Less than a week after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau celebrated its sixth anniversary, the Trump administration issued a decisive blow to the Bureau’s latest progress regarding a key arbitrations rule, which it now aims to nullify.
For Republicans, the CFPB must be curtained like similar government agencies at the helm of President Trump’s deregulation agenda. But the policies championed by the CFPB continue to greatly benefit the average American.
“The question is, why has [the CFPB] drawn so much fire from the Republicans in Washington?” asked CFPB founder Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren at a press conference Tuesday with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). “Why is it that the banks and the financial services industry [are] after it day after day after day? I’ll tell you the answer. It’s because it works.”
The CFPB “has provided needed oversight to mortgages, credit cards, student loans and other financial products,” explained Ken Blackledge, a produce farmer and independent voter from Central Iowa. His letter to the editor published in the Des Moines Register on July 25 seeks to emphasize the bipartisan importance of Warren’s agency on the heels of pivotal Dodd Frank reform.
“That little agency has forced the biggest financial institutions in this country to return nearly $12 billion directly to families they cheated,” Warren stated. “It’s handled more than a million complaints. It’s done tough oversight and enforcement, and it’s come out with regulations that—piece at a time—are beginning to level the playing field between giant financial institutions on one hand and American families on the other.”
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Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor. Follow her @alexpreditor.
Sen. John McCain’s decisive “no” vote early Friday marked a major turning point in the GOP’s seven-year war to destroy Obamacare. McCain, who had returned to Capitol Hill Tuesday just days after his brain cancer diagnosis and surgery, did so with a “refreshed appreciation for the protocols and customs” of the Senate.
In anticipation of the Senate’s “skinny repeal” vote on Friday, McCain remained largely silent, advising reporters to “watch the show,” when questioned on his vote. But just before 2am, the Arizona Republican’s fateful “no” vote became a stunning blow to the Trump agenda.
“He stood with a group of us and said, I am a ‘no,'” Sen. Chris Coons said of McCain’s announcement. “I was trying not to jump up and down and smile.”
The vote, as well as his return Tuesday, was a surprise to most, including the president.
“So great that John McCain is coming back to vote. Brave – American hero! Thank you John,” Trump tweeted.
Watch:
Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor. Follow her @alexpreditor.
To recap, Trump’s approval rating six months into his presidency slipped to 36%. Even worse, a majority of Americans (63%) reportedly disapprove of his son Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in June 2016 at Trump Tower.
But contrary to Trump’s tweet, Republicans on the Hill are far from jumping ship. Here are five who have recently leapt to the president’s defense.
1. Rep Francis Rooney
On July 17, the Florida Republican congressman weighed in on Trump’s defense of his son’s controversial meeting via Twitter.
“Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!” Trump had tweeted that morning.
Rooney largely agreed.
“It’s politics in terms of the general idea of getting opposition research,” he told CNN’s Poppy Harlow. “All’s fair, it’s a rough game.”
“Is meeting with a hostile foreign government entity fair?” Poppy pressed the congressman.
“Absolutely,” he answered. As far as he was concerned, the media coverage was largely a distraction.
2. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher
As more details of the Trump Tower meeting surfaced, it was revealed on July 14 that California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher had met with Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin in Moscow three months prior to Akhmetshin sitting in on the Trump Tower meeting.
In response, Rohrabacher delivered a fiery speech on the House floor.
“If someone says to you that they want to give you information, there is nothing wrong with that,” Rohrabacher said. “It is not illegal to receive information from someone, especially if you are engaged in an activity that’s aimed at trying to secure understanding for policies that you plan to implement as a leader in the United States. Absolutely, there is nothing wrong.”
3. Rep. Kevin Cramer
“There’s an unhealthy obsession with all things Russia and all things [that happened in] the last election by plenty of people,” the North Dakota congressman said Friday in an interview on MSNBC.
“Do you believe that Russia interfered in the 2016 election?” MSNBC’s Ali Velshi asked.
“I think Russia has attempted to interfere in several elections in the last several decades in many countries,” he answered. But he also estimated “90 percent of a newscast” (presumably MSNBC’s) was focused on Russian interference.
