Justice

A memo uncovered by The Intercept shows that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) opposed supporting a push for President Joe Biden to cancel student loan debt after billionaire donors, with whom she has close ties, urged her to do so.

As amendments to the bipartisan infrastructure bill were being debated in the Senate, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said Thursday that only about half of the $550 billion in new spending proposed by the bill will be paid for and the rest will add to the deficit. The CBO announced that the bill would add about $256 billion to the deficit over the next ten years despite the fact that the bipartisan group working on the bill had promised the entire bill would be paid for.

A journalist was forcibly removed from a press conference being held by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) on Thursday when the reporter asked the lawmaker why he still opposed a commission to investigate the violence that took place at the U.S. Capitol building earlier this year.

The July employment report again showed very strong gains in both the establishment and household survey. In addition to showing 943,000 new jobs in July, the numbers for April and May were also revised up substantially so that the average over the last three months is now 832,000. At that pace, we would make up the jobs lost in the recession in seven months. Unemployment Record Far Ahead of Recovery From Great Recession

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is 56 years old today, but instead of simply celebrating the historic law that helped combat Jim Crow-era suppression of Black voters, civil rights leaders are busy organizing mass actions to bring a fresh slate of voting rights legislation to President Biden’s desk.

As the United Nations Security Council holds an emergency session to discuss the crisis in Afghanistan, we speak with Polk Award-winning journalist Matthieu Aikins, who is based in Kabul. The Taliban have been seizing territory for months as U.S. troops withdraw from the country, and the group is now on the verge of taking several provincial capitals. “In the 13 years I’ve been working here, I’ve never seen a situation as grim,” says Aikins.

Environment & Health New COVID Variants Threaten to Make Pandemic Permanent Economy & Labor COVID Relief Packages Dramatically Reduced Poverty. They Should Be Permanent. Economy & Labor Predatory Banks at Walmarts Made Over 100 Percent of Profits From Overdraft Fees Environment & Health Biden to Set Goal for Half of All Vehicle Sales to Be Electric by 2030 Environment & Health MO Coroner Says He Alters Death Certificates If Families Dislike COVID Inclusion Environment & Health Biden Made Big Compromises on Climate — and Movements That Backed Him Are Livid Most Americans don’t think Donald Trump running for president again in 2024 would be a good thing for the country, a new poll from Quinnipiac University reveals. The survey, which asked a number of questions about elections in 2022 and 2024, revealed challenges and opportunities that both political parties will face in those years relating to voters’ preferences on what type of candidates they want to elect. On the question of the former president’s potential run in 2024, 49 percent of respondents in the poll said they believe Trump will indeed make a run for the nation’s top office that year, while only 39 percent said he would not. On whether his candidacy would be good for the country, only 32 percent said another campaign by Trump to become president would be beneficial. Conversely, 60 percent of Americans say that Trump running for president again would be bad for the country, according to the poll. The former president has not officially indicated whether he will run in 2024 or not, but has made several comments in public hinting that he will. “I do know my answer but I can’t reveal it yet because that has to do with campaign financing and everything else. But I absolutely know my answer,” Trump said when asked if he was running during a Fox News interview last month. “We’re going to do very well and people are going to be very happy.” If Trump does decide to run, he would have high chances of being picked as the Republican Party nominee, as 73 percent of GOP-leaning respondents in the poll viewed his running again as being a good thing. Regarding the midterm elections that are set to commence next year, those taking part in the poll had mixed views about who they wanted to see win. Asked who should run the House of Representatives, 45 percent said they preferred to have Democrats retain control while 42 percent said they wanted Republicans to lead in the House. But the polling results also suggested that Democrats have a possible path to winning in 2022 if they pushed more progressive and ambitious legislation, while simultaneously linking their opponents to Trump. Backing for either political party was well below 50 percent in the Quinnipiac University poll, with only 38 percent of respondents saying they approved of Democrats in Congress, and just 26 percent saying the same about Republicans. But on policies that Democrats are pushing — including a $3.5 trillion spending bill that contains aspects of President Joe Biden’s American Families Plan and American Jobs Plan — there was overwhelming support from voters in the survey, with 62 percent saying they wanted that bill to be made into law and only 32 percent saying they opposed it. Progressive commentators, noting that the party of the president traditionally performs poorly in their first midterm elections race, have suggested that Democrats need to continue promoting big ideas in order to defy historical precedent and win again in 2022. “Democrats need to follow through on Biden’s working assumption: act big and boldly,” wrote The Nation magazine’s editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel in an op-ed for The Washington Post in May. “That means reforms that make a material difference in people’s lives, counter the efforts to suppress the votes, and limit the effect of big money on our elections.” Vanden Heuvel added that Democrats winning in 2022 “isn’t a question of changing rhetoric or dodging Republican insults, it is about getting big things done.” Being anti-Trump won’t hurt, either, as the poll indicated that if Trump endorsed a candidate for office, voters would be less likely to support them. A plurality of respondents in the poll, 41 percent, said that a Trump-backed candidate would make them less likely to want to vote for that person, with 37 percent saying his endorsement wouldn’t matter. For comparison, only 29 percent of respondents said that a candidate endorsed by Biden would make them less likely to vote for a person, with 53 percent saying it’d make no difference. With the midterms still more than a year away, much can change between now and then that could affect either party’s chances of winning. But this poll suggests that the conventional wisdom, that Democrats are inherently poised to lose seats in the House, may not hold true if Democrats take certain actions and follow certain paths. Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

