Debt Forgiveness For The Rich, Destitution For The Rest

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCSmMB-s1Cs&ab_channel=RedactedTonight

Labor’s Uphill Battle

Enthusiasm for strikes, walkouts, sick-outs, and pickets has surged. A new, progressive wing of the Democratic Party, represented by young women of color like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar—has won the enthusiasm of millions of young people.




November 3, 2020 Lauren Kaori Gurley NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS




https://portside.org/2020-11-03/labors-uphill-battle




On a blustery October afternoon, Joe Biden stopped in Erie, Pennsylvania, a lakeside city in a battleground county that swung to Trump in 2016, to speak to an attentive group of plumbers at a union hall. “If every investment banker in New York went on strike, nothing would change much in America,” Biden said, addressing members of United Association Local 27, who stood by their workbenches in blue shirts and face masks. “If every plumber decided to stop working, every electrician—the country comes to a halt. I mean, literally, not figuratively. Literally, it comes to a damn halt.”

A video of Biden’s comment went viral, circulated by members of the country’s resurgent labor movement, by and large a young, multiracial coalition of social media–savvy leftists—a demographic that perhaps only shares common class interests with white, middle-aged plumbers in Erie. Many of these young labor enthusiasts had been supporters of Bernie Sanders for whom Biden was not a second or even a third choice in the primaries, and who nevertheless responded to Biden’s comment with support—and calls for a general strike.

During the 2008 recession, popular support for labor unions, according to Gallup, hit an all-time low. (Historically, American opinion on unions has suffered during economic crises.) But in the last four years, enthusiasm for strikes, walkouts, sick-outs, and pickets has surged, often in unusual places. In 2018, West Virginia public school teachers, demanding higher wages and smaller classroom sizes, staged a wildcat strike that spread to a series of red states: Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, and North Carolina. Amazon warehouse workers, Google and Microsoft engineers, and journalists at digital media companies have ignited their own combative movements, gaining widespread support on social media. Earlier this year, when UC Santa Cruz graduate students staged a wildcat strike for a $1,412 increase to their monthly stipend, their strike fund received nearly $300,000 on GoFundMe and support from Bernie Sanders on Twitter. Protests, organized on Twitter and Facebook, spread to nearly every single University of California campus in the state.

The new gig economy, which emerged out of Silicon Valley in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, has been a major site of labor organizing in recent years. Start-up platforms like Uber, Lyft, Instacart, Postmates, DoorDash, and Caviar—all founded in the span of four years, between 2009 and 2013— enticed millions of underemployed Americans into rideshare and food delivery jobs. These gig workers are not paid per hour, but per ride, delivery order, or task—in a poverty wage “piecework” labor model resembling the garment industry at the turn of the twentieth century, when Jewish and Italian seamstresses living in overcrowded New York City tenements were paid per piece of needlework, with no standardized minimum wage. Since 2018, thousands of gig workers have mobilized from coast to coast, staging massive multicity strikes and rallies at airports, corporate office towers, and the homes of billionaire investors. “All of the money I make goes to bills and car maintenance and gas,” an Uber driver in Orange County, California, who participated in a strike last year the day before Uber’s stock market debut, told me bitterly. “I did a ride yesterday where the rider paid $8.60, and my pay was $2.56. When you’re the driver and you see that, it makes your blood boil.”

Meanwhile, a new, progressive wing of the Democratic Party, represented by young women of color like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar—whose campaigns have spotlighted the labor issues affecting their working-class constituents—has won the enthusiasm of millions of young people on Twitter, Instagram, and most recently, the livestreaming service for gamers, Twitch. Support for unions among the American public, according to Gallup, is rising again to nearly the highest it has been since the 1960s.

"We Won’t Let Him": Unions Nationwide Are Planning a General Strike If Trump Tries to Steal the Election

President Trump has signaled he’s ready to declare victory before all the votes are counted. These unions are saying “hell no”—by planning massive workplace actions.




November 3, 2020 Jeff Schuhrke LABOR - IN THESE TIMES




https://portside.org/2020-11-03/we-wont-let-him-unions-nationwide-are-planning-general-strike-if-trump-tries-steal




Amid wide­spread con­cerns that Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump will attempt to steal today’s elec­tion or refuse to leave office if he los­es, the lead­ers of mul­ti­ple Chica­go-area unions issued a joint state­ment on Mon­day com­mit­ting to take any non­vi­o­lent action nec­es­sary — up to and includ­ing a gen­er­al strike — to defend democracy.

“Every sin­gle vote has to be count­ed,” says Sta­cy Davis Gates, vice pres­i­dent of the Chica­go Teach­ers Union (CTU). ​“We are pre­pared to be in sol­i­dar­i­ty to ensure that our democ­ra­cy is pro­tect­ed in this moment.”

The CTU, Unit­ed Elec­tri­cal Work­ers (UE), SEIU Local 73, SEIU Health­care, Cook Coun­ty Col­lege Teach­ers Union, Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Gov­ern­ment Employ­ees Local 704 and Ware­house Work­ers Orga­niz­ing Com­mit­tee are call­ing on ​“all unions, com­mu­ni­ty, faith and civic orga­ni­za­tions, and pub­lic lead­ers to unite in vig­i­lance and readi­ness to defend our rights as the votes in the Novem­ber 3rd elec­tion are cast and counted.”

