#biden's pro-worker policies

[tomorrowusa]

Trump's most famous promise was to make Mexico pay for his squalid and corrupt border wall.

Amount collected from Mexico: 0 centavos.

Trump did give tax breaks to billionaires while giving COVID-19 to much of the rest of the country.

Trump's promises are as worthless as degrees from Trump University.

[vaguelyaperson]

To anyone who's considering throwing away their vote if the only option against Trump in 2024 is Biden: the federal labor union I work for has been desperately trying to establish bargaining rights that would be untouchable by executive orders, in case Trump wins. Or as our lawyer said today, "[Unions] face virtual annihilation in the next administration."

There is a difference between the two candidates. Even if it does come down to a lesser of the two evils, please vote.

[trendynewsnow]

The Impact of Biden's Pro-Labor Policies and the Threat of a Trump Administration

The Shift in Labor Relations under Biden and the Anticipated Changes with Trump Joseph R. Biden Jr. made a bold promise to become the most pro-labor president in American history. Throughout his tenure, he demonstrated an unprecedented embrace of labor unions, distinguishing himself from both past Democratic and Republican leaders. By populating his administration with staunch supporters of…

[robertreich]

The Silent Revolution in American Economics

I don't think you're expecting what I'm about to say, because I have never seen anything like this in fifty years in politics.

For decades I've been sounding an alarm about how our economy has become increasingly rigged for the rich. I've watched it get worse under both Republicans and Democrats, but what President Biden has done in his first term gives me hope I haven't felt in years. It’s a complete sea change.

Here are three key areas where Biden is fundamentally reshaping our economy to make it better for working people.

#1 Trade and industrial policy

Biden is breaking with decades of reliance on free-trade deals and free-market philosophies. He’s instead focusing on domestic policies designed to revive American manufacturing and fortify our own supply chains.

Take three of his signature pieces of legislation so far — the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and his infrastructure package. This flood of government investment has brought about a new wave in American manufacturing.

Unlike Trump, who just levied tariffs on Chinese imports and used it as a campaign slogan, Biden is actually investing in America’s manufacturing capacity so we don’t have to rely on China in the first place.

He’s turning the tide against deals made by previous administrations, both Democratic and Republican, that helped Wall Street but ended up costing American jobs and lowering American wages.

#2 Monopoly power

Biden is the first president in living memory to take on big monopolies.

Giant firms have come to dominate almost every industry. Four beef packers now control over 80 percent of the market, domestic air travel is dominated by four airlines, and most Americans have no real choice of internet providers.

In a monopolized economy, corporate profits rise, consumers pay higher prices, and workers’ wages shrink.

But under the Biden, the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department have become the most aggressive monopoly fighters in more than a half century. They’re going after Amazon and Google, Ticketmaster and Live Nation, JetBlue and Spirit, and a wide range of other giant corporations. ��

#3 Labor

Biden is also the most pro-union president I’ve ever seen.

A big reason for the surge in workers organizing and striking for higher wages is the pro-labor course Biden is charting.

The Reagan years blew in a typhoon of union busting across America. Corporations routinely sunk unions and fired workers who attempted to form them. They offshored production or moved to so-called “right-to-work” states that enacted laws making it hard to form unions.

Even though Democratic presidents promised labor law reforms that would strengthen unions, they didn’t follow through. But under Joe Biden, organized labor has received a vital lifeboat. Unionizing has been protected and encouraged. Biden is even the first sitting president to walk a picket line.

Biden’s National Labor Relations Board is stemming the tide of unfair labor practices, requiring companies to bargain with their employees, speeding the period between union petitions and elections, and making it harder to fire workers for organizing.

Americans have every reason to be outraged at how decades of policies that prioritized corporations over people have thrown our economy off-keel.

But these three waves of change — a worker-centered trade and industrial policy, strong anti-monopoly enforcement, and moves to strengthen labor unions — are navigating towards a more equitable economy.

It’s a sea change that’s long overdue.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

John Knefel at MMFA:

The Heritage Foundation — lead organizer of Project 2025, a sprawling effort to provide policy and staffing for a second Trump administration — recently promoted an apprenticeship program that opens up workers to increased exploitation. Heritage also criticized President Joe Biden for ensuring that most federal infrastructure contracting projects are covered by collective bargaining agreements.

In an article headlined, “Harris, Walz Policy Records Undermine Pro-Worker Rhetoric,” Heritage argues for a return to Trump-era apprenticeship policies that left new workers vulnerable by creating a two-tier workforce, and it disparages unions as detrimental to the working class. The result is standard-fare for the conservative think tank, which regularly attacks unions and promotes anti-worker policies like so-called right-to-work laws, which starve unions of funds by denying them the ability to collect fees from all the workers they represent.  As head of Project 2025, Heritage has waged an all-out campaign against unions and the entire working class. The effort’s policybook — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise — calls for the dismantling of New Deal-era wins for organized labor by carving out state-level exceptions to the National Labor Relations Act. It would also eviscerate overtime regulations and open the door to increased child labor exploitation.

The new article furthers Heritage’s broadside against organized labor, even while masquerading as being pro-worker. Heritage criticizes what it characterizes as “the Biden-Harris Administration’s multi-front assault against apprenticeship programs,” specifically the administration’s cancellation of “new Industry Recognized Apprenticeship Programs,” or IRAPS, “that were training people in high-demand areas like nursing and technology, which now face significant workforce shortages.” In fact, IRAPs were a Trump-era policy that created a new class of apprenticeship programs that were controlled and overseen by employers — rather than the Department of Labor — and loosened standards meant to protect workers. As the progressive think tank The Roosevelt Institute wrote in response to the Trump-era rule, IRAPs are “likely to lead to a proliferation of programs that are lower-quality,” and could allow employers to exploit “loopholes in minimum wage laws.”

[...] This new salvo from Heritage is just the latest example of right-wing media pretending to endorse a pro-worker agenda, only to advance policies that benefit employers at the expense of labor.

The Heritage Foundation= enemies of workers’ rights.

[ghostpalmtechnique]

I keep seeing social media discussions of recent labor actions with the conclusion "strikes work" as if the problem at previous times was that workers were too timid.

NO!

Strikes are working because for once in 2020-2022 we properly stimulated the economy, unemployment has been persistently low, and therefore workers have leverage. If there had been similar strikes in the years after the 2008 financial crisis, when we did not do sufficient stimulus and the economy actually was weak, they would have failed miserably. And if the Republican party comes back to power for the next crisis, the strikes will go back to failing miserably when they embrace austerity.

It is nice to see President Biden joining a picket line, and even better to see him giving the NLRB real teeth again. But don't ever forget that the most pro-labor policy you can have is a relentless commitment to full employment. Don't let the politicians forget it either.

