Scott Klinger: Trump’s postmaster general continues to wreak havoc as Christmas nears

The old post office in Augusta, Maine, a notable example of Romanesque architecture

Via OtherWords.org

HARPSWELL, Maine

Last year’s holiday season was not exactly a merry one for the U.S. Postal Service. In the lead-up to Christmas, overwhelmed postal workers had to leave gifts sitting in sorting facilities for weeks. They delivered just 38 percent of greeting cards and other nonlocal first-class mail on time.

What should we expect this year?

USPS leaders claim they are ready for the rush. But customers have reason to worry about slower — and more expensive — service.

The service is aiming to hire 40,000 seasonal workers for the holidays. But that’s 10,000 less than last year — and given broader pandemic staffing shortages, recruitment and retention for these demanding jobs will not be easy. While the e-commerce surge that strained the system last year has declined somewhat, postal workers are still delivering many more packages than before the crisis.

And COVID-19 is not the only reason for concern. In fact, the root causes of our country’s postal problems are inaction by Congress and misguided action by USPS leadership.

For more than a decade, Congress has failed to fix a policy mistake that requires the Postal Service to set aside money to prefund retiree health care more than 50 years in advance. This burden, which applies to no other federal agency or private corporation, accounts for 84 percent of USPS reported losses from 2007 to 2020. If Congress had made the same demand of America’s strongest businesses, many would be bankrupt.

A bill to repeal this pre-funding mandate and put USPS on a stronger financial footing enjoys strong bipartisan support. But House and Senate leaders have not brought up this bill, the Postal Reform Act, for a vote.

In the meantime, U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Trump campaign contributor, is using the agency’s artificially large losses to justify jacking up prices and slowing deliveries.

If you’re planning to send holiday cards a significant distance this season, say from Pittsburgh to Boise, the USPS delivery window is now five days instead of three. These reduced service standards affect about 40 percent of First Class mail.

As part of a 10-year plan, DeJoy is also slowing delivery by 1 to 2 days for about a third of First Class packages. These are small parcels often used to ship highly time-sensitive medications, as well as other lightweight e-commerce purchases.

A big cause of the slowdown: DeJoy’s plan to cut costs by shifting long-distance deliveries from planes to trucks. This is a rollback of the introduction of airmail more than 100 years ago — one of many postal innovations that strengthened the broader U.S. economy.

For worse service, we’ll have to pay more.

In August, USPS raised rates for First Class mail by 6.8 percent and for package services by 8.8 percent. A holiday surcharge will raise delivery costs by as much as $5 per package through December 26. In January, rates for popular flat-rate boxes and envelopes will increase by as much as $1.10.

Next up on DeJoy’s plan: reduced hours at some post offices and the closure of others.

USPS officials argue these draconian moves will boost profits. But even the regulator that oversees the agency has criticized the underlying financial analysis.

Instead, DeJoy’s 10-year plan will more likely drive customers away. That, in turn, will lead to fewer of the good postal jobs that have been a critical path to the middle class, particularly for Black families.

Unless Washington lawmakers lift the financial burden they imposed on USPS, DeJoy will be empowered to keep up his self-defeating cost-cutting spree.

Postal workers and their customers have struggled to overcome the extreme challenges of the pandemic. Now it’s time for Congress to deliver by passing the Postal Reform Act and urging USPS leaders to focus on innovations to better serve all Americans for generations to come

Scott Klinger, who lives in Harpswell, is senior equitable development specialist at Jobs With Justice.

On Ragged Island, Harpswell, Maine, circa 1920

Lindsay Koshgarian: The wasted opportunities since 9/11

Flight paths of the 9/11 murderers

Via OtherWords.org

NORTHAMPTON, Mass.

Twenty years have now passed since 9/11.

The 20 years since those terrible attacks have been marked by endless wars, harsh immigration crackdowns and expanded federal law enforcement powers that have cost us our privacy and targeted entire communities based on nothing more than race, religion, or ethnicity.

Those policies have also come at a tremendous monetary cost — and a dangerous neglect of domestic investment.

In a new report I co-authored with my colleagues at the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, we found that the federal government has spent $21 trillion on war and militarization both inside the U.S. and around the world over the past 20 years. That’s roughly the size of the entire U.S. economy.

Even while politicians have written blank checks for militarism year after year, they’ve said we can’t afford to address our most urgent issues. No wonder these past 20 years have been rough on U.S. families and communities.

After often strong growth from 1970 to 2000, household incomes have stagnated for 20 years as Americans struggled through two recessions in the years leading up to the pandemic. As pandemic eviction moratoriums end, millions are at risk of homelessness.

Our public-health systems have also been chronically underfunded, leaving the U.S. helpless to enact the testing, tracing, and quarantining that helped other countries limit the pandemic’s damage. Over 650,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 — the equivalent of a 9/11 every day for over seven months. The opioid epidemic claims another 50,000 lives a year.

Meanwhile, such extreme weather events as wildfires, hurricanes and floods have grown in frequency over the past 20 years. The U.S. hasn’t invested nearly enough in either renewable energy or climate resiliency to deal with the increasing effects climate change has on our communities.

In the face of all this suffering, it’s clear that $21 trillion in spending hasn’t made us any safer.

Instead, the human costs have been staggering. Around the world, the forever wars have cost 900,000 lives and left 38 million homeless — and as the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan has shown us, they were a massive failure.

Our militarized spending has helped deport 5 million people over the past 20 years, often taking parents from their children. The majority of those deported hadn’t committed any crime except for being here.

And it has paid for the government to listen in on our phone calls and target communities for harassment and surveillance without any evidence of crime or wrongdoing, eroding the civil liberties of all Americans.

Fortunately, there’s a silver lining: We’ve found that for just a fraction of what we’ve spent on militarization these last 20 years, we could start to make life much better.

For $4.5 trillion, we could build a renewable, upgraded energy grid for the whole country. For $2.3 trillion, we could create 5 million $15-an-hour jobs with benefits — for 10 years. For just $25 billion, we could vaccinate low-income countries against COVID-19, saving lives and stopping the march of new and more threatening virus variants.

We could do all that and more for less than half of what we’ve spent on wars and militarization in the last 20 years. With communities across the country in dire need of investment, the case for avoiding more pointless, deadly wars couldn’t be clearer.

The best time for those investments would have been during the past 20 years. The next best time is now.

Lindsay Koshgarian directs the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. She’s the lead author of the new report “State of Insecurity: The Cost of Militarization Since 9/11’’. She lives in Northampton.

On the Connecticut River in Northampton

Phyllis Bennis: Triumph and tragedy of the Olympic Refugee Team

The Refugee Team competes under the Olympic Flag.

Via OtherWords.org

The Olympic Refugee Team filing into the stadium during Tokyo’s opening ceremonies provided a powerful, moving sight: almost 30 athletes, carrying the Olympic flag, striding alongside the delegations of almost every country in the world.

Instead of their home countries, these refugees represent the millions around the world who’ve been forcibly displaced from their homes. The team is made up of extraordinary individuals who have overcome huge obstacles just to survive — let alone train as world-class athletes.

