expansion of Social Security so that people aren't dependent on deeply corroded markets for their savings and retirement.

Another good idea would be to eliminate the tax exemption for municipal bonds, and compelling pension funds to invest in municipal bonds instead of Wall Street.  This would end a huge tax shelter for the rich, while returning public pension funds to the investment strategies that worked well for them through the end of the 1960s.

A revived Glass-Steagall Act to separate commercial and investment banking would also help to stamp out market manipulation by reining in the power of banks like Goldman and JP Morgan.  But for these things to happen, there needs to be a more adversarial public attitude towards high finance.  The stock market isn't guided by an invisible hand: There are real people behind it and profiting from it—and it isn't you.

POLITICS - Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA)

NOTE:  For me, I too think that today's 'capitalism' has become untenable.  Even though I was born in 1944, I know that socialism was given a bad rap because it was associated with Communism of the '50s.  Communism then was actually Stalinism, a warped brand of socialism.  The base idea of socialism is societies as a whole (aka government) have to care for individual people that are members of the society.

"Behind the Explosion in Socialism Among American Teens" by Rebecca Stoner, In These Times 2/14/2018

The dramatic growth of YDSA chapters confirms that millennials don't think capitalism is working for them.

TAMPA, FLA.—In a fluorescent lit classroom with handmade posters covering one wall, approximately 15 high school students are chanting the words of black revolutionary Assata Shakur: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom.  It is our duty to win.  We must love each other and we must support each other.  We have nothing to lose but our chains."  With some embarrassed giggling, they recite it once, twice, three times, led by their visiting speaker, Pamela Gomez of the Hillsborough Community Protection Coalition, an alliance of local progressive groups.

These students are some of the 40-odd members of the Blake High School chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA).  The Tampa high school has 1,697 students, a majority of them black or Latino, and the YDSA chapter reflects that.  The chapter also has a high concentration of LGBTQ students, the club's biggest demographic bloc.

The chapter is the brainchild of Graham Shelor, 17.  Slim and sandy-haired, a contemporary dancer as well as an organizer, Shelor grew up in a “fairly liberal” household but became disillusioned with the Democratic Party during the 2016 elections.  “They lied to me and the people of America that they were going to make it work,” he says.  “It led to a domino effect of me seeing the flaws in the current American system.”

Blake's chapter is part of the youthful explosion of interest in socialism that has led to YDSA's impressive recent growth, with 130 chapters and organizing committees, a five-fold increase in two years.  Since 2015, the average age of a DSA member has dropped from 64 to 30.

YDSA's members must be under 31 and are usually affiliated with a university or high school chapter.  University chapters outnumber high school chapters by about 10 to 1.  Like its parent organization, YDSA is multi-issue and “big tent."  It doesn't require members to subscribe to any particular ideology beyond a commitment to feminism and an opposition to racism, imperialism, homophobia, transphobia and, of course, capitalism.

Chapters are largely autonomous: Though many work with their local DSA chapter, they're not required to.  Often, they focus on youth and campus-specific labor issues, like graduate student organizing or fighting the privatization of facilities staff at state universities.  Blake's YDSA has rallied in support of a long-promised wage hike for their teachers.

The meeting begins with announcements about upcoming actions, like canvassing for Medicare for All with the Tampa DSA.  Then an invitation is issued to join Hillsborough Community Protection Coalition in campaigning for Black Lives Matter, immigrant rights and environmental justice.

For co-chair Kayla Ginty, 16, YDSA is more than a conduit to political action: It's led her to question inherited political beliefs and define her adult political identity.

“There are a lot of myths about what socialism is,” says Ginty.  “High school is the perfect time to start educating ourselves.  We are the next generation of voters.  We can't keep depending on older adults to lead the way.”

“When the [2008 financial] crisis hit, I think a lot of [young] people experienced the impact of that on their home lives,” says YDSA National Coordinating Committee co-chair Michelle Fisher, 20.  “Their parents got laid off, they got evicted from their homes, and they needed to be able to do something about it.”

In the 2016 primaries, 2 million people under 30—YDSA age—voted for Bernie Sanders, far more than voted for Clinton (770,000) and Trump (830,000) combined.  A survey conducted by Harvard University's Institute of Politics found only a minority—42 percent—of millennials support capitalism.

There's a popular belief that youthful radicals turn into middle-aged conservatives.  A 2014 study by Columbia University political scientists, however, found that “the political events of a voter's teenage and early adult years, centered around the age of 18, are enormously important in the formation of these long-term partisan preferences.”

For the students in Blake High School YDSA, the “enormously important” political events of their formative years will include the surprisingly successful campaign of Bernie Sanders, the election-year failures of the Democratic Party, and the rise of Trump.  These events took place against a backdrop of skyrocketing student debt, a dismal job market, a significant decline in upward mobility, and the first shocks of capitalism driven climate change.

“Our generation is really political because we have to be,” says Fisher.

TRUMP AGENDA - Anti-Labor

"As Media Focuses on Russia Collusion, Trump Is Quietly Stacking the Labor Board with Union Busters" by Michael Arria, In These Times 7/14/2017

It might not get as much press coverage as other Donald Trump administration calamities, but the U.S. President is set to appoint a known union buster to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), push the body to a Republican majority and reverse Obama-era protections that rankle Big Business.

On July 13, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee held hearings on Trump's two NLRB selections and his deputy labor secretary pick.  All three of these men are expected to be confirmed.

William Emanuel, one of Trump's NLRB appointees, is a management-side attorney and a member of the conservative Federalist Society.  He is also a shareholder of Littler Mendelson, an infamous union busting firm that was most recently brought in by Long Island beer distributor Clare Rose to negotiate a contract full of pay cuts.

After being selected, Emanuel disclosed 49 former clients and declared he would recuse himself for up to a year if any of the companies found themselves in front of the NLRB.  The list included multiple businesses that have clashed with the labor board, including JPMorgan Chase Bank, MasTec Inc, Nissan, and Uber.

Uber's ongoing skirmishes with the NLRB have, perhaps, been the most publicized.  At the end of 2016, the ride-share company battled with the NLRB after the agency sent out subpoenas aimed at gleaning information about whether Uber drivers were statutory employees.

In 2016, Emanuel authored an amicus brief that defended class-action waivers in employment contracts.  Workers often depend on class actions to fight sexual and racial discrimination, and their existence is an important part of upholding wage laws.  The NLRB ruled that such waivers were illegal under Obama. 

Emanuel was asked about Littler Mendelson's anti-union work by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.  “You have spent your career at one of the country's most ruthless, union-busting law firms in the country,” she said.  “How can Americans trust you will protect workers' rights when you've spent 40 years fighting against them?”

In response, Emanuel claimed that he would be objective whenever making decisions for the agency.

Emanuel is not the only appointee raising concern among workers' rights advocates.  Marvin Kaplan, another Trump nominee to the NLRB, is a public-sector attorney and current counsel to the commissioner for the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.  The Kaplan pick excites business executives and their advocates, who envisioned him helping overturn Obama-era labor regulations.