“I’m going to ask our producers, congressman, to send you links to all of the stuff that [host] Stephanie [Ruhle] and I have done on health care, on infrastructure on American-made [products], on minimum wage, on economic growth,” Velshi told Cramer. “So that you don’t go on anybody else’s TV [show] and spout this nonsense.”
4. Sen. Chuck Grassley
On July 11, Iowa senator Chuck Grassley, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, penned a letter to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson regarding Natalia Veselnitskaya’s residency in the U.S. on the date of her Trump Tower meeting.
“It is unclear how she was still in the country for that meeting despite being denied a visa beforehand and her parole purportedly expiring on January 7, 2016. This raises serious questions about whether the Obama administration authorized her to remain in the country, and if so, why?” Grassley wrote.
President Trump’s frustration with his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions (and the first senator to have endorsed him), has been baffling, if not “disturbing” to Republicans. Not to Alabama congressman Luther Strange.
“My sense is it’s probably more related to the frustration not only to the president, but all of us at least on the Republican side about the obsession with Russia and the inability to get on to the issues that are affecting our agenda,” he said during a joint appearance with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue in Point Clear, Alabama. “Which is what we want to do in repealing and replacing Obamacare, deal with tax reform, infrastructure spending and some key issues like that.”
Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor. Follow her @alexpreditor.
Fox News remains President Trump’s favorite news channel, and Sean Hannity his single greatest champion. But mounting criticism from the latter’s Fox co-anchors this week suggests the network’s support for the president may be eroding.
“Just today John Roberts, Fox News correspondent of the White House walked out of a White House press briefing,” explained “Young Turks” host Cenk Uygur. “Sarah Huckabee Sanders… said ‘I guess he has somewhere better to go,’ and he said ‘yeah, we’re not on camera. You are not doing this on TV, so I have to do a live show.'”
Roberts isn’t the only Fox News correspondent who appears fed up. Nightly panelist Charles Krauthammer torched Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Kremlin-connected attorney on “The Story” with Martha MacCallum, three days after the New York Times bombshell report. Krauthammer continued his attack on Thursday’s “Special Report With Bret Baier.”
“I’m willing to concede it is not a criminal act, but it is certainly an unethical act,” he said of the meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya last June at Trump Tower.
“Damn,” exlaimed Uygur. “Fox News calling the Trump administration unethical and saying they were deceiving you all along.”
Even Judge Andrew Napolitano had some choice words to describe the Trump Tower summit. According to Napolitano, Don. Jr. was lucky not to receive any information about Hillary Clinton from Veselnitskaya.
“That would have been a felony,” he concluded. “That would have been the completion of a crime.”
“This is a guy Trump liked so much that he thought about putting him on the Supreme Court,” Uygur reminded viewers. “[And] even Napolitano is saying this looks really bad.”
Earlier in the week, a furious Sheppard Smith told viewers, “There are still people out there who believe we’re making it up, and one day they are going to realize we are not.”
“This is a weird topsy-turvy world where I am agreeing with Fox hosts,” Uygur noted. That makes two of us.
Watch:
Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor. Follow her @alexpreditor.
This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.
Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough made a surprising announcement on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday: The former Florida Republican Congressman is giving his party the boot.
“You changed your mind about Donald Trump. Why haven’t other Republicans done the same?” Colbert asked, drawing on Scarborough’s lifelong allegiance to the GOP.
“I think it’s inexplicable,” Scarborough answered. “This is well before Donald Trump was elected president that my party has betrayed their core values.”
According to Scarborough, Republicans had “a thousand” reasons not to vote for their candidate, from Trump’s initial Muslim ban proposal, to his attack on Judge Gonzalo Curiel, to his feigning ignorance of David Duke and the KKK.
“Time and time and time again they turned the other way,” he lamented. “And they’re doing the same thing now. And it’s actually disgusting.”
“You have to ask yourself, what exactly is the Republican party willing to do?” Scarborough asked. “How far are they willing to go? How much of this country and our values are they willing to sell out?”
“But aren’t you a Republican?” Colbert wanted to know.