They are swimmers, cyclists, judoken, wrestlers, runners, and more — from Iraq and Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon, Sudan and South Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, and beyond.

Several were part of the Olympics’ first Refugee Team five years ago, including Yusra Mardini, a Syrian swimmer and refugee from the country’s civil war.

Her incredible story went viral. When their overloaded dinghy broke down in the Aegean Sea, Yusra and her sister jumped overboard and swam for three hours, pushing it to safety. They saved the lives of dozens desperately trying to reach safety in Greece.

Yusra’s was only one of the stories of extraordinary trauma and triumph from Team Refugees. But unfortunately, the population represented by the team just keeps growing.

At the time of the Rio Olympics five years ago, 65 million people were forcibly displaced. This year, that figure has soared to over 82 million. If it were its own country, Refugee Nation would be the 20th most populous country on earth, right between Thailand and Germany.

There are many reasons people are forced to flee their homes — including war and violence, extreme weather and climate change, and economic injustice. The harsh reality is that mass displacement has become normalized, acceptable in today’s world.

Global warming and climate chaos are so severe that climate refugees are emerging everywhere. Wars, including many involving the United States, continue to push millions of people out of their homes. And abject poverty, skyrocketing inequality, and a global pandemic are all forcing more desperately poor people to flee in search of work, food, and safety.

It’s not enough to honor millions of refugees with an Olympic team of their own — they need rights, not medals. As long as millions remain displaced, it remains important to build broad and global movements to defend their rights.

The rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights include “freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State,” the right “to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution,” and the right to return to their homes when hostilities are over.

Unfortunately, from the dangerous waters of the Mediterranean to the arid U.S.-Mexico border, those rights are often denied. It’s a grim thing indeed that there are more people displaced now than at any time since World War II — so many that Refugee Nation appears to be a permanent feature of the Olympics.

Still, the courage of these extraordinary young athletes at the Olympics keeps the plight of refugees — and the responsibility of our own governments for their plight — in front of the eyes of the world.

Team Refugees’ entrance to Tokyo’s Olympic stadium provided a moment of hope and a moment of internationalism. It was beautiful.

But how much more beautiful, how much better than medals, if those athletes — and the 82 million displaced people they represent — could go home after the games? To a home for themselves and their families, in their own country or abroad, safe from the wars and disasters and poverty that drove them out in the first place?

Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Jim Hightower: Tyson Foods bets on bad taste

World headquarters of Tyson Foods, in Springdale, Ark.

— Photo by Brandonrush 

Via OtherWords.org

We’ve got the Academy Awards, the Emmys and Grammys. But what should we call the award for the most extraordinary performance by a corporate profiteer?

How about the “Sleazy,” with winners getting a solid gold sculpture of a middle finger?

There were so many worthy contenders, but one corporation exhibited uncommon callousness, so the 2021 Sleazy goes to… Tyson Foods!

The meatpacking giant has regularly run roughshod over workers, farmers, communities, and the environment — not to mention the millions of animals it fattens and slaughters. But the coronavirus really pulled out the worst in Tyson’s corporate ethic.

Last April, its billionaire chair, John Tyson, ranted that health officials who were closing down several of his slaughterhouses that had become hotbeds of contagion were creating another crisis: a national meat shortage!

Responding instantly, our corporate-compassionate, burger-gobbling former president decreed that meatpacking plants were crucial to America’s national security and must be kept open at all cost. Trump’s edict required workers to return to their jobs or be fired.

Only there was no meat shortage.

Not only did Americans have an excess of cheeseburgers, pork chops, and chicken nuggets, but Tyson and other giants actually increased their meat exports to China last year. Meanwhile, COVID-19 rampaged through Tyson’s factories.

In its Waterloo, Iowa, facility alone, a third of the processing workers — mostly low-wage people of color — were infected. At least eight died.

Which brings us to the corporate play that cinched this year’s Sleazy for Tyson.

Waterloo slaughterhouse supervisors actually knew that the back-to-work order would sicken hundreds, but not exactly how many. So, managers organized a winner-take-all betting pool on the percentage of employees who would test positive. “It was simply something fun,” said one —  “kind of a morale boost.”

The virus infected more than a third of 2,800 workers in the plant. Some fun, huh?

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer and public speaker. Distributed by OtherWords.org.

Robert P. Alvarez: Ga. voter law is an attack on my Catholic faith.

Outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, with blue signifying areas (especially cities) that voted for Biden and red for Trump

—Graphic by AdamG2016

Via OtherWords.org

I believe in God and in the right to vote. Georgia’s recent election bill doesn’t just feel like an attack on democracy — it feels like an attack on my faith.

The bill, formally SB 202, infamously makes it illegal to give people food or water while they’re waiting in line to cast their ballot. Providing food for the hungry and water for the thirsty are tenets of my Catholic faith.

So is standing with the marginalized. People don’t like to bring race into the conversation, but we have to be honest about how this bill harms people of color.

In Georgia neighborhoods that were 90 percent or more white, the average wait time to vote was around five minutes in last year’s elections. For neighborhoods that were 90 percent or more people of color, the wait time was about an hour. Some voters waited up to 11 hours.

Georgia’s new law seems designed to make these lines longer — and to punish anyone who tries to make them more comfortable. This disproportionate impact on Black, Latino, Native, and Asian communities isn’t an accident. It’s the result of public policy.

Long lines make people less likely to vote in future elections. Republicans know this. That’s why these long lines are concentrated in areas where voters are more likely to cast their ballots for Democrats.

For many voters of color, the ballot box is how we advocate for our needs — and how we defend ourselves against legislation that might harm us. Make no mistake, this bill is about silencing voters of color and chipping away at our political power.

The new law also chops the period of time when voters can request an absentee ballot in half, imposes stricter voter ID requirements for mail-in voting, and slashes the number of locations where voters can cast a ballot.

More worryingly still, it strips control of the state’s election board from Georgia’s secretary of state — and gifts it instead to the Republican-controlled state legislature.

Last year, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger refused President Trump’s calls to “find” 11,000 more votes for the president, who lost the state. Now, by giving themselves power over the board, Georgia Republicans are plainly laying the groundwork to decertify any future election results they don’t like.

The GOP used to shout their commitment to religious freedom, the rights of businesses, and freedom of speech from rooftops. Now, with their wide net of voter suppression drawing the condemnation of faith groups as well as businesses, they’re stumbling over their own hypocrisy. When Georgia-based businesses like Coca-Cola and Delta spoke out against these new laws, Republicans tried to raise their taxes.

To top it all off, Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, are now telling businesses to “stay out of politics.”

That’s rich coming from McConnell, a lifelong defender of corporate “speech” whose super PAC took in an unbelievable $475 million from corporations last year alone. It’s like if businesses do anything other than write checks, Republicans cry “cancel culture.” Give me a break.

GOP lawmakers are pushing hundreds of bills like Georgia’s in nearly every state in the country. These coordinated attacks on voting rights will inevitably leave poor people and people of color vulnerable to harmful public policy.

As a Catholic, I’m deeply offended by this assault on our democracy. No matter what your faith is, you should be, too.

Robert P. Alvarez is a media relations associate at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Paul Armentano: Does it matter if pot is stronger these days?

