House Dems Demand Harris Advance $15 Minimum Wage

In a new letter, nearly two dozen House Dems are pressing Vice President Kamala Harris to ignore the Senate parliamentarian and fulfill her minimum wage promise.

Julia Rock and Andrew Perez
Mar 1




Progressive House lawmakers are demanding Vice President Kamala Harris use her power as presiding officer of the Senate to immediately advance the $15 minimum wage that she has long said she supports.

“Eighty-one million people cast their ballots to elect you on a platform that called for a $15 minimum wage. We urge you to keep that promise,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Harris and President Joe Biden, pressing the White House to raise the wage for workers as part of Biden’s American Rescue Plan. “We must act now to prevent tens of millions of hardworking Americans from being underpaid any longer.”

The letter released Monday was signed by 23 Democrats, including Reps. Ro Khanna, Pramila Jayapal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Jamal Bowman, and Cori Bush.

Raising the federal minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour would increase the wages of 32 million workers, a majority of whom currently live below the poverty line.

“We believe that the bill the President signs must include the House-passed minimum wage legislation,” Khanna told The Daily Poster. “This is the moment to get this done and it is within our control.”

The Senate Presiding Officer Is The Decider, Not The Parliamentarian

Last Thursday, Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, the body’s nonpartisan adviser on all procedural matters, issued an opinion advising Democrats that she believes the minimum wage increase is subject to a point of order, allowing it to be stripped out of a COVID bill under the budget reconciliation process. Democrats are using that process so they can pass the legislation by a simple majority vote.

The parliamentarian’s advice is non-binding. The presiding officer of the Senate is the ultimate decision maker and can ignore the parliamentarian, as The Daily Poster previously reported and as indicated by a recent Congressional Research Service (CRS) report. If the minimum wage is included in Democrats’ COVID relief bill and Republicans raise a point of order to try to strip it out, the presiding officer can reject the point of order.

As vice president, Harris is the chamber’s presiding officer, though if she decides to avoid being present in the chamber, another Democratic senator can issue rulings on parliamentary questions. The CRS report notes that 60 votes are needed to overrule a presiding officer’s ruling, though Republican senators could try to change that longstanding rule with a simple majority vote.

Democrats also have another option to advance the minimum wage: They could follow Republican precedent and replace the parliamentarian with a different adviser with a different interpretation of the so-called Byrd Rule, a three-decade-old rule requiring measures in budget legislation be related to federal spending. A Congressional Budget Office report said the minimum wage is related to spending, but the parliamentarian ignored that report.

While Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin backed a minimum wage increase in 2014, they have said they oppose including a $15 minimum wage in the COVID bill. It’s unclear whether they would vote to sink the entire relief package if Democrats include the measure and overrule the parliamentarian.

White House Is So Far Trying To Preemptively Surrender

President Biden campaigned on a promise to enact a $15 minimum wage and presented himself as the guy who knows “how to make government work,” but his White House has suggested it wants Democratic senators to accept the parliamentarian’s opinion and allow the minimum wage measure to be pulled out of the COVID relief bill.

“The vice president's not going to weigh in,” Biden National Economic Council Director Brian Deese said Friday on CNBC. “The president and the vice president both respect the parliamentarian's decision and the process.”

House Democrats included the minimum wage measure in the COVID relief legislation they passed on Saturday.

The new letter from the House Democrats heightens the pressure on Harris, who has backed a $15 minimum wage for years.

Exactly one year ago today, Harris reiterated her support for the wage increase.
Kamala Harris @KamalaHarrisIn 2009, the federal minimum wage was set at $7.25/hour. More than 10 years later and it’s still $7.25. We need a $15 minimum wage to be the national floor. Now.


March 1st 20206,232 Retweets36,965 Likes

She is now letting White House aides speak for her on the issue, however. Harris, should she want to run for president, could be seen as the candidate who killed a major party priority while in the White House. Alternately, she could play a high-profile role in advancing the minimum wage increase.

The letter notes that Vice President Hubert Humphrey twice overruled the Senate parliamentarian, as did Vice President Walter Mondale. In 2001, Republicans fired the parliamentarian after he made two rulings that impeded their policy goals.