At the time of the announcement, Kristen Swearingen, chair of the anti-union group Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, declared that “Marvin Kaplan will begin to restore balance to an agency whose recent and radical decisions and disregard for long standing precedent have injected uncertainty into labor relations to the detriment of employees, employers and the economy.”

The excitement is well-founded.  Kaplan served as counsel for Republicans on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.  The New York Times reports, “The committee held hearings during his tenure scrutinizing prominent NLRB actions in which the witnesses skewed toward business representatives and other skeptics.”  Kaplan also helped develop the The Workforce Democracy and Fairness Act, legislation that would kill a labor board rule that shortened the amount of time between when the board authorizes a workplace unionization vote and when the vote actually takes place.  Since 2014, the number has been set at 11 days.  But this act would increase it to at least 35, thus allowing more time for union efforts to be squashed.  The legislation hasn't passed in congress yet.

Concerns do not stop at the NLRB.  Trump's Labor Department nominee is Patrick Pizzella, a Federal Labor Relations Authority Member who was grilled by Minnesota Senator Al Franken on his ties to the infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff.  Pizzella worked with Abramoff during the 1990s to exempt the Northern Mariana Islands from federal labor regulations.

The Senate has only been in session for 10 days since the Pizzella and Kaplan nominations, and only four days since Emanuel's.  A group of civil rights and labor organizations sent the committee a letter asking for the hearings to be postponed.  During her opening remarks, Sen. Patty Murray called Trump's attempt to jam through the nominees without proper oversight “unprecedented.”

Roughly 10 workers representing the pro-labor organization Good Jobs Nation stood up during Thursday's hearing, put blue tape over their mouths and walked out of the room in silent protest.  Groups like Good Jobs Nation are concerned about a pro-business majority in the agency amidst Trump's proposed cuts to the Labor Department.

Trump is putting the NLRB in the position to undo a number of important Obama-era labor decisions.  His NLRB could potentially reverse rulings that made it easier for small groups of workers to unionize, established grad students as employees, put charter school employees under NLRB jurisdiction, and held parent companies jointly liable for with franchise operators who break labor laws.  Writing about the imminent anti-union crackdown on this website in May, Shaun Richman wrote, “Unions and their allies should be convening research teams to plot out a campaign of regulatory and judicial activism.  That work should begin now.”

Early in the hearing, Washington Senator Patty Murray asked Emanuel if he had ever represented a union or a worker.  Emanuel explained that he worked exclusively for management for his entire career.  "You just don't do both,” he told her.  “It's not feasible."

POLITICS - Branding vs Having a Plan

"Naomi Klein: We Need A Plan, Not A Brand" by Kate Aronoff, In These Times 7/10/2017

The author speaks on Corbyn, Trump, climate change, and the “hollow branding” that got us here.

By her own admission, Naomi Klein's books tend to be tomes.  In three several-hundred-page doorstoppers, each comprising a half-decade's worth of research and reporting, she's explored the damage wrought by cynical corporate branding projects (No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies), the way neoliberal strategists exploit crises for profit (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism) and the deep connection between the climate crisis and our economic system (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate).  When Trump was elected, Klein decided to take a new tack.  Her latest book, "No Is Not Enough: Resisting the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need," is a good deal shorter, synthesizing lessons from her work over the last 20 years into a theory of how Donald Trump won and how to fight him.

In These Times sat down with Klein in mid-June to talk Corbyn, Trump, climate change, populism, and the “hollow branding” and shock-therapy economics that got us here.

In These Times: To start on an upbeat note, the U.K. Labor Party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, have just pulled off a huge upset—in part by campaigning on what, in the United States, would be considered a far-left platform.  Is there a lesson here for the U.S.?

One of the lessons is that the ideas matter at least as much as the messenger.  The messenger does matter, and having political skill matters.  But being trustworthy matters, and something Corbyn and Bernie Sanders share is they don't have a lifelong history of flip-flopping.  They've had a core set of beliefs for a long time, and they're not slick.  There is something about that un-slickness that is making them trustworthy carriers for these policies.

Once again, we are learning that bold, transformative ideas that really hold up the promise of tangibly improving people's lives can win elections or come damn close.  And so that's exciting, and it's a fearsome responsibility: If the Left can win, that means the Left must win.  That's not a sense of responsibility that I grew up with.  We thought we could never run on a platform like this.  It turns out that it's possible, and that these ideas are wildly popular.  So this is a message for not just establishment Democrats, but for everyone.  Because it also means that we have to figure out why we're not making it all the way.  Let's remember that Labor came close, but they didn't win.

Corbyn's rise, though, is such a repudiation of the takeover of politics by the logic of corporate branding.  That whole process was really kick-started by Tony Blair.  When I was writing "No Logo," although eons ago, it was shocking that Tony Blair talked about Labor as a brand.  They were using this language of rebranding, calling it the “New Labor Party.”  The idea of treating a political party as a brand was new.  And he went on to treat Britain as a brand.  He relaunched Britain under this slogan, “Cool Britannia,” which you're too young to remember.

In These Times: That's horrible.

Yeah, what I wrote in "No Logo" was that Tony Blair's party was a “Labor-scented party.”  It explicitly deracinated the word labor from its meaning, in the same way that these companies were deracinating their brands from the products that they were selling.  What I found so moving about Corbyn's campaign was that when the Labor logo appeared at the end of his ads, it meant workers.  It meant being aligned with workers and having the trust of working people.  It ceased being a brand and became a description of the values and policies of the party.  That's an important shift, especially because a lot of Democrats think that the way to beat Trump is to come up with a better-branded billionaire.

In These Times: Some of the language you use to describe branding sounds a lot like the language used by political theorists to describe populism's effect on people—giving people a sense of belonging to a larger group, being able to transcend their material conditions.  These things are, of course, absurd to read onto something like a pair of sneakers.  But are there aspects of branding that can be salvaged by movements, especially when “the resistance” seems to be struggling to come up with a coherent identity?

The kind of branding that I was writing about in "No Logo" was what I was calling “hollow branding,” where the idea that you're selling basically has no relationship to the reality of what you are offering.  And that is a concept that I don't think should be redeemed.  So maybe it's helpful to make a distinction between that and using the best communication and design skills that are available to get a vision and a platform and a message out.  I'm all for that.  But I'm not sure I'd call it branding.  I really think that phrase may be poisoned.

There is something inherently possessive about branding, because brands compete with other brands for market share.  And I think that the way in which political groups—not just political parties but campaign organizations, NGOs, even individual people—have come to think of themselves as brands and apply to politics this very proprietary logic of the corporate world has done tremendous damage to movement building.  Brands compete with one another for market share, while movements want to work with whoever wants to reach the same goal.

So I'm all for using great design where it's useful to have a common umbrella so that people feel part of something bigger than themselves.  But I think we need to be very aware of when thinking like a brand becomes a problem—when we're making decisions based on protecting our brand as opposed to on building the largest movement that we can, which is much more of an open-source ethos.

In These Times: You talk about Trump as the accumulation—the Frankenstein monster—of trends that you've written about for years, from hollow branding to the shock doctrine.  Do you anticipate anything unique about the way Trump is likely to respond to an external shock, whether it's a terrorist attack or a natural disaster?