Flowering cannabis (marijuana) plant

Via OtherWords.org

I’ve worked in marijuana policy reform for nearly 30 years. Throughout my career, opponents of legalization have alleged that “today’s” pot is far more potent — and therefore more dangerous — than the cannabis of prior generations.

For instance, former Drug Czar William Bennett claimed in 1990 that if people from the late 1960s “suck on one of today’s marijuana cigarettes, they’d fall down backwards.”

His successor, Lee Brown, claimed in 1995 that “marijuana is 40 times more potent today” than it was decades ago. Not to be outdone, then-Delaware Sen. Joe Biden opined in 1996: “It’s like comparing buckshot in a shotgun shell to a laser-guided missile.”

Taking their hyperbole at face value, the message is clear: Modern marijuana is exponentially stronger and more harmful than the weak, nearly impotent weed of yesteryear.

But that’s not what the drug warriors of yesteryear warned.

During the 1930s, Henry Anslinger, Commissioner of the Bureau of Narcotics, testified to Congress that cannabis is ”entirely the monster Hyde, the harmful effect of which cannot be measured.”

Decades later, in the 1960s and ‘70s, public officials argued that the pot of their era was even stronger. They claimed that smoking “Woodstock weed” would permanently damage brain cells — and that, therefore, possession needed to be heavily criminalized to protect public health.

By the late 1980s, former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates opined that advanced growing techniques had increased THC potency to the point that “those who blast some pot on a casual basis… should be taken out and shot.”

Now a new generation of prohibitionists are recycling the same old claims and scare tactics in a misguided effort to re-criminalize more potent cannabis products in states where their production and sale is legal.

Most recently, these calls have even come from the Senate, including from Senators Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas).

So, is there any truth to the claim that today’s weed is so much stronger?

According to marijuana potency data compiled annually by the University of Mississippi at Oxford since the 1970s, one thing is true: The average amount of THC in domestically produced marijuana has increased over time.

But does this elevated potency equate to an increased safety risk? Not necessarily.

Higher-potency cannabis products, such as hashish, have always existed. Marijuana is still the same plant it has always been — with most of the increase in strength akin to the difference between beer and wine, or between a cup of tea and an espresso.

Consuming too much THC at one time can be temporarily unpleasant. But studies have as of yet failed to identify any independent relationship between cannabis use and mental, physical, or psychiatric illnesses.

Furthermore, THC — regardless of potency or quantity — cannot cause death by lethal overdose. Alcohol, by contrast, is routinely sold in lethal dose quantities. Drinking a handle of vodka could easily kill a person, yet vodka is available in liquor stores throughout the country.

Just as alcohol is available in a variety of potencies, from light beer to hard liquor, so is cannabis. So most users regulate their intake accordingly.

Also like with alcohol, cannabis products of the highest potency comprise a far smaller share of the legal marketplace than do more moderately potent products, like flower. According to data published last year in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, nearly eight in ten cannabis consumers prefer herbal cannabis over higher-potency infused concentrates.

Virtually no one thinks alcohol over a certain potency should be re-criminalized. The same should be true of cannabis.

Instead, we should simply make sure consumers know how much THC is in the products they consume and what the effects may be. And we need more diligence from regulators to ensure that legal products for adults don’t get diverted to the youth market.

In other words, let’s address public health concerns with facts, not hyperbole.

Paul Armentano is the deputy director of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. He’s the co-author, with Steve Fox and Mason Tvert, of Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?

Anti-marijuana ad from 1935

Sam Pizzigati: Walgreens workers take the pandemic risks as chain's senior execs get even richer

A Walgreens store on Route 1 in Saugus, Mass.

Via OtherWords.org

BOSTON

Every week, millions of us walk into a Walgreens drugstore without giving it a second thought.

Maybe we should. Walgreens perfectly encapsulates the long-term economic trends of the Trump years: top corporate executives pocketing immense paychecks at the expense of their workers.

At Walgreens, workers start at just $10 an hour. No chain-store empire employing essential workers pays less.

And no retail giant in the United States has given its workers less of a pandemic hazard pay bump — just 18 cents an hour, according to Brookings analysts Molly Kinder and Laura Stateler.

These paltry numbers look even worse when we turn our attention to the power suits who run Walgreens, who face no pandemic hazard. Walgreens CEO Stefano Pessina took home $17 million last year. Altogether, the five top Walgreens execs averaged $11 million for the year, a 9 percent hike over the previous year’s annual average.

Meanwhile, the typical Walgreens employee pulled down a mere $33,396. Pessina’s take-home outpaced that meager reward by 524 times. In effect, Pessina made more in a single weekday morning than his company’s typical worker made for an entire year.

Kinder and Stateler found similar levels of greed at other U.S. retail giants, especially Amazon and Walmart. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the heirs to the Walmart fortune, they note, “have grown $116 billion richer during the pandemic — 35 times the total hazard pay given to more than 2.5 million Amazon and Walmart workers.”

Amazon and Walmart, they add, “could have quadrupled the extra COVID-19 compensation they gave to their workers” and still earned more profit than the previous year.

Not every major corporate player has treated the pandemic as just another easy greed-grab. Workers at Costco — who start at $15 an hour, $5 an hour more than workers at Walgreens — got an extra $2 an hour in hazard pay.

Costco’s top executive team, interestingly, last year collected less than half the pay that went to their counterparts at Walgreens. Costco’s most typical workers took home $47,312 for the year. At 169 to one, that’s less than one-third the pay gap between Walgreen’s chief exec and his company’s most typical workers.

As a society, which corporations should we be rewarding — those whose executives enrich themselves at worker expense, or those that value the contributions all their employees are making?

In moments of past national crises, like World War II, lawmakers took action to prevent corporate profiteering. They put in place stiff excess profits taxes. We could act in that same spirit today. We could, for instance, raise the tax rate on companies that pay their top execs unconscionably more than their workers.

We could also start linking government contracts to corporate pay scales: no tax dollars to any corporations that pay their CEOs over a certain multiple of what their workers take home.

Efforts to link taxes and contracts to corporate pay ratios have already begun.

Voters in San Francisco this past November opted to levy a tax penalty on corporations with top executives making over 100 times typical San Francisco worker pay. Portland, Oregon took a similar step in 2018. At the national level, progressive lawmakers have introduced comparable legislation.

Donald Trump may be gone, but the executives who did so well throughout his tenure remain in place. We need to change the rules that flatter their fortunes.

Sam Pizzigati, based in Boston, is the co-editor of Inequality.org and author of The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win.

Basav Sen: Fossil-fueled fascism

Via OtherWords.org

The year 2020 will be remembered in history for a deadly pandemic and a deep economic crisis that touched almost every country. . Hopes for a brighter 2021 were one of the few things most people could agree on.

But just six days into the new year, these hopes were rudely shattered by images of far-right white supremacists, incited by an aspiring autocrat refusing to admit his electoral defeat, storming the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the election.

This fascist putsch was implicitly supported by some elected leaders, including GOP members of Congress who continued to promote the thoroughly debunked falsehood that the 2020 elections were “stolen.” Worse still, there are early indications that some elected officials may have aided the violent mob more directly as well.

