All posts tagged: Democratic Party

What Labor Could Lose | Dan Kaufman

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] When Joe Biden described himself this month as “the most pro-labor President in American history,” he was being overly self-congratulatory. Union density actually fell during his presidency, he signed a bill blocking a railroad workers strike, and he quickly abandoned an effort to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. (It has remained $7.25 since 2009.) Still, he was far more supportive of unions than his recent predecessors. He became the first president to walk a picket line and backed union organizing campaigns at Tesla, Toyota, and Amazon.  Yet his strongest claim to pro-labor bona fides was one he never touted in public. A month into his term he nominated Jennifer Abruzzo, a career labor lawyer, as the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel—the role that directs enforcement priorities for some 1,200 employees across the agency’s forty-eight field offices and its D.C. headquarters. The NLRB has a bifurcated structure: the general counsel’s office is the agency’s prosecutorial arm, with a field staff that administers union elections and investigates, prosecutes, and settles charges …

One Door at a Time | William Neuman

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] In mid-October I arrived in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, to canvass voters for the Kamala Harris campaign. The fall colors were in riot: it was a magnificent display of the kind I hadn’t seen in years. Against the cloudless sky the reds and yellows were heightened by golden sunlight. Then one night a strong wind blew all the color away, leaving only the brown oak leaves that hang on stubbornly through the winter. A few weeks later, Donald Trump painted the county—and the state—red again.  According to the Harris campaign’s database, between October 15 and election day I knocked on the doors of more than eight hundred voters and spoke to more than two hundred of them. Eventually I was assigned to train other canvassers. The eastern edge of Monroe County, on the Delaware River, is just an hour’s drive from the Holland Tunnel. Waves of volunteers poured in from New York (where I live), New Jersey, and other nearby states. Some came from as far as California, Oregon, and Hawaii. Such was the urgency …

Pennsylvania’s Grassroots Revival | Lara Putnam

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[ad_1] Tracy Wilson grew up in Luzerne Township, Pennsylvania, a cluster of unincorporated towns around which the Monongahela River loops as it winds its way from Fayette County northward toward Pittsburgh. Some five thousand people live here today, half as many as eighty years ago, when Fayette was at the peak of its economic growth. The Connellsville seam there bears some of the world’s best bituminous coal for conversion into coke, which was essential to early iron and steelmaking. By the 1880s Fayette produced nearly half of all coke nationwide, sending it downstream on wooden barges to the iron and steel mills burgeoning near Pittsburgh. In the 1920s, at the height of the coal boom, Fayette’s county seat, Uniontown, had the most millionaires per capita in the United States. By then the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) were decades into the struggle to unionize Pennsylvania’s anthracite and bituminous coal fields. In 1922 in nearby Windber, a UMWA flyer urged nonunion miners to “[THROW] OFF THEIR FEAR.” “STRIKE!!!” it said: “650,000 Miners Are With You.” …

Fear and Joy in Chicago | Fintan O’Toole

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] As we stood on the slow line to enter the secure zone around the United Center in Chicago, an angry preacher thrust his sign toward us: “How can ye escape the damnation of Hell?” He probably did not realize how apt this question was. Just a month earlier, before Joe Biden announced that he would not, after all, seek a second term, America was hurtling unstoppably toward the Hell of another Trump presidency, and the Democrats deserved to be damned for their seeming inability to do anything about it. Now, with extraordinary rapidity, impending doom had given way to the ecstasy of release. The whole convention was an answer to the preacher’s question: “here’s how.” All week I kept having the thought that the whole event felt like one of those movies where the wrongly incarcerated prisoner, so long trapped in miserable gloom, emerges blinking into the light, dazzled and amazed. And then, on the last night, the image became real as Al Sharpton brought onstage four members of the Central Park Five, who …

Joe Lieberman’s religiously promiscuous campaign

Published by Sam

[ad_1] (RNS) — It may not be true, as an old wag said, that all careers end badly, but Joe Lieberman’s didn’t end very well. Before his death on Wednesday (March 27), he was serving as founding chairman of the No Labels political organization, which is fixing to run someone for president this year without having so far identified a candidate, a policy agenda, a public list of funders or a persuasive rationale. Click the Lieberman video on the No Labels website and there’s a hand placing a needle on a scratchy LP of a crooner singing a 1950s-type song praising Joe over a campaign montage of the first Jewish American to run on a major-party presidential ticket. No Labels = Nostalgia. No doubt, Lieberman considered Al Gore’s nod to run for the vice presidency in 2000 to be his most thrilling moment in politics, and it is what will earn him a footnote in the history books. A trip down memory lane shows the choice was greeted with a warm round of patriotic applause …