[azspot]

When Joe Biden was running in 2020, I expected him to exhibit this sort of centrist drift as president. In fact, he did the opposite, appointing Lina Khan at the FTC and Jennifer Abbruzzo at the NLRB and carrying out the most progressive and pro-worker economic agenda of any president in my lifetime. Why did lifelong moderate Joe Biden, the credit card industry’s favorite senator, end up doing so much good economic policy? One major reason is that after a tightly contested 2020 primary campaign that Bernie Sanders looked for a time like he might win, Biden made the choice to bring the left wing of the party into the fold, rather than slamming the door in their face. He created a formal “Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force” that hammered out a set of policy recommendations for his term. He gave progressives like Elizabeth Warren significant input into staffing decisions for parts of his administration. After watching Democratic presidents freeze out the left for decades, I failed to anticipate Biden’s willingness to allow the left some real policy power. It was a political decision, and it doesn’t mean that Biden himself is a resounding progressive, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the Biden presidency produced hugely important tangible victories for progressive economic values.

Run a Left Wing Democratic Primary Candidate in 2028. No Matter What.

[misfitwashere]

September 9, 2024 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

SEP 10

Last night, Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign launched a new section of its website detailing her policy positions. Titling her plans “A New Way Forward,” Harris vows to build the American middle class through an “opportunity economy.” Her vision for the future, she says, “protects our fundamental freedoms, strengthens our democracy, and ensures every person has the opportunity to not just get by, but to get ahead.” 

Harris’s economic plan builds on that of the Biden-Harris administration. This makes sense, since their focus on investing in the middle class has created the strongest economy in the world. Harris is emphasizing the need to bring down household costs of food, medicine, housing, healthcare, and childcare, all issues important to Americans.  

The website provides concrete economic actions she plans to take with a willing Congress. They include expanding the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, investing in more housing, and supporting the PRO Act, which protects the rights of workers to unionize, while continuing the crackdown on business consolidation that kills competition and rolling back the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

The biggest economic shift from the current administration is pegging a new capital gains tax for those earning more than a million dollars a year at 28%, significantly lower than the 39.6% President Joe Biden proposed in his 2025 budget. The plans also call for the first-ever national ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries (37 states already have such laws). 

Aside from strictly economic plans, the policy pages say Harris backs passing the bipartisan immigration bill that Republicans killed on Trump’s orders, protecting reproductive healthcare and restoring Roe v. Wade, and protecting the right to vote and ending partisan gerrymandering through the John Lewis Voting Rights and the Freedom to Vote Acts.

Republicans have charged that Harris has not offered specifics for her policies, but much of what is now clearly laid out is already in the public record. By the standards of American history, it is a strikingly moderate agenda that reflects the belief that the best way for the government to protect opportunity and nurture the economy is to make sure that the system is fair and that ordinary people have access to opportunity.

The “New Way Forward” in Harris’s plan seems to be less a new set of policies than a rejection of the politics of the past several decades. She and her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz appear to be attempting to reshape the political landscape to bring Americans of all parties together to stand against Trump’s MAGA Republicans. The campaign has actively reached out to Republicans, several of whom spoke at the Democratic National Convention. On Saturday, Harris said she was “honored” to have the endorsement of former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) and former vice president Dick Cheney, both staunch Republicans. “People are exhausted about the division and the attempt to divide us as Americans,” she said. “We love our country and we have more in common than what separates us.” 

Trump’s website offers slogans rather than policies, so Harris’s website compares her policies to the comparable sections of Project 2025, the playbook for a second Trump term laid out by a number of right-wing institutions led by the Heritage Foundation. Trump and his campaign have tried to distance themselves from Project 2025, but at his rallies, he has offered the policies in it—like firing nonpartisan civil servants and replacing them with loyalists, and abolishing the Department of Education—as his top priorities. 

While Harris focused on policy, as critics have demanded, MAGA Republicans today spread slurs about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, claiming they are eating other people’s pets and local wildlife. Right-wing media figure Benny Johnson, who was one of the six commenters whose paychecks at now-disbanded Tenet Media were paid by Russia, was one of those pushing the false stories. So was X owner Elon Musk. 

The story was debunked almost immediately by the Springfield police, but Republican politicians ran with it. The X account for Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee ran it; so did Texas senator Ted Cruz, who shared an image with two kittens saying: “PLEASE VOTE FOR TRUMP SO IMMIGRANTS DON’T EAT US.” And the Republican vice presidential nominee, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, posted: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country.” (The Haitians in Springfield are in the U.S. legally.)

Perhaps most significantly, Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, who is challenging Democratic Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, pushed the story. That Senate seat is crucial to the Republican attempt to take control of the Senate, and Moreno has just launched a $25 million ad campaign against Brown, accusing him of giving undocumented immigrants taxpayer-funded benefits. Today’s disinformation was well timed for that ad campaign. 

The Justice Department today announced  charges against two leaders of the white supremacist Terrorgram Collective, an international terrorist group that operates on the platform Telegram. Dallas Humber of California and Matthew Allison of Idaho have been charged with “soliciting hate crimes, soliciting the murder of federal officials, and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.” They “solicited murders and hate crimes based on the race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, and gender identity of others,” U.S. Attorney Phillip Talbert said. They had a hit list of federal, state, and local officials, as well as corporate leaders, and they encouraged attacks on government infrastructure, including energy facilities. Their plan was to create a race war. 

“Hate crimes fueled by bigotry and white supremacy, and amplified by the weaponization of digital messaging platforms, are on the rise and have no place in our society,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said.

Congress is back in session today and must fund the government before October 1 or face a government shutdown. Although Congress negotiated spending levels for 2024 and 2025 back in June 2023, the House has been unable to pass appropriations bills because MAGA extremists either refuse to accept those levels or insist on inserting culture war poison pills into the bills. 

Now, Trump has demanded that a continuing resolution to fund the government must include a measure requiring proof of citizenship to vote. Since it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in elections for president or members of Congress and there is no evidence it is anything but vanishingly rare, the measure actually seems designed to suppress voting. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) went along and put the measure in the bill. He also designed for the measure to last until next March, making the budget so late a new president could write it, but also blowing through a January 1 deadline set in the June 2023 bill to require automatic cuts to spending.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) wrote to his colleagues: “House Democrats have made it clear that we will find bipartisan common ground on any issue with our Republican colleagues wherever possible, while pushing back against MAGA extremism.” Jeffries called the Republican bill “unserious and unacceptable.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told House and Senate leaders that the cuts required by law if Congress pushes the budget into March would drastically affect the military. “The repercussions of Congress failing to pass regular appropriations legislation for the first half of [fiscal] 2025 would be devastating to our readiness and ability to execute the National Defense Strategy,” Austin wrote.

Meanwhile, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is back to his old trick of blocking a military promotion, this time of Lieutenant General Ronald Clark, one of Austin’s top aides. Tuberville says he placed the hold because he has concerns that Clark did not alert Biden when Austin had surgery. Biden has nominated Clark to become the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Pacific, a position currently held by General Charles A. Flynn, younger brother of Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s first National Security Advisor who resigned after news broke that he had hidden conversations with Russian operatives. 

Today, ten retired senior military officials endorsed Harris, saying she “is the best—and only—presidential candidate in this race who is fit to serve as our commander-in-chief…. Frankly stated, Donald Trump is a danger to our national security and our democracy. His own former National Security Advisors, Defense Secretaries, and Chiefs of Staff have said so.”