Environment & Health New COVID Variants Threaten to Make Pandemic Permanent Economy & Labor COVID Relief Packages Dramatically Reduced Poverty. They Should Be Permanent. Economy & Labor Predatory Banks at Walmarts Made Over 100 Percent of Profits From Overdraft Fees Environment & Health Biden to Set Goal for Half of All Vehicle Sales to Be Electric by 2030 Environment & Health MO Coroner Says He Alters Death Certificates If Families Dislike COVID Inclusion Environment & Health Biden Made Big Compromises on Climate — and Movements That Backed Him Are Livid Three national banks that partner with Walmart are wholly dependent on overdraft fees extracted from low-income shoppers. First Convenience Bank, Academy Bank and Woodforest National Bank all made more than 100 percent of their profit in 2020 and 2019 from overdraft fees, according to a study published earlier this year by the Brookings Institution. As the report notes, the firms “had overdraft revenues greater than total net income (meaning they lost money on every other aspect of their business.)” The research was cited by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) during an August 3 oversight hearing before the Senate Banking Committee featuring top financial regulators. The acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), Michael Hsu, criticized “excessive fees on overdrafts,” and told Sen. Van Hollen that his agency is “looking very closely” at the issue. “These particular institutions have been identified, as well as other practices. We’re going to use the full range of our toolkit, our supervisory toolkit, to address it,” Hsu said. “Some of these have been identified for some time and we’ve been working on it,” he added. Van Hollen had asked about the safety and soundness of banks reliant on certain income streams for profitability. Hsu said it was a valid concern, but remarked that he couldn’t comment on specific cases or on “confidential supervisory information.” It’s long been known that Walmart’s in-store banks are usually the country’s biggest collectors of overdraft fees. But the new scrutiny comes with Walmart attempting to expand its reach into the financial services industry. Earlier this year, the firm announced that it was launching a start-up “fintech” (financial technology) arm aimed at offering its customers “affordable financial solutions.” Truthout asked Walmart to comment on Hsu’s remarks. This story will be updated if a company representative responds. The Brookings study didn’t focus on Walmart, which is still the largest company in the world in terms of revenue and people employed, despite Amazon’s rapid expansion over the past two decades. The research looked into which firms derive most of their profit from overdraft fees, and found that the top three are all Walmart partners. First Convenience, Academy and Woodforest are also the only firms in the United States whose overdraft fees exceed 100 percent of profit totals, with penalties extracted by the former two exceeding 200 percent of each firm’s profit. Both Woodforest and First Convenience market services they offer at Walmart cash registers on their websites. The author of the study, Brookings Senior Fellow Aaron Klein, said banks that earn most of their income from overdraft fees resemble “payday lenders” more than traditional banks. Loans are typically the most lucrative financial service offered by banks. “They are a combination of payday lenders and check cashers, whose business model depends on a single product with a sky-high annual interest rate that is only paid by people who run out of money,” Klein said of the firms. He offered one example: a $35 overdraft fee to facilitate a $25 purchase, which amounts to an annual interest rate (APR) of 25,000 percent. By comparison, credit unions offer small dollar, short-term loans with APR capped at 28 percent. Klein noted that prior research showed 9 percent of people accounting for 80 percent of all overdraft fees, highlighting how overdraft fees lead to a cycle of debt similar to that which ensnares borrowers of payday loans. Another recent study by the Financial Health Network showed that 43 percent of lower-income households reported having overdrafts in the past year, with 9.6 overdrafts on average. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau also released research in April showing that many lower-income people avoid opening bank accounts altogether for fear of incurring overdraft fees, resulting in them paying for “services that banked households routinely receive free of charge,” such as check cashing, money transferring and prepaid debit cards to make online purchases. In 2014, overdraft fees at in-store Walmart banks made national news when an analysis published by the Wall Street Journal showed how the firms had disproportionately high overdraft penalty income, and how they were effectively being used by Walmart customers as alternatives to payday lenders. The article noted how the vast majority of First Convenience, Academy and Woodforest branches were located inside of Walmart stores. In 2010, the biggest and most Walmart-dependent of the three, Woodforest, paid $33 million to settle OCC allegations over deceptive practices and excessive overdraft fees. The company altered its practices but the agency settled the charges without making the firm admit or deny the charges against it. Robert Marling, then-Woodforest CEO, told the Wall Street Journal in 2014 that he was aware of people using his bank as a substitute for a payday lender. Woodforest lets people overdraw up to $500 for a penalty fee. Walmart became the largest company in the world in 2002, at the height of the neoliberal-era push for deregulation, after a series of free trade agreements led to the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing and growth in the nation’s service economy. The firm also topped the Fortune 500 list through an aggressive cost-cutting strategy — by squeezing suppliers and through ruthless union-busting campaigns targeting its staff. Walmart has shut down entire stores and divisions rather than negotiate with workers who vote to unionize. Not one of the company’s 1.5 million employees in the U.S. belongs to a union. New hires have also been forced to watch a training video bashing collective bargaining. The result has been the preservation of poverty wages for Walmart employees. No other company has more of its staff on means-tested welfare programs like Medicaid and food stamps, according to a study published last November by the Government Accountability Office. Since 2017, Walmart has given its employees an alternative to overdraft fees and payday loans in the form of payday advances with interest rates between 6-36 percent. About 27 percent of the company’s workforce, or 380,000 employees, used the service in 2019. After capturing the largest share of the retail market, Walmart sought to establish its own bank by applying for a federal bank charter in October 2005. The company withdrew its application in March 2007 after pushback from lawmakers and regulators. But with the development of fintech companies, Walmart doesn’t need to apply for a bank charter to expand the array of financial services that it offers. Fintech firms can be regulated as vendors to banks. One such company, Chime, recently attracted scrutiny from ProPublica after it received a high volume of complaints for restricting its customers’ access to their money. Walmart said in February that it had no plans to apply for a charter to become an industrial loan company (ILC) after beefing up its fintech team by hiring two senior bankers from Goldman Sachs. (In December 2020, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation made it easier for non-financial firms to become ILCs, which are allowed to act like banks without oversight by the Federal Reserve.) Industry observers have also said that Walmart doesn’t appear interested in establishing its own bank, but rather on beefing up the services it offers by smartphone app. This could give the company and its partners additional opportunities to extract onerous banking fees from customers without being subject to the oversight that normal banks face. But it’s unclear how the regulatory landscape would look for the company’s fintech venture if officials crack down on high penalties from partner banks whose business models resemble that of payday lenders. “Excessive fees on overdrafts, predatory lending, high-cost debt traps: All these things should be prohibited,” Hsu told Van Hollen. “They don’t have a place in the federal banking system.” Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