“I am a Republican,” admitted the Morning Joe host. “But I’m not going to be a Republican anymore. I’ve got to become an Independent.”
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Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor. Follow her @alexpreditor.
The Russian collusion saga continues apace. On Saturday, the New York Times reported that Donald Trump Jr. agreed to meet with Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya after he was promised compromising information on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign. Paul J. Manafort and Jared Kushner also attended the meeting.
According to Richard Painter, former ethics lawyer to Pres. George W. Bush, the Trump campaign staff meeting “borders on treason if it’s not treason itself.”
“Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner were both apparently involved in this,” Painter said in an MSNBC interview on Sunday. “And this was an effort to get opposition research on an opponent in an American political campaign from the Russians, who are known to be engaged in spying inside the United States.”
Painter, a frequent critic of Trump allies coordinating with Russia’s cyber operations, has suggested the Trump administration may be guilty of treason before, but never this explicitly.
“We do not get our opposition research from spies. We do not collaborate with Russian spies unless we want to be accused of treason,” he hammered.
“The Bush administration never would have tolerated this,” Painter continued. “And if this story is true, we’d have one of them or both of them in custody by now and we’d be asking them a lot of questions. This is unacceptable.”
Watch:
Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor. Follow her @alexpreditor.
This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.
Chris Christie is just trolling New Jerseyans at this point.
In June, a Quinnipiac University poll found that his approval rating stood at a dismal 15 percent, the lowest of any American governor in decades. Yet this past weekend, he was photographed sunbathing on a beach that had been closed to the public amid a state government shutdown.
Here are five ways the New Jersey governor is extending a giant middle finger to voters before he leaves office:.
1. Shutting down beaches…for taxpayers.
A health care bill involving Horizon, the state’s largest health insurer, catalyzed a fiscal debacle not seen since 2006.
“I’m not happy about this,” Christie said in a press conference, hours before the government shutdown began Friday. “This is completely avoidable.”
As a result, all state-run parks, recreational areas, forests, camping areas, historic sites, and beaches were shuttered. But not for Christie. The New Jersey governor and his family had Island Beach State Park all to themselves on Sunday, less than 48 hours after the start of the shutdown.
In an interview WTXF-TV in Philadelphia on Monday, Christie offered this inexplicable defense of his afternoon tanning session: “Well, I’m sorry… they’re not the governor.”
2. No interest in helping Atlantic City.
After updating the legislation to his liking, “Gov. Chris Christie once again rejected a set of rescue bills aiming to give a boost to the financially struggling Jersey Shore gambling resort,” reported NJ.com in January last year.
Christie provided no explanation for his decision, which left a $33.5 million gap in Atlantic City’s municipal budget. Now, casinos could be forced to shut down if the stalemate continues, costing the city millions during peak tourist season.
3. Marijuana arrests on the rise.
A new American Civil Liberties Union report published in June found that marijuana arrests have been steadily rising under Christie, a former federal prosecutor, just as New Jersey is progressing toward legalization.
What’s worse, according to the ACLU, “black residents were three times more likely than their white counterparts to be arrested on marijuana charges despite no difference in the rate of marijuana use between the two groups.”
4. Commuting remains a mess.
A transportation expert pulled Crain’s reporter Greg David aside at the Crain’s Real Estate Forum in June.
“It’s going to be a tense summer in the city,” he warned, “with 400,000 angry people getting off the trains each day.”
“He was referring to the commuters from New Jersey and Long Island derailed by track problems at Penn Station,” reported David, “and the 100,000 or more subway riders who see their commute disrupted every day by the antiquated signal system.”
A week earlier, New Jersey Advance Media had found that less than 50 percentof the state’s morning trains to Penn Station arrived on time in May.
“State aid to New Jersey Transit declined by 90% under Gov. Chris Christie,” David added.
5. Back pay not likely for workers affected by shutdown.
When 45,000 government workers were pulled off the job during New Jersey’s first-ever state government shutdown, Gov. Jon Corzine, along with the state senate and assembly, agreed to grant them retroactive pay.
“Don’t count on it [this time],’ Christie has asserted.