—

[mariacallous]

At 8:22 am on December 4 last year, a car traveling down a small residential road in Alabama used its license-plate-reading cameras to take photos of vehicles it passed. One image, which does not contain a vehicle or a license plate, shows a bright red “Trump” campaign sign placed in front of someone’s garage. In the background is a banner referencing Israel, a holly wreath, and a festive inflatable snowman.

Another image taken on a different day by a different vehicle shows a “Steelworkers for Harris-Walz” sign stuck in the lawn in front of someone’s home. A construction worker, with his face unblurred, is pictured near another Harris sign. Other photos show Trump and Biden (including “Fuck Biden”) bumper stickers on the back of trucks and cars across America. One photo, taken in November 2023, shows a partially torn bumper sticker supporting the Obama-Biden lineup.

These images were generated by AI-powered cameras mounted on cars and trucks, initially designed to capture license plates, but which are now photographing political lawn signs outside private homes, individuals wearing T-shirts with text, and vehicles displaying pro-abortion bumper stickers—all while recording the precise locations of these observations. Newly obtained data reviewed by WIRED shows how a tool originally intended for traffic enforcement has evolved into a system capable of monitoring speech protected by the US Constitution.

The detailed photographs all surfaced in search results produced by the systems of DRN Data, a license-plate-recognition (LPR) company owned by Motorola Solutions. The LPR system can be used by private investigators, repossession agents, and insurance companies; a related Motorola business, called Vigilant, gives cops access to the same LPR data.

However, files shared with WIRED by artist Julia Weist, who is documenting restricted datasets as part of her work, show how those with access to the LPR system can search for common phrases or names, such as those of politicians, and be served with photographs where the search term is present, even if it is not displayed on license plates.

A search result for the license plates from Delaware vehicles with the text “Trump” returned more than 150 images showing people’s homes and bumper stickers. Each search result includes the date, time, and exact location of where a photograph was taken.

“I searched for the word ‘believe,’ and that is all lawn signs. There’s things just painted on planters on the side of the road, and then someone wearing a sweatshirt that says ‘Believe.’” Weist says. “I did a search for the word ‘lost,’ and it found the flyers that people put up for lost dogs and cats.”

Beyond highlighting the far-reaching nature of LPR technology, which has collected billions of images of license plates, the research also shows how people’s personal political views and their homes can be recorded into vast databases that can be queried.

“It really reveals the extent to which surveillance is happening on a mass scale in the quiet streets of America,” says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. “That surveillance is not limited just to license plates, but also to a lot of other potentially very revealing information about people.”

DRN, in a statement issued to WIRED, said it complies with “all applicable laws and regulations.”

Billions of Photos

License-plate-recognition systems, broadly, work by first capturing an image of a vehicle; then they use optical character recognition (OCR) technology to identify and extract the text from the vehicle's license plate within the captured image. Motorola-owned DRN sells multiple license-plate-recognition cameras: a fixed camera that can be placed near roads, identify a vehicle’s make and model, and capture images of vehicles traveling up to 150 mph; a “quick deploy” camera that can be attached to buildings and monitor vehicles at properties; and mobile cameras that can be placed on dashboards or be mounted to vehicles and capture images when they are driven around.

Over more than a decade, DRN has amassed more than 15 billion “vehicle sightings” across the United States, and it claims in its marketing materials that it amasses more than 250 million sightings per month. Images in DRN’s commercial database are shared with police using its Vigilant system, but images captured by law enforcement are not shared back into the wider database.

The system is partly fueled by DRN “affiliates” who install cameras in their vehicles, such as repossession trucks, and capture license plates as they drive around. Each vehicle can have up to four cameras attached to it, capturing images in all angles. These affiliates earn monthly bonuses and can also receive free cameras and search credits.

In 2022, Weist became a certified private investigator in New York State. In doing so, she unlocked the ability to access the vast array of surveillance software accessible to PIs. Weist could access DRN’s analytics system, DRNsights, as part of a package through investigations company IRBsearch. (After Weist published an op-ed detailing her work, IRBsearch conducted an audit of her account and discontinued it. The company did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.)

“There is a difference between tools that are publicly accessible, like Google Street View, and things that are searchable,” Weist says. While conducting her work, Weist ran multiple searches for words and popular terms, which found results far beyond license plates. In data she shared with WIRED, a search for “Planned Parenthood,” for instance, returned stickers on cars, on bumpers, and in windows, both for and against the reproductive health services organization. Civil liberties groups have already raised concerns about how license-plate-reader data could be weaponized against those seeking abortion.

Weist says she is concerned with how the search tools could be misused when there is increasing political violence and divisiveness in society. While not linked to license plate data, one law enforcement official in Ohio recently said people should “write down” the addresses of people who display yard signs supporting Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, exemplifying how a searchable database of citizens’ political affiliations could be abused.

A 2016 report by the Associated Press revealed widespread misuse of confidential law enforcement databases by police officers nationwide. In 2022, WIRED revealed that hundreds of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees and contractors were investigated for abusing similar databases, including LPR systems. The alleged misconduct in both reports ranged from stalking and harassment to sharing information with criminals.

While people place signs in their lawns or bumper stickers on their cars to inform people of their views and potentially to influence those around them, the ACLU’s Stanley says it is intended for “human-scale visibility,” not that of machines. “Perhaps they want to express themselves in their communities, to their neighbors, but they don't necessarily want to be logged into a nationwide database that’s accessible to police authorities,” Stanley says.

Weist says the system, at the very least, should be able to filter out images that do not contain license plate data and not make mistakes. “Any number of times is too many times, especially when it's finding stuff like what people are wearing or lawn signs,” Weist says.

“License plate recognition (LPR) technology supports public safety and community services, from helping to find abducted children and stolen vehicles to automating toll collection and lowering insurance premiums by mitigating insurance fraud,” Jeremiah Wheeler, the president of DRN, says in a statement.

Weist believes that, given the relatively small number of images showing bumper stickers compared to the large number of vehicles with them, Motorola Solutions may be attempting to filter out images containing bumper stickers or other text.

Wheeler did not respond to WIRED's questions about whether there are limits on what can be searched in license plate databases, why images of homes with lawn signs but no vehicles in sight appeared in search results, or if filters are used to reduce such images.

“DRNsights complies with all applicable laws and regulations,” Wheeler says. “The DRNsights tool allows authorized parties to access license plate information and associated vehicle information that is captured in public locations and visible to all. Access is restricted to customers with certain permissible purposes under the law, and those in breach have their access revoked.”

AI Everywhere

License-plate-recognition systems have flourished in recent years as cameras have become smaller and machine-learning algorithms have improved. These systems, such as DRN and rival Flock, mark part of a change in the way people are surveilled as they move around cities and neighborhoods.

Increasingly, CCTV cameras are being equipped with AI to monitor people’s movements and even detect their emotions. The systems have the potential to alert officials, who may not be able to constantly monitor CCTV footage, to real-world events. However, whether license plate recognition can reduce crime has been questioned.