Environment & Health New COVID Variants Threaten to Make Pandemic Permanent Economy & Labor COVID Relief Packages Dramatically Reduced Poverty. They Should Be Permanent. Economy & Labor Predatory Banks at Walmarts Made Over 100 Percent of Profits From Overdraft Fees Environment & Health Biden to Set Goal for Half of All Vehicle Sales to Be Electric by 2030 Environment & Health MO Coroner Says He Alters Death Certificates If Families Dislike COVID Inclusion Environment & Health Biden Made Big Compromises on Climate — and Movements That Backed Him Are Livid My work days move to the sound of McCoy Tyner’s mastery pouring out of the Pandora app on the television. Every so often, and always against my better judgment, I’ll flip to one of the alphabet soup “news” networks to get an update on how screwed we are. They seldom disappoint, which is to say they always do, and I flee back to the piano of the gods at speed. Lately, however, those forays to CNN or MSNBC have been fraught with a special sort of gall. In between the litany of doom that is the average break-to-break broadcast, they’ve been showing wall to wall commercials congratulating viewers on COVID being over. “It’s been a long year, but now that things are getting back to normal…” intones one, followed by another announcing “We made it!” The imagery is all sunrises and maskless couples noshing pasta in crowded restaurants, everyone wreathed in smiles and presumably vaccinated… …and then the broadcast begins again: “Good morning, I’m Fippy Fuzznerf sitting in for Ankles McGee, and here are our top stories. There were more than 96,000 new cases of COVID-19 recorded yesterday alone, a two-week increase of 131 percent. Around the world, known cases of COVID have surpassed 4 million infections. Scientists credit the dramatic infection spike in this country to the national dominance of the highly contagious Delta variant, and to the fact that millions of Americans still refuse to accept vaccination. Leading COVID expert Anthony Fauci anticipates we may see as many as 200,000 new infections per day until this new spike recedes, or until enough people have gotten vaccinated. We’ll be right back after these messages.” “…Now that the pandemic is over, isn’t it time to start planning your special vacation at last? At BookYourCrap.com, we have all the tools you need to organize the trip you’ve been dreaming about for a year…” Sigh. Thanks to the incredible bungling of this crisis for vital months by the Trump administration, that last horse appears to have left the barn. “Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term ‘herd immunity’ came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives,” reports The New York Times. “Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.” There were more than 96,000 new cases of COVID-19 recorded yesterday alone, a two-week increase of 131 percent. Of course, it is not all gloom and shadows at this juncture. The number of people dying from COVID has plummeted, thanks almost entirely to the vaccines. Vaccination rates are ever so incrementally on the rise. Those who are vaccinated currently face a very low chance of enduring a virus “breakthrough” which infects them, and those who do become infected have a much, much lower chance of hospitalization. The vaccines are not seamless, a small percentage of people who got the shot(s) are still getting damn sick, but the drear finality of mass death at the end of a ventilator tube has receded dramatically for the time being. If that were the whole story, I would just put on my mask and bend my shoulder to the task of convincing as many people as possible to get vaccinated. I will still do so every single day, but there are weevils in this loaf that threaten to ruin all the progress we have made so far. Delta, you see, is not the only variant. New ones — specifically named Epsilon and Lambda — have emerged, and early research indicates these new breeds of COVID might be far more effective at breaching our vaccine defenses than Delta. “The Epsilon and Lambda variants of COVID-19 are ‘variants of interest,’ according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and early studies show they have developed a resistance to vaccines,” reports NJ.com. “Japanese researchers found the Lambda variant, which was initially discovered in Peru and is now spreading throughout South America, is highly transmissible and more resistant to vaccines than the initial COVID-19 strain…. Meanwhile, the Epsilon variant that was initially discovered in California in 2020 is spreading in Pakistan and is proving to be resistant to vaccines, according to researchers.” The current national conversation on COVID is not broad enough. It is essential to get millions more vaccinated — it’s an absolute top priority — but we must also recognize that we’ve let this thing burn for so long that it appears to be on the edge of evolving beyond our defenses. A virus evolves within its host at an astonishing rate. Every new host gives COVID a chance to concoct a variant with the ability to turn our vaccines into white wine spritzer, and as noted, there were almost 100,000 new infections yesterday in this country alone. The variant that partly defies our vaccines may have already emerged in the form of Epsilon or Lambda, but the research on those two has only begun. The Law of Large Numbers strongly suggests the emergence of a more strongly vaccine-resistant variant is going to happen sooner or later, and thanks to our bungled response for the first year of the crisis — and to the ongoing intransigence of millions who disdain science because it makes Donald Trump look bad — the rise of such a circumstance is all but inevitable. The TV commercials are peddling an alluring fiction, but the facts are difficult to dispute: This thing is not over, and the way matters are going, it may never be over. The wolf is through the door, and the feeding is fine indeed. Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