The Chica­go unions are part of Labor Action to Defend Democracy (LADD) — a recent­ly formed nation­al net­work of union mem­bers orga­niz­ing the labor movement’s response to the threat of a stolen election.

Alex Han, a Chica­go-based labor orga­niz­er help­ing coor­di­nate LADD, says the net­work seeks to tap into the unique pow­er of unions and work­ers to not only protest in the streets, but to cause seri­ous eco­nom­ic dis­rup­tion, if necessary.

“One les­son we learned from the sum­mer is you can sus­tain street heat to some degree, but it’s going to dis­solve. We saw this dur­ing Occu­py, we’ve seen this many times,” Han tells In These Times. ​“There’s a per­spec­tive that would say the miss­ing ingre­di­ent is a direct link­age with work­place action, which is the kind of action that could be more sus­tain­ing and sharp­er, and not let street action devolve into a run­ning bat­tle with police.”

LADD has put togeth­er var­i­ous resources—includ­ing sam­ple res­o­lu­tions and a mod­el let­ter to politi­cians — that unions can use to ampli­fy calls to pro­tect the elec­toral process. In the past three weeks, over twen­ty cen­tral labor coun­cils, state labor fed­er­a­tions, nation­al and local unions have issued res­o­lu­tions express­ing firm oppo­si­tion to any efforts to sub­vert, dis­tort or dis­re­gard the final results of the pres­i­den­tial election.

The Rochester Labor Coun­cil is specif­i­cal­ly call­ing on the nation­al AFL-CIO to pre­pare for a gen­er­al strike, while the Ver­mont AFL-CIO plans to hold a gen­er­al strike vote on Novem­ber 21 should Trump lose and refuse to con­cede. The Seat­tle Edu­ca­tion Asso­ci­a­tion will also con­vene an emer­gency meet­ing of its board of direc­tors with­in a week of the elec­tion to con­sid­er next steps for pos­si­ble action.

Mean­while, the Emer­gency Work­place Orga­niz­ing Com­mit­tee (EWOC)—a joint project of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ists of Amer­i­ca and UE formed ear­li­er this year in response to the pan­dem­ic — host­ed a livestream dis­cus­sion last week on how work­ers can take mass action to ensure a peace­ful tran­si­tion of pow­er. Fea­tur­ing Asso­ci­a­tion of Flight Atten­dants Pres­i­dent Sara Nel­son and EWOC orga­niz­ers Dawn Tefft and Zack Pat­tin, the livestream has near­ly 6,000 views.

“The labor move­ment knows how impor­tant it is to defend democ­ra­cy in this coun­try. We are demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions,” UE Pres­i­dent Carl Rosen explains. ​“We’re pre­pared to do what­ev­er it takes to make sure democ­ra­cy is sus­tained. We know what it’s tak­en in oth­er coun­tries that have faced tin­pot dic­ta­tors try­ing to stay in office after the peo­ple of their coun­try have vot­ed them out.”

As Rosen indi­cates, unions around the world are often the first line of defense against would-be dic­ta­tor­ships. For exam­ple, in the year since Bolivia’s demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed pres­i­dent Evo Morales was oust­ed in a U.S.-backed mil­i­tary coup, the Cen­tral Obr­era Boli­viana — the nation’s largest labor fed­er­a­tion—led the fight to restore democ­ra­cy, cul­mi­nat­ing in the recent elec­toral vic­to­ry of Morales’s par­ty, the Movimien­to al Socialismo.

“The labor move­ment has a proud his­to­ry of stand­ing up for democ­ra­cy and fair elec­tions around the world,” says SEIU Local 73 Pres­i­dent Dian Palmer. ​“Cit­i­zens across the coun­try are vot­ing like nev­er before. We are uti­liz­ing the rights afford­ed to us to vote ear­ly, in per­son, and by mail. And those votes should be counted.”

“We believe in the pow­er of the peo­ple — the mul­ti-racial, work­ing-class major­i­ty,” the Chica­go unions’ state­ment reads. ​“Don­ald Trump wants to steal this elec­tion. We won’t let him.”

The Real Reason Democrats Didn’t Stop the Barrett Confirmation

She’s exactly the kind of judge corporate donors support.




November 3, 2020 Leonard C. Goodman CHICAGO READER




https://portside.org/2020-11-03/real-reason-democrats-didnt-stop-barrett-confirmation




On March 16, 2016, President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland for the U.S. Supreme Court to succeed Antonin Scalia, who had died one month earlier. But Senate Republicans blocked his nomination on the grounds that it was too close to the presidential election, which was then seven months away. Four and a half years later, President Donald Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to succeed the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. Although Barrett’s nomination was made just over one month from the presidential election (which Trump appears to be losing), she was confirmed.

The Democrats claimed to be united in their opposition to Barrett’s confirmation. Yet their resistance to having a justice rammed through at the 11th hour of a lame duck presidency feels like the resistance that the Washington Generals used to show against the Harlem Globetrotters. That is, pure theater in which the outcome is never in doubt.