I don't think it will be unique; I think it's kind of an evolution.  But I do think Trump's admiration for authoritarian figures—authoritarian leaders and authoritarian tactics—is a shift.  Bush and Cheney didn't ban protests after 9/11.  They could have tried, and they did a lot of other things to try to silence dissent by trying to associate any serious criticism of the United States with terrorism.  But it's worth noting that they didn't do what the French government did under François Hollande after the Paris attacks, which was institute a state of emergency banning political gatherings and outdoor gatherings of more than five people.

Given Trump's clear comfort level with authoritarian regimes, we should expect that his administration would try to do something like that in the aftermath of a terrorist attack.  We are hearing open talk about internment on Fox News.  The kind of policies that Trump ran on are precisely what we should be very afraid of.

Take him at his word.  He said he wanted to ban the entry of Muslims into the United States.  He immediately started talking about the need for his Muslim ban after the London terrorist attack.  It would be very foolish to reassure oneself that the White House wouldn't do that.  Maybe it wouldn't, but it's better to be prepared.

They certainly have learned a lesson from the protests that responded to the introduction of the travel ban.  They did not repress those protests in any kind of strong way, but they know that the protests got in their way and emboldened the lawmakers and the courts.  I would be worried about his willingness to crack down on protests like that.  It's so important in that moment for there to be just huge numbers of people in the street.  If it's left to the most targeted and most vulnerable communities to defend their own rights, the repression will be much more severe than if this administration finds itself confronted with hundreds of thousands of people of all ethnicities and religious backgrounds in the streets.  That is a lot harder to repress, right?  At least without serious consequences.

In These Times: One of the things that alarms me about Trump is that his staunch climate denialism sets an incredibly low bar—basically anything north of outright denial looks like progress.  What has been the impact of this?

I'm not sure so far that he is constraining the climate conversation, if we look at the way states and some cities are reacting to the withdrawal from the Paris Accord.  The sort of policies we are seeing put on the table from the mayors of Pittsburgh and Portland—to get to 100 percent renewables by 2035—are more in line with what science demands and what technology allows than what we were talking about under Obama.  Maybe that would have happened anyway, but maybe not.

Obviously the Republicans are doing less than nothing.  The Democrats don't have a clue about what to do, and so into that vacuum have come some real solutions from the local level.  I think we see a similar dynamic with that disastrous healthcare plan proposed by Congress.  That's creating more of a space for single payer at the state level, right?  Pushing for some of the actual policies we need at the sub-national level in the U.S. and at the national level outside of the U.S. is what we need to do when we finally get rid of these maniacs and get things caught up to where we need to be.

In These Times: Do you see any kind of single-payer-type demand when it comes to climate?  Is there anything that captures that type of energy?

Climate is more complex because it's about changing the backbone of our whole economy.  I'm always suspicious when people frame the solution as just one thing, like the carbon tax.  We are past that point, and the idea that there could be just one thing, and that would ever be enough to change the building blocks of an industrial economy, just seems crazy.

A big piece with climate is that getting to 100 percent renewables within two decades requires a huge jobs plan.  Of course, it requires different flanks to get there.  A jobs plan has to be designed and thought through.  That's why I've thrown my eggs in the basket of coming up with a policy platform that connects the dots between the need for unionized jobs, energy democracy and putting frontline communities first in line to own their own power.  Part of the problem we've had is that some of the jobs we have lost are high-paying union jobs, and the renewable-energy jobs that will just sort of emerge thanks to the free hand of the market will be much lower-waged and non-union.  Not fully confronting that and hoping that nobody notices has not been a great strategy in the fight for a so-called green jobs agenda.

In These Times: You talk in the book about the importance of intersectionality.  One of the points you've made is that while the things the Left cares about have been cordoned off into issues silos, the Right sees its efforts as part of this coherent ideological project.  Could you explain that a bit?

The Right has a holistic vision to realize dominance on every level—over people and over the planet.  It is winner-take-all hyper-individualism.  These are the connective ideas of the hyper-capitalist project, right?  Progressives and people on the Left have not been clear enough about what the connective tissue is of what we want and just how well our ideas are connected.  We have a lot of work to do.

CULTURE WARS - Fascism

"Beta Testing Fascism: How Online Culture Wars Created the Alt-Right" by John Michael Colón, In These Times 6/27/2017

Angela Nagle's “Kill All Normies” charts the ideology's emergence from the internet's darkest corners.

Leftists who write think-pieces or satires about the alt-right tend to produce more sensationalism than substance.  Too often, satisfying but unhelpful insults like “anime Nazi dorks” and “neckbeard fedoras” stand in for analysis.

Rarely do we try to understand why someone who thinks of themself as a good person would want to join what amounts to the online youth wing of a global neofascist movement.  Yet many have—especially, yes, young white men—and the reactionary wave continues to spread.

By contrast, in "Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right," the Irish journalist Angela Nagle has made efforts not just to mock and condemn but to understand what's driving the alt-right's rise—and how the Left's worse tendencies help it grow.

The new book is an expansion of Nagle's reporting on the subject for American socialist magazines.  Building on work by anthropologist Gabriella Coleman and essayist David Auerbach, Nagle traces the alt-right's origins to the anonymous message boards, chat rooms, Wikis and blogs that dominated cyberspace through the mid-2000s and early 2010s, before today's public and interlinked social media accounts had reached their current level of dominance.  Defined by total anonymity, fleeting interactions and information overload, these spaces fostered a milieu of digital pranksterism and sophisticated in-jokes centered on two core interests: celebrating geek culture and transgressing moral boundaries

This culture was a mess of contradictions.  On the one hand, it was for a time a hotbed of principled leftist cyber-activism that culminated in endeavors such as the Anonymous movement and early Wikileaks.  Though their methods were controversial, these “hacktivists” were key to exposing much Obama-era corporate and government wrongdoing.  In April 2010, for example, Wikileaks released the Collateral Murder video of U.S. helicopters shooting a Reuters journalist and several civilians in Baghdad.  The next year, hackers revealed that Bank of America—with help from the Department of Justice—had assembled a team of shadowy intelligence contractors to coordinate a campaign of disinformation and hacking against journalists and activists.

As Nagle sees it, this radical element has faded away, undermined not only by state spying and repression but also by the inherent limits of its leaderless structure and ideological vagueness.

What's arisen in its place is something more toxic: a shallow online identity politics of both the Left and Right that Nagle calls “politics as culture war.”

The right-wing side grew out of forums like 4chan, where white and upper-middle-class teenagers, protected by screen names and driven by deep social alienation, could plot to ruin the lives of random strangers through harassment and the publication of personal information (known as doxxing) while cracking intentionally hyperbolic and supposedly ironic jokes on sexist, pedophiliac, anti-Semitic and racist themes.  In these web communities, it's intentionally ambiguous whether jokes like “Jews did 9/11” are supposed to be funny because they're absurd or because they're true.  This proves a fruitful ambiguity for actual racists, as it helps them normalize and spread their beliefs.