“When government or private companies promote license plate readers, they make it sound like the technology is only looking for lawbreakers or people suspected of stealing a car or involved in an amber alert, but that’s just not how the technology works,” says Dave Maass, the director of investigations at civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The technology collects everyone's data and stores that data often for immense periods of time.”

Over time, the technology may become more capable, too. Maass, who has long researched license-plate-recognition systems, says companies are now trying to do “vehicle fingerprinting,” where they determine the make, model, and year of the vehicle based on its shape and also determine if there’s damage to the vehicle. DRN’s product pages say one upcoming update will allow insurance companies to see if a car is being used for ride-sharing.

“The way that the country is set up was to protect citizens from government overreach, but there’s not a lot put in place to protect us from private actors who are engaged in business meant to make money,” Nicole McConlogue, an associate professor of law at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law, who has researched license-plate-surveillance systems and their potential for discrimination.

“The volume that they’re able to do this in is what makes it really troubling,” McConlogue says of vehicles moving around streets collecting images. “When you do that, you're carrying the incentives of the people that are collecting the data. But also, in the United States, you’re carrying with it the legacy of segregation and redlining, because that left a mark on the composition of neighborhoods.”

[walks-the-ages]

ah, can't find the original post to respond to it, and tumblr was refusing to let me actually post with the usual bullshit of "sorry there was an error processing your post" . anyways.

If you see a post going around about Jewish restaurants being targeted for harassment by pro-palestine protestors "solely for being Jewish", stop what you are doing and actually look up the incident in question, because that is not what happened at Goldie's restaurant!

Full article below for accessiblity, and because we all know Tumblr only looks at headlines and doesn't click links to news articles.

Long post!

Bolding is my own for emphasis.

A protest against a top Israel-born chef was called antisemitic. Staff tell a different story

Wilfred ChanFri 8 Dec 2023 16.55 GMTFirst published on Fri 8 Dec 2023 12.00 GMT

The 21-second clip went viral almost as soon as it was posted early on Sunday evening. It showed hundreds of protesters, some with Palestinian flags, united in a rhyming chant: “Goldie, Goldie, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!”

They were protesting outside Goldie, a vegan falafel restaurant owned by Michael Solomonov, the Israel-born celebrity chef best known for Zahav, an Israeli-themed restaurant widely considered one of the United States’ finest eateries. It was one brief stop along a march traversing Philadelphia that lasted about three hours.

Many of the protesters hadn’t even returned home from the march when the condemnations began to pour in. The Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, posted on X: “Tonight in Philly, we saw a blatant act of antisemitism – not a peaceful protest. A restaurant was targeted and mobbed because its owner is Jewish and Israeli. This hate and bigotry is reminiscent of a dark time in history.”

Even the White House piled on: it was “antisemitic and completely unjustifiable to target restaurants that serve Israeli food over disagreements with Israeli policy”, said the deputy press secretary, Andrew Bates. Douglas Emhoff, husband of Vice-President Kamala Harris, wrote on X that he had spoken with Solomonov and “told him @POTUS, @VP, and the entire Biden-Harris Administration will continue to have his back”.

It was the apex of a saga that has resulted in at least three workers fired from Solomonov’s restaurants over, as they see it, their pro-Palestine activism coming into conflict with their bosses’ views and policies, and at least one other worker who has resigned in protest – thrusting the renowned Israeli eateries into the thick of bitter US disagreements over the Israel-Hamas war.

The street protest against Goldie has sparked heated debate. As the war on Gaza rages on, with over 17,000 people killed in Gaza since 7 October – 70% of them women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry – are Israel-linked businesses in the US implicated? Was Solomonov, a chef who has credited Palestinian influences in his cooking, an appropriate target?

Interviews with protesters and current and former employees at Solomonov’s restaurants paint a more complex version of events than what the video clip may have suggested. They reject the notion that Goldie was singled out because of the owners’ ethnicity, arguing that their objections stem from management using the restaurants to fundraise for Israel after 7 October in spite of worker concerns. Activists also say their protest shines a necessary spotlight on the political commitments of one of the highest-profile restaurateurs in the United States.

Tensions at work

There were political tensions simmering at Solomonov’s restaurants before Sunday’s march. The Guardian spoke to three Goldie workers who say they were fired due to their pro-Palestine advocacy: two who wore Palestinian flag pins in violation of a newly announced dress code that forbade non-Goldie branded adornments, and another who tweeted in support of Sunday’s street protest.

Their discomfort at work began following a fundraiser in October, during which Solomonov and his business partner Steve Cook announced they would donate all of the restaurant group’s profits from one day, over $100,000, to United Hatzalah, an Israeli medical non-profit that has supplied the Israel Defense Forces with protective and medical gear during the current war against Hamas.

And in early November, Solomonov’s Zahav hosted a private fundraiser by a prominent political action committee dedicated to supporting political candidates “who reflect Jewish values”. Attendees at the event, which has not been previously reported, included the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer; and dozens of other pro-Israel officials and lobbyists, according to a current Zahav employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The employee said that in recent weeks, Solomonov had also booked and paid for multiple, lavish private dinners at Zahav for IDF members preparing to deploy to fight for Israel.

“The amount of material support that we’ve lended to pro-Israel causes and Israeli military personnel has been really discomforting,” the Zahav worker told the Guardian.

In an email to workers on Wednesday, Solomonov and Cook apologized for not communicating about their political stances with staff more directly. The pair had sought to “avoid discussing politics at work … to make everyone as comfortable as possible in the restaurant,” the owners wrote. “But perhaps we created a void that had the opposite effect. For that, we are sorry.”

The fraught politics of food

The protest and its fallout have produced the biggest controversy ever faced by Solomonov, one of America’s most prominent Israeli cultural figures and someone who for years has cast himself as a culinary bridge between Israel, Palestine, and the United States.

Solomonov’s brother, a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, was killed in 2003 by Hezbollah snipers; Solomonov wrote in his first cookbook, Zahav, that the tragedy made him briefly consider joining Israel’s army. Instead, he decided to channel his emotion into food, something he found allowed him to “expose people to a side of Israel that had nothing to do with politics”. That led him and Cook, an investment banker-turned-restaurateur, to found Zahav in 2008, followed by other prominent Israeli-themed eateries: Dizengoff, Goldie, K’Far, and Laser Wolf, under a restaurant group called CookNSolo. In 2017, Israel’s ministry of tourism named him a culinary ambassador.

The restaurants have never been completely free from controversy. Debates over the origins and ownership of Middle Eastern food have raged for years; many culinary experts have argued that Palestinian contributions to Mediterranean cuisine have been used by Israeli chefs without sufficient respect or acknowledgement. Yet while Solomonov and Cook have always branded their food as Israeli, their menus and cookbooks cite Palestinian influences on many dishes. For years, Solomonov also spoke of his friendship with the Palestinian writer and cookbook author Reem Kassis – though the two are no longer speaking, according to the New York Times.