What this tells us is that the corporate donors who control the Democratic Party are happy with a Justice Barrett. In her short time on the bench, she has ruled consistently in favor of corporations. Just weeks before her nomination to the high court, Judge Barrett delivered a key ruling blocking many gig workers from suing in court when tech companies cheat them out of overtime pay. This and other business-friendly rulings is why corporations have given millions to groups such as the Judicial Crisis Network and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to campaign for Barrett’s appointment to the court. Barrett also belongs to the business-backed Federalist Society and will join five other Federalists on the Supreme Court.

The differences between Democrats and Republicans on issues like abortion and gay rights are important to be sure. But the areas of agreement between the two parties— both parties favor the interests of corporations over their workers and the environment— are also important. And these issues don’t get discussed because there is no disagreement. It is just accepted by both parties that a lawyer must be business-friendly to qualify for a federal judgeship.

In a true representative democracy, a lawyer should not have to demonstrate her fealty to corporate power to become a federal judge. The interests of corporate America are closely aligned with only a small fraction of Americans: the investor class. Most of our interests are more closely aligned with those of workers and consumers. There are scores of talented lawyers who go to top law schools but do not go to work at corporate firms. Many of these lawyers devote their careers to representing ordinary people, often taking on the most powerful interests in industry and in government. These pro-people lawyers should also have a place on the federal courts.

Thurgood Marshall was a civil rights activist who distinguished himself representing victims of racial injustice before being nominated by President John F. Kennedy for a federal judgeship, and later to the Supreme Court. Marshall would never get on the court today. Without a track record of pro-corporate advocacy, the donors would reject him.

Some lawyers distinguish themselves by taking on powerful corporations that harm ordinary people through negligence or deliberate malfeasance, such as the lawyers who took on a power company’s illegal dumping of toxic waste portrayed in the movie Erin Brockovich. These lawyers often exhibit great skill, resourcefulness, and integrity in fighting powerful and ruthless corporations.

Probably the most successful lawyer ever in taking on the criminal acts of massive corporations is Steven Donziger. Donziger graduated from Harvard Law School, worked as a public defender in Washington D.C., and in 1993 agreed to represent a group of 30,000 Indigenous people and villagers in Ecuador who had been deliberately poisoned by Chevron, one of the world’s largest corporations with over $260 billion in assets.

Beginning in 1964, Chevron (then Texaco) began extracting oil in Ecuador. To save about $3 per barrel of oil produced, the company decided to ignore waste regulations and dump some 16 billion gallons of toxic wastewater into rivers and pits, polluting groundwater and farm land, and destroying a large section of the Ecuadorian Amazon in what came to be called the “Amazon Chernobyl” by locals and experts. Local drinking water became noxious, and citizens became ill. This has all been confirmed by courts in Ecuador after an eight-year trial, the submission of 105 technical evidentiary reports, and testimony from numerous witnesses.

“I did not set out to be an environmental lawyer,” Donziger recently told Greenpeace. “I simply agreed to seek a remedy for 30,000 victims for the destruction of their lands and water; to seek care for the health impacts including birth defects, leukemia, and other cancers; and to help them restore their Amazon ecosystem and basic dignity.”

Donziger made more than 250 trips to Ecuador over the next two decades as he led the legal fight against Chevron. Then in 2011, Donziger and his team secured a $9.5 billion judgment on behalf of the victims. The trial court decision was affirmed on the merits or for enforcement by multiple appellate courts in Ecuador and Canada, including the supreme courts of both countries.

Chevron refused to pay. During the trial, it threatened the affected communities with a “lifetime of litigation.” Afterwards, Chevron engaged a team of 2,000 corporate lawyers from at least 60 firms to retaliate against Donziger and the lead plaintiffs in the case, filing a barrage of SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) and RICO suits, legal tools used—and abused—by large companies to punish people who take them to court.

Chevron’s vile and cynical legal strategy—designed to avoid paying compensation to the Indigenous people whose lives it deliberately destroyed to earn an extra $5 billion over 20 years—could not succeed without a federal judiciary populated by corporate-friendly judges willing to bend the law to protect corporate profits.

Chevron’s RICO suit against Donziger was filed in the Southern District of New York, a Wall Street-friendly court. The case was presided over by U.S. district Judge Lewis Kaplan who, before being appointed to the bench by former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, spent decades as a corporate lawyer representing tobacco companies and banks. The record of the RICO case shows that Chevron paid a disgraced former Ecuadoran judge named Alberto Guerra about $2 million to testify that the verdict in Ecuador was the product of a bribe. Chevron’s cash payments to Guerra should have disqualified him as a witness. Moreover, Guerra admitted to lying about the bribe in another international proceeding. Nevertheless, after denying Donziger his right to a jury trial, Judge Kaplan found that Guerra’s story was credible.

Judge Kaplan later charged Donziger with criminal contempt, but the New York prosecutor’s office refused to take the case. In a rare legal move, Kaplan then appointed a private corporate law firm (that also represents Chevron) to prosecute Donziger. Kaplan personally assigned Judge Loretta Preska, a member of the corporatist Federalist Society, to hear the case. Preska placed Donziger under house arrest and confiscated his passport.

I reached Donziger by phone at his apartment in Manhattan, where he lives with his wife and teenage son. He says that his contempt trial before Judge Preska is scheduled for November 4, the day after the election. He is again being denied a jury trial.