But this attempted coup wouldn’t have progressed to this point without large amounts of funding, too. And playing a disproportionately large role among business backers of fascism are fossil fuel companies and their owners and top executives.

My Institute for Policy Studies colleagues Chuck Collins and Omar Ocampo recently documented the top billionaire donors to the Trump campaign. In first place is Kelcy Warren, co-founder and board chair (and until last October, CEO) of Energy Transfer — the company behind the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline.

Trump’s wealthy backers over the years have also included the notorious (and now deceased) coal billionaire Robert Murray, who effectively bribed Trump and his former Energy Secretary Rick Perry to implement a policy agenda that would benefit Murray.

This isn’t a case of a few isolated billionaires backing one extremist politician. It’s a case of an entire industry filling the campaign coffers of politicians who’ve waged war on our democracy. In the 2020 election cycle alone, the oil and gas industries gave some $9.3 million to lawmakers who refused to certify the 2020 election results.

The fourth largest Political Action Committee (PAC) making campaign donations to these coup-supporting politicians is the Koch Industries PAC.

Koch Industries is widely known as a major right-wing political donor. It’s also a vast conglomerate that’s deeply intertwined with fossil fuels, with interests in refineries, equipment, engineering, and construction services for petrochemical facilities, gas transportation and storage, and more.

The industry has also funded far-right hate groups directly.

DonorsTrust, a donor-advised fund that allows wealthy people to make anonymous contributions, has made large donations to multiple hate groups, totaling $5 million in 2019. The Koch Charitable Foundation is a contributor to DonorsTrust and has other organizational ties with them as well.

Unsurprisingly, Donors Trust also donated $5 million in 2019 to climate denial and misinformation groups, such as the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Climate denial and far-right extremism are two heads of the same monster.

The Koch network, American Petroleum Institute, Chevron, and other fossil fuel organizations all made public statements condemning the violence at the Capitol and supporting certification of the 2020 elections. These were fine as far as they went, but they sound rather like Dr. Frankenstein condemning the monster of his own creation.

Slaying this monster once and for all has to start with ending the culture of legalized bribery and corruption, in which wealthy individuals and corporations can fund far-right extremism inside and outside government, often anonymously.

And just to make sure the monster doesn’t rise again, we need to break the political clout of the fossil fuel industry once and for all.

Basav Sen directs the Climate Policy Program at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Sarah Anderson: The inglorious return of the three-martini lunch

Via OtherWords.org

While the world is reeling from the pandemic and American democracy faces a profound crisis, corporate lobbyists have been focused on making taxpayers subsidize lavish lunches for wealthy executives.

Their work paid off in the 11th-hour COVID-19 relief deal Congress passed late last year. Buried in the details of this modest aid plan is a provision to give executives unlimited tax deductions for their business meals for two years.

That’s how it worked back in the 1970s, when presidential candidate George McGovern had this to say about it: “There’s something fundamentally wrong with the tax system,” he said, “when it allows a corporate executive to deduct his $20 martini lunch while a working man cannot deduct the price of his bologna sandwich.”

President Reagan, of all people, actually agreed with McGovern. His 1986 tax overhaul, best remembered today for lowering overall rates, reduced the deductibility of business meals from 100 to 80 percent. In 1993, the Clinton administration pushed that deductibility rate down to 50 percent, where it has stayed ever since.

Now corporate lobbyists have managed to restore that 1970s-era perk — claiming, of course, that bigger tax write-offs for business meals would help struggling restaurants and the people they employ.

That’s the same argument they used in their opposition to the Clinton-era reform. It was flawed then and it’s even more preposterous now.

Back in 1993, the National Restaurant Association predicted that if businesses were able to write off only half the cost of their business meals (instead of 80 percent), restaurant industry sales would plummet by $3.8 billion and 165,000 jobs would be lost in just the first year.

The opposite occurred. In the year after the reform went into effect on Jan. 1, 1994, sales at full-service restaurants grew by 3.5 percent, outstripping overall U.S. economic growth, according to Census and Labor Department data. And instead of the NRA’s predicted loss of 165,000 jobs, full-service restaurant payrolls grew by 132,300. That was a 4-percent increase, compared to only 3.5 percent growth in national employment.

Today, when the real problem is a public-health crisis that’s keeping people at home, it’s even more laughable that lowering taxes on business meals will do anything to help struggling restaurant owners and employees.

In this time of crisis, any taxpayer support for corporations should require executives to treat their workers well, trim their own fat paychecks — and pay for their own lunch.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Jim Hightower: Turkey and Thanksgiving confusions

“The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth “ (1914), by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe, at the Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, Mass. If they ate turkeys, they would have been members of the Eastern Wild Turkey subspecies seen below.

Via OtherWords.org

Let’s talk about turkey!

No, not the Butterball now pouting in the Oval Office. I’m talking about the real thing — the big bird, 46 million of which Americans will devour on Thanksgiving.

It was the Aztecs who first domesticated the gallopavo, but leave it to the Spanish conquistadores to “foul-up” the bird’s origins.

The Spanish declared the turkey to be related to the peacock — wrong! They also thought that the peacock originated in Turkey – wrong again!  And they thought that Turkey was in Africa. You can see the Spanish colonists were pretty confused.

Actually, the origin of Thanksgiving itself is similarly confused.

The popular assumption is that it was first celebrated by the Mayflower immigrants and the Wampanoag natives at Plymouth in what is now called Massachusetts, 1621. They feasted on venison, neyhom (Wampanoag for gobblers), eels, mussels, corn and beer.

But wait, say Virginians, the first precursor to our annual November food-a-palooza was not in Massachusetts — the Thanksgiving feast originated down in Jamestown colony, back in 1608.

Whoa, there, hold your horses, pilgrims. Folks in El Paso, Texas, say that it all began way out there in 1598, when Spanish settlers sat down with people of the Piro and Manso tribes, gave thanks, then feasted on roasted duck, geese and fish.

“Ha!” says a Florida group, asserting the very, very first Thanksgiving happened in 1565, when the Spanish settlers of St. Augustine and friends from the Timucuan tribe chowed down on cocido — a stew of salt pork, garbanzo beans, and garlic — washing it all down with red wine.

Wherever it began, and whatever the purists claim is “official,” Thanksgiving today is as multicultural as America. So let’s enjoy — even if we’re in smaller groups or observing virtually this year.

Kick back, give thanks we’re in a country with such ethnic richness, and dive into your turkey rellenos, moo-shu turkey, turkey falafel, barbecued turkey.

Jim Hightower is a columnist and public speaker.

Jim Hightower: Pandemic has been a bonanza for the rich

Via OtherWords.org

Let’s say you’re a millionaire. That’s a lot of money, right? Now let’s say you’re a billionaire. That’s a lot more money! But how much more?

Think of all those dollars as seconds on a clock. A million seconds would total 11 days – but a billion seconds equals nearly 32 years.

Rich is nice, but billionaire-rich is over the moon — and the wealth of billionaires is now zooming out of this world.