It was the 2014 “Gamergate” controversy, Nagle explains, that turned this largely apolitical “culture of transgression” into a far-right cultural movement.  When female video-game journalists such as Anita Sarkeesian took issue with sexism in the gaming world, offended male gamers unleashed a sustained campaign of harassment, doxxing, and rape and death threats against the critics.  Like-minded young men (and some women) took note.  Soon a decentralized coalition of rabid anti-feminists, white nationalists, “free-market” libertarians and even self-proclaimed monarchists had declared war on political correctness.  The shared culture they developed, Nagle writes, was “characterized by a particularly dark preoccupation with thwarted or failed white Western masculinity as a grand metaphor.”

This primordial stew of proto-fascism is what came to be called the alt-right.  After moving through its origins, Nagle spends the bulk of her book sketching its various component movements and their figureheads.

There's the Manosphere, whose diverse collection of misogynists is united in the belief that feminism has destroyed both the traditional family and their own sexual prospects.  There's Richard Spencer and his white nationalist brigade, who argue for the biological reality of race, the impossibility of a multicultural society, and the need for white ethnostates to defend the West from immigrants and Islam.  There are carnival barkers like Milo Yiannopoulos, Gavin McInnes and Lauren Southern who manufacture whole media careers by baiting over-earnest progressives into shrill and predictable denunciations.  And there's the whole sad parade of self-help gurus, conspiracy theorists and supplement-peddling hucksters—think InfoWars.com owner Alex Jones—who have found a way to make a quick buck and a name for themselves in the alt-right digital ecosystem.

It all has the feel of a whirlwind tour—which isn't always to the book's benefit.  Much of 'Kill All Normies' is a series of anecdotes that doesn't take the time to define its terms or give more than cursory summaries of its subjects.  Often these anecdotes are illuminating in themselves, but readers who aren't already familiar with the relevant subcultures and slang may struggle to keep up.  (This improves in the last three chapters and conclusion, which stand on their own as analytic essays.)

Nagle is at her best when she moves past the fleeting scandals and fads of digital culture and cuts to the psychological roots of this new far-right cultural politics—particularly its anti-feminist core.  With surprising sympathy, she outlines their “anxiety and anger about their low-ranking status” in the sexual hierarchy.  She quotes “men's rights activist” F. Roger Devlin, who argues that the freedom of women to choose sexual partners outside marriage and defy traditional gender roles has led to “promiscuity for the few” and “loneliness for the majority.”  Put bluntly, Devlin and his ilk believe women choose to hook up with elite men and leave the vast majority involuntarily celibate, or “incel.”  Whether or not this argument holds, those lonely outcasts who see themselves as the victims of this narrative express their resentment at sexual rejection not only through trolling online but also by opposing women's basic human rights and, in extreme cases, by committing sexually motivated murders as in the 2014 massacre near the University of California, Santa Barbara.  Nagle concludes, convincingly, that this is “the central issue driving this kind of reactionary sexual politics, perhaps even the central personal motivation behind the entire turn to the far Right among young men.”

But Nagle argues these ideas gained currency as part of an online culture war—and every war has more than one side.

The alt-right's mortal enemies came into their own at the microblogging service Tumblr, where other socially alienated teens constructed subcultures based around increasingly arcane racial, gender, sexual and other identities.  Nagle argues—and I agree—that this supposedly liberal movement retreated into symbolic politics and a profoundly illiberal culture of virtue signaling, grievance and social authoritarianism.

Drawing on the work of the late writer Mark Fisher, Nagle defines “Tumblr-liberalism” (her term, though I think this underestimates the tendency's reach into radical as well as liberal circles) by its intolerance of dissent: “The very idea of winning people over through ideas now seems to anguish, offend and enrage.”  Instead, those who would express something different from the party line must be harassed or even denied a platform entirely.

Nagle catalogs many damning instances of this tendency using public humiliation, censorship, harassment and firings in order to promote and enforce its dogmas, both online and off.  (In fact I'd argue the sheer breadth of her examples shows Tumblr liberalism is something that extends far beyond Tumblr and has deeper roots.)  In one case, an “antiracist” Twitter user responds to the death of a six-year-old attacked by an alligator by mocking the “white male entitlement” of his parents; in another, anonymous students bring the academic Laura Kipnis before a Title IX court simply for writing an essay arguing love affairs between professors and their students don't necessarily constitute an abuse of power.

The spread of “antifa” tactics among anarchists and liberals in the Trump era has seen no-platforming increasingly applied to the alt-right.  But Tumblr liberals, it seems, more often than not target others on the Left, denying a platform to those guilty of thought-crime against various sacred cows.  This trend continues, as evidenced by a recent scandal in which philosophers called on a feminist journal to retract an article that dared to engage seriously with the notion of Rachel Dolezal-style “transracialism.”

Nagle believes these Tumblr liberals have “made the Left a laughingstock for a whole new generation.”  Though nominally opposed, Nagle argues, the alt-right and Tumblr liberalism feed off each other and form “essentially two rival wings of contemporary identity politics.” In the new culture wars between these two groups, the alt-right is able to claim the mantle of free speech and countercultural transgression that leftists once proudly boasted to represent, so that the Tumblr liberals are positioned as a sort of morality police—prudish, inquisitorial, and widely despised.  This in turn has made being on the Right “something exciting, fun and courageous for the first time since … well, possibly ever.”

No doubt Nagle's assault on identity politics will spark many necessary and overdue debates on the Left.  Already this has been a key part of the book's controversial reception.  But what strikes me most is something else.

Though "Kill All Normies" is a fine piece of journalism and cultural criticism—the first serious popular study of its subject—I found as I read it that I kept coming up against the book's most important limitation.  Nagle has a tendency to see the alt-right as essentially a pop-cultural phenomenon or social malaise to be diagnosed, not a political movement with ideas that must be refuted.  As a result, the book leaves many urgent questions unanswered.  Does the alt-right constitute a twenty-first century fascism?  What kind of politics, ultimately, follows from their beliefs?  What connection do they have to the xenophobic nationalism currently sweeping electoral politics across the industrialized world?  Readers must look elsewhere for answers.

Furthermore, Nagle's focus on minor Twitter celebrities means she neglects the more serious intellectuals in the movement—whether it's the post-libertarian dreams of authoritarian city-states one finds in Nick Land and Mencius Moldbug, the corporatist nationalism of Michael Anton, or the biological racism and white supremacy of Steve Sailer and Richard Spencer.  These writers make complicated arguments against democracy and for racial and sexual hierarchy rooted in historical analysis, evolutionary psychology, IQ testing and political theory.  Even when ordinary alt-righters can't recognize them by name, they are often regurgitating vulgarized versions of their ideas.

These ideas are refutable and the politics underlying them is horrific.  But every time the Left refuses to even try countering them with our own, the alt-right's portrait of us as dogmatists who can only confront their terrible truths with censorship and violence gains credibility.  (And that portrait, as we've seen, is a key component of how they recruit.)  Nagle would probably respond that the alt-right's insipid Internet lunacy reveals it to be fundamentally unserious and not worth engaging intellectually.  But today's revived socialist movement, of which Nagle and I are both a part, is no less a product of social alienation and postmodern irony than the new fascism, nor does it lack its own Twitter bullshit.  In a country that elected Trump, it's worth taking seriously the appeal of both movements as attempts to escape the dead end of neoliberalism—one by expanding democracy, the other by doing away with it.