Some 29 Nobel laureates, including nine Peace Prize winners, have signed a letter declaring that Chevron’s legal assault on Donziger is “one of the most egregious cases of judicial harassment and defamation” ever seen. He has also been backed by 475 lawyers and bar associations who wrote an open letter outlining his wrongful detention and mistreatment by U.S. judicial authorities.

Donziger’s story is also a story about the sad condition of the U.S. court system which, like the other two branches of our government, primarily serves the interests of the wealthy. On this topic, I strongly recommend a new book by Ronald Goldfarb called The Price of Justice.

Although the Democrats will do nothing to stop Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court, their leader, Joe Biden, has pledged that if elected, he would establish a bipartisan commission to study whether to expand the courts to achieve greater balance.

We recall from history class that President Franklin D. Roosevelt also threatened, in 1937, to add enough liberal justices to the court to protect his programs from the “obstructionist” conservatives. The key difference then was that FDR had an agenda of bold programs to pull the country out of the Great Depression, such as putting Americans to work building post offices, bridges, schools, highways, and parks; supporting farmers and labor unions, and ending alcohol prohibition.

The Democrats of today, however, are offering nothing but a promise to wear a face mask and to not send mean tweets at 3 AM, while Joe Biden assured his wealthy donors at a New York fundraiser that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he is elected president. Even a Supreme Court packed with Republicans is likely to go along with that agenda.

Click here for the defense fund established on Donzinger's behalf.

As Trump Spouts Last-Minute Lies, Top Pennsylvania Officials Make Clear: 'Election Will Not End' Until All Ballots Are Counted

"Donald Trump can tweet, and he can pout, and he can make whatever statements he wants to make. But this election will not be over here in Pennsylvania until we can deduce the will of the people."




November 3, 2020 Jake Johnson COMMON DREAMS




https://portside.org/2020-11-03/trump-spouts-last-minute-lies-top-pennsylvania-officials-make-clear-election-will-not




Pushing back against President Donald Trump's baseless claim on the eve of Election Day that Pennsylvania's vote-tallying process is vulnerable to "unchecked cheating," top officials in the crucial battleground state made clear in media appearances late Monday that neither the president's incendiary rhetoric nor his campaign's legal interventions will deter the counting of all lawfully cast ballots.

"This election will not end until all of the legal, eligible votes are counted," Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said on MSNBC Monday night.

"That will take a few days, and Donald Trump can tweet, and he can pout, and he can make whatever statements he wants to make," Shapiro continued. "But this election will not be over here in Pennsylvania, a winner will not be declared, until we can deduce the will of the people. And that will happen after all of those ballots are counted."


Because of its status as a potentially decisive swing state, Pennsylvania has been at the center of tense election disputes in recent weeks as Republican operatives and the

Trump campaign have carried out what one voting rights attorney described as the "most blatant, open attempt at mass disenfranchisement" that he has "ever witnessed."

Late last month, as Common Dreams reported, a deadlocked U.S. Supreme Court rejected Pennsylvania Republicans' effort to roll back a three-day extension of the state's absentee ballot deadline. The extension, approved by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in September, allows the counting of ballots that arrive by 5:00 pm on November 6 as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.

While the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to let the state court's ruling stand was applauded as a victory for voting rights, analysts warned the legal battle may not be over; newly confirmed Justice Amy Coney Barrett was not yet on the bench for the decision, and the right-wing judge could tip the balance toward the GOP in a future case.

In the final stretch of the campaign, Trump has repeatedly zeroed in on the high court's ruling in Pennsylvania as part of his flailing effort to delegitimize ballots counted after Election Day—a normal and legal practice the president has attempted to cast as unprecedented and fraudulent.

"We're going to go in the night of, as soon as that election is over, we're going in with our lawyers," Trump told reporters Sunday, threatening to try to stop the counting of absentee ballots.

During a rally in Scranton on Monday, Trump—who has openly said that he's "counting on the federal court system" to declare an election winner before all legally submitted ballots are counted—vaguely warned that "when the Supreme Court gave [Pennsylvania] an extension, they made a very dangerous situation. And I mean dangerous, physically dangerous."

The president clarified in a tweet later Monday that he meant the high court's decision would "induce violence in the streets"—a warning observers characterized as open incitement at a time when fears of mass election-related chaos and violence by right-wing militias are running high.

Twitter appended a safety warning to Trump's tweet shortly after it was sent out to his 87 million followers.



Kathy Boockvar, secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, said in an interview on MSNBC Monday that the president's tweet was "completely inappropriate" and added that she is working to ensure that "every qualified voter has the right and opportunity to vote."


"We've been fighting disinformation for years, right, but this year it's just incredibly rampant," Boockvar said, referring to Trump's lies about mail-in voting fraud. "Pennsylvania has such strong processes in place, it would be incredibly hard to do any kind of fraud or cheating. And the president knows that."

INNOCENT MOTHER BEATEN BY PHILLY COPS FILING LAWSUIT

https://popularresistance.org/innocent-mother-beaten-by-philly-cops-filing-lawsuit/

By Andrew Emett, Nation of Change.

November 3, 2020
| RESIST!