There are only 2,200 billionaires in the whole world, but the wealth stashed away by these elites hit a new record this summer, averaging more than $4 billion each. They’ve even pocketed an extra half-billion bucks on average in the midst of the COVID-19 economic crash.

Bear in mind that these fortunate few did nothing to earn this haul. They didn’t work harder, didn’t get one-digit smarter, didn’t create some new breakthrough product to benefit humankind. They could just crank back in their gold-plated La-Z-Boys and let their money make money for them.

Then there are multimillionaire corporate chieftains who are cashing in on their own failure.

Having closed stores throughout America, fired thousands of workers, stiffed suppliers and creditors, taken bailout money from taxpayers, and even led their corporations into bankruptcy, the CEOs of such collapsing giants as Hertz, JCPenney, and Toys “R” Us have grabbed millions of dollars in — believe it or not — bonus payments!

The typical employee at JCPenney for example, is held to part-time work, making under $12,000 a year. Thousands of them are now losing even that miserly income as the once-mighty retailer is shutting 154 stores. Yet, the CEO was paid a $4.5 million cash bonus before the company filed for bankruptcy this year.

And still, the corporate establishment wonders why the people consider them heartless and greedy.

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer and public speaker.

Joshua Cho: Even in Pennsylvania, opposing fracking isn't 'political suicide'

Fracking in progress

Via OtherWords.org

In this year’s vice presidential debate, Sen. Kamala Harris reiterated Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s rejection of a fracking ban, despite her earlier call for one when she was a presidential candidate.

“I will repeat, and the American people know, that Joe Biden will not ban fracking. That is a fact,” Harris said.

Whenever there are discussions about banning fracking, media coverage seems to prioritize potential “risks” to Democrats’ electoral prospects, or potential economic downturns. Unfortunately, a lot of this coverage is quite sloppy.

For instance, The New York Times quoted absurd claims that a fracking ban would mean “hundreds of thousands” of Pennsylvanians would be “unemployed overnight.” In reality, about 26,000 people work in all of Pennsylvania’s oil and gas sector.

Still, The Times suggested that any presidential candidate who supports a national fracking ban would risk losing Pennsylvania, calling the issue “a political bet.” A fracking ban “could jeopardize any presidential candidate’s chances of winning this most critical of battleground states — and thus the presidency itself,” the paper wrote.

NPR likewise made dubious pronouncements on the opinions of swing-state voters the focal point of the story, reporting that “aggressive” climate action “could push moderate voters in key swing states to reelect President Trump,” and even cited — without rebuttal — a claim from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that a fracking ban would eliminate 17 percent of all U.S. jobs.

Soon after the debate, Quartz explained that Biden and Harris don’t support a fracking ban because it “tempts political suicide in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio where fossil fuels still rule.” And the Los Angeles Times described Biden’s opposition to a fracking ban as a “nuanced position.”

There are two big problems with these arguments.

First, as journalist David Sirota pointed out, “the idea that a fracking ban is political poison in Pennsylvania” simply “isn’t substantiated by empirical data.”

A January poll of Pennsylvania voters found that more registered voters support a fracking ban (48 percent) than oppose it (39 percent). A later CBS/YouGov poll in August found 52 percent of Pennsylvania voters supporting a fracking ban. These numbers hardly suggest “political suicide.”

Second, there’s simple climate science.

In 2018, the U.N. announced that carbon pollution needs to be cut by 45 percent by 2030 to prevent irreversible planetary devastation.

Unfortunately, fracking releases large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, which can warm the planet 80 times more than the same amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. And recent reporting has suggested that fracking is an even bigger contributor to global warming than previously believed.

At the debate, Harris emphasized that Biden “believes” in science.

She claimed he “understands that the West Coast of our country is burning” and “sees what is happening on the Gulf states, which are being battered by storms,” and that he has “seen and talked with the farmers in Iowa, whose entire crops have been destroyed because of floods.”

But on this issue, the science clearly points in one direction: away from fracking.

Finally, banning fracking doesn’t need to mean eliminating jobs. Environmental and labor activists, economists, and scientists have for years discussed the need for a full employment program based on green jobs to serve as a just transition for workers. Green industries could employ many, many more workers than fossil fuels. 

There is no reason for a fracking ban to be “political suicide” — except, maybe, for the fossil fuel industry.

Joshua Cho (@JoshC0301) is a writer based in Virginia. This op-ed was adapted from a longer piece at FAIR.org and distributed by OtherWords.org.

Sam Pizzigati: Biden tax plan would reduce inequality

“The tax collector's office,’’ by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1640)

Via OtherWords.org

BOSTON

Want to know where the 2020 presidential election is heading? Don’t obsess about the polls. Pay attention to tax lawyers and accountants.

These experts in reducing rich people’s tax bills understand what many Americans still haven’t quite fathomed: The nation’s wealthiest will likely pay significantly more in taxes if Joe Biden becomes president.

Why? Because the massive tax cuts for corporations and the rich that Trump and the GOP passed in 2017 may soon be shredded.

If these rich don’t take immediate steps to “protect their fortunes,” their law firms are advising, they could lose out big-time. “We’ve been telling people: ‘Use it or lose it,’” says Jere Doyle, a strategist at BNY Mellon Wealth Management.

At first, these concerns may appear overblown. Under Biden’s plan, the tax rate on America’s top income tax bracket would only rise from 37 percent back up to 39.6 percent, the Obama-era rate.

But the real “backbreakers” for the rich come elsewhere.

Among the biggest: a new tax treatment for “investment income,” the money that rich people make buying and selling assets.

Most of this income currently enjoys a super-discounted tax rate — just 20 percent, far lower than what most working people pay on their paycheck income. The Biden tax plan ends this favorable treatment of income from “capital gains” for taxpayers making over $1 million. It would also close the loophole where wealthy people simply pass appreciated assets to their heirs.

Biden is also proposing an overhaul of Social Security taxes. The current 12.4 percent Social Security payroll tax — half paid by employers, half by employees — applies this year to only the first $137,700 in paycheck earnings, a figure that gets annually adjusted to inflation.

That means that a corporate exec who makes $1 million this year will pay the same amount into Social Security as a person who makes $137,700.

Biden’s plan would apply the Social Security tax to all paycheck income over $400,000, so America’s deepest pockets would pay substantially more to support Social Security. Meanwhile Americans making under $400,000 would continue to pay at current levels.

Corporations would also pay more in taxes. Biden would raise the standard corporate income tax rate from 21 to 28 percent, set a 15 percent minimum tax on corporate profits, and double the current minimum tax foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies have to pay from 10.5 to 21 percent.

Among other changes: Big Pharma companies would no longer get tax deductions for what they spend on advertising. Real estate moguls would no longer be able to depreciate the rental housing they own on an accelerated schedule, and fossil-fuel companies would lose a variety of lucrative tax preferences.

Together, these ideas could measurably reduce inequality.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has crunched the numbers: In 2022, under Biden’s plan, the nation’s top 1 percent would bear 97 percent of the direct tax increases Biden is proposing. The next most affluent 4 percent would bear the remaining 3 percent.

Despite some misleading Republican talking points to the contrary, no households making under $400,000 — the vast majority of Americans — would see their direct taxes rise.

