Last Call For Operation Hawkeye

As with Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky here in the the Midwest, Iowa Democrats are about to get redistricted out of the state for the next decade.

They're ba-aaaack.

For the second time this month, the Iowa Legislature is convening for a special session to consider a set of proposed new boundaries for congressional and legislative districts.

Senate Republicans voted to reject the first redistricting proposal when lawmakers met Oct. 5. That sent the nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency back to the drawing board for a second attempt.

The agency released the second set of maps last week. The maps' nonpartisan authors cannot take political factors such as voter registration or incumbents' addresses into account when drawing the maps, but the second proposal appears more favorable to Republicans — who hold majorities in the Iowa House and Senate — than the first.

One analyst, Dave Wasserman with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, called it "a dream Republican map."

Some Republican lawmakers also want to use the special session to pass legislation pushing back against proposed COVID-19 vaccine requirements from the federal government.

House and Senate Republicans each plan to meet privately Thursday morning to discuss how they plan to vote. Privately, Republicans have raised fewer alarms about the current proposed set of maps, compared to the first plan.

"Just as we did with map 1, we will do our due diligence to review this set of maps to ensure it's fair for the people of Iowa," House Speaker Pat Grassley, R-New Hartford, said in a statement the day the second proposal was released.

Democrats in each chamber have already met and are expected to largely, if not unanimously, support the maps.

"As with the first map, I’m going to put politics aside and vote for this fair, nonpartisan map," said House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst, D-Windsor Heights. "Republican lawmakers need to stay focused on redistricting and approve this nonpartisan map." 

What would the new political maps do if approved?

At the congressional level, approving the new redistricting maps could set up a 2022 battle between Democratic U.S. Rep. Cindy Axne and Republican U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks. That's because the proposed 3rd District would include Miller-Meeks' home in Wapello County in addition to Axne's Polk County home.

Among the other geographic changes in the second map: Linn and Johnson counties would be split once again between Iowa's 1st and 2nd Districts, as they are in Iowa's current congressional map. The previous proposal would have grouped the two Democratic strongholds together in Iowa's 1st District. 

Voter registration in each of the four congressional districts would remain largely the same as under the current set of maps, enacted in 2011.

Former President Donald Trump, a Republican, would have won each of the state's districts in 2020 under the proposed lines with 50.4% of the vote in the 1st District, 51.1% in the 2nd, 49.1% in the 3rd and 62.1% in the 4th. Those are similar margins to what he received in Iowa's current set of maps. Under the first proposed set of maps released this year, Democratic President Joe Biden would have won two of the four districts.

Iowa Republicans say they will pass the maps next week, almost certainly resulting in four Republican seats in 2022. Republican gerrymandering could result in more than 20 GOP gains next year nationwide, and odds are it's going to be more than that.

Democrats will need to be ready and to have something powerful to show to voters next fall.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

The COVID-19 pandemic for the meatpacking industry was far, far worse than either the industry or the Trump regime let on, with figures presented to the House COVID Subcommittee this week showing that the pandemic was more than three times as worse as reported.

Workers at the leading U.S. meatpacking plants experienced cases and death from COVID-19 that were up to three times previous estimates, according to a report by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis seen by Reuters.

The U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee surveyed major meatpackers Tyson Foods (TSN.N), JBS USA (JBS.UL), Cargill (CARG.UL), National Beef (NBEEF.UL) and Smithfield Foods (SFII.UL), which together control over 80% of the beef market and 60% of the pork market in the United States.

At those companies’ plants, worker cases of COVID-19 totaled 59,147 and deaths totaled 269, based on counts through January of this year, according to the report which was released on Wednesday ahead of the subcommittee hearing on the pandemic's impact on meatpacking workers.

That is far higher than a previous estimate by the Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN), which had been used by government agencies and media throughout the pandemic, according to the report. FERN had counted 22,694 cases and 88 deaths among workers at the five companies as of Sept. 8, primarily drawing on data from news reports and public health agencies.

"Until now, we have not had a full sense of how hard meatpacking workers were hit," U.S. Representative James Clyburn, chairman of the subcommittee, said in his opening statement at the hearing.

The meatpacking industry was especially hard hit by COVID-19 in part because its workers tend to be in close proximity for long hours in often messy conditions.

The new data comes from company calculations of worker cases primarily based on testing done within company facilities, meaning some infections identified through other health providers could have been excluded.

Cases were especially high at certain plants, including JBS’s Hyrum, Utah, beef plant and Tyson’s Amarillo, Texas, beef plant, where around 50% of workers contracted the virus, according to the report.

The subcommittee's findings also included new details of lax safety protocols at some of the plants.

In May 2020 at Tyson's Amarillo plant, for instance, workers wore masks “saturated” with fluids, were not socially distanced, and were separated by “plastic bags on frames” instead of CDC-compliant barriers, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) memo obtained by the subcommittee.

Both Tyson and JBS said in statements on Wednesday that they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on COVID-19 health and safety efforts.