“That was Jon ‘I’ll fight for a good contract for you’ Corzine,” he said of the former governor at a news conference Friday. “I ain’t him.”
Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor. Follow her @alexpreditor.
This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.
Less than a month after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Hillary Clinton’s director of progressive media began her new venture: creating a crucial space for the resistance amid a fundamental political shift.
Zerlina Maxwell is the director of progressive programming for SiriusXM, which claims an audience of 51.6 million people each week, and a subscriber base of 25.8 million who have access to its 135-plus stations. Maxwell oversees six progressive talk radio shows at Sirius, including Cenk Uygur’s The Young Turks, the Thom Hartmann Program and Make It Plain with Mark Thompson. All progressive programs at Sirius are three hours long, allowing each panelist ample time to tell their stories.
“You literally have two minutes total to make your point on cable news,” said Maxwell, a frequent guest on mainstream networks. “We pride ourselves on being able to get into the details.”
One of Maxwell’s main priorities is growing her base by providing listeners with the tools to start difficult conversations.
“People do agree with progressive values, they just don’t realize it,” she explained. “If you feel like people should have access to health care even if they don’t make a lot of money; if you are horrified by images of police brutality. We can come to [feel] a sense of empathy for other people.”
“One of the biggest weeks we had was the week after the Women’s March [in January],” she told AlterNet. “I think [it’s] what distinguishes how we view inclusion, and intersectional identity.”
As Pride Month came to a close, AlterNet visited SiriusXM for a live taping of Michelangelo Signorile’s “Queer In Trump’s America,” with panelists Alex Berg, Danielle Moodie-Mills and Xorje Olivares.The panel focused on the wide range of challenges for those who identify with multiple marginalized groups.
Berg, a Huffington Post reporter, covered the Women’s March after many months of Trump rallies.
“When I was there, there were women from all different corners of America who were there because they felt activated by all different aspects, I think, of the resistance and of Trump’s mysogyny, so I was definitely heartened to see women who didn’t feel like they were feminists, or even wanted to go near the word ‘feminism,’ who, you know, finally felt compelled to show—”
“And of course transgender women [were] elevated and on the stage and part of the movement,” Signorile cut in.
“Absolutely,” Berg agreed.
On the other hand, Moodie-Mills touched on the divisions within the LGBTQ community that existed long before Trump came along.
“I don’t ever want people to pretend that the LGBTQ community like, you know … is all rainbows and sprinkles, like, legit, but like, it’s also really racist — and misogynistic and transphobic.”
And even LGBTQ people can be, as Olivares later noted, anti-immigrant.
“I’m always reminded of this time when this whole [presidential] campaign first started,” he said. “I went to go to a friend or acquaintance’s apartment, a gay acquaintance’s apartment… it was the first Republican debate — and we had a Trump supporter come in, a gay Trump supporter.”
To their surprise, the party-goer did not show disdain for Trump’s signature wall talk and mass deportation plans.
“He was just saying, ‘You know, I think that’s true, I think these Mexicans just don’t know what the hell they’re doing and I think if they really want to be part of this country, they need to learn English and realize this is not a place for them,'” Olivares recalled.
Listen:
Watch:
Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor. Follow her @alexpreditor.
This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has delayed a vote on Republicans’ new health care bill, the Better Care Reconciliation Act. On Thursday, MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle hosted a panel discussion with five Trump-supporting doctors from around the country.
Ruhle began with a softball: “Who here thinks Obamacare made health care better for patients?”
Predictably, no one did. But her line of questioning would grow considerably more aggressive.
“If you were to sit down with Mitch McConnell and say, Leader McConnell, here is what you need to do to get this thing through, speaking as a doctor, what would you tell him right now?” she continued.
Alieta Eck, a New Jersey internist, offered this head-scratcher: “How about letting other groups form, not just employer-based. So, if a group like the NRA or, I don’t know, some other group… a township—”
“Let’s have the NRA create health care,” Ruhle cut in. “I’m gonna go with no.”
But Eck wouldn’t let it go.
“How about a township?” she pressed. “You buy into your township plan and then you’d have 50,000 people that are all buying into the same health care plan, or any kind of group of people — churches — let them form a health plan.”