Days before the presidential election, Harris appeared in a virtual town hall with Sen. Bernie Sanders and committed to raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Biden and Harris both backed a $15 minimum wage during the Democratic primaries.

“The outdated and complex Byrd rule, rooted in restricting progress, must not be an impediment to improving people’s lives.” the House Democrats said in their letter. “You have the authority to deliver a raise for millions of Americans.”

Your Privileges Are Not Universal

Formal democracies retain their constitutions and their laws, their elections and their public hearings – all part of the panoply of modern democracies. They fail, however, to actually listen to the suffering of the people, writes Vijay Prashad.

By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/03/01/your-privileges-are-not-universal/




Stencilled in red on the walls of Santiago, Chile, is a statement of fact: “your privileges are not universal” (tus privilegios no son universales).

This is a factual declaration because the privileges of power and property are not shared across the gaping class divide. Consider the fact that before the pandemic struck last year, over 3 billion people —or half the world’s population — had no access to health care. This data appears in a 2017 World Health Organization (WHO) report that tracks important matters such as access to basic household sanitation (lacked by 2.3 billion people) and medical care for uncontrolled hypertension (suffered by 1 billion people).

An Oxfam report from Jan. 25 called “The Inequality Virus” points out that “the pandemic could cause the biggest increase in inequality since records began, as it precipitates a simultaneous and substantial rise across many countries.”

Before the pandemic, the World Bank calculated that about 2 billion people “remain in poverty, that is, living below the standards their own societies have set for a dignified life.” Because of the pandemic-triggered jobs crisis, it is likely — the United Nations notes — that half a billion more people will sink into poverty by the end of the decade; World Bank numbers concur.

“And with the pandemic,” write the World Bank analysts, “the newly poor are more likely to live in congested urban settings and to work in the sectors most affected by lockdowns and mobility restrictions; many are engaged in informal services and not reached by existing social safety nets.” These are the billions who will slide deeper into debt and despair, with education and healthcare slipping away from them as hunger rates rise.

Nothing of what is written above is an exaggeration. All of it comes from researchers and analysts at mainstream organizations such as the World Health Organization and the World Bank, neither of which is known to inflate the ill-effects of capitalist policy.

If anything, these organizations have a tendency to minimize the perils of privatization and corporate-based policies, urging on further cuts to public systems. During the tenure of Gro Harlem Brundtland at the helm of the WHO (1998-2003), the organization encouraged the creation of Private-Public Partnerships (PPPs) and Product Development Partnerships (PDPs). The WHO’s emphasis on the private sector — alongside pressure from the International Monetary Fund to cut public sector funding — accelerated the hemorrhaging of public health systems in many of the poorer countries.

When the WHO should have led the fight to deepen public health systems and to create regional and national pharmaceutical production systems, the agency produced PPP platforms such as the underfunded Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI). Along with other agencies, GAVI is now spluttering forward to provide Covid-19 vaccines to low-income countries. The people who produced global austerity, a desert of possibilities, only now recognize the perils of the inequality virus.

To be anxious about inequality is insufficient. A range of possible, common-sense reforms are being demanded by people’s organizations across the world, which include:
Free Universal Healthcare This has been achieved in poorer countries like Costa Rica and Thailand as well as in socialist states and should, therefore, be the objective of every country on the planet.
A People’s Vaccine Momentum toward the availability of a people’s vaccine is growing, which should include not only open access to all patents for the Covid-19 vaccine but also the creation of pharmaceutical production facilities in the low-income states and in the public sector.

These two basic measures could be easily financed by the money now exported to service odious debts. But such logical solutions that would provide immediate relief to people are set aside. Despite the strong words about the problems posed by austerity, more austerity will be demanded, and more social disorder will be produced.

Rather than focus attention on the actual problems that face the planet’s people and acknowledge the democratic demands coming from people’s organizations and manifestations, government after government has taken refuge in undemocratic behavior.