Cargill said in a statement that it was "saddened by the tragic impacts of this virus on our colleagues and the communities in which we operate."

Smithfield said in a statement that it implemented safety measures to protect employees and tested its workers frequently, uncovering asymptomatic cases.

Officials from National Beef were not immediately available for comment.

The subcommittee report also suggested that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) had not done enough to protect workers in the meat industry from the virus.

OSHA staff told the subcommittee that under former President Donald Trump, the agency’s leadership made a political decision not to issue an emergency temporary standard (ETS) that would have required meatpackers to take certain safety precautions, the report said.

“Without being held to any specific standard, meatpacking companies were left with largely unchecked discretion to determine how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, to the detriment of meatpacking workers,” the report said.

 

The industry looked the other way, the Trump regime let them, and infection rates at some plants topped 50% of workers.

Let me spell that out for you: half of workers got COVID in some of these plants. Half of them. And that's with these companies spending "millions" of dollars on health and safety.

Which of course they are lying about, hence the House subcommittee.

In the end, Republicans make everyone else suffer.

The Good Package, Con't

President Biden is expected to announce where Democrats are going on the Build Back Better plan, but there's no guarantee the package has enough votes at all.

President Biden plans to announce Thursday a revised framework for his social spending plan that he expects will gain the support of all Democrats, according to multiple people with knowledge of the situation, marking a potential breakthrough after months of lengthy negotiations and stalled talks.

The White House plans to detail specific policies it expects to pass Congress after weeks of whittling down Biden’s agenda, according to one of the people. Democrats on Capitol Hill were preparing written details of the revamped proposal for release on Thursday, according to the second person.

The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the plans on the record. The White House declined to comment.

Biden will address House Democrats Thursday morning before delivering remarks from the White House about the plan. The announcement comes ahead of his planned trip to Rome later in the day to begin a pair of international summits.

“The President will speak to the House Democratic Caucus this morning to provide an update about the Build Back Better agenda and the bipartisan infrastructure deal,” the White House said in a brief statement Thursday morning. “Before departing for his foreign trip, he will return to the White House and speak to the American people about the path forward for his economic agenda and the next steps to getting it done.”

Build Back Better is Biden’s name for his wide-ranging plan that covers an array of education, health care, climate and other priorities. A breakthrough in the talks could clear the way for passage of a companion infrastructure measure.

The specifics of what the president would announce Thursday were not immediately clear, nor was it clear whether he would be prepared to announce the support of key Democratic holdouts. But Biden recently told congressional Democrats that he thought he could secure a deal for a spending plan between $1.75 trillion and $1.9 trillion.

Biden and congressional leaders for weeks have said they are working on a revised package to bring the top-line spending total down from the initial $3.5 trillion package they proposed earlier this year. The point of the negotiations has been to win the votes of key Democratic centrists concerned about runaway spending, without alienating liberals whose support is also crucial.

The centrists have also voiced concerns about imposing new taxes that would be used to pay for the plan. Democrats were still trying Wednesday to hash out a tax structure that could be approved by their narrow majorities. Republicans have united against the Democratic plan, and no GOP lawmakers are expected to vote for it.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced Wednesday that the House Rules Committee would hold a key procedural hearing on Thursday, a move that would allow lawmakers to eventually bring the measure to the chamber floor.

A breakthrough in the talks could clear the way for passage of a companion measure to invest in the nation’s roads, bridges and other public works. That bipartisan infrastructure bill has already passed the Senate and is awaiting a vote in the House.

But liberal House members have vowed not to sign off until they have a satisfactory agreement on the social spending plan. It was not immediately clear whether Biden’s forthcoming announcement would clinch enough liberal support to pave the way for quick passage of the infrastructure plan.

“We have to have the full legislative text and the vote,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said earlier this week, adding that “dozens” of her members would vote against infrastructure if the House tries to move the two proposals independently. “What I want is the two bills moving together at the same time.” 

 

If what I think is happening is truly the case, this is Joe Biden calling everyone to the table and saying "Time's up for games, children. We're moving forward with a deal, legislation, and a vote."

On a conference call with reporters Thursday morning, the White House announced the rough outlines of a framework on President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda.

However, there were still so many unknowns that it’s still not clear whether there’s an actual deal with holdouts such as Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) on key details.

We do have new information. We learned that the White House has given up on keeping paid family and medical leave in the deal, and the billionaires’ tax appears to be gone. The White House acknowledged that the provision allowing the government to negotiate prescription drug prices doesn’t have enough support.

Those are tough losses. But there’s a lot of good in the emerging framework. First of all, the White House committed to a set of revenue raisers that could help combat inequality and reorient our political economy. And a lot of good climate provisions remain in the bill.

 

Now, how well that will work is anybody's guess. My gut instinct tells me the chance for this being a fatal miscalculation on Biden's part remains extremely high.

You see, there are a number of Democrats who have gone on record saying they will burn the entire Good Package™ down because their perfect is the enemy of Biden's good: Manchin, Sinema, on occasion Mark Warner and Bernie Sanders, and on the House side, Jayapal, the Squad, and the Blue Dog caucus. All it will take is one senator or four House members and we get nothing whatsoever.