Sen. Al Franken’s constituents are quite literally crying over Senate Republicans’ Obamacare repeal bill, revealed in draft form by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) last week.
“We’re talking about completely going backward,” the Minnesota Democrat said in a “Morning Joe” interview Monday. “We’re talking about an $880 billion cut [to] Medicaid and matching that with a $900 billion tax cut for the wealthiest Americans.”
As a member of the Senate Health Committee and co-chair of the bipartisan Senate Rural Health Caucus, Franken regularly participates in town halls devoted to health care access for Minnesotans.
“I’ve gone to rural health meetings in hospitals and nursing homes and clinics people are crying about this [bill],” he explained. “One woman was crying because her mom gets her home health care through Medicaid… and she says she’s going to lose that.”
Franken also addressed the divide between progressives and moderates in his own part, acknowledging the party needs to win back rural Americans who voted for Donald Trump.
“How do you change the view that the Democrats are simply ‘limousine Democrats’; that the party is in the [pocket] of Wall Street,” panelist Eddie Glaude Jr. asked Franken.
“Well, we gotta stop riding in limousines,” Franken deadpanned.
“But there’s a presumption, right?” Glaude Jr. pressed. “That the corporate wing of the Democratic Party is no different than corporate Republicans, right?”
“If you’re talking about limousines,” Franken pivoted, getting back to the health bill. “How about the top 400 people in terms of tax cuts here. The amount of money they’ll get in tax cuts would pay for Medicaid for 750,000 people.”
Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor. Follow her @alexpreditor.
This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.
The Transportation Safety Administration is considering implementing a new national policy that would require passengers to remove books from their bags at airport checkpoints, like they do laptops. And given the administration’s reputation for religious profiling, the procedure could be used to violate passengers’ First Amendment rights.
“[B]ooks raise very special privacy issues,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in response. “There is a long history of special legal protection for the privacy of one’s reading habits in the United States, not only through numerous Supreme Court and other court decisions, but also through state laws that criminalize the violation of public library reading privacy or require a warrant to obtain book sales, rental, or lending records.”
One week after implementing a restriction on large electronic devices, Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly previewed changes travelers may experience going into the summer.
“We’re going to raise the bar for, generally speaking, aviation security, much higher than it is now,” Kelly told “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace on May 28.
Books aren’t the only items being targeted. The new policy applies to all paper products, and has been introduced in two states—Missouri and California—since May.
So far, it’s proven disastrous for an industry already under heavy scrutiny.
Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor. Follow her @alexpreditor.
This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.
Paul Ryan is up for reelection in 2018, and if his opponent’s first campaign video is any indication, the House Speaker is going to have his work cut out for him.
“This is repealing and replacing Obamacare, everybody doesn’t get what they want,” Ryan opines in the ad before he’s interrupted by Randy Bryce, a Wisconsin ironworker, military veteran and union organizer placing health care at the center of his platform.
“My mom is probably the most important person in my life,” Bryce says. “She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.”
“There’s no doubt in my mind that there are thousands of people like her that don’t have what she has,” he adds.
The coverage Bryce’s mother receives under Obamacare allows her to tend to her Alzheimer’s-stricken husband. But all that could change if the Senate signs the Better Care Reconciliation Act into law.
“I consider ourselves lucky because we have insurance, and it shouldn’t be a matter of haves and have-nots. It’s a basic right for everybody,” Bryce told “Last Word” host Lawrence O’Donnell in his first national interview Thursday.
Bryce is attempting the “almost impossible” in challenging Ryan, explained O’Donnell.
“A Speaker of the House has been defeated in his re-election campaign in his home district exactly twice [in American history],” the host noted. “The first time was in 1862… and the second time was in 1994.”
But Ryan’s Democratic opponent has a remarkable track record of beating the odds.
“I have a son who’s a miracle child,” Bryce said. “I was told I probably wouldn’t be able to have children after being diagnosed with cancer.”
“I’ll take you onto a job site in a construction area in downtown Milwaukee,” he offered O’Donnell. “What we do is oftentimes considered impossible.”
