The Total Report

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman. People around the world marked May Day...

Human Rights Over 10 Million People Could Become Homeless When Eviction Moratorium Ends Environment & Health Capitalism and Racism Are Enemies of an Effective Vaccine Plan War & Peace In Colombia, Hundreds of Ex-Rebels Have Been Murdered Despite Peace Agreement Economy & Labor On May Day, Gig Workers Are Organizing an Intersectional Movement Prisons & Policing My Child Is Incarcerated. One Second in This Unjust System Is Too Much. Prisons & Policing Drug Raids Killed Andrew Brown Jr., Breonna Taylor. Advocates Say: Enough. So far this year alone, Colombia has seen 33 massacres of social leaders, trade union organizers and ex-guerrilla fighters belonging to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). At least 119 people have been murdered by paramilitary groups, state security forces or unidentified assassins as of April 27, according to the Instituto de Estudio para el Desarrollo y la Paz, or Institute of Study for Development and Peace. According to Colombia’s Ombudsman’s Office, in the first three months of 2021, more than 27,000 Colombians were forcibly displaced due to violence by groups fighting for territorial control and control of the drug trade — an increase of 177 percent compared to last year. Colombia has a long history of political violence. For over five decades, beginning in the 1960s, it was gripped by a civil war between numerous left-wing rebel movements, right-wing paramilitaries and a corrupt U.S.-backed authoritarian state. This conflict resulted in more than 7 million people internally displaced and over 220,000 people killed. Of those murdered, 10,000 are considered “false positives” — often poor peasants who were murdered by the Colombian military and then dressed up as rebels so soldiers could boost their statistics in the war against leftist insurgents. In 2013, in one of the most comprehensive studies into the conflict, the National Center of Historical Memory noted that between 1980 to 2012, 1,982 massacres occurred in Colombia with 1,166 attributed to the paramilitaries, 343 to the rebels (i.e., multiple armed groups such as the FARC, ELN, M19 and EPL) and 295 to government security forces. In November 2016, after years of delicate negotiations in Norway and Cuba, the FARC and the Colombian State reached a historic peace agreement. Under the 2016 peace deal, the FARC guerrillas were allowed to create their own political party according to Nick MacWilliam, a trade unions and programs officer at Justice for Colombia in the United Kingdom. As a result, several of their leaders won seats in congress while more than 13,000 rebels surrendered their weapons, commencing a process to integrate themselves into civilian life. MacWilliam notes that, “based in specially created ‘reincorporation zones’ scattered around the country, former guerrilla combatants developed sustainable projects, enrolled on educational courses and undertook vocational training” taking up “diverse new roles in medicine, journalism, tourism, textiles, agriculture and even beer brewing.” Heading the United Nations Verification Mission in Colombia last year, Carlos Ruiz Massieu stated that, “despite continued attacks and stigmatization against them, the vast majority of those who laid down their weapons remain engaged in the reintegration process.” Still, the number of ongoing murders of ex-FARC combatants is staggering. Mariela Kohon, a senior international officer at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in the United Kingdom who worked as an advisor to the FARC during the peace agreement, notes that the number of assassinated ex-rebels since the accord was signed has reached 271. “This is a horrifying figure” says Kohon, as “these are 271 ex-combatants who signed up to the peace agreement and laid down their weapons in good faith.” In her view, “it is an absolute tragedy that so many who are working in their communities and contributing to building peace are being brutally assassinated.” According to Liliany Obando, who is a high-ranking member of the FARC’s new political party Partido Comunes (Party of Communes) in the capital of Bogotá, political violence in Colombia since the signing of the peace accord has in fact increased, and the number of ex-combatants assassinated includes seven women. The murders of these activists and ex-rebels are acts by “illegal organizations” and “criminal groups” who want to “let civilians know about the high cost of supporting the peace agreement,” according to Camilo Tamayo