 

There's no deal yet, but there's now a path to the deal, and President Biden is reminding Manchin and Sinema that he's the guy in the White House and not them.

 

It's about damn time.

Remember most of all this though: as angry as I am at the Dems, remember that the GOP will vote this down without hesitation, even the "moderate" ones like Adam Kinzinger.

There are no good Republicans.

StupidiNews!

• Costco is the latest major retail chain to raise its minimum wage for employees nationally, the company will go from $16 to $17 an hour for all positions starting Monday.
• Former New York Times columnist Nick Kristof is running for Governor of Oregon in 2022, joining a crowded Democratic primary in what could be a tough three-way general election race.
• Health ministry officials in Singapore are investigating a dramatic spike in COVID-19 cases as more than 5,000 new infections were reported Wednesday, a record for the city-state.
• Beijing is warning the Biden administration that the US faces "huge risks" in supporting Taiwan as Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen is "confident" that the US would defend the island if needed.
• Verizon Wireless says it will use Amazon's low-orbit satellites to extend 4G and 5G coverage in rural areas and to corporate customers in a major partnership deal.

Last Call For Ban 'Em, Burn 'Em, Texas Style

Never forget that Republicans are white supremacists at their core, and that means a war on infomation more than anything else. Of course to protect kids from the evils of Critical Race Theory, Texas Republicans are now "reviewing library materials" in the state for these subversive texts.

The chairman of a Texas state House committee tasked with conducting investigations is launching a probe into books that school librarians keep on their shelves in the wake of a measure the legislature passed earlier this year to bar teaching of critical race theory in public schools.

In a letter to the Texas Education Agency and unnamed school superintendents, state Rep. Matt Krause (R) asked school leaders to identify the number of copies of hundreds of specific books they have sitting on library shelves, and how much money the districts paid to purchase those books.

Krause cited five Texas school districts that have recently removed some books from their libraries or classrooms after objections from parents and students. Krause asked the districts to provide information about books that deal with sexuality, sexually transmitted disease, AIDS and HIV and “material that might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.”

The specific books Krause is looking for, attached in a 16-page list first reported by the Texas Tribune, date back to 1968. Many deal with abortion, teen pregnancy, sex education or the life experience of young LGBT people. Others deal with the Black Lives Matter movement or the concepts of anti-racism.

Also on the list are some more popular works, including:

— The Confessions of Nat Turner, a 1967 novel by William Styron written as a first-person narrative of an 1831 slave revolt in Virginia.

— The Cider House Rules, John Irving’s 1985 novel about a protagonist whose childhood mentor is an obstetrician who performs abortions.

— V for Vendetta, the 1982 graphic novel about a dystopian, post-pandemic England ruled by a fascist regime, written by Alan Moore that became a hit movie in 2005.

— The Handmaid’s Tale, another dystopian novel written by Margaret Atwood about a post-revolution United States in which women are subjected by a ruling class of men. Krause specifically asks about a graphic novel form of the book.

— We Were Eight Years in Power and Between the World and Me, two memoirs by the author and essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The letter went to school districts without a vote from the full committee on investigations. State Rep. Victoria Neave (D), the vice chair of the committee, called the letter “politically motivated.”

In a statement, the Texas State Teachers Association called the letter a “political overreach” and a “witch hunt.”

“This is an obvious attack on diversity and an attempt to score political points at the expense of our children’s education,” TSTA president Ovidia Molina said. “What will Rep. Krause propose next? Burning books he and a handful of parents find objectionable?”

 

The answer, as American history has made clear time and again, is "yes".  Expect those books and more to be removed from school libraries and public libraries in Texas and in other states.

The Big Lie, Con't

It's only a matter of time before more Democratic election officials are hurt or killed by lunatic Trump cultists.

"I am a hunter -- and I think you should be hunted," a woman can be heard saying in a voicemail left for Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs in September. "You will never be safe in Arizona again." 

Or there's the man who spit, "Die you bitch, die! Die you bitch, die!" repeatedly into the phone, in another of several dozen threatening and angry voicemails directed at the Democratic secretary of state and shared exclusively with CNN by her office. 

Officials and aides in secretary of state offices in Arizona and other states targeted by former President Donald Trump in his attack on last year's election results told CNN about living in constant terror -- nervously watching the people around them at events, checking in their rearview mirrors for cars following them home and sitting up at night wondering what might happen next. 

Law enforcement has never had to think much about protecting secretaries of state, let alone allocating hundreds of thousands of dollars in security, tracking and follow-up. Their jobs used to be mundane, unexciting, bureaucratic. These are small offices in a handful of states with enormous power in administering elections, from mailing ballots to overseeing voting machines to keeping track of counted votes. 

None were prepared to be publicly attacked. They don't have the budgets to monitor threats, and certainly not to suddenly protect officials who never had to be protected before. No systems were in place on the state or federal level to back them up, and the Department of Justice admits that the federal government doesn't yet have the infrastructure to handle the situation. 