But the conflicts aren’t just over cultural appropriation. They’re about “the way Israel as a state has weaponized food against the Palestinian people”, says the Palestinian American chef Reem Assil, who owns Reem’s, a Arab street food joint in San Francisco. “Even before these last 60 days, Israel has restricted what Gazans can access in terms of food and water. They target bakeries, they target farms, they target markets. They uproot our olive trees, they make it illegal for us to forge our own ingredients, like za’atar.” The UN warned last month that Israel’s military operations in Gaza had put residents there at “immediate” risk of starvation.

A controversial fundraiser

Since the 7 October attacks, Solomonov has publicly sought to caveat his support for Israel. “I personally believe in the right of Palestinians to have their own state, and the right for self-determination, and I don’t deny those things,” he said at an event last month in New Jersey, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. “And I believe the Israeli government oftentimes does things that I would not do at all … and it can be quite damaging.”

But internally, Solomonov and Cook were using their restaurants to steer resources toward Israel.

On 10 October, Solomonov and Cook announced a fundraiser that would donate all the profits across CookNSolo restaurants on 12 October to United Hatzalah. “It is not associated with any military,” the restaurant group assured staff in a Slack message – something that simply wasn’t true, workers soon realized with alarm.

Goldie staff were caught off guard because they considered the restaurant a politically progressive institution. The vegan falafel restaurant proudly displayed an LGBTQ flag and Black Lives Matter flag on its wall. Many of the workers were young and identified as queer. There was a casual dress code: Noah Wood, a 25-year-old who uses they/them pronouns, said they did shifts at Goldie while wearing hats with slogans supporting indigenous rights.

The night before CookNSolo’s fundraiser, Goldie’s store manager at the time, 24-year-old Sophie Hamilton, says she discovered public videos by United Hatzalah about how the non-profit supplied protective gear to IDF soldiers. She rushed off an email to Goldie’s general manager, Emma Richards, saying she felt “deeply betrayed and misled”. “I feel like I’ve been left with no choice but to refuse to come to work tomorrow unless [CookNSolo] commits to also raising donations for a Palestinian humanitarian organization, of course with no connection to any military.”

But Hamilton’s suggestion was ignored, and Richards simply told her someone would cover her shift the next day.

When Hamilton returned to work, she decided to keep working but while wearing a small Palestinian flag pin. “There’s just a point where you can’t leave your humanity at the door,” she said. No customers complained, but two weeks later, management announced a new rule: staff were not to wear stickers, pins, or patches that were not Goldie-branded.

Wood, the other server, started wearing a Palestinian flag pin in open defiance of the new rule. Another worker, June, 24, wore a green shirt, black pants, and a red bandana – a reference to the colors of Palestinian flag.

On 15 November, the restaurant asked Hamilton to send Wood home for violating the dress code. Hamilton refused, and the next day they were both fired, Hamilton for “poor performance for failing to enforce the uniform policy”. Wood was not given any official reason, they say.

In the Wednesday email to staff, the owners wrote: “We recognize that people have different views on the war between Israel and Hamas, and we respect your rights to your own views. Many of our guests have passionate feelings about the current conflict and, knowing that not all of you feel the same way, our approach is to simply avoid discussing politics at work.”

They did not provide details on the firings beyond writing: “It is also important for you to hear directly from us that we have never terminated employees based on their support for Palestine.”

The owners added: “We think it’s important to say that our support of Israel is not unqualified. We have plenty of criticisms, particularly in the way that the government has stymied the prospects for Palestinian statehood in recent years.”

In a statement shared with the Guardian, United Hatzalah’s senior vice-president for international operations, Michael Brown, said that the nonprofit and the IDF “often train together, especially when conducting mass casualty training drills, or search and rescue training drills in order to hone our skills and help the IDF sharpen theirs, as well as to allow for an easier flow of collaborative life saving efforts should the need ever arise in the field, similar to what happened during October 7th.”

The restaurant group declined to respond to a detailed list of questions by the Guardian about the fired workers, but a spokeswoman said in a statement: “CookNSolo exists to create community through food. We are committed to fostering an open, safe, and supportive workplace for all of our employees who have varying backgrounds and political views. Like many hospitality companies, we have standard policies for our employees, which we consistently enforce.” Solomonov declined, through a representative, a direct request for an interview.

Justin Sadowsky, an attorney at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights non-profit, says the firings of Goldie workers are the first time he’s heard of restaurant workers allegedly fired for supporting Palestine since 7 October. “We’ve seen it in hospitals, we’ve seen it at large corporations, we’ve seen it in law firms, but it’s sort of spilling into everywhere,” he said. The organization says it’s received a “staggering” 2,171 requests for help and reports of bias in the 57 days since the Israel-Hamas war began, equalling nearly half of the total complaints it handled in all of 2022.

Call for a boycott

Meanwhile, CookNSolo’s fundraiser for United Hatzalah had caught the attention of local activists in a group called the Philadelphia Free Palestine Coalition. The activists weren’t in touch with the restaurant workers, but drew the same conclusion: by funneling restaurant proceeds toward a group associated with the IDF, CookNSolo was complicit in Israel’s war crimes.

In mid-October, the activists called for a boycott. Natalie Abulhawa, a Palestinian American organizer at the Free Palestine Coalition, helped write an Instagram post for the boycott that named three of Solomonov’s restaurants – Goldie, Zahav, and Laser Wolf – as well as a number of other Middle Eastern restaurants in the city. “Restaurants and businesses claiming to sell ‘Israeli’ food, fruits, vegetables, and products are part of an ongoing colonial campaign of stealing, appropriating, and profiting off of Palestinian food and culture as a means of erasing Palestinian existence,” the call read.

The boycott made waves in the food world, and Solomonov addressed it at a closed-door event in November at a New Jersey Jewish Community Center. Speaking to the crowd of several hundred, he called the boycott misguided, adding that it wasn’t affecting his sales, according to the Inquirer. While acknowledging that “part of Israeli food is Palestinian influenced”, he argued that any suggestion that Israeli food was stolen from Palestinians was akin to saying Israelis “don’t have a right to be there”. Solomonov added that his restaurants credited Palestinian influences on their menus and claimed Zahav imported more Palestinian wines than any other Philadelphia eatery.

But privately, Solomonov and Cook were using their restaurants to platform Israel’s war effort. On 1 November, Zahav hosted a fundraiser by a major political action committee called Democratic Jewish Outreach Pennsylvania, whose guests included Whitmer and as many as 80 other pro-Israel officials and lobbyists, according to the unnamed Zahav employee. “It was an explicitly pro-Israel reception and speeches made were about that support,” the employee said.

The employee said that Whitmer, who delivered a keynote, opened with the Jewish expression of solidarity “Am Yisrael Chai”, or “the people of Israel live”, and called for providing material support to Israel, and that Solomonov, who was in the audience, was afterward “emphatically talking and thanking all of the attendees”.

In the following weeks, the employee became even more disturbed as Solomonov hosted and paid for at least two private dinners at Zahav for small groups of Israelis, including soldiers who were preparing to fly home to fight the Gaza war. Solomonov explained with “a level of reverence” that the restaurant would cover the bill because of the diners’ roles in the Israeli military, the employee says.