Gomez, a senior lecturer in criminology and security studies at Birmingham City University in the U.K. Based on his research, these criminal cliques are trying to “exercise control in territories prior occupied by FARC guerrillas” where, for example, poor farmers grow coca leaves that are used in the production of cocaine. Another factor for the high number of murders taking place, according to Tamayo Gomez, is the “criminal incompetence of the actual Colombian government to implement the peace agreement.” Kohon says the current administration “must implement the peace agreement in a comprehensive way, and particularly the section dealing with security guarantees” of the former rebels that are now part of civilian life. Obando says the incumbent government’s lack of willingness to support the peace accord has left many ex-rebels feeling “disappointed and betrayed and wanting to take up arms again.” In late 2019, that is precisely what Iván Márquez — the second-highest commander of the FARC — did, issuing a statement on video that he and other FARC members were returning to war given the unacceptably high number of ex-rebels that have been murdered. According to Márquez, the refusal of the current hard right-wing government of President Iván Duque Márquez to abide by the original peace accords was another reason for this action. In his declaration, Márquez was accompanied by 20 armed rebels, including ex-rebel leaders Hernán Darío Velásquez (also known as “El Paisa”), who was once commander of the FARC’s strongest military faction, the Teófilo Forero Column, and Seuxis Pausías Hernández (also known as Jesús Santrich). Political violence in Colombia since the signing of the peace accord has in fact increased. The FARC’s frustration with the state’s unwillingness to operate in good faith goes back decades. During the 1980s, the FARC attempted to engage in a peace agreement working with the progressive political party Unión Patriótica (Patriotic Union, or UP). While some critics point out that the FARC often tried to manipulate the UP to suit its own objectives, the end result, as documented in Steven Dudley’s book, Walking Ghost: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia, was that by the early 1990s, thousands of UP members had been killed, including two presidential candidates. These murders were carried out by hired assassins and right-wing paramilitaries who often had strong connections to drug cartels, the military and state authorities. With the UP decimated, the FARC returned to war, and by the end of the 1990s, had between 17,000-19,000 well-armed guerrillas controlling approximately 30 percent of Colombia. Subsequently, Washington sent Bogotá close to $10 billion in aid to fight the FARC under Plan Colombia (2000-2015). By 2008, for the first time ever, the Colombian military was able to kill several members of the FARC’s secretariat and inflict important military defeats on the rebels. Asked if he saw any parallels between the current era and the wave of killings inflicted on the UP and the FARC members in the 1980s, Tamayo Gomez said no. In his view, today the large number of killings taking place are not for “ideological reasons,” but rather monetary or territorial ones. Other experts take a different perspective. Adjunct professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh, Dan Kovalik, who has a long history of working on Colombia and defending the rights of trade unionists, states that “the Colombian state is carrying out such murders with greater frequency for one reason: it can.” He adds, “with the FARC demobilized, the state and its paramilitary allies have decided that there is no impediment to wiping out the left and progressive social movements in Colombia. This is the painful truth.” In his view, the wave of violence since 2016 peace agreement is “very reminiscent of the mass murder of UP leaders and members” during the peace talks in the 1980s. Victor Figueroa Clark, an observer of Colombian politics who taught Latin American history at the London School of Economics, takes a similar perspective, arguing that today there are “clear parallels to the political genocide of the Patriotic Union.” In his view, in contemporary Colombia, “The state, the oligarchy and its allies in the media consider that they won the war. Little in the negotiation process led them to think otherwise. They felt that the FARC were tired of fighting, that they were reeling from the loss of their leader Alfonso Cano (killed after being located through his communications with the government about starting talks), that they were