For example, the farmers and agricultural workers in India continue their months-long protest against three anti-farmer laws pushed through by the extreme right Indian government. The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi knows that its commitment to big capital — personified in the wealthy Adani and Ambani families — prevents it from any serious negotiation with the farmers and agricultural workers. Instead, the government has tried to portray the farmers and agricultural workers as terrorists and as anti-national.

When this did not work, the government went after reporters and media houses that amplified the farmers’ struggle. Many who have reported on, participated in, or shown solidarity with protestors have been arrested — such as in the cases of journalist Mandeep Punia, worker rights activist Nodeep Kaur and activist Disha Ravi, who created and shared a toolkit to support the farmers.

Finally, in an act of lawfare, the government conducted a 113-hour raid against NewsClick, one of the key media houses to cover the protests; accusations of money-laundering tried to sully the name of NewsClick, which has earned the trust of millions of readers and viewers with its frontline reporting that lifted up the sentiments and demands of the agriculturalists.

Meanwhile, India’s Ministry of Education released an order on Jan. 15 that required any online conference or webinar that might discuss India’s “internal matters” and those that receive foreign sponsorship to seek prior government approval.

Similarly, the French government started a process to investigate academic research that promotes “Islamo-leftist” ideas and thereby, according to the Minister of Higher Education, “corrupts society.” In the name of Order, freedom of speech is easily set aside and the fragility of the formal nature of democracy is exposed.

The attack on NewsClick, alongside the investigation of academics in France, reveals the yawning gap between democratic ideals and the practice of statecraft.

Despite the $364 billion prêt garanti par l’État (PGE) program to provide relief for the French population, there is a serious long-term problem of inequality and joblessness.

Rather than focus on this, the French government has whipped around to fight an illusionary adversary: Islamo-leftists. In the same way, faced with mass dislocation and social suffering deepened by the pandemic, the Indian government is prosecuting a war against farmers and media platforms that are sensitive to the issues raised by the farmers. Both these formal democracies retain their constitutions and their laws, their elections and their public hearings – all part of the panoply of modern democracies.

They fail, however, to actually listen to the suffering of the people, let alone the demands made by the people; they remain insensitive to the possibility of a more viable future for our societies.

During the period of the military dictatorship in Pakistan, the communist poet Habib Jalib sang:

—

Kahin gas ka dhuan hae kahin golian ki baarish
Shab-e-ehd-e-kum nigahi tujhay kis tarah sarahein

—

Teargas smoke is in the air, bullets are raining around.
How can I praise you, the night of the period of myopia?

—

Your privileges are not universal, since your privileges earn you — the few — the vast bulk of social wealth. When the people put forward our views, you fire teargas and bullets. You believe that your myopia will allow your night-time to last forever. We praise the hopes and struggles of the people, whose desire to advance history will cut through your repression.

The End of the Narco-Dictatorship in Honduras?

By Gilberto Ríos Munguía on February 25, 2021




https://www.resumen-english.org/2021/02/the-end-of-the-narco-dictatorship-in-honduras/




The “honorable mentions” produced by the investigations conducted by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, which named Honduran President de facto Juan O. Hernandez Alvarado as Co-conspirator 4, or CC4, in the narco-trafficking activity in the country during the past 17 years, continue to emerge and increase in the national and international communications media. The Honduran population’s hope for change has also increased, to the same extent as the increase of the evidence demonstrating the participation in organized crime by this supreme representative of oligarchic interests in Honduras.

With the current lack of any verified information, we can only speculate with the little information to which we have access, and, in passing, use the hindsight of history to try to imagine how far the U.S. actions may go against this figure who has been their main ally in the region, and whom they have firmly and decisively supported in consolidating the election frauds and violations of human rights which have been systematically committed against the social and political opposition in the country.

In his statements to the press today, Juan Hernandez himself swears on a story in which he tries to position himself as the greatest fighter against narco-trafficking – the same narrative that he uses to pretend to display himself as a victim who has fought against powerful criminals who now accuse him or “try to involve him” in illegal activity. His story lacks credibility and the facts, such as his brother Juan Antonio Hernandez having been in prison in the United States for drug trafficking, and the mysterious accident of his deceased sister Hilda Hernandez, lead us to think that his story of innocence is wearing thin and his end is near.