Attorneys Representing The Victim Confirmed She Is Filing A Civil Rights Case Against The Police Department.

Recorded on cellphone video pulling a mother out of her vehicle and smashing the windows with her toddler inside the backseat, several Philadelphia police officers are under investigation for appearing to assault an innocent woman and her family attempting to drive home during a recent protest. Attorneys representing the victim have confirmed she is filing a civil rights case against the police department.

Shortly before 2 a.m. on Wednesday, Rickia Young was driving home with her 16-year-old nephew and two-year-old son when she became stuck in traffic at a police barricade during a protest against police brutality. In a cellphone video recorded by Aapril Rice, Young’s SUV can be seen attempting a three-point turn as multiple officers surrounded the pickup truck stopped in front of her.

Instead of allowing Young to leave the area, the officers suddenly began to smash her windows before pulling her out of the vehicle and beating her with a baton. Young and her nephew were thrown to the ground, as another officer removed her 2-year-old hearing impaired son from the backseat.

Young reportedly suffered a “bloody nose, a swollen trachea, blood in her urine, and swelling and pain on her left side,” while her child was treated at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for “a large welt on his head.” Although some protesters allegedly threw projectiles at the police officers during the protest, Young was clearly attempting to drive away from the officers in the video when they attacked her family.

On Thursday, the National Fraternal Order of Police posted a photo of Young’s son on Facebook and Twitter with the caption: “This child was lost during the violent riots in Philadelphia, wandering around barefoot in an area that was experiencing complete lawlessness. The only thing this Philadelphia police officer cared about in that moment was protecting this child.

“We are not your enemy. We are the Thin Blue Line. And WE ARE the only thing standing between Order and Anarchy.”

When confronted about the authenticity of the story told along with the photo, the police union immediately deleted the post from social media.

“It’s propaganda,” attorney Riley H. Ross III told The Washington Post. “Using this kid in a way to say, ‘This kid was in danger and the police were only there to save him,’ when the police actually caused the danger. That little boy is terrified because of what the police did.”

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw confirmed that the incident is under investigation by Philadelphia Police Internal Affairs Department. At least one of the officers involved has been placed on restricted duty pending the outcome of the investigation.

PAI’S DESTROYING INTERNET ADOPTION, NOT JUST NET NEUTRALITY

By Matt Wood, Free Press.

November 3, 2020




https://popularresistance.org/pais-destroying-internet-adoption-not-just-net-neutrality/




Washington, DC (October 29, 2020) – During Tuesday’s FCC open meeting, I was tweeting about the failures and falsehoods in the agency’s latest open-internet vote — a decision that involves so much more than just Net Neutrality rules, and that’s all about the Trump FCC’s unlawful abdication of its responsibility for broadband policy.

The agency just released the final order, so this explainer recaps that Twitter thread and the Free Press research it came from.

During tumultuous times it can be hard to focus on internet and media policy issues like these. But understanding them isn’t just our job at Free Press: It’s essential for grappling with how and why this dysfunctional, hate-filled administration came into and kept power.

It’s a disgrace that nearly 80 million people lack adequate home broadband in the middle of a pandemic and economic downturn. Trump’s unwillingness to take that crisis seriously is unsurprising, considering that low-income communities and people of color — constituencies he disdains — are hardest hit by it.

Yet during a new COVID surge and amid trauma from environmental disasters and police violence, the Trump FCC is continuing to give away its power to get and keep people connected.

It’s no accident that the wildly unpopular FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is doing his best to do his worst right now, sneaking in as many bad decisions as he can before the year ends — and before a potential administration change strips him of his chairmanship and majority at the FCC.

When not engaging in embarrassing hypocrisy about his newfound readiness to “regulate the internet” under Section 230 — all to defend Trump’s disinformation — Pai is busy repeating the mistakes and lies behind his Net Neutrality repeal and related abdication of FCC authority.

Free Press filed a letter with the FCC last week, following up on comments we filed in the spring (and dozens of earlier filings too) detailing Pai’s mistakes, misstatements and misleading claims.

Here’s the what, why and how of this latest bad decision, as the agency refuses either to revisit its repeal of the Obama-era FCC’s strong Net Neutrality rules, or fix Pai’s wrongful rejection of the legal authority Congress gave the agency to protect broadband users.
What’s Pai Doing?

Rejecting the opportunity to correct his mistakes in the FCC’s Net Neutrality repeal and broadband-reclassification decision

A federal court upheld the FCC’s egregiously misnamed Restoring Internet Freedom Order last year, but the judges said that the agency’s Republican majority had “drifted far beyond the statutory design” of the laws Congress wrote for it.

In fact, while the court said it had to follow Supreme Court guidance giving the FCC some deference to interpret these statutes, even the judges who voted to uphold the agency’s decision called it “unhinged from the realities of modern broadband service.”

That kind of faint praise was the high point for the FCC. The court upheld parts of the decision despite these flaws, but rejected outright the agency’s attempt to preempt all state and federal laws designed to fill the vacuum created by the Net Neutrality repeal.

The appellate court also found that Pai had utterly failed to explain or even explore other impacts of the repeal and the decision to classify broadband as an “information service” rather than a Title II telecommunications service more fully subject to FCC oversight.