Even if Democrats win the Senate, actually passing this plan will take grassroots pressure — the only force that has ever significantly raised taxes on the rich.

Wealth inequality remains an even greater challenge, and the Biden plan includes no wealth tax along the lines of what Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, two of Biden’s primary rivals, advocated. But more pressure could also shove that wealth tax onto the table.

If that happens, we might finally begin to reverse the staggering levels of inequality that Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election ushered in.

Sam Pizzigati, based in Boston, is the co-editor of Inequality.org and author of The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win.

Jill Richardson: Trump's bogus 'meritocracy'

“The Worship of Mammon;; (1909), by Evelyn De Morgan

Via OtherWords.org

Today I looked at a graph of income inequality over time in America. This was not new information to me, and yet it was still shocking.

From the 1950s until the early 1970s, Americans grew richer together. Some Americans were poor and others were rich, but their incomes, adjusted for inflation, grew at the same pace. Income roughly doubled for all.

Then the lines diverge. The rich got much, much, much richer and the rest of us had more modest gains.

Recently, Trump issued an executive order declaring America a “meritocracy” where hard work and skill are fairly rewarded. If America’s inequality reflects a meritocracy and the wealthy grew richer while everyone else didn’t, is the president calling the majority of the American people stupid and lazy?

I am in my seventh year of a PhD program. Everyone around me is in a difficult position. COVID-19 has hobbled the economy.

The freshmen are missing out on the normal college experience right after they all missed their proms and graduation ceremonies. Some of them are living in quarantined dorms where some students have COVID. I can’t imagine how worried their parents must be. And the upperclassmen will graduate into an economy that set records for the worst unemployment since the Great Depression this year.

Graduate students are struggling to do fieldwork under quarantine. The academic job market is wrecked. Nobody knows what this will mean for our futures. How will I pay my student loan debt? I’ve done my part to get my education, and I am on track to be qualified for a job. But will there be any jobs?

The people around me are lucky. They are at an excellent state university, in training for professional jobs. How much more are others suffering compared to us right now? Many Americans are suffering far worse than missing out on frat parties.

Over 208,000 are now dead from the coronavirus, and millions more are alive but suffering in various ways — mourning lost family members, suffering long term health complications, risking their lives to go to work, or out of work and in need of income.

I think I am saddest for people who lose family members during this time. You need friends and family with you when you grieve, and too many have had to bear that burden alone.

Meanwhile, the person responsible for the safety of our nation, who has mishandled the coronavirus from the start, was living in luxury and sleeping with a porn star while he wasn’t even paying his taxes.

Donating your salary is not that noble when you are gaining much more than that by dodging taxes. Implying that you got where you did through merit when it was cheating — and that the millions of Americans with less wealth than you have less merit — is an insult.

We live in a deeply unequal society, and we are led by someone who benefits from that inequality. No executive order should gaslight us into thinking that’s fair.

Jill Richardson is a sociologist.

Chuck Collins: How you pay taxes and they don’t

Via OtherWords.org

BOSTO

My daughter, a librarian in Tucson, paid more taxes in 2017 than Donald Trump. So did my neighbor Rita, a teacher, and her son Tony, who stocks grocery shelves in Leland, Mich.

I also pay more in taxes than the president of the United States. And, probably, so do you.

We now understand why Trump was the first presidential candidate since the 1970s not to divulge his tax returns.

In 2016 and 2017, the billionaire paid just $750 each year in taxes to the U.S. Treasury. In 10 out of 15 years between 2001 and 2017, Trump paid zero taxes.

The average middle class household paid approximately three times as much in federal taxes as Trump did in 2017, an average of $2,200 based on an income of roughly $60,000. Any individual earning over $25,000 most likely paid more than the president.

It’s not that Trump wasn’t paying taxes at all. In 2017, Trump paid $156,824 in taxes in the Philippines and $145,500 in India. He just wasn’t paying them to support veterans, build roads, or protect seniors in this country.

The other secret Trump doesn’t want you to know is that his image as a wealthy successful business mogul is a mirage.

Over the decades, Trump personally lobbied Forbes Magazine to report that he was wealthier than he really is. Two decades of tax returns, however, reveal he is a man in deep financial doo-doo. He may even owe more than he owns.

Trump’s real estate and resort businesses are mostly money losers, contributing to hundreds of millions of tax-deductible business losses each year.

On top of these losses, Trump deducts tens of millions in lavish personal living expenses — such as $70,000 in hair styling, consulting fees to his children, and mansion retreats — to reduce his tax obligations.

Only someone with Trump’s army of tax attorneys and wealth managers could pull off these loopholes. Trump’s assets are spread over 500 different corporate shells, enabling limitless shifting and gaming of income and taxes.

Trump takes advantage of the fact that there are two tax systems in America: one set of rules for the super-rich and another set of rules for everyone else.

Most of us get our incomes from paychecks and government agencies that know exactly how much we are paid and often withhold our taxes before we even see the money.

People with incomes over $2 million and assets over $20 million get most of their income from investments, ownership of assets, and businesses. There are endless games they can play to manipulate their income. And they can afford to hire accountants and tax lawyers to maneuver their taxes downward.

If you lose money, you grow poorer. But when the super-rich create paper losses to offset their taxes, they’re still rich. And like Trump, they aren’t sacrificing anything in terms of their cushy standard of living.

These tax shenanigans are all the more unseemly in the face of a pandemic that’s destroyed the wealth, health, and livelihoods of millions. Tens of millions of families have lost jobs, savings, home equity, and any other economic security they may have had.

They will not be “carrying over” these losses into future years and virtually eliminating their taxes for a decade, as Trump did.

Instead, they’ll pay income taxes on unemployment insurance, stimulus checks, and any paycheck they’ve been able to eke out.  There will be no deductions for haircuts or consulting contracts for their children.

Trump’s taxes reveal the real truth. He’s more about the art of the deduction than the art of the deal.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that Trump’s tax manipulations reveal where the weak spots are in the current system. Congress should restore fairness and integrity to a tax system that has been pillaged by the super-rich.

Chuck Collins directs the Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Mitchell Zimmerman: COVID crisis shows endless liar Trump only cares about Trump

Via OtherWords.org

“Captain,” said the first mate, “we just crashed into an iceberg — the hull’s been breached!”

“An iceberg. Deadly stuff,” said the captain. “Still, let’s play it down.”

“What are your orders? We must warn the passengers.”

“I’ll make an announcement… Attention all passengers, this is your captain speaking. We’ve encountered some ice, but we have it very well under control. We’re doing a great job. No need for you to change your routines. Over and out.”

“Should we ready the lifeboats?” asked the mate.

“Nah. Let’s just show confidence. I don’t want to create a panic.”

The deceiving and self-flattering captain of the scenario, leading his passengers into disaster, seems fictitious. But he’s all too real: except for the references to ice, everything the captain says above are things that President Trump has actually said about COVID-19.

Tragically, that’s America in the age of pandemic. Over 6.5 million cases of coronavirus. Around a thousand deaths per day. An economy in ruins.

But Captain Trump is still at the helm — and Americans are still needlessly dying — because he still prefers “playing it down” to uniting us behind the tough but necessary measures that are called for.