Staff members in the offices say they're dealing with long-term emotional and psychological trauma after a year of constant threats -- in person and virtually -- to the secretaries and to themselves. 

"Bullet," read one tweet reply to Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, in September. "That is a six letter word for you." 

An email sent to her office over the summer read: "I'm really jonzing to see your purple face after you've been hanged." 

Asked by CNN last week if she feels safe in her job and going about her days, Griswold paused for nearly 30 seconds before answering. 

"I take these threats very seriously," she finally said, choosing her words carefully. "It's absolutely getting worse," she added. 

The threats come in from their home states and across the country. Few appear to be coordinated or organized, and are instead often driven by momentary, angry reactions to a news story or social media post. But some get very specific, citing details and specifics that leave the secretaries and their staff rushing to report them to authorities. 

Most anticipate the threats will increase going into next year, with Republicans around the country making election doubt conspiracies a central plank of their campaigns, and with many of these secretaries of state up for reelection themselves in races that are already generating more attention than ever before, with expectations that they will be the frontlines of potentially trying to overturn the next presidential election. 

But Griswold's problem was, ironically, summed up in one of the tweets her office has tracked: "Your security detail is far too thin and incompetent to protect you. This world is unpredictable these days... anything can happen to anyone." It ended with a shrug emoji. Griswold's vulnerability is greater than that person imagined: for now, she's had to contract private security, and only for official events, squeezing the money out of her small office budget. With all that's been coming at her, that's what she has.

 

The point is to drive good people out of politics like Jena Griswold and Katie Hobbs and replace them with Trump Cultists. The point is to make sure Democrats can't find candidates to field because they fear for their lives. The point is to terrorize Democrats into not running, not voting, and not registering. The Trump Cultists win by default if there are no other candidates.

It's working, too.

Climate Of Disaster, Con't

Decades of "Al Gore is fat!" jokes has given us an electorate that has no relation to reality when it comes to climate change. Even in 2021, the story is now "climate change is real but humans don't cause it" for nearly half of Americans.

Nearly half of Americans still don’t think climate change is caused by human activities, but Democrats were far less likely than Republicans to hold those views, a new VICE News and Guardian poll has found.

This year was marked by several unprecedented natural disasters, including a “heat dome” marked by sweltering temperatures of up to 113 F that plagued the Pacific Northwest, killing hundreds, and record-breaking wildfire seasons that razed entire towns and displaced thousands. Experts linked the string of natural disasters to the climate crisis, and yet, many Americans are still struggling to understand whether and why the generation-defining crisis is happening.

The poll, which surveyed 1,000 Americans on behalf of VICE News, the Guardian, and Covering Climate Now, by YouGov, comes less than a week before leaders and delegates from around the world meet in Glasgow, Scotland, for COP26, the United Nations’ climate change conference. The data shows that climate change is a top voter issue in the U.S., behind health care and social programs. For college grads and Democrats, climate change jumped to top spot (for Democrats it was tied with health care).

But while 69.5 percent of respondents believe global warming is happening, they were divided on what’s causing it. Forty-five percent don’t think humans are mostly to blame for global warming, opting instead to blame “natural changes in the environment” or “other,” and 8.3 percent denied global warming is happening altogether.

That’s mostly due to Republicans (55.4 percent) and independents (33 percent) though, who were far more likely than Democrats (17.2 percent) to believe “natural causes” have led to global warming. Young people and educated folks too were significantly more likely to believe humans are to blame for climate change.

A significant group of people also believe scientists don’t see eye to eye. Many respondents (30.5 percent) think there's a raging scientific debate over the cause of climate change when there really isn't. Globally, there is consensus among scientists—97 percent or more—that global warming is happening because of human activities, according to NASA and international science societies.

 

The same anti-science narrative that is currently killing thousands daily in the US from COVID started with the anti-science narrative on climate change 25 years ago. You can draw a direct line from there to here. 

Even in 2021, only a quarter of Republicans believe in human-caused climate change. The vast majority believe it;s natural (55%) and 15% don't believe it's happening at all.

You want to know why nothing gets done on climate change?

Because for a quarter of a century, Americans have been lied to, and they believe the lies they've been taught.

StupidiNews!

• Georgia officials say the last of the capsized Golden Ray cargo ship that sank in 2019 has finally been removed, the project took some three million manhours.
• Longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin says in a new book that she was sexually assaulted by a US senator in 2005.
• Biden administration lawyers are pushing to have WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange extradited from Britain to the US, where he would face espionage charges.
• Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley calls China's test of a hypersonic missile a "Sputnik moment" in the realm of international nuclear arms.
• An FDA advisory panel has unanimously greenlit COVID vaccines for children 5-12, final approval expected early next month.
  

Last Call For Sour Virginia

The Virginia gubernatorial race is effectively tied and has been for two months now according to Five Thirty Eight's averages. Former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe's lead has gone from six points to two since August and in October alone Republican Glenn "I'm Not Trump, But..." Youngkin has been within three points for the whole month.