The court zeroed in on the impacts of repeal and reclassification on three crucial areas: public safety, competitive broadband providers’ ability to deploy their networks, and the Lifeline program’s broadband support for low-income people.

Given a chance for a do-over on these topics, the Pai FCC decided to repeat its mistakes with a series of staggeringly wrong conclusions, as indefensible in terms of their public-policy impacts as they are in terms of their analytical framework.

The order the FCC voted to adopt defied the court’s instruction to take a more serious look at these three topics, and essentially said that the reasons found wanting in the original repeal were good enough all along.

Worse yet, the FCC’s fallback for its brilliant “told you so” defense is that any harms to public safety, competition and Lifeline are worth it on balance — just collateral damage to achieve the supposed tremendous investment and innovation benefits unleashed by Pai’s repeal.

This abdication of authority over the nation’s essential broadband telecommunications networks would be wrong under any circumstances. It’s especially abhorrent during a pandemic that has highlighted the searing importance of universal, affordable and open internet connectivity.

That backdrop is crucial to understanding the depth of the FCC’s failings here: The agency has put forth all sorts of magical claims about broadband investment and performance improvements that are either false or falsely credited to the repeal.
Why’s Pai Doing This Again?

Because he’s staked his entire tenure on the lie that Title II hurt investment and his repeal helped it

Aggregate broadband investment increased under Title II, and has been in decline since its repeal. Unlike Pai, Free Press doesn’t claim those regulatory changes caused the investment changes. But unless you cherry-pick data like ISPs often do, the facts are clear.

Of course, Free Press has repeatedly stated that aggregate-industry capital-investment figures are pretty meaningless, as is pretending they are due to a single regulatory classification. But this is the metric Pai chose, and if he wants to use it he has a lot of explaining to do.

Investment is down significantly at many large ISPs. The aggregate is down nearly 5 percentfrom the last year Title II was in effect. On an inflation-adjusted basis, investment in every year of Pai’s tenure is below what it was in 2015, when the Obama FCC adopted the open-internet rules.

Aggregate Capital Expenditures Made by Publicly Traded U.S. ISPs
(2012–2019, inflation-adjusted value, in billions)



And getting hung up on the aggregate data is doubly silly, considering that changes to the total are normal and easily explained. Individual ISPs invest more in years when they are upgrading, then less the year after those upgrades have been completed. ISPs explain this to their investors, on penalty of jail time for lying, telling shareholders exactly what they plan to invest and why.

As we painstakingly detailed in 2017, no cable or phone company said they had scaled back because of Title II. Just the opposite. They were either silent on it, or else told Wall Street the classification decision had no impact on their expenditures. These facts fly in the face of ISPs’ frequent lobbying laments, but track perfectly with the companies’ legally binding statements to investors.

More of the big, publicly traded ISPs increased their spending with Title II in place than the relatively few that scaled back. And those that did scale back did so not because of FCC rule changes, but because they were in a lull in their natural upgrade cycles.

This wouldn’t be a Free Press Net Neutrality investment debunker if I didn’t cite our favorite quote from AT&T, which told the FCC a decade ago: “Capital expenditures tend to be ‘lumpy’” and — get this, Chairman Pai — “Minor variations from year to year thus should not be surprising.”

So that’s the real reason ISPs’ spending shifts slightly over time. More of these companies were investing in new technologies in 2015 and 2016. Some of those same companies have ramped down for now. Investment levels stay pretty steady, and the investments accumulate over time, but they cycle up and down along a predictable trajectory.

That’s why Comcast investment was up 23 percent in the last two years of the Obama administration, under Title II, but down 14 percent in 2019 when compared to 2016. Charter’s 2019 investments were down 10 percent from 2016. CenturyLink’s were down 21%. We haven’t heard Pai bragging about any of that.
A Long But Necessary Digression On The Realities Of ISP Investment Before And During Pai’s Time As Chairman

Like Comcast and Charter, AT&T invested less in 2019 than it did in 2016 — when Title II was still in place, and the chances of a Trump win and Pai repeal seemed remote at best. AT&T’s 2019 capital expenditures were 17 percent below its 2016 level. (And AT&T spending through the first nine months of 2020 continues to free-fall too.) Why is AT&T spending so “lumpy”?

It was actually a dip in AT&T spending in 2015 in the first place that helped fuel Pai’s lies about Title II supposedly depressing investment. AT&T spent less in 2015 than it had in the two years prior, and the company is big enough that its drop had a pretty noticeable impact on the aggregate.

But this was hardly AT&T scaling back in terror over Title II. As we copiously documented at the time, AT&T bragged to investors about finishing a “monster” upgrade ahead of schedule in 2014, then bragged about saving a bunch of money from the upgraded technology.

The transcript from former AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is there for all to see, as he crowed to Wall Street about how AT&T’s spectrum holdings saved the company money, and how fiber, ethernet and then-new 4G wireless technologies were all 30 or 40 percent cheaper to operate.

Only inside the Beltway could we find politicians, like Ajit Pai, calling it a bad thing when a company like AT&T provides better service while saving itself money. But that’s what Pai’s ideology demanded, facts be damned.