For months, Trump urged resistance to the precautions epidemiologists recommended, crusaded against the lockdown, and minimized the lethal threat, even claiming the coronavirus was “totally harmless” in 99 percent of cases.

He knew this was false: “This is deadly stuff,” he privately told journalist Bob Woodward in February.

Even as Trump publicly ridiculed the use of masks and encouraged followers to defy social distancing, he knew the virus was spread through the air. “It goes through air,” he told Woodward. “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed.”

Trump claimed publicly that coronavirus was “like the regular flu,” but he told Woodward that he knew otherwise. It’s “more deadly than even your strenuous flu,” Trump told the journalist — more than five times as deadly.

Trump and his falsehoods are responsible for most of America’s 200,000 coronavirus deaths to date. How could it be otherwise? How could anyone think thwarting the epidemic response prescribed by doctors, scientists, and public health leaders would not have deadly consequences?

Turn back to January.

A dozen presidential briefings warned Trump of the coming pandemic. The Health and Human Services Department secretary twice told Trump the contagion was looming. Trump’s trade adviser wrote a memo in January warning of a “full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”

Trump claims he refused to act because he feared panic.

Avoiding panic is all very well. But if you’re telling passengers they don’t need to get in the lifeboats, you’re responsible when they start drowning. In reality, Trump cared more about not “panicking [the stock] market” — which he saw as key to his re-election — than about the lives that would be lost.

By late February a White House task force recommended aggressive steps, including stay-at-home orders. But when a Centers for Disease Control leader warned the public that a pandemic was imminent and “disruption to everyday life might be severe,” Trump threatened to fire her.

“The risk to the American people remains very low,” Trump proclaimed instead.

It was mid-March before Trump yielded to reality.

The cost of Trump’s delay? Columbia University epidemiologists concluded in May that had the lockdowns begun just two weeks earlier, “the vast majority of the nation’s deaths — about 83 percent — would have been avoided.”

But they weren’t. And the 1 million people who were needlessly infected, thanks to Trump’s indifference, then went on to infect others, and those in turn still others. Meanwhile the president kept up his campaign against the steps needed to bring the pandemic under control.

No precise reckoning is possible, but there’s no doubt a majority of our cases and deaths might have been avoided but for Trump’s lies, neglect, and sabotage. 

Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning.

Jill Richardson: Trump’s quasi-dictatorship is ill-suited to a pandemic

Strong leaders!

From OtherWords.org

The Trump administration is apparently undertaking its latest effort to make 2020 more of a Kafkaesque nightmare than it already is. Yes, we’ve got murder hornets and a swarm of flying ants that can be seen from space over in Ireland, but maybe the scariest plague of the year is the president.

Since the start of the pandemic, Trump’s only concern has been his poll numbers. He wants to go back to the reality we left behind in 2019: an open economy and no mass casualties from a novel virus.

We can’t do that, so he’s done his best to pretend: downplaying the pandemic, falsely claiming that his administration has it under control, urging a quick economic reopening, and inaccurately claiming the economy is strong anyway.

When he can’t pretend everything is fine, he blames the Chinese. But China is not responsible for Trump’s botched response to the pandemic.

Now the Trump administration is actively interfering with the pandemic response.

Hospitals have been instructed to send COVID data to a central database in Washington, bypassing the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The information will no longer be accessible to the public, raising concern that the data is being hidden for political reasons and the lack of transparency will make it easier for the administration to mislead the public.

The administration is also blocking CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield from testifying before Congress about the safety of reopening schools. They are attempting to block GOP senators from allocating billions of dollars to the CDC, Pentagon, and State Department for pandemic response. And the administration even opposes sending billions to states for testing and contact tracing.

Trump’s message to states has largely been “you’re on your own,” declining a national leadership role and placing responsibility for handling the pandemic on the states. He’s also suggested that governors should “treat him well” to receive federal aid, using the pandemic as a bargaining chip to silence dissent from governors who disagree with him.

Earlier in the pandemic, when personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies were limited, the federal government was even seizing PPE shipments.

In normal times, I would say the president should not be abdicating his leadership responsibility on the pandemic response. Under this president, I think we’re all better off if he and his political appointees interfere as little as possible and let more capable people do their jobs.

Despite his recent conversion to mask wearing, Trump’s authoritarianism is ill-suited to a pandemic. You cannot lower mortality rates by claiming the pandemic is under control and trying to force schools and businesses to reopen, regardless of the risk to workers. You can’t prevent the economy from tanking by insisting that it’s fine.

Trump’s top concern appears to be his own approval ratings, not our national welfare. He seems to believe his denial will be enough to save the economy — a plan that will fail and cause further mass casualties along the way.

The administration has created a terrible situation. All of our choices between our health and our economy are tough, and no choices will fully protect us. More than 145,000 people have died, and our economy is a mess.

We need to govern with facts instead of fantasy. If Trump can’t handle the job, he should get out of the way.

Jill Richardson is a sociologist.

Tracey L. Rogers: Gun-toting quarantine protesters called 'good people,' Floyd protesters 'thugs'

Units of the paramilitary Michigan Militia

From OtherWords.org

As protests and riots spread like wildfire across the nation in response to the death of George Floyd and other black people at the hands of white police officers, I cannot help but recall an old African Proverb:

“The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”

Protests and riots are a part of this country’s history, from the Holy Week Uprisings that occurred after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to the Los Angeles riots that took place after police were acquitted of severely beating Rodney King in 1992.

Of course, I do not condone the looting and violence that often follow public gatherings of unrest. But as a black woman living in a racist society, I know the pain and frustrations of those who are sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Dr. King once said in a speech that, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” For far too long, Black Americans have gone unheard.

The injustices that plague us become especially unbearable when you compare the mostly peaceful organizing by black activists seeking justice for George Floyd to the white protestors who entered the state capitol building in Michigan last month, armed with rifles, confederate flags, and other symbols of the slave-owning south, to reject — of all things — COVID-19 stay-at-home orders.

President Trump tweeted his support for those protestors. “These are very good people,” he said, “but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely!”

But when unarmed black people took to the streets for Mr. Floyd, Trump tweeted, “These THUGS are dishonoring his memory, and I won’t let that happen.”

What the president and others don’t realize is that we’re not just protesting the death of George Floyd (or Breonna Taylor, or Ahmaud Arbery, or Eric Garner, or Alton Sterling, or Philando Castile). We are also protesting the racist culture embedded in police precincts throughout the nation — and the brutality that comes with it.

When Sacramento police shot and killed Stephon Clark in 2017, 84 people were arrested in a subsequent peaceful march against police violence. Just last month in New York, Shakheim Brunson was beaten and pinned to the ground by police after being asked to disperse in compliance with social distance orders.

And of course, peaceful, unarmed protesters are being violently attacked by police across the country today — most recently so Trump could enjoy a photo-op outside a Washington, D.C. church.

This is the infamous tale of two Americas.

Black protestors get pegged as “Black Identity Extremists” by the FBI and can be prosecuted as domestic terrorists.