These events, in addition to the firings of Goldie staff, have made many of Zahav’s staff deeply uncomfortable. “Most of the employees here are not particularly interested in the support of Israel,” the employee said, but the workers fear retaliation if they speak out. CookNSolo declined to comment on the events at Zahav.

A clip goes viral

Pennsylvania’s Jewish and Muslim communities have been on edge since the Israel-Hamas war began. On Monday, a Jewish daycare in Philadelphia reported that vandals had spray-painted “Free Palestine” and other graffiti on its windows. On Tuesday, a pair of students sued the University of Pennsylvania, claiming it had become an “incubation lab for virulent anti-Jewish hatred”. Last week, a South Philadelphia mosque reported that it had been vandalized by anti-Muslim graffiti. And last month, a man was arrested for pointing a gun and yelling racial slurs against a group of pro-Palestine demonstrators at the state’s capitol.

The Goldie protest also followed a growing number of incidents that have entangled Middle Eastern food businesses. Palestinian restaurants such as New York City’s Ayat have reported being flooded with negative reviews since the war began; last month, an ex-Obama aide was charged with a hate crime for harassing a halal food street vendor.

But Goldie’s attempts to head off pro-Palestinian activism were futile.

On 3 December, the Free Palestine Coalition led hundreds of protesters in an evening of marches around Philadelphia to renew calls for a ceasefire. Starting from Rittenhouse Square in Philly’s Center City neighborhood, the march took a wrong turn, which brought it past Goldie, says Abulhawa. The encounter with the falafel restaurant wasn’t planned, she says, “but we ran with it”.

June, who is Jewish, was one of the employees working inside Goldie that night, and said the protest – which lasted just a few minutes – was completely peaceful: “There was nothing violent, no hint of antisemitism.” The store was devoid of guests when the marchers arrived, though one customer came in partway through to pickup an online order and displayed no reaction. June even thought about going outside to join the protest, but thought better of it and instead quietly chanted along to the slogans from inside the store.

Someone placed two small stickers on Goldie’s door and window. One read, “Free Palestine,” and another contained a statistic about the number of children Israel had killed in Gaza (Abulhawa says that whoever placed the stickers were not asked to do so by protest organizers). One protester briefly posed in front of the door with a Palestine flag. Then the protest shuffled on.

A few minutes later, a user named Jordan Van Glish posted a 21-second clip of the protest to X, where it quickly went viral. Comments flooded in: “Once again proving that this is about hating Jews,” one user wrote. Stop Antisemitism, a prominent pro-Israel group, posted that it was a “failure” that no anti-riot police were dispatched and no protesters were arrested.

But Philadelphia’s police force told the Guardian that officers observing the march “did not see, hear, or record any threats to persons inside or outside Goldie”, and the department received “no 911 calls or complaints” during the event.

Some marchers have acknowledged how the clip, taken out of context, could have been misinterpreted. “I’d say in hindsight, maybe [the organizers] should have spent another minute explaining why we were stopping there,” says Joe Piette, a photographer who joined the protest. “It would have been better to explain some of the details of the owner of that restaurant. Our mistake was not explaining it on the spot.”

June felt that frustration when they got home that night and saw the clip gaining traction. “So I felt like I should give the context that was missing from that tweet,” they said. June published a post explaining that the restaurant group had raised money for Israel-linked causes and punished pro-Palestine employees. “If you don’t want to be directly funding genocide, you should probably stay away from Goldie” and other CookNSolo restaurants, they wrote.

On Monday, June got a phone call while on the bus to work: they were fired as well. The manager gave no explanation, but June didn’t need to ask why. “Honestly, I didn’t really feel that bad or surprised,” they said. “I had no pride in this job.”

High-profile officials have continued to argue that the protesters were motivated by antisemitism. Governor Shapiro doubled down on his tweet after visiting Goldie and meeting with Solomonov on Wednesday. “A mob protested a restaurant simply because it’s owned by a Jewish person,” the governor claimed. “That is the kind of antisemitic tropes that we saw in 1930s Germany, and it’s the kind of thing we should not tolerate.” In a statement to the Guardian, his office reiterated: “This was not a peaceful protest”.

Two days after the march, Tess Rauscher, a 25-year-old barista at the CookNSolo-owned Israeli cafe K’Far, resigned, citing the company’s fundraiser and firing of Goldie workers, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. “It was these actions, not the identity of the owner, that changed the nature of my job,” she said.

This article was amended on 8 December 2023 to delete an incorrect reference to a manager taking down an LGBTQ+ flag. Also references to Governor Josh Shapiro attending an event at Zahav on 1 November were deleted. Governor Shapiro’s office have said he was not at the event.

[end article]

TL;DR:

Goldie's restaurant and 2 other restaurants owned by the same famous Israeli chef were part of a general boycott starting in October.

The famous israeli chef, Michael Solomonov, has been directly funding the Israeli military with fundraisers at his various owned resteraunts (including donating over $100,000 in a single day)

Michael Solomonov has also hosted multiple, lavish "going away parties" free of charge for people deploying to go fight in Gaza (you know, just, going on over to help commit genocide!)

Multiple staff were fired for being pro-palestine, including for wearing pins with the Palestinian flag, or wearing the colors of the palestinian flag to work.

June, A jewish staff member who was working when the protestors arrived outside the restaurant, did not feel threatened in any way, affirmed it was a completely peaceful protest, and actually considered stopping their work to go out and join the march, but ultimately decided to stay for the rest of their shift and quietly chant along with the protestors. They were fired a few days later, and not given any explanation.

[beardedmrbean]

California’s Democratic-controlled legislature axed a Republican proposal that would have exempted tipped-income from state income taxes, striking down a policy proposal similar to ones endorsed by Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

"It is deeply disappointing that the legislature chose not to consider a proposal that could have provided much-needed relief to California’s workers," Republican State Sen. Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh, who introduced the measure, said in a press release after it was defeated.

Ochoa Bogh introduced the amendment in California’s Senate on Thursday that would have exempted service industry workers with a state tax exemption on tips, but the proposal was voted down on a mostly party line vote without discussion or debate by the Democratic majority.

TRUMP PLEDGES TO ELIMINATE TAXES ON TIPS FOR SERVICE WORKERS DURING LAS VEGAS RALLY

"With Californians facing one of the highest costs of living in the nation, our service and hospitality industry employees are particularly burdened by a tax system that leaves them struggling to make ends meet," Ochoa Bogh said. "They deserve better, and today’s decision is a missed opportunity to support those who need it most."

The attempt to exempt tips from taxes in the state comes as both Trump and Harris have expressed support for federal tax legislation that would exempt tipped-income on the campaign trail. Trump was the first to champion the proposal during a June rally in Nevada, while Harris, who started her political career in California, echoed a similar sentiment during an August rally in Las Vegas.

According to a press release by California Senate Republicans, the proposal in that state was aimed at helping service workers navigate California’s "unsustainable tax burden," allowing workers who rely heavily on tipped-income to have more take-home pay.