Environment & Health New COVID Variants Threaten to Make Pandemic Permanent Economy & Labor COVID Relief Packages Dramatically Reduced Poverty. They Should Be Permanent. Economy & Labor Predatory Banks at Walmarts Made Over 100 Percent of Profits From Overdraft Fees Environment & Health Biden to Set Goal for Half of All Vehicle Sales to Be Electric by 2030 Environment & Health MO Coroner Says He Alters Death Certificates If Families Dislike COVID Inclusion Environment & Health Biden Made Big Compromises on Climate — and Movements That Backed Him Are Livid Congressmember Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, whose district includes Minneapolis, says she supports a ballot initiative to abolish the city’s police department and replace it with a new “Department of Public Safety.” Local activists have already gathered tens of thousands of signatures for the move. “We’ve had a very incompetent and brutal police department for a really long time,” says Omar, who adds that while much of the world associates the city’s cops with the murder of George Floyd, local residents have witnessed the department’s violence for much longer. TRANSCRIPT This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Omar, speaking of the horror of losing lives unnecessarily, I wanted to pivot to your home state and to your city, Minneapolis, where police killed George Floyd, murdered him, prompting mass protests. Now local activists have gathered more than 22,000 signatures to place a measure on the ballot this November to vote on whether to abolish the city’s police department and replace it with a new Department of Public Safety. But the city attached an explanatory note to the ballot initiative that organizers say is a misleading, partial description. They filed a lawsuit to stop the note from being placed on the ballot initiative, saying the city is trying to influence voters with subjective, selective language. You are one of the leaders of this community that has experienced so much trauma. Can you talk about your views on this and what you think would lead to a more just solution, not only in Minneapolis, but it is certainly a model for the whole country? REP. ILHAN OMAR: Yeah. Well, first of all, in regards to the ballot measure and to the tactics of those that want to keep the status quo in place, I say to them, you know, we’ve dealt with that before in Minnesota in regards to ballot measures, and I believe that this one will also be met with the same fate as the other ones, so I’m confident that we will prevail. We’ve had a very incompetent and brutal police department for a really long time. And, you know, to the rest of the country and the world, they saw what happened with George Floyd and might have thought this is a one-off situation. I remember witnessing my first police shooting as a teenager, where they put nearly 38 bullets into the body of a mentally ill man who was just released from an institution, who didn’t speak a word of English, who couldn’t respond to their commands, who was not of any imminent threat to have had his life taken in such a brutal and a shameful way. And so many of us have experienced those kind of killings in front of civilians far too often than we would like to have seen. So, the fact that the Minneapolis Police Department can no longer exist the way it is is one that is understood by the majority of us. And I believe in the fight that people have engaged in, in regards to trying to have a more just system for us, and we’ll continue to support their effort. AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Congressmember Ilhan Omar, Minnesota congressmember representing the 5th Congressional District, from Mogadishu to Minneapolis. The paperback edition of her memoir has just been released. It’s titled This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman. Thanks so much, Congressmember Omar. Well, up next, we go to Lebanon, where security forces fired water cannons and tear gas at protesters marking one year since the devastating explosion at the Port of Beirut, killing hundreds, injuring thousands. Stay with us. This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.