Still, Nagle's book is a good start.  What we get from it is a brief history and a portrait of the cultural logic that may breed tomorrow's authoritarianism.  Hopefully it is the first contribution of many to that part of the antifascist struggle that employs means other than fists and makeshift shields.

REPUBLICAN AGENDA - Is Deadly

"Shutting Out the Public from the Senate Healthcare Bill Isn’t Just Antidemocratic: It’s Deadly" by Ben Palmquist, In These Times 6/20/2017

These lethal policies would never pass through an accountable, participatory public process.

A secretive Senate working group is closing in on a bill to overhaul the U.S. healthcare system by gutting Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  With Republican leaders tight-lipped, the details of what’s in the bill remain a matter of speculation. [updated, been released]

The closed-door deliberations by this all-male cabal of Republican senators are antidemocratic to the point of parody, but the stakes are dangerously high.  Healthcare is not just one sixth of the U.S. economy: It is critical to people’s wellbeing and very survival.

These draconian policies would never pass through an accountable, participatory public process.  By fast-tracking this bill with no transparency or public hearings, and perhaps as little as a handful of days for any public response, they are threatening tens of thousands of people’s lives.

How many lives could be at stake?  If the Senate bill cuts 23 million people off of Medicaid and ACA insurance plans as the Congressional Budget Office calculated the House healthcare bill would, estimates suggest that somewhere between 17,000 and 44,000 people would die every year.

Skeptics may quibble that these estimates lean high, but does the precise figure matter?  How many lives would it be acceptable for Republicans’ healthcare cuts to take?

Widespread suffering borne unevenly

Death by a thousand Republican cuts would hit people of every race and every gender in every state.  Even people with comfortable incomes and comprehensive employer-sponsored insurance are just one illness, divorce or job loss away from danger.  Yet the harm of the Senate bill would overwhelmingly fall on poor people, sick people, older people, women and people of color.

Senate Republicans’ plans would do incredible harm to poor and working-class people by slashing Medicaid and ACA subsidies in order to fund an enormous redistribution of resources up the income ladder.  These funding cuts, along with deregulation of private insurance, would exacerbate the existing failures of the insurance market by raising people’s premiums and out-of-pocket costs, limiting coverage and leaving many uninsured entirely.  All this would especially hurt the very people who most need care; people with serious illnesses and chronic conditions, as well as older people.

Women and people of color are disproportionately poor and thus more likely to be hurt by cuts to Medicaid and ACA subsidies.  Women are impoverished by wage inequality, part-time jobs that don’t provide health benefits and lack of payment for domestic work.  They would also be hurt by Republican plans to defund Planned Parenthood.  Black and Brown communities are kept poor by racial inequities in public health, criminalization, education, hiring, housing, banking, and other arenas, and would thus be especially hard hit.  At the same time, because more white people rely on Medicaid and ACA subsidies than people of any other racial or ethnic group, huge numbers of poor and working-class white people would be hard-hit too.

Illnesses and deaths ripple out too, taking an emotional and financial toll on entire families.  The communities that Senate Republicans are targeting have the least resources to cope with the loss of a wage earner, caregiver or loved one.

Death by unnatural causes

Preventable deaths are not a natural disaster.  They are produced by policy choices and are, by definition, totally avoidable.

The root of the problem is the way the U.S. healthcare system prices and pays for healthcare.  Other wealthy countries guarantee healthcare to everyone as a fundamental human right by controlling healthcare prices and levying taxes to pay for healthcare as a public good.  But in the U.S. healthcare system, insurance, hospital and drug corporations are allowed to set healthcare prices virtually without limit, and the private insurance system allocates healthcare not to those who need it, but to those who can afford to pay.

This pay-for-access healthcare market puts up cost barriers that force an enormous number of people to forego needed care.  According to a survey by The Commonwealth Fund, even after the coverage gains of the Affordable Care Act, 63 million people (one in three adults under 65) skip doctors’ visits, prescriptions and other needed care because they can’t afford the costs.  All these people suffer, and a portion die.  The Senate bill would force this needless misery on millions more.

It’s not hard to see why costs create a barrier to care.  In some cases, the ACA allows insurance companies to charge deductibles of over $14,000.  Out-of-pocket costs that high prevent even middle-class people from going to the doctor and filling prescriptions.  And if Senate Republicans have their way, deductibles could rise much higher.

For poor people, the cost barriers are even worse.  Working a low-wage job and struggling to pay for rent, transportation, food, utilities and other necessities means that even a $20 copay can be prohibitively expensive.

Market-based healthcare pricing is especially cruel to poor people, but it hurts us all.  People in the United States pay far more for healthcare than any other nation.  We have the worst health performance in the industrialized world.  And by dividing us into categories and forcing us into isolated struggles for survival rather than uniting us around our shared needs and values, the health insurance market frays our democracy.

Ultimately the only way to remove cost barriers and to stop forcing people to die tragically preventable deaths is by moving from private, for-profit insurance to a universal, publicly financed, single-payer insurance system.  In the meantime, Senate Republicans must be stopped.  Our lives depend on it.

TRUMP AGENDA - Toxic Workplaces

"Trump's Policies Are Already Making Workplaces More Toxic" by Elizabeth Grossman, In These Times 4/11/2017

Trump lies, lies and more lies 😡  An agenda to kill American workers.

The “wellbeing of America and the American worker is my North Star,” President Donald Trump trumpeted at a recent White House event.

But the Trump administration's policies are already adversely affecting workers' health by undermining occupational illness prevention—including for cancers, musculoskeletal disorders and respiratory diseases that afflict hundreds of thousands of U.S. workers.

“It couldn't get much worse in terms of the federal government's role in preventing the number of occupational illnesses and diseases,” said Charlotte Brody, vice president of health initiatives at BlueGreen Alliance, an alliance of labor unions and environmental organizations.

Or, as Sidney Shapiro, a professor at Wake Forest's law school, put it, “We weren't doing this terribly well under a reasonably friendly administration so all bets are it's now going to fall completely apart.”

Deaths from occupational diseases

Occupational fatalities remain a grave problem in the United States.  In 2015, 4,836 people died on the job.  Yet the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) estimates that approximately ten times more Americans die per year from occupational diseases.  Of the 2,905,900 non-fatal workplace injuries and illnesses the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) cataloged in 2015, about 187,900 were job-related illnesses.

This number, like all official records of occupational illness, is considered a significant undercount.  Among other omissions, including very small workplaces and self-employed workers, these numbers don't include work-related illnesses diagnosed after someone left a job or fully account for chronic conditions.

“Combine that with people who are immigrant workers with limited English, who are not organized, and low-income, who are vulnerable to exploitation because they'll do anything to get a job—and they're less likely to object to unsafe working conditions, less likely to seek help or speak up,” says Michael Wilson, director of the occupational and environmental health program at BlueGreen Alliance.