REPUBLICANS BLAST BIDEN ADMIN OVER PLAN TO CRACK DOWN ON WAITERS' TIPS

All nine Republican state senators supported the amendment, while almost all the state’s Democratic senators, except for Senate President Pro Tempore Mike McGuire and State Sen. Nancy Skinner, voted in opposition. McGuire and Skinner voted to abstain.

"The negligence involved in a refusal to even debate a policy issue of this magnitude cannot be overstated," Republican Senate Minority Leader Brian W. Jones said in the release. "Legislative Democrats knew they were on the wrong side of this important issue, so they chose to sweep it under the rug rather than do the right thing for working Californians. The push to eliminate the federal tip tax has made its way to the campaign stage for both major party’s this year, yet California Democrat politicians don’t believe it be even worthy to discuss at the state level for residents here." 

McGuire’s office did not immediately respond to a Fox News Digital request for comment on the Democratic majority’s opposition to the amendment.

[jeannettegray]

Joe Biden is a great man.

My concern is that future politicians will see that he did everything right yet got no credit whatsoever and got smeared with lies, and they'll decide that they should never champion progressive policies.

Like, as an example out of *many*, how he was praised by unions as the most pro-labor President in history, yet the Left claimed that he backstabbed the railroad workers, even though *the workers themselves* came out to say that he successfully negotiated behind the scenes to get them everything they asked for.

He does a lot of things quietly, under desk, and so people who benefit from his work believe that he does nothing or even makes things worse.

Meanwhile Republicans constantly take credit for good bills they voted *against*, and everybody just nods along.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Daniel Villareal at LGBTQ Nation:

Anyone with eyes in their head can see that the American government and media both have a clear pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian bias. Neither one officially recognizes Palestine as a state, and any criticisms against the Israeli government or in favor of Palestinian civilians are automatically labeled (at best) as ignorant, misinformed, and over-idealistic or as hateful, antisemitic, and pro-terrorist. The goal of these denunciations seems to have only one aim: to silence any criticism of Israel. I’m sick of it… and I’m not alone.

In numerous conversations, when I have argued that perhaps the Israeli government is becoming increasingly right-wing, I have been told that Israel is a queer oasis in the bigoted Middle East and that all of Israel’s neighboring countries are rabidly anti-LGBTQ+ and will gladly kill their own queer citizens. When I mention that Israel’s military-enforced policies of forced displacement and segregation against Palestinian citizens could violate their dignity and human rights, I’m reminded of the Holocaust — as if I somehow forgot — and am told that Hamas wants to exterminate Israel and all Jews and that all of Israel’s neighboring countries have threatened to wipe Israel off the map as well. If I mention any recent news report about Israeli forces killing Palestinian journalists or civilians, I’m informed that I do not know my history and that Palestine’s government has repeatedly allowed terrorists from its region to infiltrate Israel and commit atrocities against innocent Israelis. [...]

When any politician or activist publicly criticizes Israel in the media, they’re denounced, and we’re told that we must defend Israel at all costs to protect stability and U.S. interests in the Middle East and to offer a shining beacon of Western democracy to the people living in the otherwise barbaric region. These talking points are reinforced by American media, which commonly depict Israel as a bustling modern nation and depict all other Middle Eastern countries as war-torn deserts consisting of mostly huts, murderers, and goats. These things have all been pretty uniform throughout my entire life: Israel can do no wrong. To imply otherwise is to show your own stupidity or align with Nazis and terrorists. End of conversation. As if numerous progressive Jews and international human rights organizations, like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, haven’t asked the same questions or reached the conclusion that Israel is hardly above reproach. The other not-so-subtle implication is that anyone who wants to criticize Israel openly should either be Jewish themselves or at least have university degrees in Israeli history, Middle Eastern studies, and international political science.

[...] The October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians and recent reports that an estimated 35,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza since Israel’s military destroyed Palestinian homes, schools, hospitals, and vital infrastructure. I’ve been thinking about it as more and more voters vote “uncommitted” in the Democratic primaries, signaling to President Joe Biden that America’s mostly unconditional support of Israel could cost him the election. I’ve been thinking about it as bipartisan politicians urge mayors, police, and the National Guard to violently disband pro-Palestinian student encampments on university campuses rather than engage in good-faith discussions about the institutions’ investments in businesses that benefit from Israel’s conflict.

As a journalist, I would normally turn to trust U.S. news sources to learn more about what’s happening on the ground in Gaza. But journalists and aid workers are being killed there, media outlets that criticize Israel run the risk of driving advertisers away, and pro-Palestinian journalists sometimes get hate mail and death threats. As a result, I hear even less in the news about Palestine than I do about Africa. I want to be clear: I denounce all terrorist actions and the murder of civilians, regardless of nationality. I support Israel and Palestine’s right to exist and the right of all people to peacefully practice their religion without any threats of violent persecution. I acknowledge that antisemitism is real, that hateful attacks on Jewish people and neo-Nazi activity have increased over recent years, and that some of Israel’s critics are bigoted. I also know that some white Christian nationalists and Republicans who support Israel don’t actually approve of anyone who doesn’t embrace Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior. Rather, they support Israel because of Biblical prophecies that say its existence will bring about Jesus’s return and the end of the world.

Daniel Villarreal wrote in LGBTQ Nation on how America needs to speak up on the abuses the Israel Apartheid government have heaped on Palestinians and the effects of silencing criticism of Israel has had adverse effects on discourse.

[zenaidamacrouras1]

If anyone needs a reason to vote for Joe Biden let me tell you why: He hires the best paper pushers and administrative staff to implement his programs. These people are god tier, and the president himself doesn't matter all that much to how the government runs.

Long version:

I work in policy, and part of my job is trying to make sure money for stopping climate change goes to union jobs, and that communities are included in decision-making and that low-income/marginalized communities get good investments as much as the rich communities, that there are strong worker and environmental justice protections. It's boring and often depressing and while my dad thinks I am ruining the world, I think I do good stuff, more or less.

And I am OLD and have worked in my field under Bush (cry), Obama, Tr*mp (cries harder) and Biden.

The Biden administration staff - from the lowest level intern people to the higher up political appointees - I have worked with have been the straight up best, most committed, most PASSIONATE about helping people of any administration listed. Also a lot of them are nice.

I think Obama's people were pretty solid, and they did care (memorable moment of having a protest with a bunch of people getting arrested outside the EPA and staff sneaking out and thanking them because they needed political cover to do their job) but maybe they never had the kind of ambitious programming to work with that Biden has.

Kind of what happened is that we passed two mega pieces of climate legislation (IRA and BIL if your nasty like that) and then a bunch of the people who worked on passing those bills got jobs in the Biden administration to help turn those fresh new baby laws into actual real policy and projects, which is really hard, guys, it's so hard. It's so many and so much and it never ends and we have this MOMENT.

So they are passionate. They have been dreaming for YEARS about what we could accomplish with some ambitious public money to fucking do stuff about climate change and workers rights. They are SO PRO BLUE COLLAR WORKERS. I love them. They get it. When they don't get it, they LISTEN.