Steve M. sheds some light on what the heck is going on over there, and the answer is that the news on the Right is vastly different from that on the Left and the Left remains unaware, thus unable to fight back in Virginia.

 

We all know that right-wingers often won't acknowledge the same basic set of facts as the rest of us. But the right doesn't just look at major news stories and disagree on the facts -- it also has a separate set of top stories that are unknown to the rest of us but are, to the right, harbingers of the end of civilization as we know it. Right now, several such stories are arousing anger on the right. They are:

•  Reports that a teenager sexually assaulted two students in separate schools in Loudoun County, Virginia. As the right tells it, in the first of these assaults, the assailant was a"skirt-wearing male student" who described himself as "genderfluid" and who committed the assault in a girls' bathroom, just as the county was considering a rule allowing students to use the bathroom of their choice.
• Claims that Dr. Anthony Fauci personally approved extremely cruel scientific and scientifically unnecessary experiments on beagles.
• Allegations that the crowd at the January 6 Stop the Steal rally occupied the Capitol because they were goaded to do so by a provocateur who's being protected by the FBI.

Right-wingers think the existence of a provocateur on January 6 exonerates all the arrested participants (even though the participants were adults with free will who, if the story is accurate, were encouraged but not forced to become a rioting mob). They think the experiments partly funded by money from the National Institutes of Health are among the many signs of Dr. Fauci's limitless depravity (even though when Snopes looked into an earlier version of the story in August, it could find no evidence that Fauci had any personal involvement in the approval of the experiments, and even though it could find no evidence of animal cruelty.) They think the Loudoun school bathroom policy is linked to the assault even though it's unclear whether the assailant was actually a "skirt-wearing male student." (No one claims the assailant was dressed in a "genderfluid" was for the second incident, which took place despite the fact that the alleged assailant was wearing an ankle monitor.)

These are huge stories on the right. If right-wing voters turn out in big numbers for Glenn Youngkin in the Virginia governor's race or donate large amounts of money to Trumpist, Fauci-averse candidates, these stories are among the reasons why. And yet if you get your news from the mainstream media, you probably aren't aware of them at all -- which means that virtually all the available information on the stories is slanted or distorted in a way that favors the right.

A long time ago ago, in the early years of the last Democratic president's time in office, there were voices in the mainstream media arguing that the MSM should pay more attention to what the right-wing press was talking about. Many people on the left were repulsed by that idea, saying that the mainstream press shouldn't make bad-faith right-leaning media voices their "assignment editors." Some of that criticism makes sense -- the mainstream press shouldn't cover stories from the right-wing fever swamp the way the right-wing media covers them -- but it's still good for the mainstream media to be an honest counterbalance on stories that are being successfully turned into propaganda reaching a large portion of the country. If right-wing media sources identify someone they believe was a January 6 provocateur working with the FBI to sabotage the MAGA movement and that's not the case, wouldn't it be best if the mainstream media acknowledged the story's existence and debunked the right's reporting? If right-wingers and animal lovers think Anthony Fauci is sadistically okaying cruel treatment of animals and he isn't, wouldn't it be beneficial for that to be disproved? 

The problem is, every time the news tries it, it only further "proves" that the disinformation is correct and hardens the position of the right. Tens of millions of people refusing vaccinations alone are proof of the flaws with that theory.

But yes, these are the stories getting massive play in Virginia right now, along with the usual election period "Caravan of illegals!" story.

The entire right-wing noise machine has been improved and perfected over the last 25 years. The actual news can't compete anymore, and Virginia being even moderately close is the result.

The Inhuman Resources Department

Amazon, who I remind you is the second-largest private employer in the US, has an HR system so broken that thousands of workers get screwed out of pay, time off, leave, and benefits every day and often have to navigate a maze so dense and purposefully confusing that they effectively have no recourse, all so Jeff Bezos can make a few more billion.

A year ago, Tara Jones, an Amazon warehouse worker in Oklahoma, cradled her newborn, glanced over her pay stub on her phone and noticed that she had been underpaid by a significant chunk: $90 out of $540.

The mistake kept repeating even after she reported the issue. Ms. Jones, who had taken accounting classes at community college, grew so exasperated that she wrote an email to Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder.

“I’m behind on bills, all because the pay team messed up,” she wrote weeks later. “I’m crying as I write this email.”

Unbeknown to Ms. Jones, her message to Mr. Bezos set off an internal investigation, and a discovery: Ms. Jones was far from alone. For at least a year and a half — including during periods of record profit — Amazon had been shortchanging new parents, patients dealing with medical crises and other vulnerable workers on leave, according to a confidential report on the findings. Some of the pay calculations at her facility had been wrong since it opened its doors over a year before. As many as 179 of the companies’ other warehouses had potentially been affected, too.

Amazon is still identifying and repaying workers to this day, according to Kelly Nantel, a company spokeswoman.