If you’re a real-life white identity extremist, on the other hand, you can actually join the ranks of the law enforcement. “There is a long history of the military, police, and other authorities supporting, protecting, or even being members of white supremacy groups,” wrote Rashad Robinson in The Guardian last year.

All this comes around the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre that took place in 1921, when white mobs rampaged against black people and black-owned businesses. Private planes from a nearby airfield even dropped firebombs on black neighborhoods, wiping out a district then known as “Black Wall Street.”

Who were the “thugs” in this incident?

And, as Dr. King asked in his speech on riots, “What is it that America has failed to hear?”

This injustice is precisely why we march. This is why we protest. This is why we chant, “no justice, no peace.

Tracey L. Rogers is an entrepreneur and activist living in Philadelphia.

Negin Owliaei: Right-wingers, some rich folks quite all right with sacrificing the vulnerable

COVID-19 nurse.

From OtherWords.org

Every morning for the last two months, I’ve checked the news in my home state of Florida with growing concern.

First came the photos of unemployed people lining up to file for benefits in person, denied access to an overburdened system. Then came the news that only a tiny percentage of unemployment claims were paid out by late April.

Now, barber shops and nail salons are reopening, even as the state saw its deadliest week yet. Altogether, the news paints a horrifying picture of a government cruelly uninterested in protecting human life.

The overwhelming majority of Americans continue to support social distancing and stay-at-home orders. But right-wing forces across the country are demanding an end to life-saving lockdowns, cheered on by a White House well aware of how devastating the loss of life could be.

The government estimates a death count as high as 3,000 people a day. Despite those horrifying numbers, some states are encouraging employers to report workers who are afraid that returning to their jobs could amount to a death sentence, kicking them off unemployment.

As other countries have shown with far more grace, the alternative isn’t shutting down forever — it’s investing in testing and social safety nets.

Senegal, which has 50 ventilators for its population of 16 million, is building more through 3D printing, all while it trials a $1 testing kit. The world took note of South Korea’s quick and vigorous testing system. Countries across Europe have relied on existing social safety nets to prevent the mass layoffs we’ve seen here in the U.S.

Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo provided necessary perspective: “We know how to bring the economy back to life,” he said. “What we do not know is how to bring people back to life.”

By contrast, the Trump administration’s callousness has become more evident than ever.

Experts have been sidelined in favor of fumbling volunteers from private-equity and venture-capital firms, who botched the procurement of medical supplies. And when Trump finally invoked the Defense Production Act, it was to force meatpacking workers — who are mostly Latinx and Black — to work through unsafe conditions at the very plants that have emerged as outbreak hotspots.

Indeed, those demographics may help explain the government’s willingness to risk lives.

It seems like no coincidence that the far-right pushback became stronger as evidence mounted showing the virus disproportionately killing already marginalized people of color, especially black Americans. And it was hard to miss the Nazi slogan prominently displayed at a “re-open” protest in Illinois, or the Confederate flags featured as far north as Wisconsin.

Government disregard for vulnerable lives is hardly new. Who can forget the New Orleans residents stranded on their rooftops after Hurricane Katrina? Or the disabled New Yorkers left stranded for days after Hurricane Sandy?

Every level of the U.S. government has shown, time and again, that the default setting is to leave the vulnerable behind. But Americans themselves are challenging that approach.

Workers at General Electric protested to switch production to ventilators, a move that could save jobs and lives. Teachers have promised more strikes if schools open against medical advice.

Nurses, in addition to treating the sick, have faced “re-open” protesters head on. And they’ve stood outside the White House, reading the names of their colleagues killed by government inaction and demanding more protections.

Add these actions to the wave of strikes and sickouts from essential workers across the country, and a clear picture emerges: The wealthy may be fine with sacrificing the vulnerable. But workers understand the sanctity of human life, and will fight for it.

Negin Owliaei is a researcher and co-editor of Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Lois Gibbs: Under cover of COVID-19, EPA just gave polluters a license to kill

The best-seller (followed by a movie) about an infamous industrial water-pollution case in Woburn, Mass. , in the 1980s.

Protestors at Love Canal in 1978

Via OtherWords.org

Our government just told polluters they are free to pump deadly chemicals into our air and water. That’s because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has suspended all enforcement indefinitely, until the COVID-19 crisis is over.

This terrifies me. I know firsthand that giving polluters free rein will cost thousands, even millions, of lives.

As a young mother in Niagara Falls, N.Y., in the 1970s, I watched toxic chemicals bubble up through our lawns, poisoning our children. When my neighbors and I discovered that our neighborhood, Love Canal, was built on a toxic waste dump, our advocacy led to the creation of the first Superfund site by Congress in 1980.

Today the EPA acknowledges more than 40,000 communities across the United States are dangerously polluted with toxic chemicals, from rural areas to major cities like Birmingham and Detroit. At the 1,344 sites targeted for cleanup by Superfund, polluters are required to pay — at least when they can be found.

But there are tens of thousands more communities where the pollution continues unabated. These are known as “sacrifice zones” — places where the health of residents is permanently sacrificed to industrial contamination.

Already, 36 percent of all school-age children — over 19.6 million — live in sacrifice zones. But if the EPA abandons its oversight of polluting industries now, this number of dangerously uninhabitable communities will grow exponentially. Many more people will die.

In short, the EPA just gave polluters a license to kill.

On March 26, the EPA said it will not “seek penalties for noncompliance with routine monitoring and reporting obligations” from polluters until further notice. This came days after the American Petroleum Institute sent a 10-page letter to the EPA, asking them to suspend enforcement.

And while the EPA now claims the pandemic is the reason, this change has been coming for months. Last November, they rolled back requirements that companies take safety measures to prevent chemical releases, calling these regulations “burdensome,” “costly,” and “unnecessary.”

If we told drivers there are no more traffic rules, most would still do the right thing and drive safely. But a handful will drive drunk, blow through stop signs, and run over pedestrians. A few scofflaws make our country a much more dangerous place.

That’s especially true in sacrifice zones where residents are being told to shelter in place because of COVID-19 — they can’t leave. Often this may apply to communities they had previously been told were toxic.

Imagine how a shelter in place order must feel to people like Eddie Ramirez.

He’s one of the 60,000 Texans who were ordered to leave — then return, and stay home — after a petrochemical plant explosion in Port Neches last November released dangerous amounts of butadiene, which causes nervous system damage. After Eddie returned home, authorities realized dangerous chemicals were still in the air, so they ordered residents to evacuate a second time.

TCP Group, the Houston-based petrochemical company that owns the Port Neches plant, had to pay more than $378,000 in penalties for more violations last year. If the EPA suspends even minimal penalties like these, polluters have no incentive to do the right thing.

Dozens of refinery fires and factory explosions emit toxic chemicals into the environment every year. If we remove penalties and enforcement, there will be more.

And right now, because of COVID-19 and our government’s refusal to protect our environment, the residents of sacrifice zones like Port Neches are like sitting ducks. They have no place to go. It is our responsibility to keep them safe.

Lois Gibbs is the founder of the Center for Health and Environmental Justice, part of the People’s Action network of grassroots groups. She helped win recognition for the first Superfund site at Love Canal in Niagara Falls, N.Y., in 1980.

Locations of Superfund sites