Saturday, April 3, 2021
CITING UNFAIR LABOR PRACTICES, 1,300 STEELWORKERS STRIKE IN FIVE STATES
By C.M. Lewis, In These Times.
April 2, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/citing-unfair-labor-practices-1300-steelworkers-strike-in-five-states/
United Steelworkers Members Claim Allegheny Technologies Incorporated Is Refusing To Provide Essential Bargaining Information.
Brackenridge, PA – At 7:00 AM on Tuesday, March 30, 1,300 Steelworkers employed by Allegheny Technologies Incorporated (ATI) walked out in protest at facilities in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. The strike comes just over a year after United Steelworkers began negotiations with ATI. According to a statement released that day, the union is dissatisfied with company demands for “major economic and contract language concessions.”
United Steelworkers further claims that ATI has committed unfair labor practices. A charge filed with the National Labor Relations Board on March 9 alleges that the company is refusing to furnish the union with essential bargaining information. As USW International Vice President David McCall tells it, this withholding finally pushed the workers to strike.
“We are willing to meet with management all day, every day. But ATI needs to engage with us to resolve the outstanding issues,” McCall says. “We will continue to bargain in good faith, and we strongly urge ATI to start doing the same.
Healthcare is among the biggest points of contention in the negotiations. While the company maintains that their proposals continue a “premium-free plan,” a union bargaining update contends that out-of-pocket costs are up. Workers are also balking at a company plan to assign coverage to workers hired after 2024, which they say will give new employees inferior, more expensive coverage and thus introduce a “two-tiered system.”
Plant closures have been another topic of heated debate. Andy Artman, President of USW 1138 – 6 and an electrician at ATI’s Latrobe facility, says he had to relocate after ATI’s Bagdad plant in Gilpin, PA, shuttered in 2016. And he has company. Michael Barchesky, who has worked in electrical maintenance at the Latrobe facility since 2007, claims he knows people who have had to move two or three times because of facility closures. With the company pushing for more — including the Waterbury facility in Connecticut, the Louisville facility in Ohio, and a production line in Brackenridge — the union is fighting to ensure that workers forced into retirement will keep the pensions they’ve earned.
For rank-and-file workers like Joe Clark, an overhead crane operator at the Brackenridge facility, a work stoppage is his chance to draw a line in the sand after years of compromise.
“When we were first contracted to put this [hot rolling mill] in [at Brackenridge], they asked us for concessions because they wanted to create jobs that were going to be for us and for our families in the future,” says Clark. “It was supposed to guarantee more jobs for the community, so we sacrificed.”
The company spent $1.5 billion to expand and update the Brackenridge facility, aided by a controversial economic development strategy known as “Keystone Opportunity Zones.” The long-term tax abatements awarded to these zones were supposed to create jobs, but a 2015 piece written by then-President of the USW, Leo Gerard, argues they have never materially benefitted local residents. Bill Hrivnak, who Gerard quotes in the piece, says that “[Everyone] thought when they built a $1 billion plant here that it would be great for the community, and it hasn’t been.”
“They cut two thirds of the same department we work in now,” he continues. “The [new] jobs never appeared, the technology cut [existing] jobs, and we continued to work without raises, sacrificing. They’re always telling us the company is in a difficult position, and they’re not making money. But they’re paying out millions of dollars to their CEOs and their upper-level people.”
Workers are skeptical about the company’s claimed hardship. “You look at what we’re getting compensated and what the CEOs are getting compensated, it doesn’t really add up,” says Barchevsky.
Although it expects to rebound in 2021, recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission reveal ATI has lost money each of the last three quarters. The same report finds that the company has “reduced company-wide employment levels by approximately 1,400 people, or about 17% of our total workforce.”
Many of those layoffs have been union jobs. Before a 2015 labor dispute that led to a lockout, workers say there were approximately 2,200 bargaining unit employees. Now there are just 1300, with management proposing to close more plants and make further cuts.
Artman puts things bluntly: “They’re trying to break the union.” Clark agrees, describing management as a “tyranny of evil men.” For its part, ATI released a statement on social media saying that it was “disappointed USW elected to strike.”
Fortunately for the USW, the Brackenridge community is on its side.
“Everyone’s still supportive,” says Barchesky. “They still wave, they still come and talk to us. Nobody wants to go on strike. We didn’t get compensated for the last seven months we were locked out, but we can’t lay down and take another beating… we can’t let them just keep gutting us.”