Before he left the top spot at AT&T, Stephenson himself had started to change his tune — complaining in vague lobbying and press pitches about how deregulation and Trump’s tax cuts would spur investment.

Stephenson said, “Take regulation down, you get investment up” and “Lower taxes drive[ ] more investment [and] hiring” of “jobs wearing hard hats.” Yet we see just the opposite at AT&T, and that’s bad news not just for Pai’s tale but for taxpayers and workers too.

As Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica chronicles, AT&T promised to create 7,000 jobs in exchange for those Trump tax cuts. It slashed 23,000 jobs instead. AT&T kept cutting jobs and cutting spending in 2018 and 2019 too, with its regulatory breaks and tax breaks in hand. And it hasn’t looked back.

As Brodkin also reports, even before continuing to “rationalize” jobs (that’s corporate-speak for firing people) during the pandemic, AT&T was slashing billions in investment, and planning to continue these investment cuts in 2020.



So with a wallet fattened by Trump tax breaks and bolstered by Pai doing its bidding, AT&T is still cutting investment and jobs (as other major wireless companies downsize too) by closing stores and replacing people with drones and chatbots.

But as Iain Morris at Light Reading noted, some people at AT&T still do pretty well despite these cuts. New CEO John Stankey “collected $22.5 million in total compensation last year,” while the CFO’s haul grew to $16.7 million. Before stepping down, Stephenson enjoyed a 10-percent compensation increase himself, with a $32-million haul.

This is all part of an essential fact check on this FCC’s oft-repeated claim that Title II hurt investment, and somehow the repeal order healed that hurt. Because none of it is true.
Pai’s Other Boasts On Broadband Metrics And Markets Improving Are Unjustified Too

Before we get back to Tuesday’s order, remember that the other broadband-performance improvements Pai tries to take credit for are either not real, not his doing or not that impressive.

For example, there have been more fiber deployments in the past few years, but fiber deployment under Pai is exactly what we’d expect based solely on the deployment trends from the prior eight years accelerating at the predicted rate.

92 percent of these Pai-era fiber deployments came from projects announced during 2015–2016, and AT&T’s DIRECTV merger-buildout commitment (that Pai opposed) accounted for two-thirds of all new household-fiber deployments during his tenure. Then AT&T’s fiber deployments all but ceased upon completion of these Obama-era commitments. Similarly, increases in availability of very-high-speed cable-broadband services were planned, publicly announced or begun before Pai’s reign as chairman ever started.

Plus, despite Pai’s empty claims about increased competition and decreased prices, his chairmanship has seen the cable industry increase its share of the home-internet market to 68 percent, with home-internet and wireless prices rising again.

Pai even brags about growth in average broadband speeds — but if you use the same speed-test data he does, you see that the rate of speed increases has been slower in the Trump era than it was in the last three-plus years of the Obama FCC.

So that’s the list of supposed achievements that make the whole Net Neutrality repeal worth it, in Pai’s narrow mind. Those are the underwhelming “benefits” Tuesday’s order sets against the loss of FCC authority and certainty for public-safety applications, Lifeline and competitive broadband-only providers.
How Is Pai Harming Public Safety, Competition And Lifeline?

By trading them for illusory broadband-investment benefits

The FCC’s just-released order holds to the conclusion that tossing away Title II’s superior legal authority for the three issues on remand is all justified by the supposed investment gains — even as the FCC acknowledges that its investment claims are subject to “dispute.”

More accurate than “disputed” would be “debunked,” both when Pai made these claims in 2017 and for the years since. There have been almost three years of contrary evidence since the initial repeal decision, all showing broadband investment has not in fact gone up as a result of that repeal.

Yet the FCC’s Republican majority bizarrely insists that assessing the truth of its own investment assertions is “outside the scope” of the remand, all while using these same assertions to excuse its abdication on public safety, competition and Lifeline.

This FCC relies in almost every particular on a calculus that prioritizes these debunked investment claims over every other concern raised by public-interest commenters, public-safety officials and even the court itself.

Perhaps if the Commission had found some actual legal or evidentiary support for its conclusions, then the correction of its faulty investment claims would not be needed on remand — but it did not, and they are.

Among its many missteps, the agency admits it would trade away a program that provides critical life-and-death support for poor people trying to afford a broadband connection, all to further its baseless fabrications on how deregulation drives investment.

These kinds of grave errors are a mishandling of the court’s remand and an abandonment of the FCC’s public-interest obligations to promote competition, public safety and universal service.

Public safety

Given not just the chance but the responsibility for a redo, the FCC still rejects the public-safety arguments raised by emergency responders and public-safety officials — instead prioritizing the plainly less-expert analysis of internet service providers.

Pai pins all hopes for resolution of any public-safety harms on transparency and PR pressure to make internet providers behave better. This is as ridiculous as it sounds for these widely hated, highly profitable companies that are subject to so little competition and market discipline. People so often have nowhere to go when ISPs treat them badly, so transparency and public pressure alone just don’t cut it.

First responders themselves are better placed than we are to explain the harms stemming from the FCC’s cavalier approach. Yet from a legal standpoint, the Commission cannot satisfy the remand by merely doubling down on the arguments the court rejected.