basically losing the war. I think this attitude was shared by the government’s allies in the U.S. and across ‘the West.’” Figueroa Clark adds that, “as a result” of how the war was going for the Colombian state in the last years before the peace accords were signed, “the government saw peace as a charity offering, a sort of dignified way out for the guerrillas, and not a negotiation enforced by military stalemate.” Cristian Delgado, a leading human rights defender from the southwest of Colombia and the National Coordinator for Human Rights for the Marcha Patriotica, a conglomeration of student groups, unions, peace activists and grass roots organizations from rural zones experiencing conflict, notes that “since the signing of the [2016] peace agreement, there have been 1,163 homicides against social leaders and human rights defenders in Colombia, 128 of them committed against members of the Patriotic March.” Delgado claims that several of these murders were “committed by agents of the public force, which shows an exponential and sustained increase.” Created in 2010, the objective of the Marcha Patriotica is to bring national attention to the reality of urban, rural and agricultural Colombia, and express its views on a range of issues such as social and economic rights. According to one observer, in Marcha Patriotica’s view, the end of the armed conflict should be accompanied by real steps toward social justice, including “the need for agrarian reform, a radical change in economic policy, and respect for the right of all Colombians to health, education and work opportunities.” Currently Marcha Patriotica represents over 2,000 national and regional organizations. Asked for his opinion on the future of the peace process, Figueroa Clark is not optimistic. He says that for peace to succeed, what would be required would be a “fundamental change of attitude from the government, from the state and from the oligarchy that they rule for.” He adds that the United Nations should play a greater role — for example, through an oversight mission reporting to the Security Council. An increase in the protection of social activists and trade union leaders would also be necessary, while Colombia’s armed forces should be seriously reduced and retrained. However, these changes “would require at root a recognition of the state’s role as an instigator of violence.” Figueroa Clark claims the U.S. government’s attitude toward the Colombian government would also need to change, given that the U.S. is Colombia’s “main ally and guarantor.” From Kohon’s perspective, the “international community should be outraged that signatories to a peace agreement are facing this violence.” In the British parliament, this issue along with other human rights concerns have been raised by Labour MPs, but thus far the response from the international community has been paltry at best. Back in Bogotá, Defense Minister Diego Molano recently confirmed that the practice of massive aerial fumigation would resume in areas where poor farmers grow coca leaves. In 2015, after a World Health Organization literature review found that the herbicide glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans,” the Santos government suspended the program. While one observer pointed out that aerial fumigation was reminiscent of the days of Plan Colombia, the U.S. State Department for its part declared it a “most welcome development.” In March 2020, during his presidential campaign, Joe Biden stated that he was “the guy who put together Plan Colombia … straighten[ing] that government out for a long while.” In Colombia, as the daily killings of ex-rebels, social leaders and trade union organizers continue at alarming rates, the Duque administration was met with a massive national strike on April 28 organized by student groups and the Central Unitary of Workers, the country’s largest trade union federation. Demonstrating against the government’s recently proposed sharp increase in taxes that would hurt working-class and middle-class families, and the conditions of a collapsing public health care system due to the COVID-19 pandemic, protesters also expressed concerns about the danger in which the country’s peace process now finds itself. Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

Pandemics don’t spread evenly. The spread depends on environmental conditions such as temperature and airflow, population density and size, and, as it turns out, privilege. Brutal capitalism has driven the disproportionate impact of COVID on marginalized communities, and it is now driving inequities in vaccine distribution.