1,100 MINE WORKERS IN ALABAMA ARE GOING ON STRIKE
By Sou Mi, Left Voice.
April 2, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/1100-mine-workers-in-alabama-are-going-on-strike/
After The Failure Of Contract Negotiations, 1,100 Mineworkers In West Alabama With United Mine Workers Are Going On Strike Against Warrior Met Coal.
Over 1,100 workers at two Alabama coal mines and related facilities will go on strike starting Thursday, April 1, at 10:30 pm. United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) issued the strike notice against Warrior Met Coal on behalf of the workers in the company’s two coal mines and related facilities after negotiations over the latest contract failed.
The last contract was negotiated in 2016, as Warrior Met Coal was bringing the company out of the bankruptcy caused by its erstwhile owner, Walter Energy. As the union’s press release details, it was on the backs of the labor and sacrifice of their workers that the company turned itself around. Since then, the company has raked in millions in profits.
Coal mined by Warrior Met is used for steel production in Asia, Europe, and South America. The company reported a loss of $35 million in 2020, compared to a net income of $302 million in 2019. Citing uncertainty due to the pandemic, it has not released any financial guidance for the current year. Yet, as UMWA President Cecil E. Roberts says, the company has rewarded upper management with bonuses of up to $35,000 in recent weeks.
To no one’s surprise, the company continues to do this by squeezing their workers. In addition to the strike notice, the UMWA has filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board over Warrior Met’s conduct during negotiations.
All Eyes On Alabama
This strike comes days after a historic unionization drive concluded at an Amazon fulfillment facility in Bessemer, only a few dozen miles away. Cheered on by the community, 5,800 Amazon workers voted on whether or not to unionize with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). As we now wait for the ballots to be counted, there are new rumblings not too far away among the ranks of labor.
From Hunts Point, to Bessemer, to the coal mines of West Alabama, workers are increasingly realizing that they are the ones who are essential — not the bosses. This comes in the midst of a pandemic that has disproportionately hurt the working class. While they put their lives on the line, reporting to work to produce everything necessary to keep the wheels of society running, the bosses sat at home, in all their comfort, raking in profits. The bourgeoisie has had little to offer to the working class. Beyond some well-placed ads and symbolic crumbs, the ruling class continues to act in their self-interest, hoarding the profits generated from looting workers of the fruits of their labor. This isn’t a question of moral failure — capitalism is functioning exactly designed.
But workers aren’t just waking up to the injustices of the bosses, but also to the immense power that the working class holds. Not only do workers create the millions that their bosses pocket —- they also have the power to shut everything down. As Marcos, a worker at Hunts Point Market says, “A lot of the guys died with me here [on the job]. We kept this place open…While the bosses were home, I was here working for them. They got money, they got millions. They didn’t share it with us. We deserve more.” It is this anger that is spreading its roots across the country and now holds ground in the mines of West Alabama. After decades of defeats, faced with compounding crises, the U.S. working class is slowly beginning to rear its head again.
That these incidents are emerging in the South is particularly telling. Bourgeois media would have us believe that the Southern worker is conservative and reactionary. Indeed, Southern states continue to have some of the lowest union densities. At 8 percent, Alabama’s union density is lower than the national average of 10.8 percent. But what this belies is the region’s deep and rich history of multiracial labor militancy, particularly in Alabama. As Michael Goldfield notes in The Southern Key, “what made Alabama exceptional was that in the 1940s it was the most unionized state in the South. Union membership had increased from approximately 70,000 in 1933 to over 200,000 in 1945, over 25% of the labor force in that year.” Alabama had a higher union density — 25 percent — than in any state in the United States today. Bound in interracial unions, Black and white workers fought alongside each other through the turn of the 20th century against Jim Crow era laws and, later, against segregation.
It is a history that the UMWA itself has long been an essential part of. As Goldfield further writes,
The Alabama labor movement was centered in the Birmingham area, the stronghold of the United Mine Workers, who had already shown their strength in 1928 by leading a coalition that successfully abolished convict labor in the state. The roughly 23,000 unionized coal miners in Alabama were clearly the vanguard of the labor movement, aiding in the organization of all other workers across the state in the 1930s, including steel workers, wood workers, textile workers, school teachers, and even principals in one county.
In this vanguard role, through the 30s and 40s, mineworkers with the UMWA agitated and organized to unionize Alabama “wall to wall,” across all industries, giving material support and solidarity to these efforts.