Like a trio of broken records, Pai and his two GOP colleagues at the agency rely solely on evidence-free speculation and self-serving industry comments about the improved broadband deployment and performance that they falsely claim arose from the repeal.

Competition from broadband-only providers

Unlike the phone and cable incumbents, some ISPs might offer broadband over a network that doesn’t also offer legacy telephone or pay-TV service. But they’d need the right to build their networks in rights of way that are often controlled by the same incumbents.

The court directed the FCC to “grapple with the lapse in legal safeguards” from reclassification, and specifically the consequent elimination of rights (in Section 224 of the Communications Act) for broadband providers that don’t offer a legacy telephone or cable-TV service.

Yet the FCC refuses to grapple at all and simply taps out of the ring. The order gives up, and admits the court was right about this loss of safeguards for competitive providers’ deployment plans. So much for this agency’s supposed pro-deployment stance.

Perhaps the most glib and condescending conclusion here, in an order rife with them, is the FCC’s smug proclamation that the loss of protections is actually good for competitive providers facing bottlenecks and the incumbents’ stalling. That’s because, in the absence of applicable law, broadband-only providers “have the regulatory flexibility to enter into innovative and solution-oriented pole attachment agreements with pole owners.” Yes, it really says that.

It may be easy for the FCC to conclude that stripping away parties’ rights and legal recourse is good, but the competitive providers who’ve lost these rights tend to take a different view. Unfortunately, the Commission’s gambling with other people’s rights doesn’t stop with this surrender on competition.

Lifeline

The FCC’s order adopts the same backwards legal framework for Lifeline, by tying it to legacy services too. Providing voice service is the only way a provider can get Lifeline support for broadband. And that condition amounts to an outright attack on a modernized Lifeline program.

Even if the FCC’s legal reasoning for Title I classification were sound, and its arguments about the investment benefits from that classification were true, the choice to exclude broadband-only providers would be a significant drawback. Wrongly labeling broadband as something other than a “telecommunications service” that’s eligible for support means Lifeline subscribers can get standalone broadband only if the carrier providing it provides telephone service too. This type of convoluted nonsense is exactly as ridiculous as it sounds, and it’s completely unnecessary too.

This classification choice is designed solely to avoid supposed broadband-investment harms from Title II that simply do not exist.

In 2016, the FCC sought to increase competition by expanding the number of eligible Lifeline providers and services by directly supporting broadband and inviting broadband-only providers into the program. But Pai’s legal theory locks broadband-only providers out of the Lifeline program — severely limiting its potential for expansion, competition and modernization.

And the legal Jenga tower this Commission has constructed to continue offering Lifeline support for broadband service (for now) — while explicitly removing broadband as a supported service — simply is not workable. To direct broadband subsidies to users through the Lifeline program, which aims to make critical communications services more affordable for low-income households, the agency cannot rely on a legal fiction. The universal-service statute makes plain that Congress anticipated a need to support a world beyond voice service, where multiple facilities such as cable and wireless infrastructure would compete to carry an “evolving level” of communications services.

What Congress didn’t anticipate was an FCC like this one, intent on playing word games that would shackle a modernized broadband subsidy to support for voice services that the FCC has decided to transition away from supporting at all.

In sum, making broadband support the centerpiece of a modernized Lifeline program requires including broadband-internet access as a supported service under Section 254(c) of the Communications Act — and that requires correctly reclassifying broadband as a Title II telecom service.

The mess that results from taking a contrary tack is unconscionable. Tuesday’s order openly admits that if the agency’s legal contortions fail to convince the courts, this FCC would rather see broadband removed from the Lifeline program entirely than consider properly reclassifying.

These are not the words of an agency that believes it has found a workable legal framework to support critical modernization of a universal service program, but one trying to cover its tracks and retcon its justifications for scrapping the legal authority Congress gave it.

There is no reason for the FCC to back itself into this corner. It could have pursued (and did, for two years under Title II) light-touch regulation not by misclassification but under the law in Title II and the Section 10 forbearance it offers.

Instead, by cynically defining away its authority, in order to gift regulatory relief to internet service providers, the Commission has boxed itself into a position where it is prohibiting — not promoting — competition in the Lifeline program from innovative providers.

Worse, the FCC’s Republican commissioners are shrugging their collective shoulders at the possibility of cutting broadband support entirely while miring Lifeline in the past instead of modernizing it.
The Final Tally For A Failed FCC Chairman

This flagrant indifference fits with this Commission’s history of attacks on the Lifeline program. And during a global pandemic when families are more reliant than ever on broadband connectivity, this is even more despicably cruel.

Nearly 80 million people in the United States lack an adequate home-broadband connection. Economic and racial gaps in broadband adoption persist. Only 48 percent of low-income households have a fixed broadband connection. 13 million Black people, 18 million Latinx people and 13 million Indigenous people lack the adequate home connectivity they need to fully participate in today’s economy and education systems. Lack of good and affordable broadband options is the biggest problem they all face.

Yet this FCC openly admits that, if put to the test, it would rather completely eliminate Lifeline for broadband than simply reconsider its suspect decision to strip broadband of its classification as a telecommunications service.

Nothing coming out of Washington and this White House should shock anyone anymore, yet this is another example of a Trump appointee putting ideology ahead of sound process, policy impacts and the law he should be following.