The most frequently reported U.S. work-related health problems include respiratory and skin diseases along with musculoskeletal disorders.  Musculoskeletal problems account for about one-third of all reported workplace illnesses and injuries and affect workers in industries ranging from meatpacking to nursing, shipyards, cleaning services, manufacturing and retail grocery stores.

Cancer is one of the hardest occupational diseases to account for given the typically long time between exposure and diagnosis.  But the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate is that past exposure in the workplace caused between 45,872 and 91,745 new cancer cases.  That estimate, which the CDC said is likely an underestimate, was for a single year.

Delays cost lives

Connecting workplace exposure and disease diagnosis precisely can be complicated.  But the links between occupational exposure to silica and beryllium dust and lung disease are well documented.  Cases of these occupational diseases may well increase under Trump.

This month, OSHA delayed by three months the date on which its new silica exposure safety standard for the construction industry will take effect.  This is the first update of the standard in more than 40 years and will reduce by half the silica dust level to which most workers can be exposed and prevent about 900 new silicosis cases each year.

OSHA says the delay will allow it to “conduct additional outreach and provide educational materials and guidance for employers.”  But the rule “has been decades in the making” and “will save more 600 lives each year,” according to Jessica Martinez, co-executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health.

Major industry trade associations, including in construction, oil and gas extraction, have long opposed the new standard.

Meanwhile, the Department of Labor (DOL) has twice postponed implementation of its rule updating standards for workers' protection from carcinogenic beryllium dust.  Like silica, exposure to beryllium, used in construction, shipyards, foundries and industries that use the metal to make electronics, aerospace, defense and other components, causes incurable lung disease and lung cancer.

“OSHA estimates that when fully implemented it [the rule] will save 94 lives a year.  Every four days of delay in the implementation dates costs the life of one American worker,” wrote Michael Wright, director of health, safety and environment at United Steelworkers, in comments submitted to the DOL.

Republicans want the regulation delayed indefinitely and are calling it a “midnight” rule, implying the Obama administration rushed it through.  In fact, the rule results from a process that began in 2002.

Also delayed are Environmental Protection Agency rules to prevent emissions of formaldehyde, a carcinogen and serious respiratory hazard, from manufactured wood products, to increase safety at industrial plants that use and store highly hazardous chemicals and to increase protections for pesticide applicators.

Tracking occupational illness

Trump has now signed two bills that will make it harder to track occupational illness.  One undoes a rule requiring federal contractors to fully report all labor law violations.  The other undoes a rule to strengthen employers' workplace illness and injury recordkeeping requirements.  Both were nullified with Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions that prevent an agency from ever issuing a comparable regulation.  At an April 5 briefing for reporters, White House director of legislative affairs Marc Short called passage of these bills “a huge accomplishment.”

“Recordkeeping is so important because it allows OSHA to research what's really putting workers at risk and to target the most serious hazards affecting workers,” says Emily Gardner, Public Citizen worker health and safety advocate.

And, says Wilson, “Who's bearing the disproportionate burden of exposure to substances like silica and asbestos gets submerged if we don't know it's happening.” Without this evidence, managing the problem becomes harder.

Trump budget threatens safety training and enforcement

The White House “budget blueprint” proposes eliminating OSHA's Susan B. Harwood training grants.  “The Harwood grants include very important training programs to reduce occupational illnesses, like grants that go out to train workers in nail salons and beauty parlors,” on exposure to hazardous chemicals, explained David Michaels, George Washington University professor of environmental and occupational health and Obama administration Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA.

These grants, which cost the federal government about $11 million annually, are probably the biggest source of worker “training about rights and procedures” on “preventing and reporting occupational illness,” said Craig Slatin, University of Massachusetts Lowell professor of health education and policy.

Proposed DOL funding cuts will also likely reduce OSHA's already constrained enforcement budget.  “OSHA is primarily an enforcement agency,” said Center for Progressive Reform executive director Matthew Shudtz.  OSHA's budget determines what the agency “can do to fight occupational illness,” he explained.

For example, OSHA funding will help determine what the agency can do to update its limited and outdated chemical safety standards, said Shudtz.  These resources will also influence how OSHA uses what's called the general duty clause.  This sounds obscure but it's key tool for the agency's enforcement of workplace health and safety.  It allows OSHA to enforce a general standard of safety “even when rules are outdated,” Shudtz explained.  “This is really important in the illness context,” he said, particularly where specific safety standards are outdated or non-existent.  The Obama administration pursued such cases but it seems unlikely that the Trump administration will do likewise.

So far, the Trump administration's decisions impacting occupational health “are profoundly political, not scientific,” said Brody.

“How someone gets sick is always complicated,” she said.  “And as long as there's doubt and industry can pay for that doubt to be generated, we don't move ahead on protecting workers.”

TRUMP AGENDA - Who IS That Pulling the Strings??

"The Right-Wing Machine Behind the Curtain" by Theo Anderson, In These Times 3/14/2017

The radical conservative Heritage Foundation has spent 40 years trying to gut the federal budget.  Now Trump is providing to be the perfect tool.

THE MOOD WAS JUBILANT TWO DAYS AFTER THE NOVEMBER 2016 ELECTION at a Washington, D.C., panel co-hosted by two powerhouse conservative thinktanks—the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

In his opening remarks, Heritage president Jim DeMint rejoiced that Donald Trump's election had “preserved our constitutional republic.”  Panelist John Yoo, a Berkeley law professor best known as the architect of George W. Bush's justification for torture, drew laughs with feigned surprise at the audience size.  “I thought everyone at Heritage was working over at transition head quarters,” Yoo quipped.  “I asked the taxi cab driver to take me to Trump transition headquarters, and he dropped me off here.”

Indeed, Politico reported in November that Heritage, based in D.C., had become “a crucial conduit between Trump's orbit and the once-skeptical conservative leaders who ultimately helped get him elected.”  By Heritage's own account, “several dozen” of its staff members worked on the transition team, and Trump used its recommendations for his list of potential Supreme Court picks.

Vice President Mike Pence, the head of that transition team, has deep ties to the foundation.  In 2006, Heritage co-founder Paul Weyrich, a mentor of Pence's, said of him, “Nobody is perfect, but he comes pretty close.”  In early December, Pence gave the keynote speech at a Heritage event (held at Trump's D.C.  hotel) to honor its biggest donors.  He promised that the Trump administration “is now and will continue to draw on” the institution's work.

Heritage defines its mission as creating “an America where freedom, opportunity, prosperity and civil society flourish.”  It has an annual budget of about $100 million and a staff of about 90 “experts” who hold such pseudo-academic titles as “research fellow' and “policy analyst.”  One example is libertarian economist Stephen Moore, a Trump advisor and a Heritage “distinguished visiting fellow.”

Heritage's ties to the administration have received relatively little press.  With its academic gloss, it may seem benign set against the extremism and zaniness that dominate the headlines: a press secretary only marginally less bizarre than the Saturday Night Live spoof of him; a key advisor who embraces the role of Darth Vader; cabinet picks who have promised to abolish the institutions they lead; executive orders that stigmatize Muslims and violate the Constitution; attacks on the press as “the enemy of the American people”; and on and on.