Human Rights Over 10 Million People Could Become Homeless When Eviction Moratorium Ends Environment & Health Capitalism and Racism Are Enemies of an Effective Vaccine Plan War & Peace In Colombia, Hundreds of Ex-Rebels Have Been Murdered Despite Peace Agreement Economy & Labor On May Day, Gig Workers Are Organizing an Intersectional Movement Prisons & Policing My Child Is Incarcerated. One Second in This Unjust System Is Too Much. Prisons & Policing Drug Raids Killed Andrew Brown Jr., Breonna Taylor. Advocates Say: Enough. After more than a year of economic, social and spiritual upheaval, Americans are beginning to see the light at the end of the COVID tunnel. While infection rates are not yet stable in the U.S., hospitalizations remain on the decline, and the vaccine is now available to everyone. A return to something close to normal life feels tantalizingly close. For the one in every seven tenants in the U.S. currently behind on rent, however, the end of COVID could mean eviction. Marginalized tenants are especially at risk — one in five Black tenants, Latino tenants and tenants with children currently owe back rent. “We have projections of 500,000 people living on the streets of L.A. if nothing is done to curb these evictions,” Trinidad Ruiz of the L.A. Tenants Union says — a catastrophic increase from the estimated 40,000 people currently without housing in the Los Angeles area. Without assistance, over 10 million people nationwide could find themselves without housing when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) eviction moratorium ends on June 30. In an attempt to avert this crisis, the federal government has allocated a total of over $45 billion in renter’s assistance for states, counties and municipalities to distribute. This amount, while a far cry from the estimated $70 billion needed to provide aid to every tenant in need of help, could go a long way toward restoring housing security to millions of Americans. Yet, despite the tremendous need for rental assistance, these funds languish in state treasuries while more and more tenants fall behind on their rent. Why? Infrastructure Troubles According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), much of the failure to distribute available funds results from city, state and municipal lack of experience with building and coordinating massive aid distribution programs. Inefficiencies and structural issues lead to massive delays in processing and disbursal. According to a February Avail poll, 54.7 percent of landlords and 72.7 percent of tenants who have applied for relief have yet to receive assistance. 72.7 percent of tenants who have applied for relief have yet to receive assistance. In an attempt to create more efficient distribution programs, 55 percent of state and local agencies used the services of an NGO. Unfortunately, these NGOs are sometimes just as inefficient as amateurish government programs. Washington, D.C.’s government, for example, partnered with Deloitte, a company that provides audit, consulting, tax and advisory services, to coordinate rent relief; yet Greg Afinogenov of the anti-eviction group Stomp Out Slumlords reports the same bottleneck issue. “People around the city that we’re in contact with have been trying to apply for this money, and many of them have incredible trouble getting it,” Afinogenov told Truthout. Other states, like Ohio, partnered with nonprofit organizations which, according to the NLIHC, typically outperform both in-house and NGO solutions. Nonetheless, nonprofits are also struggling to ramp up existing programs to meet demand for housing relief. “These groups normally deal with maybe 5 percent of the money they’re dealing with now,” Bill Faith of the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio (COHHIO) told Truthout. “So they went from going 15 mph to going 90 mph in no time.” Even when relief programs function more or less as intended, many tenants remain unaware of the existence of rent relief programs. According to the Avail poll, 48.1 percent of landlords and 68.8 percent of tenants are unaware of available rental assistance programs. Even those who know about the programs show hesitation to apply — 62.7 percent of landlords do not believe they are eligible for relief. Byzantine Bureaucracy Rent relief cannot help those already evicted from their apartments. Application processes also place significant burden on tenants, who must navigate a dizzying maze of bureaucratic requirements in order to obtain relief. “The application is not user-friendly,” Ruiz said. “It takes 2 to 3 hours per tenant, and this is [assuming] knowledge of how the web works, how to upload a photograph, and how to scan documents.” Lack of technological knowledge hits especially hard because of COVID restrictions. “You’ve got to scan [the documents] in to send them in because people are still trying to minimize face-to-face contact,” Faith said. Recently relaxed COVID restrictions mean Ohio nonprofits are now able to hold open hours. Activists can thereby accept and scan documents directly, which helps get applications out the door and into processing. Adversarial