That error is only one strand in a longstanding knot of problems with Amazon’s system for handling paid and unpaid leaves, according to dozens of interviews and hundreds of pages of internal documents obtained by The New York Times. Together, the records and interviews reveal that the issues have been more widespread — affecting the company’s blue-collar and white-collar workers — and more harmful than previously known, amounting to what several company insiders described as one of its gravest human resources problems.

Workers across the country facing medical problems and other life crises have been fired when the attendance software mistakenly marked them as no-shows, according to former and current human resources staff members, some of whom would speak only anonymously for fear of retribution. Doctors’ notes vanished into black holes in Amazon’s databases. Employees struggled to even reach their case managers, wading through automated phone trees that routed their calls to overwhelmed back-office staff in Costa Rica, India and Las Vegas. And the whole leave system was run on a patchwork of programs that often didn’t speak to one another.

Some workers who were ready to return found that the system was too backed up to process them, resulting in weeks or months of lost income. Higher-paid corporate employees, who had to navigate the same systems, found that arranging a routine leave could turn into a morass.

In internal correspondence, company administrators warned of “inadequate service levels,” “deficient processes” and systems that are “prone to delay and error.”

The extent of the problem puts in stark relief how Amazon’s workers routinely took a back seat to customers during the company’s meteoric rise to retail dominance. Amazon built cutting-edge package processing facilities to cater to shoppers’ appetite for fast delivery, far outpacing competitors. But the business did not devote enough resources and attention to how it served employees, according to many longtime workers.

“A lot of times, because we’ve optimized for the customer experience, we’ve been focused on that,” Bethany Reyes, who was recently put in charge of fixing the leave system, said in an interview. She stressed that the company was working hard to rebalance those priorities.

The company’s treatment of its huge work force — now more than 1.3 million people and expanding rapidly — faces mounting scrutiny. Labor activists and some lawmakers say that the company does not adequately protect the safety of warehouse employees, and that it unfairly punishes internal critics. This year, workers in Alabama, upset about the company’s minute-by-minute monitoring of their productivity, organized a serious, though ultimately failed, unionization threat against the company.

In June, a Times investigation detailed how badly the leave process jammed during the pandemic, finding that it was one of many employment lapses during the company’s greatest moment of financial success. Since then, Amazon has emphasized a pledge to become “Earth’s best employer.” Andy Jassy, who replaced Mr. Bezos as chief executive in July, recently singled out the leave system as a place where it can demonstrate its commitment to improve. The process “didn’t work the way we wanted it to work,” he said at an event this month.

In response to the more recent findings on the troubles in its leave program, Amazon elaborated on its efforts to fix the system’s “pain points” and “pay issues,” as Ms. Reyes put it in the interview. She called the erroneous terminations “the most dire issue that you could have.” The company is hiring hundreds of employees, streamlining and connecting systems, clarifying its communications and training human resources staff members to be more empathetic.

But many issues persist, causing breakdowns that have proved devastating. This spring, a Tennessee warehouse worker abruptly stopped receiving disability payments, leaving his family struggling to pay for food, transportation or medical care.

“Not a word that there had ever been a problem,” said James Watts, 54, who worked at Amazon in Chattanooga for six years before repeated heart attacks and strokes forced him to go on disability leave. The sudden loss of his benefits caused a cascade of calamities: Because he was without pay for two weeks, his car was repossessed. To afford food and doctors’ bills, Mr. Watts and his wife sold their wedding rings.

“We’re losing everything,” he said.

 

And understand that despite staggering profits in the hundreds of billions of dollars, Amazon still says it's "working" on fixing these HR issues that are years and years old, having screwed over tens of thousands of its employees who have yet to get their owed back pay.

Odds are they never will see it, because Amazon can simply make the problem go away with the billions it has...except for actually paying its warehouse workers.

The largest company on earth can't fix its HR systems.

The Big Lie, Con't

Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth, as it has in Macomb County, Michigan.

 

The Macomb County Republican Party is on-board with former President Donald Trump’s assertions that 2020 presidential election was stolen from him as they released a statement saying his loss was “the culmination of a four-year coup.”

County GOP leaders last week endorsed two pro-Trump state candidates — Matthew DePerno for attorney general and Kristina Karamo for secretary of state in the upcoming 2022 election. In announcing their selection, Republicans claimed Trump won the November 2020 election “by a wide margin.”

While taking a break from a weekly pro-Trump rally held near 23 Mile Road and Van Dyke Avenue in Shelby Township, county chairman Mark Forton stated his party’s reason for backing the pair.

“We endorsed them both because our president endorsed them,” the Chesterfield Township resident said. “That’s the reason we did it.”

Trump’s discredited allegations about a stolen election have been widely reported. His claims have been the subject of courtrooms, state governments and even Congress, which all affirmed the legitimacy of his defeat and the honesty of the process.

Yet the so-called “Big Lie” continues to divide the nation, with supporters lining behind candidates who take a stance for or against Trump’s assertions.

“We are determined to make the fraud of 2020 the issue of the election,” Forton said.

In a statement issued Oct. 21, the Macomb County GOP group referred to Trump as “our legally elected” leader.