The Wisconsin Democrat attributes the early buzz around his campaign to working people “wanting to be heard.”
“[No-show Ryan] is not representing anything [or] anybody in the district,” Bryce asserted. “He’s been absent. He hasn’t been in the district for over 600 days, but he does have time to appear at 50 fundraisers where you can pay $10,000 to have your picture taken with them.”
As for the president, Bryce believes Ryan “pretty much owns Donald Trump at this point.”
“There’s no distancing himself,” he emphasized.
Watch:
Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor. Follow her @alexpreditor.
This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.
Hours after a draft of the GOP Senate’s new health care bill was released, protesters from across the country began staging sit-ins and die-ins in response to its draconian measures.
“No cuts to Medicaid,” chanted members of ADAPT (Americans Disabled Attendant Programs Today) outside Mitch McConnell’s office on Thursday.
According to a press release for the event, about five dozen members of the disability rights organization showed up to protest Senate Mitch McConnell’s plans to phase out the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion over several years. Several protesters were forcibly removed from their wheelchairs.
“The Senate proposal cuts off Medicaid expansion more gradually than the House bill, but would enact deeper long-term cuts to the health-care program for low-income Americans,” reported the Washington Post late Wednesday.
After working for weeks in secret to revise the House’s health care bill, Senate Republicans unveiled the Better Care Reconciliation Act Thursday—a 142-page document maintaining the same multi-billion dollar cuts to Medicaid as its earlier iteration.
“[Senate Republicans] worked really, really hard on [this bill] and it’s pretty clear now exactly who they were working for,” remarked Massachusettes Senator Elizabeth Warren on Thursday. “[And it’s] not American families.”
“The Senate bill is crammed full with just as many tax cuts as the House bill; tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, tax cuts for wealthy investors, tax cuts for giant companies, but all those tax cuts don’t come cheap,” she continued. “Senate Republicans had to make a choice how to pay for all those juicy tax cuts for their rich buddies. I’ll tell you how—in blood money.”
According to Caroline Pearson, a senior vice president of the health care consulting firm Avalare Health, “unlike the House bill, which bases its subsidies for private insurance on age, the Senate bill uses age and income. That focuses financial assistance on people with lower incomes.”
But under Obamacare, she explains, “many of those people would have gotten much more generous plans.”
The new bill will let states use waivers to ignore some coverage requirements, although coverage will be less affordable overall.
“I don’t know if the Republicans were expecting a round of applause for pitting kids with breathing tubes against vulnerable seniors or someone needing treatment for addiction, but I do know this so-called ‘exemption’ won’t do a thing to help these kids,” continued Warren. “The Republican cuts still slash hundreds of billions of dollars for Medicaid leaving states with no choice… but to cut services.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has had it with Republican senators keeping their Democratic colleagues from even seeing their revisions to the heavily contested American Health Care Act, legislation even President Trump admitted was “mean” just last week.
“It should tell every American, whether you are a Democrat, a Republican or an Independent, whether you’re conservative or progressive. It should tell you something that major, major legislation is being written at this moment, and most Republicans don’t have a clue as to what’s in that legislation, let alone Democrats, let alone the average American,” Sanders noted in a speech on the Senate floor late Monday.
Sanders was joined by senators Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, Kamala Harris and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer among others, all of whom blasted Republicans for refusing any committee talks with the Democrats on the wildly unpopular bill.
The Vermont Independent drew on Republicans’ profound disregard for their constituents in his fiery dissent.
“I say to the Republican leadership, what are you afraid of?” Sanders asked. “Bring that bill out. … We have not had one hearing to ask members of the administration, people throughout this country what the impact of this legislation will be on the children, on the elderly, on working families, on those who have chronic diseases, on ordinary Americans… 300-plus million people?
Watch:
Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor. Follow her @alexpreditor.
This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.
Since CEO and founder Travis Kalanick announced his indefinite leave of absence from Uber, the company has spent the past week desperately attempting to steer the conversation away from scandal. But plans ranging from rural ride-sharing to curbing drinking at work are doing little to help the startup still drowning in legal woes.