Yet a grim reality underlies the White House circus.  Trump's election is the culmination of a radical right-wing movement that began with the founding of Heritage in 1973.  “We are different from previous generations of conservatives,” Weyrich said in the early 1980s.  “We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of this country.”

Trump is that movement's best hope yet for achieving its great dream of gutting government.  Heritage isn't an appendage of the Trump administration's radicalism.  It's the heart of it.  Trump is just a tool.

THE RESISTANCE - Via In These Times

"HOW CORPORATE MEDIA THREATENS OUR DEMOCRACY" by Bernie Sanders, In These Times 1/26/2017

MEDIA SHAPES OUR VERY LIVES.  It tells us what products we need to buy and, by the quantity and nature of coverage, what is “important” and what is “unimportant.”  Media informs us as to the scope of what is “realistic” and “possible.”

When we see constant coverage of murders and brutality on television, corporate media is telling us that crime and violence are important issues that we should be concerned about.  When there is round-the-clock coverage of the Super Bowl, we are being informed that football and the NFL deserve our rapt attention.  When there is very little coverage of the suffering of the 43 million Americans living in poverty, or the thousands of Americans without health insurance who die each year because they can't get to a doctor when they should, corporately owned media is telling us that these are not issues of major concern.  For years, major crises like climate change, the impact of trade agreements on our economy, the role of big money in politics and youth unemployment have received scant media coverage.  Trade union leaders, environmentalists, low-income activists, people prepared to challenge the corporate ideology, rarely appear on our TV screens.

Media is not just about what is covered and how.  It is about what is not covered.  And those decisions, of what is and is not covered, are not made in the heavens.  They are made by human beings who often have major conflicts of interest.

As a general rule of thumb, the more important the issue is to large numbers of working people, the less interesting it is to corporate media.  The less significant it is to ordinary people, the more attention the media pays.  Further, issues being pushed by the top 1 percent get a lot of attention.  Issues advocated by representatives of working families, not so much.

For the corporate media, the real issues facing the American people— poverty, the decline of the middle class, income and wealth inequality, trade, healthcare, climate change, etc.—are fairly irrelevant.  For them, politics is largely presented as entertainment.  With some notable exceptions, reporters are trained to see a campaign as if it were a game show, a baseball game, a soap opera, or a series of conflicts.

I saw this time and time again.

Turn on CNN or other networks covering politics and what you will find is that the overwhelming amount of coverage is dedicated to personality, gossip, campaign strategy, scandals, conflicts, polls and who appears to be winning or losing, fundraising, the ups and downs of the campaign trail, and the dumb things a candidate may say or do.  It has very little to do with the needs of the American people and the ideas or programs a candidate offers to address the problems facing the country.

According to a study of media coverage of the 2016 primaries by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, only 11 percent of coverage focused on candidates' policy positions, leadership abilities and professional histories.  My personal sense is that number is much too high.

The “politics as entertainment” approach works very well for someone like Donald Trump, an experienced entertainer.  That kind of media approach didn't work so well for a campaign like ours, which was determined to focus on the real problems facing our country and what the solutions might be.  For the corporate media, name-calling and personal attacks are easy to cover, and what it prefers to cover.

While I was still considering whether or not to run, I did a long interview with a very prominent national newspaper writer.  Over and over I stressed that I wanted to talk about my assessment of the major problems facing the country, and how I proposed to address them.  And for 45 minutes, that's what the discussion was about.  The reporter appeared interested in what I had to say, and I thought we had a good conversation.  At the very end, as he was leaving, he said: “Oh, by the way, Hillary Clinton said such and such.  What's your comment?”  I fell for it.  Needless to say, that one-minute response became the major part of his story.  And that occurred time after time after time.

On a CNN show, an interviewer became visibly angry because I chose not to respond to her questions with personal attacks against Secretary Clinton.  The interviewer opined that I didn't have “sharp enough elbows” to become a serious candidate, that I wasn't tough enough.  Identifying the major problems facing our country, and providing ideas as to how we could address them, was just not good enough.

In fact, I was gently faulted by some for having excessive “message discipline,” for spending too much time discussing real issues.  Boring.  The result of all of these factors is that while I was getting coverage, it was far less than what other candidates were getting.

In a Dec.  11, 2015, blog post for Media Matters for America, Eric Boehlert wrote:

ABC World News Tonight has de voted less than one minute to Bernie Sanders' campaign this year.

In his article, Boehlert also reported that:

Trump has received more network coverage than all the Democratic candidates combined.  ?

Republican Jeb Bush received 56 minutes of coverage.

"With Donald Trump as President, Americans Are Flocking to Socialism" by Kate Aronoff, In These Times 1/23/2017

One evening the week before Christmas, about 100 people squeezed into a room in the Brooklyn Free School, located on one of central Brooklyn's posher streets.  The private school's chair collection exhausted itself within minutes as attendees packed the room for the monthly meeting of the Brooklyn chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—which, just a month earlier, had fit easily into the same space.

Since Nov 8, 2016, thousands have joined DSA.  The organization has ballooned to over 14,000 members, more than doubling in size from 6,500 members in May 2016.  DSA National Director Maria Svart says of new sign-ups, “You could literally see the moment when Trump was declared the winner.”

Organizations such as the ACLU and Planned Parenthood are reporting a similar spike in new members and donations in the wake of Trump's election.  But interest in socialist groups, grown accustomed to being small and isolated in U.S. politics, appears to be surging in a way it hasn't in decades.  Many of those joining are young people who don't have their parents' Cold War hangups about socialism.  Politicians like Bernie Sanders—an avowed socialist whom many supporters are looking to for an effective counter to Trump—have further sparked their interest in a politics outside mainstream Democrats and Republicans.

That puts DSA in a promising, if uncertain, position in the wake of Trump's election.  “People … are looking to DSA as an organization that full throatedly supported Bernie Sanders in the primary and has the potential to be a serious part of the fightback, both to Trump and to the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party,” says Svart.

Founded in 1982 out of the remnants of the '60s New Left, DSA also has roots in Eugene Debs' Socialist Party of America, which at its height in 1912 boasted 113,000 dues-paying members.  Eager to avoid the pitfalls of insular ideological squabbles, DSA strives to work with community organizations and social movements.  Following the election, DSA chapters have mobilized to support organizing by communities threatened by Trump and his supporters, including local mosques and immigrant rights organizations.  DSA is also working on building a multiracial membership—its current members are predominantly white—while supporting existing organizing by communities of color.  Brooklyn DSA's Racial Justice working group, for example, is partnering with the New York-based group Communities United for Police Reform to help pass the Right to Know Act, aimed at increasing transparency and accountability on the part of the NYPD.

Ultimately, says Svart, there's agreement within the organization about “the need for a multi-racial, anti-capitalist movement that is in touch with the grassroots.”

For now, DSA is proving an on-ramp for those frustrated with Trump and the Democratic establishment alike.  The Brooklyn meeting on Dec 22, 2016, was the first for Hannah Silverman, a New York native who worked on local Democratic campaigns in high school but grew disillusioned with politics before heading off to Brown University, where she graduated in 2015.