However, faced with these occurrences, one cannot be too optimistic. The end of Juan Hernandez as an individual representative of organized crime, political reactionary ideology, and the right-wing of Honduras will be an incentive to continue the struggle for the structural transformation of Honduras; it may perhaps be a good start to continue to persevere in that direction, but it will, by no means, be the end of the criminal structure of the oligarchy who controls the country and who also receives all the support of the US government.

We have referred to the importance that this year should have, as the 200th anniversary of the first independence efforts in Central America; after freeing ourselves from Spanish colonialism, one of the central problems that we face is that, without being able to exercise national sovereignty and confronted with the power that the forces of giant capital have acquired to control our economy and national politics, the internal forces who oppose the neoliberal model may be insufficient, unless they are able to come together to defeat it and also unless they are able to raise their levels of consciousness and commitment to understand and overcome it.

Returning to history, in this region alone we have the case of Noriega in Panama – the invasion with which Bush senior began to show the true face of the “Washington Consensus” and also the invasion with which the deepening of neoliberalism began. The attack became more extreme with the political and military defeat of the opposition forces in Central America, after the heroic fight of our peoples who opposed this neoliberal model that deepens social inequality, concentrating the wealth generated by the work of the masses of men and women into very few hands. On this occasion the empire may take away Juan O. Hernandez or throw him out of power, just as they did with Otto Perez Molina, replacing one presidential figurehead with another to guarantee that the system will not undergo any modification.

Real change will not come without a course of organized struggle by the people of Honduras; this situation marks an important turning point. The enemies of the people have the worst image of their history – a history that increasingly shows their cruel and cynical nature. But it is also true that this opportunity could be lost if the “damage control” actions coming from the U.S. embassy and their oligarchic instruments in this country can be put into effect faster than the opposition can act.




Source: El Pulso, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau

Unsurprisingly, leaked files confirm the Foreign Office coordinates multi-agency propaganda programmes

https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2021/02/28/unsurprisingly-leaked-files-confirm-the-foreign-office-coordinates-multi-agency-propaganda-programmes/




A tranche of leaked files shows that the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) is coordinating multi-agency propaganda programmes. These files show that the programmes mainly target the authoritarian regimes in Russia and Syria. This is not unexpected. More significantly, perhaps, documents also show that these programmes are not confined to just foreign targets.
Leaked files

The leaked files, were released to The Canary by ‘Anonymous’:
OP. HMG Trojan Horse. Part 4: Undermining Russia I
OP. HMG Trojan Horse. Part 4: Undermining Russia 2
OP. HMG Trojan Horse. Part 4: Undermining Russia 3
OP. HMG Trojan Horse. Part 4: Undermining Russia 4

The entire collection is also available as an archive file.

The commentary accompanying these recent leaks is conversational and partisan. The main claims concern which organisations – and which personnel – bid for the programmes.



Propaganda partners

But it is the earlier leaks on the FCO programmes that are perhaps of more interest.

In July 2020, The Canary published details of the Open Information Partnership (OIP), described as:


the “Network Hub of the UK government Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s (FCO) EXPOSE network”. It is understood that the network facilitator of EXPOSE is “a consortium led by Zinc Networks who were formerly known as Breakthrough Media. The project’s resource partners are Bellingcat, DFR Labs and the Media Diversity Institute. The implementing consortium partners are the Institute of Statecraft and Aktis Strategy (no longer operating) with risk management and security almost certainly provided by Toro Risk Solutions. Grant fund management is probably handled by Ecorys”. EXPOSE is “a project of the Counter Disinformation & Media Development Program (CDMD), currently headed by Andy Pryce”.




In the blog In This Together, one of these earlier leaks provides details of an FCO request for submissions for a multi-million pound programme to commence in the summer of 2018. The programme was to “counter disinformation and propaganda” in “northern and eastern Europe”. Zinc Networks and its partners – including Bellingcat and the Institute for Statecraft – submitted its proposal, “A Network of NGOs”, to the FCO in August of that year.

The proposal stated that the objective was to “use audience-centric communications to undermine the credibility of disinformation sources for specific target audiences whilst building their resilience in the long term”. A list showed those involved in the submission. It included Chris Donnelly and Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow with Digital Forensic Research Lab (via the Atlantic Council). There’s also a summary of partners, as well as a proposed structure for the programme.



Another document shows that the FCO’s Expose network counter-disinformation programme includes media and think tank organisations across Europe. Bellingcat, Factmata, and ISD are listed under UK. Examples of these projects extend to the Balkans, southern Europe, Caucasus, Eastern Europe, and the Baltics.

In a sense, none of this is revelatory, apart from the extent of the partnerships involved.
Case study: BBC and Reuters roles

Based on his analysis of the recently leaked files, Max Blumenthal of the Grayzone accused Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF) and BBC Media Action of playing an active role in the FCO propaganda programme. He claims the files:


cast serious doubt on the independence of two of the world’s largest and most prestigious media organizations, revealing Reuters and the BBC as apparent intelligence cut-outs feasting at the trough of a British national security state that their news operations are increasingly averse to scrutinizing.

And former Labour MP Chris Williamson commented:


The BBC and Reuters portray themselves as an unimpeachable, impartial, and authoritative source of world news, but both are now hugely compromised by these disclosures. Double standards like this just bring establishment politicians and corporate media hacks into further disrepute.

But in response, Jenny Vereker of TRF told the Grayzone:


The inference that the Thomson Reuters Foundation was engaged in ‘secret activities’ is inaccurate and misrepresents our work in the public interest. We have for decades openly supported a free press and have worked to help journalists globally to develop the skills needed to report with independence.

Also in response, the BBC told The Canary:


The allegations contained in The Greyzone [sic] report are false and a complete misrepresentation of our work. BBC Media Action is the BBC’s international charity. We provide technical training and mentoring to public service media in many countries, following the editorial standards and principles of the BBC. Our areas of work and our funding are clearly outlined on our website and in our Annual Reports. As an independent charity, we rely on the support of donors to carry out our work.
Twitter intervenes


Ominously, perhaps, Twitter added a caveat to the Grayzone’s tweets of its article that read:


These materials may have been obtained through hacking






According to Mashable, this was the first time Twitter used such a label warning.
More FCO funded projects

In November 2018, The Canary provided evidence on how Statecraft was directly funded by the FCO. Indeed, foreign office minister Alan Duncan MP admitted:


In financial year 2017/18, the FCO funded the Institute for Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative £296,500. This financial year, the FCO is funding a further £1,961,000. Both have been funded through grant agreements.

At the time, leaked files showed that the UK cluster of Integrity, funded by the Institute for Statecraft, included individuals who held hedge-fund interests or represented thinktanks, such as DEMOS, RUSI, the Henry Jackson Society, and Chatham House. It also named people who represented the Ministry of Defence and the FCO as well as Orbis. Orbis is the private intelligence agency headed by ‘Trump dossier‘ author and former MI6 operative Christopher Steele.

The Institute for Statecraft also boasts some interesting directors, invariably with a military or related background. For example, Donnelly was a special adviser to the secretary general of NATO (and an adviser to Margaret Thatcher). And Daniel Lafayeedney was a fellow with the Advanced Research and Assessment Group at the Defence Academy of the UK.
Hypocrisy

Nor is FCO-funded propaganda confined to foreign targets. In December 2018, The Canary ran a story showing how disinformation specialists with Integrity Initiative published a number of tweets denigrating then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

For example:



Whether domestic or foreign targets, one thing is clear about FCO propaganda programmes. As confirmed by the earlier leaks and the latest ones, the programmes expose the sheer hypocrisy of UK government while accusing, say, Russia of doing the same thing.

The new leaked files provide a certain insight into how media and government work closely together in such propaganda programmes. Those partnerships named in the files complement the more informal arrangements between UK mass media and government. Altogether, these arrangements could even be characterised as components of the ongoing information ‘cold war’ – a war the extent of which we’re only able to glimpse.

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