Matthew DePerno, a Kalamazoo attorney, is the Macomb County Republican Party’s choice for state attorney general.TWITTER PHOTO

“The American people watched on election night and witnessed the culmination of a four year coup,” they said in the statement.

“President Trump has declared publicly that Michigan is the most corrupt state in the union,” the statement read. “After pushing for a computer audit for the last 10 months and witnessing numerous roadblocks by our own elected officials, we have discovered that he is right.”

 

Every one of these insurrectionists sddhould be removed from politics, but that who the Republican party is now, the Trump cult dedicated to the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

 

Everything they do now is "justified" by the "coup".

 

There's no limit to what they will try now. Arrest Democrats? Violence against them? Worse? Who knows? 

The Cold Civil War is going to turn hot faster than you think.

StupidiNews!

• The Biden administration continues to reject executive privilege claims by Donald Trump's lawyers involving January 6th Committee documents that Trump wants kept secret.
• Tennessee GOP Rep. Brian Kelsey is facing federal indictment for campaign finance law violations, Kelsey is the second Republican Congressman indicted this month on federal charges.
• Developed nations are some three years late on creating a $500 billion climate fund to help developing nations get renewable energy tech, but the fund is expected to be completed in 2023.
• The Biden administration has suspended some $700 million in foreign aid to Sudan after a military coup in the country over the weekend, with the US calling for a "return to civilian rule".
• Texas-based Firefly Aerospace says it has completed design review of its planned Moon mission and is ready to work with NASA to put together a rocket mission for 2023.
  

Last Call For Certified Jackasses

Oklahoma's state Health Commissioner has abruptly resigned a day after it was revealed that the state issued a non-binary birth certificate for an Oregon resident.

 

Oklahoma Health Commissioner Dr. Lance Frye unexpectedly resigned from the post on Friday, effective immediately, the state health department said.

Department spokesperson Rachel Klein said Frye “felt it was time to move on” from leading the agency.

His departure came a day after state Republican leaders, including Gov. Kevin Stitt, expressed outrage upon learning the health department in May issued a birth certificate with a nonbinary gender designation.

The birth certificate was issued as part of a settlement with an Oklahoma-born Oregon resident. The settlement was reached under the administration of former state Attorney General Mike Hunter, Frye said.

Frye lauded “the dedication, resilience and tenacity of the OSDH team,” in a statement released Friday by the department. “They have worked tirelessly over the last two years to ensure Oklahomans had access to not only COVID-19 testing, vaccinations and critical information, but to other life-saving services.”

Stitt, who appointed Frye, praised his handling of the coronavirus pandemic in the state.

“Dr. Frye provided steady leadership during Oklahoma’s COVID response from his role in surge planning on the Governor’s Solution Task Force to guiding our vaccine rollout that was Top Ten in the nation as Commissioner of Health,” Stitt said in a statement.

Although Frye encouraged mask wearing to slow the spread of COVID in Oklahoma and was commonly seen wearing one, he refused to publicly disagree with Stitt’s stance to not issue a statewide mask mandate.

Deputy Health Commissioner Keith Reed has been named interim commissioner of health, according to Kevin Corbett, state Secretary of Health and Mental Health.

 

You'd better believe Frye was told to resign or to be fired.

Never forget that Republicans want to stop LGBTQ+ folks from ever existing.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

In "We're doing this to protect the people!" news, Florida Republicans would rather ban enforcement of all federal worker safety rules in the state than submit to President Biden's vaccine mandate rules under OSHA.

 

Hours after Thursday’s unexpected request by Gov. Ron DeSantis for lawmakers to return to Tallahassee and pass laws against vaccine mandates, Florida’s top GOP legislators had a surprise of their own.

Florida should remove itself from the direct federal oversight of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, they said. The proposal was a reaction to President Joe Biden’s administration announcing a rule, to be enforced by that agency, that says private businesses with 100 or more employees must require their workers to be vaccinated against the coronavirus or undergo weekly testing.

Instead of submitting directly to federal regulations, Florida would create its own workforce safety program — an idea that could cost millions and make the state the first to withdraw from direct Occupational Safety and Health Administration oversight in nearly 40 years.

House Speaker Chris Sprowls, R-Palm Harbor, and Senate President Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, wrote in a joint statement that the federal agency’s regulations are “onerous” and that a state program could “alleviate” state employers and employees.

Simpson has a history with those regulations. The environmental cleanup company he owned was fined $18,000 by the agency after a worker fell and died in 2014.

The roofing company owned by another top GOP senator, Keith Perry of Gainesville, was fined nearly $50,000 for six incidents between 2011 and 2017, including two in which employees fell and were hospitalized with serious injuries. The fines were later reduced to just over $21,000.

State lawmakers hadn’t proposed leaving the federal agency until Thursday in the hours following DeSantis’ call for a special legislative session.

Florida’s conservative leaders have bristled at the new Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule. Attorney General Ashley Moody and DeSantis said they plan to fight it in court.

But Simpson and Sprowls took DeSantis’ ideas a step further, proposing to exempt Florida from Occupational Safety and Health Administration oversight and instead create a state workforce agency.