Alabama’s combative unionism was eventually weakened and defeated in the McCarthy Era by the bosses, who used the police and the KKK to repress workers. They further divided workers by inflaming racism and anti-communism. Through the next decades serving as junior partners to the bourgeois regime, union bureaucracies steered unions towards business unionism: the union became a service that workers received for better wages, conditions and job protection, as opposed to a tool of self-organization for the working class. To rebuild the militant history that workers in the South belong to, rank-and-file workers have to reclaim unions from this misleadership and transform them into fighting organizations — ones that they can use to win both economic and political rights.
Today, the South continues to light the spark for the U.S. labor movement. From the West Virginia teachers’ strike of 2018 that began a strike wave among education workers in the United States, or the ongoing Amazon unionization drive in Bessemer, Alabama, Southern labor continues to show the way. To take lessons of the past and to fight with the full power of the organized working class, against the injustices of the bosses, and for better conditions and life, we now look to the miners of West Alabama.
Bidens Totally-Not-The-Same-As-Trumps kids in cages (AOC plays defense of Bidens policies!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Dk7YFBBXtg&ab_channel=TheSerfTimes
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland: The integration of the Native American elite with the Democratic Party
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/03/haal-a03.html
Kayla Costa
13 hours ago
On March 15, the US Senate voted 51-40 to confirm Democratic Representative Deb Haaland as the Interior Department’s secretary under the Biden administration, making her the first Native American to hold any Cabinet position.
Her selection has been praised as a “historic moment” since she is a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe and thus is being portrayed as someone who will defend and fight for the interests of all Native American people.
“This is a big deal,” tweeted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on December 17, describing Haaland as “a visionary Native woman in charge of federal lands. Unequivocally progressive. Green New Deal champion. Exquisitely experienced.”
Secretary Deb Haaland swearing-in with Vice President Kamala Harris (Credit: U.S. Department of the Interior)
Nathan Rott with National Public Radio wrote on the day of her confirmation, at which she wore traditional Native dress and ornaments: “Her confirmation is as symbolic as it is historic. For much of its history, the Interior Department was used as a tool of oppression against America’s Indigenous peoples. In addition to managing the country’s public lands, endangered species and natural resources, the department is also responsible for the government-to-government relations between the U.S. and Native American tribes.”
Elle magazine published an essay by Crystal Echo Hawk, member of the Pawnee Nation in Oklahoma and nonprofit leader, headlined: “The Revolutionary Power of Deb Haaland.” Echo Hawk wrote: “Deb Haaland’s secretary of the Interior confirmation is transformational for Native people. Finally, a leader who can help Americans understand that we are human beings—not caricatures or mascots. We aren’t peoples that don’t exist anymore. We are here.”
The gushing admiration for Haaland by major media outlets focuses exclusively on her cultural identity and personal story, as well as her support for Green New Deal reforms and environmental protections. These components allegedly make her the woman who will reverse Trump’s reckless environmental policies, combat climate change, fight for working people and resolve the historic oppression of Native Americans in the United States, all within Biden’s next four years.
In reality, Haaland is a longtime representative of the Democratic Party and American capitalism, including the capitalist ventures carried out on tribal lands. Her record as a businesswoman, successful campaigner and fundraiser for Democratic officials, and years as an elected representative in New Mexico have made it clear that she can be trusted to carry out the strategic aims of the Biden administration.
Her presence in the Cabinet is designed to provide Biden with a left cover. The Democratic Party is attempting to hide its true class policy—including the continuation of military aggression against China and Russia, horrific deportations of immigrants, fueling the spread of COVID-19 by reopening schools and workplaces before it is safe to do so—with the promotion of racial, gender and sexual diversity.
Early years and rise to prominence
Haaland was born in Winslow, Arizona. She is an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo, located 45 miles west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her mother is Native American and served in the United States Navy and later the Bureau of Indian Affairs, while her father, a Norwegian American from Minnesota, was an officer in the US Marine Corps and fought in the Vietnam War in the course of his military career.
Growing up in a military family, she moved throughout her life, then finally settled in Albuquerque, where she graduated from Highland High School. She often refers to her military background with pride, even serving on the Armed Services Committee and taking a trip to the Middle East during her two years in Congress.
After receiving her Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of New Mexico in 1994, she struggled to support her newborn child as a single mother, relying on food stamps at certain points until she graduated from UNM Law School in 2006. Haaland also started a small salsa business for additional income.