There’s No Such Thing as Good Housing News

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[ad_1] This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here. If you want to understand America’s strange relationship with housing in the 21st century, look at Austin, where no matter what happens to prices, someone’s always claiming that the sky is falling. In the 2010s, the capital of Texas grew faster than any other major U.S. metro, pulling in movers from around the country. Initially, downtown and suburban areas struggled to build enough apartments and single-family homes to meet the influx of demand, and housing costs bloomed across the region. Since the beginning of the pandemic, even as rent inflation has gone berserk nationwide, no city has experienced anything like Austin’s growth in housing costs. In 2021, rents rose at the most furious annual rate in the city’s history. In 2022, rent growth exceeded every other large city in the country, as Austin’s median rent nearly doubled. This might sound like the beginning of a familiar and depressing story—one that Americans have …

Attention, Biden and the Democrats! “There’s No Cavalry Coming”

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[ad_1] Moreover, there’s evidence to suggest that the legal and political efforts to stop Trump have only made him stronger with his base and helped cast him as a martyr; they may possibly lead to more civil unrest and violence. For a year now, political strategists (including yours truly) and members of the pundit class (including yours truly) have proposed Hail Mary options to upend the 2024 election. In previous columns in this space, for example, I floated a couple plan B options. First, I posited that an eleventh hour independent candidate might emerge. Second, I suggested that the much-talked-about political organization No Labels might come up with a viable ticket—or, in a maneuver meant to directly thwart Trump, might parse the electoral map and run separate favorite son or daughter candidates in a handful of swing states. Neither option, at this point, seems likely—though I’d love to be surprised. And while my typical rule of thumb for 21st-century politics is to always expect the unexpected, the message of this column is the opposite: Don’t …

Sonia Sotomayor Should Retire Now

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[ad_1] On Election Day in 2006, Justice Antonin Scalia was 70 years old and had been serving on the Supreme Court for 20 years. That year would have been an opportune time for him to retire—Republicans held the White House and the Senate, and they could have confirmed a young conservative justice who likely would have held the seat for decades to come. Instead, he tried to stay on the Court until the next time a Republican president would have a clear shot to nominate and confirm a conservative successor. He didn’t make it—he died unexpectedly in February 2016, at the age of 79, while Barack Obama was president. Conservatives nevertheless engineered some good fortune: There was divided control of government, and then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to even hold confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to the seat. Donald Trump won that fall’s election and named Neil Gorsuch to the seat that McConnell had held open. But imagine for a moment that Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election, as many expected. …

Biden Talks About Roads, Bridges, While Protesters Shout About Death in Gaza

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[ad_1] Milwaukee, Wisconsin —  U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday visited Wisconsin, a key swing state that he narrowly won in 2020, meeting with community members at a once shuttered but now thriving children’s community center to sell them on how he believes his economic policies are making their lives better. Biden’s approval ratings in the Badger State have recently slumped, and on Wednesday afternoon, as Biden chatted privately with campaign volunteers at his new campaign headquarters in Milwaukee, less than a block away, several dozen protesters took aim at one reason why. “Free, free, free Palestine!” the group members yelled as they waved Palestinian flags. “Hey, Joe, what do you say, how many kids did you kill today,” they also shouted. Demonstrators in support of Palestinians gather near where U.S. President Joe Biden speaks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, March 13, 2024. Inside the White House’s carefully managed events on Wednesday, the scene was different. Biden announced $3.3 billion in initiatives aimed at fixing transportation and infrastructure. He did not, during his public remarks, mention Gaza …

Trump, Biden clinch their party nominations for US presidential race

Trump, Biden clinch their party nominations for US presidential race

Published by Sam

[ad_1] Joe Biden and rival Donald Trump won enough delegates Tuesday to clinch their party nominations in the 2024 presidential race, networks projected, all but assuring a rematch and setting up one of the longest general election campaigns in US history. Issued on: 13/03/2024 – 04:49 3 min The results in four statewide elections Tuesday, the latest in the months-long march to determine the Democratic and Republican party flagbearers, were essentially a foregone conclusion as incumbent Biden and former president Trump had already seen off all primary challengers. Biden crossed the threshold of 1,968 delegates needed when he won Georgia — a US swing state where Trump faces trial over an alleged conspiracy to steal the last election. Trump’s victory in Washington helped him secure the 1,215 delegates needed to earn the Republican nomination — and to propel him and his Make America Great Again movement back into the cauldron of a presidential race. As the pair now head for a rematch of their 2020 showdown, Biden laid into his challenger in a statement. “I …