“Unfortunately, (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) is now being weaponized by the Biden Administration not to protect workers, but to institute an illegal and unconstitutional nationwide vaccine mandate that robs the American people of the dignity of work,” Simpson said in a statement Friday. “If Florida withdraws from (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration), our state plan would certainly maintain, or exceed the effective safety standards that currently protect employees and employers in our state.”

Former Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials say Florida forming its own program would hardly lessen any burden supposedly brought about by federal regulations — for two reasons.

First, any state program would still have to be approved by the federal government. Second, as Simpson noted, agency rules say the program would have to “be at least as effective” as federal workplace standards.

“You’re not going to get very far if you tell the feds you’re going to adopt a state OSHA plan so that you don’t have to adopt federal OSHA standards,” said Jordan Barab, who served as the deputy assistant secretary of labor at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from 2009 to 2017. “It makes no sense.”

 

"We'll just simply refuse to follow federal law" never works out in the end, but I expect we're going to see a lot more of this, and that this Supreme Court is going to allow more and more of it until a defacto breakup of the union occurs. The only opinions that actually matter in this country are what five of nine justices think, and even then I'd expect Texas and Florida and Georgia Republicans are only going to do what they want anyway.

California did the same thing years ago, but it took a while, and their standards are much higher than federal OSHA ones, not less. The point isn't to form a new state worker regulation authority, the point is tying up Biden's vaccine mandate in court for years so that it can never be enforced.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

Why yes, the January 6th terrorist attack was 100% planned by the Trump regime and now we know that includes multiple House Republicans who were in on the planning as well, because the terrorists are freely admitting it.

As the House investigation into the Jan. 6 attack heats up, some of the planners of the pro-Trump rallies that took place in Washington, D.C., have begun communicating with congressional investigators and sharing new information about what happened when the former president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Two of these people have spoken to Rolling Stone extensively in recent weeks and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent.

Rolling Stone separately confirmed a third person involved in the main Jan. 6 rally in D.C. has communicated with the committee. This is the first report that the committee is hearing major new allegations from potential cooperating witnesses. While there have been prior indications that members of Congress were involved, this is also the first account detailing their purported role and its scope. The two sources also claim they interacted with members of Trump’s team, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who they describe as having had an opportunity to prevent the violence.

The two sources, both of whom have been granted anonymity due to the ongoing investigation, describe participating in “dozens” of planning briefings ahead of that day when Trump supporters broke into the Capitol as his election loss to President Joe Biden was being certified.

“I remember Marjorie Taylor Greene specifically,” the organizer says. “I remember talking to probably close to a dozen other members at one point or another or their staffs.”

For the sake of clarity, we will refer to one of the sources as a rally organizer and the other as a planner. Rolling Stone has confirmed that both sources were involved in organizing the main event aimed at objecting to the electoral certification, which took place at the White House Ellipse on Jan. 6. Trump spoke at that rally and encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol. Some members of the audience at the Ellipse began walking the mile and a half to the Capitol as Trump gave his speech. The barricades were stormed minutes before the former president concluded his remarks.

These two sources also helped plan a series of demonstrations that took place in multiple states around the country in the weeks between the election and the storming of the Capitol. According to these sources, multiple people associated with the March for Trump and Stop the Steal events that took place during this period communicated with members of Congress throughout this process.

Along with Greene, the conspiratorial pro-Trump Republican from Georgia who took office earlier this year, the pair both say the members who participated in these conversations or had top staffers join in included Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas).

“We would talk to Boebert’s team, Cawthorn’s team, Gosar’s team like back to back to back to back,” says the organizer.

And Gosar, who has been one of the most prominent defenders of the Jan. 6 rioters, allegedly took things a step further. Both sources say he dangled the possibility of a “blanket pardon” in an unrelated ongoing investigation to encourage them to plan the protests.

“Our impression was that it was a done deal,” the organizer says, “that he’d spoken to the president about it in the Oval … in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support.”

 

Sure is going to be fun to watch the GOP turn on the January 6th terrorists, huh?

The House GOP Fascist Caucus was in on January 6th from the beginning, guys.

Time for subpoenas. Resignations and expulsions are wishful thinking, as a two-thirds vote to expel anyone wouldn't be happening even if we proved Marjorie Taylor Greene or Madison Cawthorne were more than happy to sacrifice members of their own party.

And prison.

As Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz pointed out Sunday:

They tried to overthrow the government, they had a plan, they executed it, and they broke many laws along the way. And the leader of the Party is going to run again. This problem won’t naturally fade away - it must be confronted. https://t.co/b9GtTplDlJ

— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) October 25, 2021

 

The Rolling Stone story effective shatters the GOP gaslighting that the January 6th attack was a "tourist event" and now we know why the gaslighting was so ridiculously obscene: because House Republicans were in on it from the start. They helped coordinate a terrorist attack against their Democratic colleagues in order to steal the election.

 

At some point, we have to start making Republicans pay the price for their failed coup, or the next coup will not fail.