Landlords The required documents themselves can be hard to come by, however, especially for people in unusual circumstances. Rose Lenehan of the Autonomous Tenants Union Network (ATUN) describes a client from Oaxaca, Mexico, who speaks very little English and owes $10,000 of back rent. The tenant lost almost all work opportunities due to COVID, but because he works in the informal economy, he has no way to prove lost hours and apply for aid. While organizations like ATUN can sometimes help tenants like this put together an application, the situation is virtually impossible for someone without legal knowledge or whose English is limited. To make things worse, activists across the country report that a substantial number of landlords prefer to move immediately to eviction rather than pursue or accept rent relief funding. Although it may seem counterintuitive for landlords to oppose a process that could potentially result in a large payday, their reluctance often stems from the aforementioned long wait times for disbursement and confusion about the programs themselves. “When you can talk to some of the owners,” Faith says, “they may not even know about the emergency rental assistance program, or … they don’t know whether [the assistance] will come.” In some states, stonewalling by landlords renders tenants ineligible for rental assistance. Although the federal program specifies that tenants may receive rent relief even without landlord cooperation, states like Kentucky have adopted tighter requirements that prohibit the disbursal of funds if landlords refuse to participate. One-fifth of all rent relief applications in the Bluegrass State are rejected due to landlord noncooperation. Activists across the country report that a substantial number of landlords prefer to move immediately to eviction rather than pursue or accept rent relief funding. Activists across the country report that a substantial number of landlords prefer to move immediately to eviction rather than pursue or accept rent relief funding. Some landlords actively use their tenants’ housing insecurity to gain economic advantage. Afinogenov reports that many D.C. landlords refuse to fill out necessary rent relief paperwork unless the tenants first agree to move out. Lenehan describes “cash for keys” operations in which landlords offer to forgive back rent if tenants move out of rent-controlled housing. Once they leave, landlords turn around and rent the same apartment for a far higher price. Meanwhile, their old tenants find they can no longer afford to live in the city. Low-income, undocumented, and tenants whose second language is English are especially at risk of these kinds of predatory practices. Nevertheless, They Evicted Rent relief cannot help those already evicted from their apartments. “Possession is everything,” Ruiz explains as he describes Los Angeles landlords who illegally lock tenants out of their apartments, often with the backing of the police. Landlords need not resort to physically removing possessions to convince tenants to leave their homes. According to Eviction Lab, many states allow landlords to file for eviction, but not to actually go through with the process until the moratorium expires. Nevertheless, even the threat of eviction often frightens tenants enough that they decide to vacate rather than risk a black mark on their rental record.Despite the federal moratorium, illegal evictions never really stopped. “It’s not a [real] moratorium,” Elena Popp, lawyer and executive director of the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Eviction Defense Network, told Truthout. “If you had a moratorium, the sheriff would just stop evicting people.” Instead, landlords and local governments alike continue to take actions that put families onto the street despite federal and local safeguards. Chaotic, last-minute policy changes have also created legal loopholes that led to tenant evictions. In Los Angeles, tenants must re-file for eviction protection each time the CDC extends the deadline. On March 29, the CDC extended the moratorium expiration date from April 1 to June 30, which left tenants and activists three short days to file for extensions. While the Eviction Defense Network managed to protect all but one client from eviction, Lenehan knows of at least 20 tenants evicted as a result of this avoidable legal chaos. What Must Be Done As things stand currently, the U.S. has a little over two months to sort out this chaos if it wants to avoid a housing crisis of proportions not seen since the Great Depression. But the situation is far from hopeless. “[People are] one paycheck away from having a crisis. Until we address that, we’re just waiting for the next crisis to create another wave of evictions in this country.” According to Emily Benfer, chair of the American Bar Association’s COVID-19 Task Force Committee on Eviction, state and local governments should begin by halting all stages of the eviction process. This simple step would allow families to stay housed while awaiting rent relief. Improvements to distribution programs can also go a long way. While most state and local governments place