Dispatches

NLRB’S RECENT DECISIONS ARE GOOD NEWS FOR WORKERS. Public excitement about workers’ efforts to organize is spreading, more and younger workers are unionizing, and changes to the government rules regulating those efforts are rebalancing the scales ever so slightly away from a union-busting free-for-all, Jane McAlevey noted at The Nation (9/4). For people just tuning in to these conversations—and those of us who’ve been at it for a while—it’s important to take the right lessons from this dynamic moment: The hard work of building durable worker power and organization can’t ease up just because it seems like, officially, it should be getting easier.

The National Labor Relations Board announced two significant changes to unionization rules in August. The first ends Trump-era rules from 2019 that slowed down and intentionally mangled the process for workers to hold a unionization election—what union organizers call restoring the Obama-era “fair election rules.” It shortens delays employers can use to hack away at union support among members, but implementation will take time: The change won’t take effect until Dec. 26.

The second NLRB decision is in Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, LLC (28-CA-230115), which takes immediate effect. It seeks to restore the “Joy Silk doctrine,” which until a 1969 Supreme Court decision meant that workers who got a majority of their coworkers to sign union cards would not have to jump through the second hoop of winning an NLRB election. Instead the organizers could simply inform their employer that a majority of its workers demand legal recognition of the new union and that it should start negotiations. If the employer rebuffs the workers, the NLRB will, in most instances, essentially rule for the workers and impose certification of a new union along with an order for the employer to start negotiations.

A Gallup poll released 8/30 shows overwhelming support for workers who are challenging the unfettered power and greed of the corporate elite. Film and television writers demanding justice from the Hollywood and Silicon Valley billionaires, now heading into the fifth month of their strike, enjoy 72% support from everyday people (vs. only 19% supporting the employers). For the autoworkers fighting to reclaim fair compensation for all their members—not to mention reining in the out-of-control work regimes imposed by the Big Three auto CEOs and fighting to wrest back the right to a life outside of work—an eye-popping three in four Americans stand with the workers. Most Americans—77%—now believe unions are good for their members (up 11% since 2009), with 61% saying unions are good for the economy and 57%t saying unions are helpful to the companies for whom they work. That’s the general public—not Democrats, not union members.

TEXAS SENATE ‘ACQUITS’ IMPEACHED ATTORNEY GENERAL. REPUBLICANS SEEK STATE HOUSE SPEAKER’S REMOVAL IF HE WON’T QUIT FOR PUSHING IMPEACHMENT. A feud between Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and fellow Republican House Speaker Dade Phelan escalated as Patrick accused Phelan of being unworthy of his leadership post while the state Republican Party approved a resolution seeking the House chief’s resignation, the Austin American Statesman reported (9/25).

Continuing the intraparty fallout after Attorney General Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial in September, the GOP’s motion seeking Phelan’s removal from the speaker’s chair came via a 58-2 vote by the State Republican Executive Committee (9/23) after 16 of 18 Senate Republicans voted to acquit Paxton of all charges.

Citing “pressure” on House Republicans to impeach Paxton, an inability to pass certain GOP legislative priorities during the regular session and allowing Democrats too much say in the lower chamber, the state Republican Party is seeking Phelan’s ouster before the start of an anticipated special session in October at which Gov. Greg Abbott is expected to demand the Legislature pass vouchers for private schools, which the House under Phelan rejected in the regular session.

“Should Speaker Dade Phelan fail to step down from the Speaker chair for this upcoming special session, the Republican Representatives should vote to vacate the chair and allow for a new Speaker,” the resolution says.

Phelan, in an opinion piece written for his hometown paper, the Beaumont Enterprise, accused Patrick of influencing the outcome of Paxton’s impeachment trial after taking $3 million from Paxton supporters before the trial began.

In defending his chamber’s decision to advance 16 articles of impeachment that broadly accused Paxton of misusing the power of his office to benefit a campaign donor, Phelan wrote that it was a necessary procedure to determine the validity of the accusations by Paxton’s former top aides who have accused the attorney general of abusing his power to personally assist Nate Paul, an Austin real estate developer.

“I stand by that vote, and I stand by the belief that Paxton’s conduct is beneath the office he holds,” Phelan said of advancing the impeachment inquiry to the Senate.

Paxton still faces state securities fraud charges, a case that has stretched out for eight years, starting with an indictment just months after he took office in 2015. The case has been delayed for years by pretrial disputes — including a back-and-forth battle over the trial venue that saw it moved to Houston from Collin County, which Paxton represented as a state lawmaker.

Paxton has been under investigation by the FBI since October 2020, although no charges have been filed.

RUPERT MURDOCH’S LEGACY IS STAIN ON PSYCHIC LIFE OF AMERICA. Charles P. Pierce, who worked for Murdoch’s Boston Herald for six years, from 1983-89, moving from the alternative weekly Boston Phoenix for twice as much money as he was making across town, offered his assessment of the impact of the Australian immigrant on American journalism.

“In 1983, Murdoch had been doing business in the United States for several years,” Pierce noted in his blog at Esquire.com (9/21). He had bought the New York Post, and changed its personality from the genteel liberalism of Dorothy Schiff. He had bought the Chicago Sun Times, and driven the great Mike Royko down the river to the Chicago Tribune. Royko referred to Murdoch as ‘the alien.’ Back in New York, where Murdoch not only had purchased the Post, but also New York magazine and the Village Voice, Pete Hamill wrote,’Something vaguely sickening is happening to that newspaper and it is spreading through the city’s psychic life like a stain.’

“At the time I signed aboard with the Australian buccaneers, the best you could say about Murdoch was that he kept newspapers alive instead of killing them, or merging them until their individual personalities were bled out of them. The one thing you couldn’t say about a Murdoch paper, including the Herald, was that it lacked an individual personality. That was one quality it shared with the Phoenix, my previous employer. Or, at least that’s what I told myself. And I was writing sports, so I was insulated from the newspaper’s paleo-conservative politics. Murdoch created strong sports sections. Or at least that’s what I told myself. Don’t get me wrong. I did good work there, and so did many of my colleagues, some of whom ended up down the shoreline at the Boston Globe. But then Fox News happened, and that ‘vaguely sickening’ stain that Pete Hamill had recognized as emitting from the New York Post spread through the psychic life of the entire country.

“On [Sept. 21], when Rupert Murdoch announced that he was retiring as the head of News Corporation and Fox, that stain will be his lasting legacy of his time in the United States, the country in which he bought a citizenship through money and influence in 1985, a transaction with the Reagan Administration that enabled him to buy television stations in this country and launch his new network, including its news operation, which he handed over to king ratfcker Roger Ailes. And we were off to the races.”

(Journalist Robert Parry, and testimony before the Iran-Contra committee, later revealed that Murdoch’s citizenship also was compensation from the Reagan administration for his work in catapulting propaganda supporting their adventurism in Central America, Pierce noted.)

“He leaves behind a strain of insane politics that has rolled so far around the bend that it’s come around to bite him in his own withered hindquarters. He leaves behind an incredible amount of damage to his adopted country. And his departure is no occasion for hope. He’s leaving the empire to his son, Lachlan, whom he once sold out in favor of Roger Ailes in an internal power squabble. In 2014, the old man pleaded with Lachlan to come back to the family business, largely because his brother, James, had gotten tangled up in the notorious phone-hacking scandal involving Murdoch’s British tabloid, News of the World.”

The Guardian noted (9/21): Elite tendencies notwithstanding, Lachlan Murdoch has shown himself to be a loyal fighter when it comes to following in his father’s controversial footsteps. He was at the front and center of many of Fox News’s most controversial recent actions. He played a major hand in the rise of Tucker Carlson as Fox News’s biggest and most extreme star, defending the prime-time commentator when he smeared immigrants as making “America dirtier.” According to [Michael] Wolff, Rupert Murdoch at one point complained that his son wanted Carlson to run for president – “My son wants his own president,” he allegedly said.

Last month he was forced to pay more than $800,000 in legal fees to the Australian company Private Media after he abandoned a defamation suit against its outlet Crikey. It had called him an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol. Lachlan was also implicated in the lawsuit brought by the voting systems company Dominion, which cost Fox $786m in damages and brought about the downfall of Carlson. In legal documents, Dominion accused Lachlan of playing a central role in allowing Fox News hosts to broadcast lies about its voting machines from Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. The company said his involvement in disseminating the election denial falsehoods was “direct.” Material obtained by Dominion under disclosure also showed Lachlan Murdoch playing a hands-on role in determining the political thrust of Fox News in favour of Trump. It alleged that he had gone so far as to complain of a chyron at the bottom of a news broadcast that was “anti-Trump.”

Pierce concluded: “Looking back at my time in the empire, I realize how seductive the Murdoch ethos really is. You are made to feel like a true revolutionary, fighting an ill-defined Establishment fairly defined as anyone or anything who is Not Us. It’s very compelling, especially if you’re prone to thinking that anyway. I remember a night at J.J. Foley’s, the great old cop-newspaper bar down the street from the old Herald building, in which we all were waiting to see if a power play by Senator Edward Kennedy was going to force Murdoch to sell the paper. (Kennedy was leaning on the regulatory agency to enforce the rule that forbade one company from owning both a newspaper and a television station in the same media market.) On TV, Murdoch announced that he would sell the local TV station rather than sell our newspaper. Everybody in the bar cheered. Senator Kennedy came on, and everybody booed. Including me. I booed Ted Kennedy.

“But, as I said, Murdoch put together good sports sections.”

NEWS FLASH FOR REPUBLICAN HARD-LINERS: SHUTDOWNS COST BILLIONS. House Republican extremists holding the government hostage want you to believe that they just want to “rein in” government spending and “get our fiscal house in order.” One former legislative counsel for Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul even advises, “A good old government shutdown is exactly what we need right now,” arguing that it will “push the budget closer to balance.”

Then there’s reality: Shutting down the government costs taxpayers billions of dollars in lost fees, revenue, administrative costs to shut down and start government agencies back up, and back pay for furloughed federal employees. It means small businesses can’t get loans from the federal government for the duration. It will delay people from getting federally backed home loans. And while the Republican-controlled House was fiddling around doing nothing to solve the pending shutdown in the final week of the fiscal year, it was also not reauthorizing a bunch of programs with a direct impact on people’s lives, Joan McCarter noted at Daily Kos (9/25).

According to a 2019 investigation by a Senate subcommittee, “the last three government shutdowns cost taxpayers nearly $4 billion—at least $3.7 billion in back pay to furloughed federal workers, and at least $338 million in other costs associated with the shutdowns, including extra administrative work, lost revenue, and late fees on interest payments.” Everything from entrance fees at national parks to souvenir sales at gift shops shuts down, along with the government.

Some of the largest agencies couldn’t provide estimates on the shutdowns’ cost to their operations, including the Departments of Defense, Agriculture, Justice, and Commerce, and the Environmental Protection Agency. But among the agencies that did report, the figures for lost days of work are eye-popping and indicate “the combined total of furlough days during all three shutdowns was about 14,859,144, representing an estimated 56,938 years of lost productivity for those agency employees.”

Those federal employees also have to keep paying their rent or mortgage and feed their families. Some families who rely on government food assistance will also be harmed, Gayle Carlson, president of the Montana Food Bank Network, told NPR . Her group is already preparing for a shutdown based on their experiences of previous shutdowns. “The impact is pretty severe for those federal government employees, but it also impacts thousands and thousands of children in schools with child nutrition programs and young women and mothers with babies and, you know, families who are trying to provide for their households.”

US Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT), one of the GOP hard-liners pushing a shutdown over fiscal terms, downplayed the impact. “The government continues on, business as usual,” he said. “When we have these supposed shutdowns, it’s more like a slowdown.” It’s true that the government continues on, business as usual, for him and other members of Congress—they’ll still be getting paid. The hundreds of thousands of federal workers who will be furloughed, however, won’t get a paycheck for as long as the shutdown continues.

Compounding the looming shutdown is the fact that the House has been too chaotic to accomplish most of what it was supposed to do by now. For instance, they haven’t passed a farm bill, which means that a bunch of programs—including crop insurance, nutrition programs such as SNAP, rural development funds, and agricultural research and conservation programs—expire at the end of the week. Flood insurance and disaster relief funds are also drying up as the clock ticks down.

Grants and other funding for child care programs expire at the end of the week. The authorization for welfare benefits, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, expires as well. Without congressional action, hospitals around the country that take a disproportionate share of Medicaid patients will see as much as a 54% cut in reimbursements beginning next month.

All of this has an impact not just on millions of lives, but on the economy. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the 35-day shutdown in 2019 lowered the gross domestic product by a total of $11 billion for the first half of that year, and estimated that $3 billion of that would never be recovered.

“I don’t think people who are arguing we should shut down the federal government have thought through all of the unintended consequences,” Bill Hoagland, a former Republican budget director in the Senate, told Bloomberg. “It does affect people definitely.” It’s also possible that they just don’t care.

DEMOCRATIC SENATORS SOUND ALARM OVER KOCH-BACKED PLOT TO ‘EVISCERATE’ REGULATORY STATE. Hours before ProPublica revealed new details about US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ relationship with the Koch network, a group of Democratic senators filed a brief warning that Koch-backed entities are closely involved in an upcoming case that could further gut the federal government’s regulatory power—and enhance the strength of the conservative-dominated high court, Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams (9/22).

The case in question is Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which stems from a New Jersey-based fishing company’s challenge to a law requiring certain fishing boats to carry federal compliance monitors to enforce regulations.

Loper Bright Enterprises specifically objected to an interpretation of federal law by the National Marine Fisheries Service, which said the Magnuson-Stevens Act allows the agency to require industry to pay the costs of the monitors.

The dispute over an obscure federal statute has since exploded into a matter of great interest to industry groups and environmentalists, with the latter warning that if the Supreme Court sides with the plaintiffs, it will be much more difficult for federal agencies to implement climate regulations.

Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) echoed that concern and spotlighted the attention the case has attracted from right-wing and corporate-funded groups.

“This case is the product of a decades-long effort by pro-corporate interests to eviscerate the federal government’s regulatory apparatus, to the detriment of the American people,” the lawmakers wrote, noting that a number of groups connected to the Koch network and other powerful right-wing organizations have submitted briefs in support of the plaintiffs in Loper v. Raimondo.

“For example, amici The Buckeye Institute, Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Landmark Legal Foundation, Mountain States Legal Foundation, National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, New Civil Liberties Alliance, and Pacific Legal Foundation have all received hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of dollars from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund—two donor-advised funds that allow ultra-wealthy interests to direct funding anonymously.”

“The Buckeye Institute, Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, New Civil Liberties Alliance, and Pacific Legal Foundation

have also received substantial funding from the Koch family foundations—another top-ten funder for the climate change counter-movement,” the senators added.

At the center of Loper v. Raimondo is the so-called Chevron doctrine, a decades-old administrative law principle that says courts should defer to a federal agency’s “reasonable” interpretation of a statute when the law’s language is ambiguous.

The plaintiffs in the case and their corporate-backed supporters have called on the Supreme Court to either weaken the Chevron doctrine or overrule it entirely.

In its amicus brief in the case, the Cato Institute—which was co-founded by billionaire oil tycoon Charles Koch—declares that the Chevron doctrine is “unconstitutional and ahistorical” and has “wreaked havoc in the lower courts upon people and businesses.”

The Democratic senators counter in their brief that the Chevron doctrine has been critical in “allowing Congress to rely on agency capacity and subject-matter expertise to help carry out Congress’ broad policy objectives.”

“Administrative regulations reined in dangerous industry activities,” the senators added, “and our society became safer and more prosperous.”

A ruling that effectively casts the principle aside, the lawmakers argued, “would not just conflict with Congress’ well-established policymaking desires; it would erode the separation of powers by shifting policymaking power from Congress and the executive to the unaccountable judiciary.”

The brief was submitted a day before ProPublica reported that Thomas, one of the justices poised to rule on Loper v. Raimondo, has attended at least two donor events for the Koch network during his time on the Supreme Court.

ProPublica noted that Thomas used to support the Chevron doctrine but has changed his position in recent years amid a growing corporate onslaught against the regulatory principle.

The Democratic senators stressed in their brief that “the assault in this case on the regulatory system is not an isolated effort.”

“For years, regulated interests have funded a full-scale campaign to delegitimize and dismantle federal regulations,” the lawmakers wrote. “The court should proceed cautiously before contributing to their sought-for degradation of our American regulatory system.”

From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2023

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