“I was afraid [the meeting] would feel futile,” she said as chairs were being collected toward the end.  Instead, she was pleasantly surprised by the tailored facilitation—after a discussion of the importance of organizing “openly as socialists” at the local level, the meeting broke out into smaller committees on everything from affordable housing fights to climate justice—and the high attendance.  “Looking at Trump's election, the only way to spin it positively is that it compelled a lot of people to become politically active,” she noted.  “It created a sense of urgency that was missing.”  She plans to attend next month's meeting.  In New York City alone, DSA now has 1,000 members.

But deep-blue Brooklyn isn't the only place where democratic socialism is undergoing a resurgence.  Local organizers are in the process of getting six new chapters off the ground in Florida and four in Ohio, both of which went for Trump in November.  DSA's tiny national staff, funded entirely by dues and small donations, has been overwhelmed by requests to create new chapters around the country and is looking for ways to expand accordingly.

Tom Tilden, 59, is among those DSA members setting up shop for socialism deep in Trump country.  Tilden is a DSA veteran, having joined when he lived in Chicago in the late '80s.  But when he moved to Nebraska in 1993, Tilden says, he didn't consider starting a new chapter there, though he remained a member of the national organization.  When people talk about “the Left” in conservative Nebraska, Tilden explains, they're referring to “people in the middle of the Democratic Party leftward.  ‘The Left' is progressive.  People don't usually think in terms of socialist.”

But that may be changing after Sanders' primary run, which “changed the nature of the Democratic Party in the state” while stripping away some of the taboos that plague socialist politics, says Tilden.  In Nebraska's March 2016 caucus, Clinton won just 10 of the state's pledged delegates to Sanders' 15, and he successfully won over some of the state's most rural counties.  Since the caucuses, Tilden has been working to get a new chapter off the ground in Omaha, and another has sprung up in nearby Lincoln.  About 30 people attended the first meeting in December 2016.

Like many other DSA members around the country, Tilden sees potential in building institutions outside the Democratic Party, but is also a firm believer in trying to stage a takeover from the inside.  This fall, he joined Keystone XL pipeline opponent Jane Kleeb on the ticket to run Nebraska's Democratic Party.  She's now the party's state chair.  Tilden is second associate chair, and has similar goals for his work in this position as he does as a local DSA organizer; Reaching working-class voters, especially those who went for Trump but might yet be won over to the kind of anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement that DSA hopes to build.

“People in rural Nebraska are more progressive than they realize,” Tilden reasons.  While door-knocking during the Sanders campaign, he and other volunteers found that many rural voters took firm stands against corporate agriculture and attacks on public education.  “I think once we work with them on their issue, they'll see that the people on their side are not the Republicans.”

Instead, Tilden hopes, they just might embrace an entirely different shade of red.

GAMING THE SYSTEM - Trump Played Sucker

"Carrier is 'Gaming the System' and Trump Just Played into Its Hands" by Steve Horn, In These Times 12/2/2016

As one of their first orders of business, President-elect Donald Trump and Mike Pence, his vice president, helped strike a deal between the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC) and the Carrier Corporation to keep more than 1,000 jobs at Carrier's Indianapolis manufacturing plant.

The company had originally planned to send all but 300 research and headquarters jobs at the facility to Monterrey, Mexico, where workers reportedly earn $3 an hour.  Carrier later decided to keep an additional 800 or so jobs in Indiana in exchange for a reported $7 million in tax breaks over 10 years.

Carrier was a frequent target of Trump during his presidential campaign, in which he promised to protect jobs and penalize companies for leaving the United States.  After tweeting about a deal in the works with Carrier on Thanksgiving, Trump and Pence spent the next several days hashing out its parameters before the president-elect announced on Twitter on November 29 that they had reached an agreement.  Trump took a victory lap at Carrier's plant in Indianapolis this week.

Mixed reactions

Though controversial, it's important to note that workers at Carrier have lauded the Trump-Pence deal.  That's the case even though the actual terms and conditions of the deal, as it applies to workers who get to keep their jobs, have yet to appear in fine print and the union representing the plant was not involved in the negotiations.

Looked at as a whole, the Trump-Pence announcement has received mix reviews.  Some have celebrated Trump's “art of the deal,” others have questioned whether this is a model that can be replicated as a way to keep jobs in the United States, while Bernie Sanders decried it as a bad deal for taxpayers and a potentially disastrous precedent moving forward. 

Even Trump admitted his own sense of surprise at a press conference celebrating the agreement.

During the presidential campaign, in which he made an example of the Carrier plant as the dark side of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Trump told the public that he would use his business prowess to force Carrier and companies like it to keep jobs in the United States.  If not, Trump said, there would be economic hell to pay.

But in his speech in Indianapolis, he said his campaign promise to bring Carrier jobs back was a “euphemism,” not an actual promise to cut a deal at that particular plant.  With Pence uniquely situated to help foster a deal through the IEDC, though, the stars aligned and the deal was cut.  (Pence chairs the IEDC board.)

Workers at a nearby plant in Huntington, Indiana, however, may not be as lucky.

That facility, which is also owned by Carrier's parent company, will soon lay off 700 workers.  Many of them made the two-hour drive south to Indianapolis to protest.  They held signs that read, “What about our jobs?”

“All of our jobs are leaving.  Why isn't he saving some of our jobs if not all of them?” asked Bill Davis, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 983.  “I'd love to keep the whole facility, but even if we can keep some of our jobs – because I think some of the people would be glad to retire and some of the younger ones stay – so I think our membership could be satisfied even if it was just 50 percent that got to stay.”

Offshoring jobs and taxes

Missing in the many media stories that have tackled the Carrier deal is the fact that Carrier's parent company—United Technologies—isn't just in the business of offshoring U.S. jobs.  It also likely skirts paying its share of federal and state income taxes by maintaining offshore tax havens.  Carrier, itself, is incorporated in the domestic tax haven of Delaware.

Though a company with taxable income at the level of United Technologies has a corporate tax rate of 35 percent at the federal level, United Technologies only paid an 11 percent tax rate between 2008-2012, according to numbers crunched by Citizens for Tax Justice.  It has done so while also securing billions of dollars of U.S. government contracts and receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal tax subsidies.

Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, who has critiqued the Trump-Pence Carrier deal in a series of blog posts, told In These Times he sees this entire saga as an example of Carrier “gaming the system” for its own ends on the backs of taxpayers.

“Companies competing with United Technologies that haven't as brazenly threatened to move jobs offshore will have to pay higher tax rates than United Technologies,” says Gardner.  “And, of course, in the balanced-budget setting of state budgets, every tax break for a specific company ultimately has to be paid for by the rest of us, including smaller businesses and working families.  This deal is a poke in the eye for the many business and individuals who already pay their fair share.”

Like Sanders, Gardner sees Carrier as a worrisome case moving forward in the sense that if it can be repeated or modeled at other workplaces in other cities and states, it will only harm working-class communities.

“The more such deals are carved out, the more unfair—and unsustainable—the tax system becomes,” says Gardner.  “From a broader economic development perspective, and from the perspective of the public interest, there's nothing to cheer about here and certainly nothing to replicate.”