I don't care if you vote for Biden, the man. Who even is he? I could care less. But vote for who ever is in charge of hiring for Biden. Vote for the staff at the Department of the Interior and the EPA and the Department of Energy and the people in charge of programming for flood preventing agricultural practices at the USDA and the people at the Department of Labor who want to bring people who've been caught up in the criminal justice system into special apprenticeship programs with wrap around care services so they can get a good job with dignity and wages to sustain a family.

They are fucking rock stars. And I am starting to really see some cool projects come out, for example, my region has seen a $30/hour an hour wage increase in environmental remediation jobs DIRECTLY DUE to Biden administration policies and the BIL. We have to be able to continue this work.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 9, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Sep 10, 2024

Last night, Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign launched a new section of its website detailing her policy positions. Titling her plans “A New Way Forward,” Harris vows to build the American middle class through an “opportunity economy.” Her vision for the future, she says, “protects our fundamental freedoms, strengthens our democracy, and ensures every person has the opportunity to not just get by, but to get ahead.” 

Harris’s economic plan builds on that of the Biden-Harris administration. This makes sense, since their focus on investing in the middle class has created the strongest economy in the world. Harris is emphasizing the need to bring down household costs of food, medicine, housing, healthcare, and childcare, all issues important to Americans.  

The website provides concrete economic actions she plans to take with a willing Congress. They include expanding the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, investing in more housing, and supporting the PRO Act, which protects the rights of workers to unionize, while continuing the crackdown on business consolidation that kills competition and rolling back the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

The biggest economic shift from the current administration is pegging a new capital gains tax for those earning more than a million dollars a year at 28%, significantly lower than the 39.6% President Joe Biden proposed in his 2025 budget. The plans also call for the first-ever national ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries (37 states already have such laws). 

Aside from strictly economic plans, the policy pages say Harris backs passing the bipartisan immigration bill that Republicans killed on Trump’s orders, protecting reproductive healthcare and restoring Roe v. Wade, and protecting the right to vote and ending partisan gerrymandering through the John Lewis Voting Rights and the Freedom to Vote Acts.

Republicans have charged that Harris has not offered specifics for her policies, but much of what is now clearly laid out is already in the public record. By the standards of American history, it is a strikingly moderate agenda that reflects the belief that the best way for the government to protect opportunity and nurture the economy is to make sure that the system is fair and that ordinary people have access to opportunity.

The “New Way Forward” in Harris’s plan seems to be less a new set of policies than a rejection of the politics of the past several decades. She and her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz appear to be attempting to reshape the political landscape to bring Americans of all parties together to stand against Trump’s MAGA Republicans. The campaign has actively reached out to Republicans, several of whom spoke at the Democratic National Convention. On Saturday, Harris said she was “honored” to have the endorsement of former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) and former vice president Dick Cheney, both staunch Republicans. “People are exhausted about the division and the attempt to divide us as Americans,” she said. “We love our country and we have more in common than what separates us.” 

Trump’s website offers slogans rather than policies, so Harris’s website compares her policies to the comparable sections of Project 2025, the playbook for a second Trump term laid out by a number of right-wing institutions led by the Heritage Foundation. Trump and his campaign have tried to distance themselves from Project 2025, but at his rallies, he has offered the policies in it—like firing nonpartisan civil servants and replacing them with loyalists, and abolishing the Department of Education—as his top priorities. 

While Harris focused on policy, as critics have demanded, MAGA Republicans today spread slurs about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, claiming they are eating other people’s pets and local wildlife. Right-wing media figure Benny Johnson, who was one of the six commenters whose paychecks at now-disbanded Tenet Media were paid by Russia, was one of those pushing the false stories. So was X owner Elon Musk. 

The story was debunked almost immediately by the Springfield police, but Republican politicians ran with it. The X account for Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee ran it; so did Texas senator Ted Cruz, who shared an image with two kittens saying: “PLEASE VOTE FOR TRUMP SO IMMIGRANTS DON’T EAT US.” And the Republican vice presidential nominee, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, posted: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country.” (The Haitians in Springfield are in the U.S. legally.)

Perhaps most significantly, Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, who is challenging Democratic Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, pushed the story. That Senate seat is crucial to the Republican attempt to take control of the Senate, and Moreno has just launched a $25 million ad campaign against Brown, accusing him of giving undocumented immigrants taxpayer-funded benefits. Today’s disinformation was well timed for that ad campaign. 

The Justice Department today announced  charges against two leaders of the white supremacist Terrorgram Collective, an international terrorist group that operates on the platform Telegram. Dallas Humber of California and Matthew Allison of Idaho have been charged with “soliciting hate crimes, soliciting the murder of federal officials, and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.” They “solicited murders and hate crimes based on the race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, and gender identity of others,” U.S. Attorney Phillip Talbert said. They had a hit list of federal, state, and local officials, as well as corporate leaders, and they encouraged attacks on government infrastructure, including energy facilities. Their plan was to create a race war. 

“Hate crimes fueled by bigotry and white supremacy, and amplified by the weaponization of digital messaging platforms, are on the rise and have no place in our society,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said.

Congress is back in session today and must fund the government before October 1 or face a government shutdown. Although Congress negotiated spending levels for 2024 and 2025 back in June 2023, the House has been unable to pass appropriations bills because MAGA extremists either refuse to accept those levels or insist on inserting culture war poison pills into the bills. 

Now, Trump has demanded that a continuing resolution to fund the government must include a measure requiring proof of citizenship to vote. Since it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in elections for president or members of Congress and there is no evidence it is anything but vanishingly rare, the measure actually seems designed to suppress voting. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) went along and put the measure in the bill. He also designed for the measure to last until next March, making the budget so late a new president could write it, but also blowing through a January 1 deadline set in the June 2023 bill to require automatic cuts to spending.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) wrote to his colleagues: “House Democrats have made it clear that we will find bipartisan common ground on any issue with our Republican colleagues wherever possible, while pushing back against MAGA extremism.” Jeffries called the Republican bill “unserious and unacceptable.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told House and Senate leaders that the cuts required by law if Congress pushes the budget into March would drastically affect the military. “The repercussions of Congress failing to pass regular appropriations legislation for the first half of [fiscal] 2025 would be devastating to our readiness and ability to execute the National Defense Strategy,” Austin wrote.

Meanwhile, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is back to his old trick of blocking a military promotion, this time of Lieutenant General Ronald Clark, one of Austin’s top aides. Tuberville says he placed the hold because he has concerns that Clark did not alert Biden when Austin had surgery. Biden has nominated Clark to become the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Pacific, a position currently held by General Charles A. Flynn, younger brother of Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s first National Security Advisor who resigned after news broke that he had hidden conversations with Russian operatives. 

Today, ten retired senior military officials endorsed Harris, saying she “is the best—and only—presidential candidate in this race who is fit to serve as our commander-in-chief…. Frankly stated, Donald Trump is a danger to our national security and our democracy. His own former National Security Advisors, Defense Secretaries, and Chiefs of Staff have said so.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON