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Donald Trump should not be allowed on the ballot.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment prohibits anyone who has held public office and taken an oath to protect the Constitution from holding office again if they “have engaged in insurrection” against the United States.
This key provision was enacted after the Civil War to prevent those who rose up against our democracy from ever being allowed to hold office again.
This applies to Donald Trump. He cannot again be entrusted with public office. He led an insurrection!
He refused to concede the results of the 2020 election, claiming it was stolen, even when many in his inner circle, including his own attorney general, told him it was not.
Trump then pushed state officials to change vote counts, hatched a plot to name fake electors, tried to pressure his vice president into refusing to certify the Electoral College votes, had his allies seek access to voting-machine data, and summoned his supporters to attack the capitol on January 6th to disrupt the formal recognition of the presidential election results.
And then he waited HOURS, reportedly watching the violence on TV, before telling his supporters to go home — despite pleas from his staff, Republican lawmakers, and even Fox News.
If this isn’t the behavior of an insurrectionist, I don’t know what is.
Can there be any doubt that Trump will again try to do whatever it takes to regain power, even if it’s illegal and unconstitutional?
If anything, given all the MAGA election deniers in Congress and in the states, Trump is less constrained than he was in 2020. And more power hungry.
Trump could face criminal charges for inciting an insurrection, but that’s not necessary to bar him from the ballot.
Secretaries of State and other chief election officers across the country have the power to determine whether candidates meet the qualifications for office. They have a constitutional duty to keep Trump off the ballot — based on the clear text of the U.S. Constitution.
Some might argue that voters should be able to decide whether candidates are fit for office, even if they’re dangerous. But the Constitution sets the bar for what disqualifies someone from being president. Candidates must be at least 35 years old and a natural-born U.S. citizen. And they must also not have engaged in insurrection after they previously took an oath of office to defend the Constitution.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has already been used to disqualify an insurrectionist from continuing to hold public office in New Mexico, with the state’s Supreme Court upholding the ruling.
This is not about partisanship. If a Democrat attempts to overthrow the government, they should not be allowed on ballots either.
Election officials must keep Donald Trump off the ballot in 2024.
Democracy cannot survive if insurrectionists hold power in our government.
Republicans don’t seem to care that Ronald Reagan once starred in a film that featured a prominent drag scene or that Rudy Giuliani did a skit in drag with Donald Trump.
Suddenly, they’re trying to ban or restrict drag performances in at least 15 states, with bills so broadly worded that advocates warn they could be used not only to prosecute drag performers, but also transgender people who dare to simply exist in public.
These bans are part of a cynical campaign to demonize the LGBTQ+ community. MAGA politicians are stoking fear over imaginary dangers to distract from how their policies only help themselves and their wealthy donors.
In the first half of 2023 alone, Republicans across the nation introduced a record number of bills to strip away freedoms and civil rights from LGBTQ+ Americans, largely targeting transgender and gender-nonconforming people.
By banning gender affirming care for minors, GOP lawmakers are effectively practicing medicine without a license — overruling the guidance of doctors, the American Medical Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. And they’re lying about what gender affirming care even is.
Genital surgery, for instance, is rarely, if ever, done under the age of 18. It’s not even all that common for adults. Politicians like Ron DeSantis are lying about it to scare people.
And the Republican presidential frontrunner has made it clear that trans people have no place in his vision of America.
MAGA lawmakers and pundits falsely claim trans people and drag performers are a danger to children and the public at large, when there is no evidence at all to support that. None. Trans people are in fact four times more likely to be the victims of violent crime.
These scare tactics are dangerous. Recent analysis found a 70% increase in hate crimes against LGBTQ+ Americans between 2020 and 2021, as the surge of these bills began. And that’s only counting hate crimes that get reported. 2020 and 2021 each set a new record for the number of trans people murdered in America.
The cruelest irony is that these Republican bills pretending to protect children actually put some of the most vulnerable children at greater risk. LGBTQ+ kids are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide, especially transgender children. Gender-affirming care reduces that risk. That is why it is life-saving.
Don’t Say Gay laws strip away potentially life-saving support. A teacher discussing sexual orientation and gender identity won’t turn a straight kid gay. But it will make an LGBTQ+ student 23% less likely to attempt suicide.
The tragic truth is that Don’t Say Gay Laws and health care bans will cause more young lives to be needlessly lost.
If Republicans really cared about protecting kids, they’d focus on gun violence, now the leading cause of death for American children. If they were really worried about children undergoing life-altering medical procedures, they wouldn’t pass abortion bans that force teens to give birth or risk back-alley procedures.
What the GOP’s vendetta against the LGBTQ+ community really is, is a classic authoritarian tactic to vilify already marginalized people. They’re trying to stoke so much paranoia and hatred that we don’t notice how they are consolidating power and wealth into the hands of a ruling few.
We need to see this attack on LGBTQ+ Americans for what it is: a threat to all of our human rights.
You’ve probably heard that everyone is “paid what they’re worth.” Don’t buy it.
According to this mythology, workers at the bottom are “unskilled” and don’t deserve more than what they currently earn.
Minimum wage workers at McDonald’s are paid what they are worth in the so-called “free market.” If they were worth more, they’d earn more.
By the same logic, the CEO of McDonald’s is worth his multi-million dollar compensation package.
The notion that people are paid what they’re “worth” is by now so deeply ingrained in the public consciousness that many who earn very little assume it’s their own fault that they don’t earn more. That they simply lack the skills they need to be paid more.
But there’s no such thing as unskilled workers. Only underpaid workers. Their productivity — that is the value of what they produce — has been growing for decades. The problem is that their wages haven’t kept pace with their productivity.
The “paid what you’re worth” mythology also lures the unsuspecting into thinking nothing can be done to change what people are paid. It’s simply the way the market works.
Meanwhile, according to this same view, CEOs who rake in tens of millions and Wall Street traders who rake in hundreds of millions, are simply being paid what they’re “worth” because that’s what the market has dictated.
Rubbish. The “paid what you’re worth” fairytale ignores power and disregards policies that have made inequality skyrocket. Like the demise of antitrust enforcement, which has given big corporations the power to set prices, make record profits, and reward their CEOs unprecedented compensation. This fairytale ignores the attacks on labor unions that have reduced union membership from over a third of all private-sector workers in the 1950s to just 6 percent today. All of this resulting in a massive shift in power and wealth from workers to owners.
Those at the top justify their staggering wealth, and they’re “worth,” three ways:
The first is trickle-down economics. They claim that their wealth trickles down to everyone else as they invest it and create jobs. Just wait for it… But as we know, wealth at the top has soared for decades and nothing has trickled down.
The second is the “free market.” They talk about market forces beyond their control. But remember, markets are created by rules. These rules don’t exist in nature; they are human creations. The political power of the wealthy has let them change the rules for their own benefit — busting unions, monopolizing industries, and reaping big tax cuts.
The third is the idea that they’re superior human beings. Sure, they may be talented but this doesn’t justify the staggering amount of wealth they are now taking home. Nor does it justify the amount of wealth they will pass down to heirs. The biggest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history will occur over the next 25 years as the richest 1.5% of Americans hand down roughly some $36 trillion dollars to their children and grandchildren. That doesn’t make those heirs superior. It makes them lucky.
The reality is there’s no justification for today’s extraordinary concentration of wealth at the very top. Or for how little people are paid at the bottom.
The “paid what you’re worth” myth has proven to be a cruelly effective way to put the blame on workers for not getting ahead — while giving the rich and powerful cover to rig the game for their own benefit.
It is distorting our politics, rigging our markets, and granting unprecedented power to a handful of people while millions of Americans struggle to get by.
Don’t fall for it.
Missing from most history books is a key moment leading to the culture wars now ripping through American politics.
In 1970, hundreds of construction workers pummeled around 1,000 student demonstrators in New York City — including two of my friends. The “Hard Hat Riot,” as it came to be known, ushered in an era of cynical fear-mongering aimed at dividing the nation.
The student demonstrators were protesting the Vietnam War and the deadly shooting of four student activists at Kent State University that occurred just days before.
The workers who attacked them carried American flags and chanted, “USA, All the way,” and “America, love it or leave it.” They chased the students through the streets — attacking those who looked like hippies with their hard hats and steel-toed boots.
When my friends in the anti-war movement called to tell me about the riot later that day, I was stunned. Student activists and union workers duking it out in the streets over the war? I mean for goodness’ sake, weren’t we on the same side?
According to reports, the police did little to stop the mayhem. Some even egged on the thuggery. When a group of hardhats moved menacingly toward the action, a patrolman apparently shouted: “Give ’em hell, boys. Give ’em one for me!”
The construction workers then marched toward a barely-protected City Hall. Why? Because the mayor’s staff had lowered the American flag in honor of the Kent State dead. In a scene eerily foreshadowing the January 6th Capitol Riots, they pushed their way towards the building.
Fearing the mob would break in, city officials raised the flag.
The hard hats also ripped down the Red Cross banner that was hanging at nearby Trinity Church. They stormed a Pace University building, smashing lobby windows with their tools and beating students and professors.
Around 100 people were wounded that day, many of whom were college students. Several police officers were also hurt. Six people were reportedly arrested, but only one construction worker.
My friends escaped injury but they were traumatized.
The Hard Hat Riot had immediate political consequences. It was, in my opinion, a seminal moment in America’s culture wars.
Then President Richard Nixon exploited the riot for political advantage. His administration had been working on a “blue collar strategy” to shift white working-class voters to the Republican Party.
“Thank God for the hard hats,” Nixon exclaimed when he heard about the riot.
But rather than passing pro-labor policies to court workers, which would go against the values of the pro-business Republican Party, Nixon sought to use cultural issues like patriotism and support for the troops to drive a wedge between factions of the Democratic Party.
Nixon invited union leaders, some of whom were involved in the riot, to the White House. They presented Nixon with a hard hat inscribed with “Commander in Chief”and an American flag pin. Nixon praised the union workers as, “people from Middle America who still have character, and guts, and a bit of patriotism.”
Nixon’s strategy to use the Hard Hat Riot to appeal to blue collar voters paid off. In his 1972 re-election campaign against the anti-war Democrat George McGovern, he secured a victory with ease and gained the majority of votes from organized labor – the only time in modern history a Republican presidential candidate accomplished such a feat.
The Hard Hat Riot revealed a deep fracture in the coalition of workers and progressives that FDR had knitted together in the 1930s, and the later alliance of Black Americans, liberals, and blue-collar whites that led to Lyndon Johnson’s landslide re-election in 1964.
The mostly white construction workers who attacked the demonstrators had felt abandoned — and forgotten – as the Civil Rights movement rightfully took hold. They felt stiffed by the clever college kids with draft deferments, and burdened by an economy no longer guaranteeing upward mobility.
The class and race based tensions that Nixon exploited would worsen over the next half century.
I witnessed this when I was secretary of labor during the Clinton Administration. I spent much of my time in the Midwest and other parts of the country where blue-collar workers felt abandoned in an economy dominated by Wall Street. I saw their anger and resentment. I heard their frustrations.
Many Democrats, whether they will admit it or not, have not done enough to respond as Republicans have destroyed unions, exacerbated economic inequality through trickle-down nonsense, tried to gut just about every social safety net we have – and stood in the way of practically every effort to use the power of government to help working people.
Today, the right is trying to channel that same anger and violence against the Black Lives Matter movement, the LGBTQ+ community, particularly drag queens and transgender people, and whatever they consider “woke.”
It is the same cynical ploy to instill a fear of “the other” as a means to distract from the oppression and looting being done by the oligarchs who dominate so much of our economy and our politics.
As such, today we face the same questions we faced in 1970:
Will we finally recognize that we have more in common with each other than those who seek to divide us for political and economic gain?
Can we unite in solidarity, and build a future in which prosperity is widely shared by all?
I truly believe that we still can.
Corporations are bringing back child labor in America.
And some Republicans want to make it easier for them to get away with it.
Since 2015, child labor violations have risen nearly 300%. And those are just the violations government investigators have managed to uncover and document.
The Department of Labor says it’s currently investigating over 600 cases of illegal child labor in America. Major American companies like General Mills, Walmart, and Ford have all been implicated.
Why on Earth is this happening? The answer is frighteningly simple: greed.
Employers have been having difficulty finding the workers they need at the wages they are willing to pay. Rather than reduce their profits by paying adult workers more, employers are exploiting children.
The sad fact of the matter is that many of the children who are being exploited are considered to be “them” rather than “us” because they’re disproportionately poor and immigrant. So the moral shame of subjecting “our” children to inhumane working conditions when they ought to be in school is quietly avoided.
And since some of these children (or their parents) are undocumented, they dare not speak out or risk detention and deportation. They need the money. This makes them easily exploitable.
It’s a perfect storm that’s resulting in vulnerable children taking on some of the most brutal jobs.
Folks, we’ve seen this before.
Reformers fought to establish the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 for a reason — to curb the grotesque child labor seen during America’s first Gilded Age.
The U.S. banned most child labor.
But now, pro-business trade groups and their Republican lackeys are trying to reverse nearly a century of progress, and they’re using the so-called “labor shortage” as their excuse.
Arkansas will no longer require 14 and 15 year olds to get a work permit before taking a job — a process that verified their age and required permission from a parent or guardian.
A bill in Ohio would let children work later on school nights.
Minnesota Republicans are pushing to let 16 year-olds work in construction.
And 14-year-olds in Iowa may soon be allowed to take certain jobs in meatpacking plants and operate dangerous machinery.
It’s all a coordinated campaign to erode national standards, making it even easier for companies to profit off children.
Across America, we’re witnessing a resurgence of cruel capitalism in which business lobbyists and lawmakers justify their actions by arguing that they are not exploiting the weak and vulnerable, but rather providing jobs for those who need them and would otherwise go hungry or homeless.
Conveniently, these same business lobbyists and lawmakers are often among the first to claim we “can’t afford” stronger safety nets that would provide these children with safe housing and adequate nutrition.
So what can stop this madness?
First: Fund the Department of Labor so it can crack down on child labor violations. When I was Secretary of Labor, the department was chronically underfunded and understaffed. It still is, because lawmakers and their corporate backers want it that way.
Second: Increase fines on companies that break child labor laws. Current fines are too low, and are treated as costs of doing business by hugely profitable companies that violate the law.
Third: Hold major corporations accountable. Many big corporations contract with smaller companies that employ children, which allows the big corporations to play dumb and often avoid liability. It’s time to demand that large corporations take responsibility for their supply chains.
Fourth: Reform immigration laws so undocumented children aren’t exploited.
And lastly: Organize. Fight against state laws that are attempting to bring back child labor.
Are corporate profits really more important than the safety of children?
Should someone else’s vote count more than yours?
For 80% of Americans, that’s exactly what’s happening. Their vote for president isn’t nearly as valuable as the vote of someone in a so-called “swing state.” Why?
Most of us live in states that have become so predictably Democratic or Republican that we’re taken for granted by candidates. Presidential elections now turn on the dwindling number of swing states that could go either way, which gives voters in those states huge leverage.
The 2020 election came down to just over 40,000 votes spread across just three swing states.
2016 came down to fewer than 80,000 votes also across three states.
In those elections, the national popular vote wasn’t that close. In fact, in the last five elections, the winners of the popular vote beat their opponents by an average of 5 million votes.
The current state-by-state, electoral college system of electing presidents is creating ever-closer contests in an ever-smaller number of closely divided states for elections that aren’t really that close.
Not only that, but these razor-thin swing state margins can invite post-election recounts, audits, and lawsuits — even attempted coups. A losing candidate might be able to overturn 40,000 votes with these techniques. Overturning 5 million votes would be nearly impossible.
The current system presents a growing threat to the peaceful transition of power.
It also strips us of our individual power. If you’re a New York Republican or an Alabama Democrat, presidential candidates have little incentive to try and win your vote under the current system. They don’t need broad popular support as much as a mobilized base in a handful of swing states. Campaigning to a smaller and more radical base is also leading to uglier, more divisive campaigns.
And it’s become more and more likely that candidates are elected president without winning the most votes nationwide. It’s already happened twice this century.
Now, fixing the Electoral College should be the ultimate goal. But this requires a constitutional amendment — which is almost impossible to pull off because it would need a two-thirds vote by Congress plus approval by three-quarters of all state legislatures.
But, in the meantime, there’s an alternative — and it starts with getting our states to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Don’t let that mouthful put you off. It could save our democracy.
This compact would guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes nationwide WITHOUT a constitutional amendment.
How does it work?
The Constitution assigns each state a number of electors equal to its number of representatives and senators. As of now, the total number of electors is 538. So anyone who gets 270 or more of those Electoral College votes becomes president.
Article 2 of the Constitution allows state legislatures to award their electors any way they want.
So all that’s needed is for states with a total of at least 270 electoral votes to agree to award all their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote.
The movement to do this is already underway. 15 states and the District of Columbia have joined the compact, agreeing that once enough states join, all their electoral votes will go to the popular vote winner.
Together, states in the compact have 195 electoral votes. So we just need a few more states with at least 75 electors to join the compact and it’s done.
Popular vote laws have recently been introduced in Michigan [15 electors] and Minnesota [10 electors], which if passed, would bring the total to 220.
Naturally, this plan will face legal challenges. There are a lot of powerful interests who stand to benefit by maintaining the current system.
But if we keep up the fight and get enough states on board, America will never again elect a president who loses the national popular vote. No longer would 80 percent of us be effectively disenfranchised from presidential campaigns. And a handful of votes in swing states would no longer determine the winner — inviting recounts, audits, litigation, and attempted coups that threaten our democracy.
If you want to know more or get involved, click this link to read about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
If your state is not already a member, I urge you to contact your state’s senators and reps to get your state on board.
Republicans are threatening to destroy the economy if President Biden doesn’t give into their demands. But the Fourteenth Amendment gives him the power to stop them.
Republicans are taking advantage of the “debt ceiling” to try to force deep, painful cuts to programs Americans rely on. If Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling, America might have to default on its bills, destroying the credit of the United States and wiping out millions of jobs.
Remember, raising the debt ceiling isn’t about taking on new debt. It’s about whether America will pay its current debts.
This is a key reason why raising the debt ceiling should not be negotiable.
Ironically, Republicans had no problem raising it three times under Trump, even as they enacted major tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy that caused the nation’s debt to soar.
But now, Kevin McCarthy and his band of MAGA radicals say they’ll only raise it in exchange for drastic cuts to health care, education, veterans’ benefits, and more.
My advice to President Biden: Ignore them. Mr. President, your oath to uphold the Constitution takes precedence. And as the supreme law of the land, the Constitution has greater weight than the law on the debt ceiling.
Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment states that, “The validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.”
A debt ceiling that prevents the government from honoring its existing financial commitments clearly violates the Constitution.
So, if Republicans threaten the full faith and credit of the United States, you are constitutionally obligated to ignore the debt ceiling, and must continue to pay the nation’s bills.
Should they wish, let the radical Republicans take you to court.
Even the conservatives on the Supreme Court will likely support you. No “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution could read that document differently,
The Constitution makes it clear that Congress’s power to borrow money does not include the power to default on such borrowings.
If Republicans are going to play this game, Mr. President, you need to play hard ball.
We need to make the House of Representatives bigger!
Now I know what some might be thinking: “Make the government bigger?” Well, technically yes. But that’s missing the point. We need to expand the House to make the government work better, and be more responsive to our needs.
Put simply: The House of Representatives does not have enough members to adequately represent all 334 million of us.
Now, the House hasn’t always had 435 members and it was never intended to stay the same size forever. For the first 140 years of America’s existence, a growing House of Reps was actually the norm.
It wasn’t until 1929 that Congress arbitrarily decided to cap the size of the House at 435 members. Back then, each House member represented roughly 200,000 people.
But since then, the population of the United States has more than tripled, bringing the average number of constituents up to roughly 760,000.
Compared to other democracies, we are one of the worst in terms of how many constituents a single legislator is supposed to represent. Only in India does the average representative have more constituents.
And as America continues to grow it’s only going to get worse.
Think your representative doesn’t listen to you now? Just wait.
Not surprisingly, research shows that representatives from more populous House districts tend to be less accessible to their constituents, and less popular.
Thankfully, the solution is simple: allow the House to grow.
Increasing the number of representatives should be a no brainer for at least four reasons:
First, logically, more representatives would mean fewer people in each congressional district — improving the quality of representation.
Second, a larger House would be more diverse. Despite recent progress, today’s House is still overwhelmingly male, white, and middle-aged. More representatives means more opportunities for young people, people of color, and women to run for office — and win.
Third, this reduces the power of Big Money. Running an election in a smaller district would be less expensive, increasing the likelihood that people elect representatives that respond to their interests rather than big corporations and the wealthy.
Fourth, this would help reduce the Electoral College’s bias toward small states in presidential elections. As more heavily populated states gain more representatives in Congress — they also gain more electoral votes.
Now, some might say that a larger House of Representatives would be unwieldy and unmanageable.
Well, Japan, Germany, France, and the UK — countries with smaller populations than us — all have larger legislatures — and they manage just fine.
Others might say that it would be too difficult — or expensive — to accommodate more representatives in the Capitol. “Are there even enough chairs???”
Seriously?
Look, we’ve done it before. The current Capitol has been expanded to accommodate more members several times — and it can be again. A building should not be an obstacle to a more representative democracy.
Increasing the size of the House is an achievable goal.
We don’t even need a constitutional amendment. Congress only needs to pass a law to expand the number of representatives, which it’s done numerous times.
And as it happens, there is a bill — two in fact!
Each would add more than 130 seats to the House and lower the number of constituents a typical representative serves from 761,000 to a little over 570,000. Plus, there is a mechanism for adding new members down the line.
These bills are our best chance to restore the tradition of a House that grows in representation as America grows.
It’s time for us to think big — and make the People’s House live up to its name.
The modern Republican Party doesn’t give a damn about democracy – it is rapidly becoming the American fascist party.
This party is devoted to three ideas: that power is only legitimate if Republicans wield it, power must be acquired by any means necessary, and the party is accountable to no one once it has it.
Are Democrats protesting your inaction on gun violence? Expel them!
Does the public want to speak against your extremist proposals? They’ve got 30 seconds each – if you let them speak at all.
At risk of losing your supermajority due to changing demographics? Bypass your own state constitution and redraw legislative districts early to keep it!
Lose the election? Deny the outcome!
And what if one of your own is charged with a crime? Reject it all as a witch hunt, and undermine the justice system to protect them.
My friends, the Republican Party is only committed to maintaining its own power. Nothing more, nothing less.
We must continue to protest this radicalism in the streets, and punish it at the ballot box.
Authoritarianism is not just an external threat. It’s right here in America.
If there’s one thing that brings our divided nation together, it’s our hatred of junk fees.
Junk fees are extra charges you don’t know you’re paying until you get the bill. They hide the true cost when you buy a good or service, so it’s impossible to comparison shop. For example…
Say I want to travel to go see my favorite musician Dolly Parton play at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry.
When I book my plane ticket, I have to fork up extra cash to bring luggage or change my flight. My grandkids are more into Blippi than Dolly — so they won’t be traveling with me. Otherwise, I might have to pay a fee just to sit with them.
I need a rental car once I land, so I’ll be stuck paying an extra fee to pick up the car at the airport and another fee they never told me about to cover the rental company’s costs for disposing old tires. Seriously?
When I pay my hotel bill, the price is way higher than I thought I’d pay when I booked the room, to cover wi-fi, pool access, a gym, state and local taxes and other special fees.
Before I get to the show, I better look at my checking account balance if I want to buy a record. Even if I see that I have enough money to make a purchase, the timing of other charges hitting my account could result in me getting slapped with a surprise overdraft fee. It’s a simple mistake, but could make a $20 record end up costing $50.
Oh and don’t forget the concert tickets themselves. Major ticket sellers like Ticketmaster tack on fees to attend shows, which can drive up the final ticket price as much as 78% percent higher than what I was told the initial price was.
It’s all bait-and-switch. You thought you could afford to see Dolly Parton, but it turns out it’s gonna take a lot more than working “9 to 5”.
Corporations often label these types of charges “convenience fees” or “service fees.” Probably because they “conveniently” “serve” to pad their bottom lines, costing Americans at least $29 billion dollars a year we didn’t expect to pay. This is a huge problem spanning many different industries — not just the ones I’d encounter on my trip.
But there’s good news: President Biden has urged Congress to draw up legislation to prevent these outrageous fees.
Turns out, one of the few things as popular as Dolly Parton is tackling junk fees.
It’s time for Congress to act.
There’s a dirty trick many employers use to keep workers from getting a better job.
Some 30 million Americans are trapped by contracts that say if they leave their current job, they can’t work for a rival company or start a new business of their own.
These are called non-compete agreements.
They block workers from seeing higher wages or better working conditions. And they enlarge corporate monopoly power by stifling competition.
But a sweeping new rule from the Federal Trade Commission would put a stop to these non-compete agreements.
The FTC estimates that banning them could increase wages by nearly $300 billion a year overall by allowing workers to pursue better job opportunities.
But non-competes aren’t just bad for workers. They also harm the economy as a whole by depriving growing businesses of the talent and experience they need to build and expand.
Experts argue California’s ban on non-competes was a major reason for Silicon Valley’s boom.
For several decades, non-compete agreements have been cropping up all over the economy — not just in high-paying fields like banking and tech but as standard boilerplate for employment contracts in many lower-wage sectors such as construction, hospitality, and retail.
A recent survey found that non-competes are used for workers in more than a quarter of jobs where the typical employee only has a high school diploma. Another found that they disproportionately impact women and people of color.
Employers say they need noncompete agreements to protect trade secrets and investments they put into growing their businesses, like training workers.
Rubbish. Employers in states that already ban these agreements (such as California) show no sign of being more reluctant to invest in their businesses or train workers.
The real purpose of noncompetes is to make it harder (or impossible) for workers to bargain with rival employers for better pay or working conditions. Workers in states that have banned non-compete agreements have seen larger wage increases and more job mobility than workers in states where they are still legal.
As we learn again and again, the economy needs guardrails — and workers deserve protection. Otherwise, unfettered greed will lead to monopolies that charge high prices and suppress wages.
America once understood the importance of fighting monopolies. Woodrow Wilson created the Federal Trade Commission in 1914 to protect the public against the powerful corporate monopolies that fueled unprecedented inequality and political corruption.
In 1976, when I ran the policy planning staff at the FTC, it began cracking down on corporations under its then assertive chairman, Michael Pertschuk.
Corporate lobbyists and their allies in Congress were so unhappy they tried to choke off the agency’s funding, briefly closing it down. Pertschuk didn’t relent, but eventually he (and I) were replaced by Ronald Reagan’s appointees, who promptly defanged the agency.
Now, under its new Biden-appointed chair, Lina Khan, the FTC is back. Its ban on non-compete agreements nationwide marks the first time since Pertschuk that the agency has flexed its muscle to issue a rule prohibiting an unfair method of competition.
The rule is hardly a sure thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if the radical-right Republicans, now in control of the House, tried to pull off a stunt similar to what the House tried in the late 70s. And corporations are sure to appeal the rule all the way up to the Supreme Court.
In the meantime, kudos to Lina Khan and the FTC for protecting American workers from the unfettered greed of corporate America.
Think your grocery bill is high now? Just wait.
A massive corporate merger could send skyrocketing food prices through the stratosphere, unless the government sees the deal for what it is — a rotten egg.
Supermarket giant Kroger is in the process of finalizing a nearly $25 billion deal to acquire its jumbo-sized competitor Albertsons, combining their 5,000 supermarkets into one mega company.
Corporate concentration in the grocery market is already a huge problem, with estimates showing that just five companies control over 60 percent of American grocery sales
This means less consumer choice, and more opportunity for grocery stores to jack up prices — which they’ve already been doing lately under the cover of inflation. Let’s be clear: Big corporations are using the excuse of inflation to pass price increases through to you.
Now you may think this merger won’t affect you because you don’t have a Kroger or Albertsons where you live, but here’s the kicker: Both stores already control dozens of other grocery brands across the country. So you may not even know you’re actually shopping at Kroger or Albertsons.
All told, this deal could affect grocery stores relied on by 85 million households.
What’s to stop this new goliath from continually raising prices if customers have nowhere else to shop? With grocery bills already going through the roof, Kroger buying Albertsons gets rid of the roof altogether.
A Kroger-owned mega company can also get away with paying workers even less than it already does — because fewer competitors means grocery workers have fewer choices of whom to work for.
According to one survey, 75% of Kroger workers were food insecure and 14% have experienced homelessness. One out of every five Kroger workers has relied on government aid to survive.This is no secret to Kroger execs either. Recently leaked internal documents reveal that the company has known about the plight of its workers for years.
This is the story of monopolization, folks. Corporate consolidation is bad news for everyone except the super-rich. It’s awful for consumers, workers, and the economy as a whole — and it’s driving the most extreme wealth imbalance in over a century.
But the good news is that this Kroger-Albertsons deal is far from being fully baked. The Federal Trade Commission has the power to intervene and stop it. Several labor unions, produce growers, antitrust experts, and state Attorneys General are already urging the FTC to block it.
We can’t afford to let another supermarket giant gobble up an even bigger piece of the American pie.
I keep hearing “no one wants to work anymore.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, corporate America’s biggest lobbying group, claims there are over 10 million job openings right now in the US for which employers can’t find workers.
Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell says the U.S. is dealing with a “structural labor shortage” that won’t be resolved anytime soon.
But here’s the truth: there is no labor shortage.
There is a shortage of jobs paying sufficient wages to attract workers to fill them.
When a problem is wrongly described, the solutions posed often turn out to be equally wrong.
For most Americans, real inflation-adjusted wages continue to drop. Any pay increases workers may have earned in the past few years have actually been pay cuts, because wages have lagged behind the rising costs of basic necessities — like housing, food, childcare, and healthcare.
You don’t have to be a financial wizard to see why some workers might say the hell with it.
So, what should be done about the difficulty employers are having finding workers?
Simple. If employers want more workers, they should pay them more.
Many corporations are raking it in right now, they can clearly afford to.
Of course Jerome Powell and his colleagues at the Fed don’t want to hear this. They’re aiming to deal with the so-called “labor shortage” by slowing the economy so much that employers can find all the workers they need without raising wages.
But the Fed increasing interest rates to slow the economy will prevent millions of people from getting desperately-needed raises and cause millions more to lose their jobs — disproportionately low-wage workers, women and people of color.
Meanwhile, Republicans and some corporate economists blame the “labor shortage” on overly generous unemployment benefits. They say the way to get more people into jobs is to make their lives outside jobs less tolerable.
Rubbish. Most unemployed people are already hard up.
Pandemic benefits are long over, and even before COVID, America’s unemployment system was already the least generous of any rich nation.
Taken to its logical extreme, the corporate Republican argument holds water only if you don’t give a damn about workers.
Sure…you could eliminate all safety nets and at some point people without jobs will hurt so much they’ll have to take any available job, at any wage, whatever it demands.
But do this, and we’ll end up with an economy that’s even crueler than today’s economy.
Look: If we want more people to take jobs — AND we wish to live in a moral society where people can maintain decent lives — the answer is to pay people more.
Instead of saying “no one wants to work anymore,” we should be saying, “no one wants to be exploited anymore.”
In America, it’s expensive just to be alive.
And with inflation being driven by price gouging corporations, it’s only getting more expensive for regular Americans who don’t have any more money to spend.
Just look at how Big Oil is raking it in while you pay through the nose at the pump.
That’s on top of the average price of a new non-luxury car — which is now over $44,000. Even accounting for inflation, this is way higher than the average cost when I bought my first car — it’s probably in a museum by now.
Even worse, the median price for a house is now over $440,000. Compare that to 1972, when it was under $200,000.
And when you get back after a long day of work, you’ll likely be met with bills up the wazoo for doctor visits, student loans, and utilities.
So what’s left of a paycheck after basic living expenses? Not much.
All of this comes back to how we measure a successful economy.
What good are more jobs if those jobs barely pay enough to live on?
Over one-third of full time jobs don’t pay enough to cover a basic family budget.
And what good are lots of jobs if they cause so much stress and take up so much time that our lives are miserable?
And don’t tell me a good economy is measured by a roaring stock market if the richest 10 percent of Americans own more than 80 percent of it.
And what good is a large Gross Domestic Product if more and more of the total economy is going to the richest one-tenth of one percent?
What good is economic growth if the way we grow depends on fossil fuels that cause a climate crisis?
These standard measures – jobs, the stock market, the GDP – don’t show how our economy is really doing, who is doing well, or the quality of our lives.
People who sit at their kitchen tables at night wondering how they’re going to pay the bills don’t say to themselves
“Well, at least corporate profits are at record levels.”
In fact, corporations have record profits and CEOs are paid so much because they’re squeezing more output from workers but paying lower wages. Over the past 40 years, productivity has grown 3.5x as fast as hourly pay.
At the same time, corporations are driving up the costs of everyday items people need.
Because corporations are monopolizing their markets, they don’t have to worry about competitors. A few giant corporations can easily coordinate price hikes and enjoy bigger profits.
Just four firms control 85% of all beef, 66% of all pork, and 54% of all poultry production.
Firms like Tyson have seen their profit margins skyrocket as they jack up prices higher than their costs — forcing consumers who are already stretched thin to pay even more.
It’s not just meat. Weak antitrust enforcement has allowed companies to become powerful enough to raise their prices across the entire food industry.
It’s the same story with household goods. Giant companies like Procter & Gamble blame their price hikes on increased costs – but their profit margins have soared to 25%. Hello?
They care more about their bottom line than your bottom, that’s for sure.
Meanwhile, parents – and even grandparents like me – are STILL struggling to feed their babies because of a national formula shortage. Why? Largely because the three companies who control the entire formula industry would rather pump money into stock buybacks than quality control at their factories.
Traditionally, our economy’s health is measured by the unemployment rate. Job growth. The stock market. Overall economic growth. But these don’t reflect the everyday, “kitchen table economics” that affect our lives the most.
These measures don’t show the real economy.
Instead of looking just at the number of jobs, we need to look at the income earned from those jobs. And not the average income.
People at the top always bring up the average.
If Jeff Bezos walked into a bar with 140 other people, the average wealth of each person would be over a billion dollars.
No, look at the median income – half above, half below.
And make sure it accounts for inflation – real purchasing power.
Over the last few decades, the real median income has barely budged. This isn’t economic success.
It’s economic failure, with a capital F.
And instead of looking at the stock market or the GDP we need to look at who owns what – where the wealth really is.
Over the last forty years, wealth has concentrated more and more at the very top. Look at this;
This is a problem, folks. Because with wealth comes political power.
Forget trickle-down economics. It’s trickle on.
And instead of looking just at economic growth, we also need to look at what that growth is costing us – subtract the costs of the climate crisis, the costs of bad health, the costs of no paid leave, and all the stresses on our lives that economic growth is demanding.
We need to look at the quality of our lives – all our lives. How many of us are adequately housed and clothed and fed. How many of our kids are getting a good education. How many of us live in safety – or in fear.
You want to measure economic success? Go to the kitchen tables of America.
Billionaires have found one more way to funnel our tax dollars into their bank accounts: sports stadiums. And if we don’t play ball, they’ll take our favorite teams away.
Ever notice how there never seems to be enough money to build public infrastructure like mass transit lines and better schools? And yet, when a multi-billion-dollar sports team demands a new stadium, our local governments are happy to oblige.
A good example of this billionaire boondoggle is the host of the 2023 Super Bowl: State Farm Stadium.
That’s where the Arizona Cardinals have played since 2006. It was finally built after billionaire team owner Michael Bidwill and his family spent years hinting that they would move the Cards out of Arizona if the team didn’t get a new stadium. Their blitz eventually worked, with Arizona taxpayers and the city of Glendale paying over two thirds of the $455 million construction tab.
And State Farm Stadium is not unique. It’s part of a well established playbook.
Here’s how stadiums stick the public with the bill.
Step 1: Billionaire buys a sports team.
Just about every NFL franchise owner has a net worth of over a billion dollars — except for the Green Bay Packers, who are publicly owned by half a million cheeseheads.
The same goes for many franchise owners in other sports. Their fortunes don’t just help them buy teams, but also give them clout — which they cash-in when they want to get a great deal on new digs for their team.
Step 2: Billionaire pressures local government.
Since 1990, franchises in major North American sports leagues have intercepted upwards of $30 billion worth of taxpayer funds from state and local governments to build stadiums.
And the funding itself is just the beginning of these sweetheart deals.
Sports teams often get big property tax breaks and reimbursements on operating expenses, like utilities and security on game days. Most deals also let the owners keep the revenue from naming rights, luxury box seats, and concessions — like the Atlanta Braves’ $150 hamburger.
Even worse, these deals often put taxpayers on the hook for stadium maintenance and repairs.
We taxpayers are essentially paying for the homes of our favorite sports teams, but we don’t really own those homes, we don’t get to rent them out, and we still have to buy expensive tickets to visit them.
Whenever these billionaire owners try to sell us on a shiny new stadium, they claim it will spur economic growth from which we’ll all benefit. But numerous studies have shown that this is false.
As a University of Chicago economist aptly put it, “If you want to inject money into the local economy, it would be better to drop it from a helicopter than invest it in a new ballpark.”
But what makes sports teams special is they are one of the few realms of collective identity we have left.
Billionaires prey on the love that millions of fans have for their favorite teams.
This brings us to the final step in the playbook: Threaten to move the team.
Obscenely rich owners threaten to — or actually do — rip teams out of their communities if they don’t get the subsidies they demand.
Just look at the Seattle Supersonics. Starbucks’ founder Howard Schultz owned the NBA franchise but failed to secure public funding to build a new stadium. So the coffee magnate sold the team to another wealthy businessman who moved it to Oklahoma.
The most egregious part of how the system currently works is that every dollar we spend building stadiums is a dollar we aren’t using for hospitals or housing or schools.
We are underfunding public necessities in order to funnel money to billionaires for something they could feasibly afford.
So, instead of spending billions on extravagant stadiums, we should be investing taxpayer money in things that improve the lives of everyone — not just the bottom lines of profitable sports teams and their owners.
Because when it comes to stadium deals, the only winners are billionaires.
Are you sick of the onslaught of negative political ads that air on your TV every election season?
The fear-mongering. The half-truths.
Believe it or not, there’s a simple reform we can enact to make elections more bearable for voters.
It’s called ranked choice voting, or RCV, and it could change our politics for the better.
When you head to the ballot box under ranked choice voting, instead of voting for just one candidate, you have the option to rank candidates in order of preference: first, second, third and so on.
So if you’re stuck between two preferred candidates for a position, you can spread your preferences out in hopes that one of them wins.
When ballots are counted, if none of the candidates gets an outright majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and their votes are redistributed to their supporters’ second choice candidate.
This process continues until a candidate receives over 50% of the vote, and is declared the winner.
It’s also good for a whole host of other reasons.
Implementing RCV could have the added benefit of making our elections… well… nicer.
In a ranked choice voting system, candidates are less likely to engage in the kind of mudslinging we see every election season, because they’re not just trying to be a voter’s first choice — they also want to be the second choice of voters who are backing their opponents.
This can motivate anyone running for office to be more inclusive and appeal to a broader range of voters — helping to connect people who don’t always agree on every issue.
RCV also allows us to exercise our right to vote without feeling like we’re compromising our beliefs or simply voting for the “lesser of two evils.” We can vote FOR the candidates we like the most, rather than voting AGAINST the candidates we like the least. RCV could also open the door to voters casting their ballots for more third-party candidates.
Even if your favorite candidate from your preferred party is not favored to win, that person could still be your first-choice — without you feeling like you are giving up your vote entirely. If your candidate doesn’t make it to the final round, your second or third choice could still end up winning in the final tally.
Ranked choice voting can even change the kinds of people who run for office — for the better. Potential candidates wouldn’t have to avoid running for fear of splitting the vote or “spoiling” a close election — allowing for a potentially more diverse pool of candidates to run.
Look at Alaska, where voters used RCV to elect Mary Peltola to Congress — making her the first Alaskan Native and first woman to represent the state in the U.S. House.
Lastly, ranked choice voting saves everyone — you, me, elections officials — time and money.
There would no longer be runoffs, which can be costly and often have lower turnout — which means election results that are less likely to reflect the will of the public.
There’s a reason why RCV is starting to sweep the nation — it’s currently being used by 13 million voters across the country.
Ranked choice voting makes elections less painful, less expensive, and can help make our government more inclusive and responsive to what people actually want.
Maybe you can organize to make ranked choice voting a reality where you live.
Republicans have been trying to crush unions for decades, but American workers are fighting back with a vengeance.
Many GOP leaders wink and nod while talking about “making America great again,” as if the country was more prosperous when they were in charge.
Rubbish.
Yes, there was a time when the American economy worked better for workers than it does now, but not because Republicans played any part in making it that way. And certainly not because of the bigotry, misogyny, and racism they’ve been peddling to pit workers against each other to distract them from how much wealth is being siphoned off to the top.
In fact, Republicans have been waging a relentless war against what had been one of the biggest drivers of prosperity for the working class — labor unions.
Now, it’s important to note that this prosperity wasn’t shared equally with women or people of color, but a big reason much of the workforce was better off decades ago than today is because of the power of labor unions to organize and fight for the rights and dignity of workers.
Republicans have fought labor unions tooth and nail. They’ve enacted deceptively named “right-to-work” laws, which are all about weakening unions rather than giving workers more rights. And they’ve voted against bills allowing workers to form unions with simple up or down majorities at the workplace.
This is the great irony of the MAGA movement. And it would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. If Republicans really cared about American greatness, they would support unions — one of the major tools at our disposal to actually combat inequality and lift up the working class.
Fortunately — despite Republican efforts — labor unions are on the rise once more. And so are pro-labor Democratic politicians.
These Democrats won big in the 2022 midterms — especially in the rust belt. They captured the governorships of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, and also Michigan — where they flipped both chambers of the state legislature. The last time Democrats had full control of Michigan’s state government was in the 1980s.
And look at the impressive victory of John Fetterman — the new U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. He defeated a wealthy Republican snake oil salesman and flipped a senate seat, while running on an unabashedly pro-worker platform aiming to increase the federal minimum wage, end corporate price gouging, and make it easier for workers to organize unions at their workplaces.
It wasn’t just pro-worker politicians who won big during the midterms, but worker friendly ballot measures as well — almost universally opposed by Republicans.
Illinois voted to enshrine collective bargaining rights into its constitution, effectively banning right to work laws from ever being passed in the state.
Washington D.C. voted overwhelmingly to eliminate the subminimum wage for tipped workers.
Voters in Nebraska and Nevada chose to increase their state minimum wage.
Forced prison labor was outlawed in Vermont, Alabama, Tennessee, and Oregon.
Republicans, along with their rich and powerful patrons, have always feared that working people would recognize their collective power, both through unions and at the ballot box. So the wealthy are doing everything they can to hold working people down.
But the midterm elections and the resurgent worker power movement should give us hope that a more just and equitable United States will be built with union labor.
It’s not just about making America great — it’s about making America better. Not just a bigger economy but a fairer economy. Not just more wealth for the wealthy, but better and more secure lives for all.
FreshRSS 