the primary onus on tenants to start the rental relief application process, Baltimore’s program now contacts landlords directly and adds up the total rent debt for each complex. If the landlord agrees to discount 20 percent of back rent owed and cease eviction attempts, the program pays the landlords a lump sum to cover all rent debt. This “bundling” approach requires far fewer total applications, which cuts down on total paperwork. Focusing on landlords also places the bureaucratic burden on the party better able to navigate legal paperwork. While this solution may seem counterintuitive given widespread landlord resistance to rent relief programs, activists often find that approaching landlords directly can clear up misconceptions and encourage cooperation. Nonprofit groups in Ohio now take a similar approach, with good results. “Sometimes if you work with the landlords as one way to do outreach, they can help,” Faith said. Activists across the country are organizing to help tenants understand their rights and navigate the onerous legal process necessary to obtain relief. Thanks to the Eviction Defense Network, Los Angeles courts must include a flyer in the packet of eviction paperwork sent to tenants in danger of losing their homes. This flyer helps tenants understand their options and tells them what organizations they can contact for help. COHHIO sets up tables outside the convention center, where eviction proceedings currently take place, to help people process eviction paperwork on the spot. The L.A. Tenants Union is pushing hard to build more robust networks of tenants to better resist eviction attempts. Organizer Colin Stevens told Truthout that the group’s membership increased fivefold since the beginning of pandemic shelter-in-place orders. The group hopes to organize up to 62 percent of tenants by 2028, when the Olympics will come to town and massive homeless sweeps will likely occur as they did during the Olympics in 1984. “We are the majority,” Ruiz said. “It’s time to flex that political power.” Ultimately, however, the country’s housing problem extends far beyond the COVID crisis. Even before the pandemic, tenants struggled to keep up with rental costs, which increased at over three times the rate of inflation in 2019. Vacancy rates are at their lowest point in over 30 years, which means landlords can increase rent with impunity. While 2019 saw the construction of many new apartment buildings, only 12 percent of those new units rented for below $1,050, further squeezing supply for the poorest tenants. It is little wonder that over 70 percent of households earning less than $15,000 per year pay more than 30 percent of their income toward rent. These worrisome trends were already accelerating before COVID, and the increasing wealth inequality caused by the pandemic will likely only make things worse. “The one thing that this whole situation brings to light is how poorly we are, as a country, at meeting the basic housing needs of our citizens,” Faith laments. “There’s no buffer. Everyone’s on the edge. [People are] one paycheck away from having a crisis. Until we address that, we’re just waiting for the next crisis to create another wave of evictions in this country.” Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

One new study found that radiation exposure didn't genetically harm future generations, while another offers insights into how radiation causes thyroid cancer. On this day in 1986, workers ran a safety test...

Violando la legislación internacional, Estados Unidos busca extraditar y encarcelar a empresarios extranjeros por sortear sus sanciones unilaterales. Los objetivos de Washington incluyen al ciudadano venezolano Alex Saab, el norcoreano Mun...

Economy & Labor On May Day, Gig Workers Are Organizing an Intersectional Movement Prisons & Policing My Child Is Incarcerated. One Second in This Unjust System Is Too Much. Prisons & Policing Drug Raids Killed Andrew Brown Jr., Breonna Taylor. Advocates Say: Enough. Politics & Elections No, Joe Manchin, Eliminating the Filibuster Won’t Lead to “Serious Problems” Politics & Elections Biden’s Speech Pointed to a Possible End to Reagan’s Rancid Legacy Prisons & Policing New Report Looks at Strategies to Cut Incarceration of Illinois Women by Half In the United States, Labor Day is celebrated on the first Monday of September, while the rest of the world celebrates it on May 1st. May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day, actually has its origins in the U.S. It is a workers’ holiday celebrating international solidarity, a day of demonstrations and organizing, a day for workers to rise up — but for over a century, this holiday has not been observed in the U.S. However, this lack of formal recognition, intended deliberately by politicians to weaken the labor movement, hasn’t stopped American workers from celebrating on May 1st. Today, thousands of workers are rising up across the country to celebrate, demonstrate and demand change. One particular group of workers — gig workers, who have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 — have organized a day of demonstrations and caravans