1. Hundreds of Sexual Harassment Claims
More than 20 people have been fired as a result of 215 sexual harassment claims. As of June 6, 57 employees were still being investigated.
Arianna and Liane to press: there is no systemic sexual harassment, just Susan.
Additionally, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder released his own recommendations, which Uber’s board of directors voted unanimously to uphold on June 15.
Phil Bezanson, white collar partner at Bracewell, is wary the damage control isn’t enough.
“Just because they are doing their best going forward, doesn’t erase liability for things they have done in the past,” Bezanson said.
Another attorney, Kate Bischoff of tHRive Law & Consulting, is taking the “wait and see” approach.
“I do a lot of harassment training for companies,” Bischoff said. “Sometimes after that training, the HR department gets complaints, people saying, ‘I didn’t want to stick my neck out, but now I know that it’s a big deal.’ I don’t know if litigation comes out of that …. We might see more come out of Uber.”
2. Mishandling of a Rape Case
According to a Recode report dated June 7, “A top Uber executive (Eric Alexander, the president of business in the Asia Pacific) obtained medical records of a woman who had been raped during a ride in India,” and was fired two years after the incident occurred.
Alexander, among other executives, was worried a competitor was behind the attack. Even so, “Alexander then brought the files to the attention of Kalanick and Michael,” reported Recode, which was “highly unusual since they were records related to a criminal investigation.”
3. Improper Driver Classification
A June 2016 class-action lawsuit filed by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance “alleged that Uber’s deduction of sales tax and the injured driver fee after the commission was calculated violated the terms of service and amounted to wage ‘theft,'” the Guardian reported in late May.
The verdict cost Uber tens of millions in back pay to the New York City drivers and was the third high-profile case settled this year concerning Uber employees’ earnings.
“In March, the company paid refunds to UberBlack drivers in Philadelphia after charging them an extra 5% in commission for about 18 months. In January, Uber agreed to pay $20 million to settle allegations by the Federal Trade Commission that it had tricked drivers with false promises of higher earnings,” reported the Guardian.
4. The Waymo War
Google parent company Alphabet is suing Uber — a “mini civil war” revolving around allegations that Anthony Levandowski, the head of Uber’s self-driving effort, formerly employed in Alphabet’s self-driving division, stole thousands of Alphabet’s confidential files prior to his departure.
5. Greyball’s Criminal Investigation
The company has used the software Greyball since 2014 to trick law enforcement agencies in specific cities awaiting approval for Uber. According to one Portland official, the federal action became a criminal investigation in May.
Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor. Follow her @alexpreditor.
This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.
The terrorist attack on a Finsbury Park mosque early Monday has led any number of right-wing media outlets to question how suspect Darren Osborne was radicalized. One senior military intelligence officer has a compelling theory.
“I’m not surprised that this happened, but I will tell you, one of the highlights that I’m glad that you all have placed some attention on, are the Muslim men who came out and captured this guy and held him for the police to come and take custody of him,” Steve Rogers told the cast of “Fox and Friends” Monday.
“That is a very significant act on the part of these individuals because it saves the police a lot of time, a lot of investigative work when looking for a motive,” Rogers added.
Osborne, a 47-year-old married father of four, reportedly shouted: “I want to kill all Muslims” before ramming his van into a crowd of Ramadan observers. He has since been charged with instigating terrorism and attempted murder. The imam at the mosque, Mohammed Mahmoud, reportedly protected Osborne until the police arrived.
Rogers believes the attack was an act of retaliation for the London Bridge murders.
“Do Muslims overall need to be more vocal in their opposition?” asked co-anchor Heather Childers. “Or does the media need to give it more coverage, if in fact, that is happening and we’re not covering it as much?”
“I personally would like to see more Muslim leaders come out and really speak out against these attacks. [But] the media, yeah, they have to do a little bit more coverage of these leaders who are speaking out against them,” answered Rogers. “So those of us in the viewing audience, we don’t know if they’re speaking out, unless the media begins to give them the airtime.”
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Alexandra Rosenmann is an AlterNet associate editor. Follow her @alexpreditor.
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