led by rideshare drivers currently or previously working for companies like Uber and Lyft. Oakland is just one of several cities across the country where gig workers are planning a caravan of drivers today. Today’s action is being co-organized by a coalition of over 25 groups, including Rideshare Drivers United, Gig Workers Rising, Workers World and the People’s Strike. “In the last year with this pandemic and all of the things that have come with it, there are people from many different groups that are very angry about the state of our society,” Erica Mighetto, a former Lyft driver and organizer at Rideshare Drivers United, told Truthout. “So, I’m really excited for the action in Oakland, it’s really an uprising that’s happening and it’s really going to be a wonderful show of that solidarity.” Throughout the day there will be pit stops at locations such as Whole Foods and City Hall where Amazon workers and gig-workers will address the crowd, trucks with flatbed trailers will carry floats, and organizers will hand out fliers and petitions. “People are losing their housing, people like ourselves are losing their vehicles, some of us are even living in our vehicles,” Mighetto said. “We have a lot of legislation that’s working against people like me and people struggling for survival — so that’s why this event is so important to us, because there are hundreds, if not thousands of people just in the Bay Area that are in similar situations.” In November of last year, Californians passed Proposition 22, a ballot initiative designed to strip so-called gig workers of many rights traditionally afforded to workers, such as a guaranteed a minimum wage, access to unemployment insurance or overtime pay, and paid sick leave or family leave. The impacts of Prop 22 were only exacerbated as the pandemic hit and countless drivers lost their income because of social distancing mandates. “As it relates to economic exploitation and unsafe working conditions, I know what it’s like to work long hours with no guaranteed wage and no work and no restroom facilities, no overtime,” Cherri Murphy, a former Lyft driver and organizer at Gig Workers Rising, told Truthout. “I know what it’s like to be in the middle of a pandemic and have your corporation refuse to pay unemployment wages and have to wait for three months to get protection.” Although the challenges faced by gig workers are a significant focus of the caravan, the coalition has made sure to broaden its focus to address a wide variety of interlinked struggles faced by marginalized communities across the country. “We’re calling out police violence as well,” Murphy said. “Police violence and economic violence are all connected — they’re all part of the same systems that impact mostly people of color. COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter really pulled the curtain back and showed America’s rooted disease for which there still is no vaccine for.” In addition to elevating the voices of low wage workers and speaking out against police violence, today’s action puts a spotlight on housing issues in the Bay Area — a region which is home to one of the most inaccessible housing markets in the country. “People can’t afford to pay their rent and they need to be provided sustainable housing,” Mighetto, who was herself evicted from her apartment in Sacramento in September of 2019, told Truthout. “We really want to show that these are important issues and it’s not out of laziness that this is our situation — it’s out of social injustice and legislative shortcomings.” Not only is the coalition in solidarity with low wage workers, folks struggling with housing, and communities facing violence from the police, but they’ve also chosen to include a focus on things such as climate change, education and immigration. “We understand that oppression is intersectional,” Murphy said. “The majority of the workers that Uber, Lyft, and Doordash employ happen to be immigrants and people of color. And so we know that economic justice is racial justice.” With surprisingly progressive policy proposals like the PRO Act winning the support of the Biden administration, we may be witnessing the beginning of a shift in how gig workers are treated in the United States. Demonstrations and caravans such as those taking place today are an essential component in bringing about the sweeping structural reforms needed to address the many challenges of our time. The powerbrokers who defanged Labor Day in the United States knew that very well, but fortunately, as we see the beginnings of a broad and intersectional labor movement emerge in the U.S., it seems that their time may be coming to an end. Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

Fainting, dizziness, vomiting, a racing heart— these are just some of the reported reactions people said they experienced after receiving Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccine. However, according to a new analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), these reactions weren’t related to an issue with the vaccine itself but instead were the results of pre-vaccine anxiety, including a fear of needles.

Economy & Labor On May Day, Gig Workers Are Organizing an Intersectional Movement Prisons & Policing My Child Is Incarcerated. One Second in This Unjust System Is Too Much. Prisons & Policing Drug Raids Killed Andrew Brown Jr., Breonna Taylor. Advocates Say: Enough. Politics & Elections No, Joe Manchin, Eliminating the Filibuster Won’t Lead to “Serious Problems” Politics & Elections Biden’s Speech Pointed to a Possible End to Reagan’s Rancid Legacy Prisons & Policing New Report Looks at Strategies to Cut Incarceration of Illinois Women by Half U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia bolstered his impedimentary pedigree on Friday by becoming the first Democratic senator to publicly oppose legislation that would make Washington, D.C. the nation’s 51st state. D.C. statehood would not only end “taxation without representation” for the capital’s approximately 700,000 residents, it would also boost Manchin’s own party’s political fortunes as the city’s residents overwhelmingly vote Democratic. Following last week’s passage of the Washington, D.C. Admissions Act (H.R. 51) by the House of Representatives, voting rights advocates demanded the Senate follow suit. However, despite having 51 votes in the upper chamber, the faltering foursome of Democratic caucus members — Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Independent Angus King of Maine, and Manchin — who oppose or have yet to signal their support for statehood-by-legislation pose a potentially mortal threat to D.C.’s hopes. From opposing the $15 federal minimum wage, higher corporate taxes, and the pro-democracy reforms of the For the People Act, to preserving the filibuster and the fossil fuel industry, Manchin has earned a reputation among progressives as an obstructionist to rival the most intransigent Republican. Y’know there are constitutional scholars who argue West Virginia was improperly admitted, if Manchin wants to go to war over thishttps://t.co/BKQmteVvdt — dylan matthews (@dylanmatt) April 30, 2021 During a Friday morning press call, Manchin told reporters in his home state that he believes making the nation’s capital a state would require a constitutional amendment. Discussing H.R. 51, Manchin invoked former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in saying that the measure “complicates D.C.’s pathway to statehood.” The senator said: Congress had three options to choose from back in 1961. They could either have D.C. statehood, they could have retrocession to Maryland… or they could have granted electoral votes to D.C…. Congress selected, at that time, option three… Kennedy said in 1963 that Congress and the states embodied this choice in the form of a constitutional amendment. Hence, it is arguable that the choice can now be reconsidered only by means of another constitutional amendment. He said that we are a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and it seems to me that’s who should be answering this question. Let the American people decide. The people, according to a March poll by Data for Progress and Democracy for All 2021, support D.C. statehood. Over half (54%) of all survey respondents said they favored statehood, including 74% of Democrats, 51% of Independents, and 34% of Republicans. That is the highest level of support for the policy recorded to date. Over the course of US history, we've added 37 states. Not a single one required a constitutional amendment. And yet: DC requires a constitutional amendment to become a state? https://t.co/9rzUrtX2um — Lee Drutman (@leedrutman) April 30, 2021 “The people who elected President [Joe] Biden and Democrats in Congress recognize that making D.C. a state is critical to the fight for racial justice and civil rights in this country,” Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, said in a statement after the poll’s publication. Last week, the White House formally endorsed D.C. statehood, with its Office of Management and Budget declaring the move “will make our union stronger and more just.” In a Friday Chicago Sun-Times opinion piece, civil rights icon, two-time Democratic presidential candidate, and longtime D.C. statehood supporter Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. argued that racism and Republican fear of losing power are behind opposition to making the district a state, and that doing so is a matter of fundamental fairness. “The case for D.C. statehood is clear,” he wrote. “The nation was founded in protest against taxation without representation. D.C. residents are denied voting representation in the House and Senate.” “The nation is shamed by military service without representation,” Jackson added. “D.C. residents have fought in wars going back to the Revolutionary War and yet have no representatives to vote in favor or against those wars. America, which claims to lead democracies across the world, denies the foundation of democracy to more than 700,000 citizens in the nation’s capital.” 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.