In 2007, she participated in a program with Emerge New Mexico, a nonprofit organization that develops women to run for elected office under the Democratic Party. This prepared her for her role in the Democratic Party and the management of tribal businesses, during which she established her own career while channeling social discontent among Native American and working class voters behind the Democrats in the aftermath of the 2008 recession.
By 2010, Haaland served as the Native American Vote Manager for the Democratic Party in the gubernatorial election won by Republican Susana Martinez. In 2012, she led the state’s Native American voter drive for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, while also being the Native American Caucus Chair for the Democratic Party of New Mexico.
From 2013 to 2015, she was an administrator for the San Felipe Pueblo tribe. Then she ran for Lieutenant Governor of New Mexico in 2014 on the ticket with then-Attorney General Gary King, who has a record as an energy consultant for the state and federal governments. This ticket was defeated as Martinez won a second term.
Between 2015 and 2017, Haaland was the chair of the Democratic Party of New Mexico, praised for her hand in producing record fundraising and voter turnout. In a Rolling Stone interview from August 2018, she explained her time as chairwoman. “We had lost our Statehouse in 2014 after 60 years, and the party had accumulated seven years worth of debt. I said I would pay off the debt and win back our Statehouse, and we did both.”
As chair of the state’s Democratic Party, she did not endorse either Sanders or Clinton in the race for the 2016 presidential nomination. Once it was clear that Clinton had won the primary contest, Haaland endorsed her and led the state party’s drive to get out the vote for her in 2016. A similar situation took place during the 2020 primaries, although Haaland was considered more favorable to Elizabeth Warren, who later advocated for her position in the Biden Cabinet.
In 2018, she ran in the Democratic Party primary election for the First Congressional District, for the seat left open when Representative Michelle Lujan Grisham ran for governor. In a contest with a heavy focus on identity politics, multiple Hispanic candidates split the vote and Haaland won the primary with 41 percent. She won the general election easily, joining Sharice Davids of Kansas as the first two Native American woman ever elected to Congress.
Her congressional record includes supporting every major element of the Democratic Party’s platform. She supports “comprehensive immigration reform,” which is code for a supposedly “humane” deportation of undocumented immigrants. She encourages “business-friendly policies” to lure businesses to areas with low tax rates to “create jobs.” During the pandemic, she voted for the CARES Act in March 2020, which funneled around $4 trillion into the financial markets while allowing COVID-19 to spread throughout the country.
Her support for the Democrats’ pro-corporate and anti-worker policies is masked behind her focus on token measures to address “environmental justice, climate change, missing and murdered indigenous women, and family-friendly policies [at workplaces].”
Laguna Development Corporation and the Native elite
Notably, in the course of her political activity between 2010 and 2015, Haaland also served on the Laguna Development Corporation (LDC) Board of Directors and became the first appointed chairwoman of the organization.
LDC is a business management firm led by a board of Native American, Hispanic and Caucasian executives, who oversee tribal retail, gaming, food and beverage, entertainment and hospitality enterprises. They currently manage Route 66 Casino, Thunder Road Steakhouse & Cantina, Legends Theater, Dancing Eagle Casino and over two dozen other sites. Its website states that the LDC’s “vision is to be a multi-billion dollar diversified corporation. Through its people and successful business development we will achieve a return on shareholder equity greater than our industry.”
The profits generated from these corporate enterprises are presented as ways to fund welfare programs, education and other public resources on tribal lands, needed since the federal government provides abysmally low levels of resources and support. In 1988, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was passed to allow tribes to operate full-scale casino gambling to generate revenue to use however they wish. By 2013, annual Indian gaming revenue reached $28.3 billion.
A tiny elite layer of the Native population has profited from this arrangement, while the vast majority of the Native community exists as the most oppressed social layer in American society. Tom Love, for example, is a member of the Chickasaw Tribe in Oklahoma with a net worth of $5 billion from his ownership of the “Love’s Travel Stops and Country Stores” chain.
The Laguna Development Corporation incorporates this privileged capitalist layer of the Pueblo tribes in New Mexico. Board members often have a background with oil and gas companies, agricultural business. One current member, Maxine Velasquez, managed the Laguna Construction Company, which held multiple contracts with the US Air Force and military.
Throughout her own time on the board, the “unequivocally progressive” Haaland completely accepted this capitalist framework and ties to the US war machine (which she grew up in) and was praised as a corporate leader, who pushed Laguna to adopt “commitments to earth-friendly business practices.”
A “left” face in the right-wing Biden administration
Her actual political record runs counter to the conventional narrative that Haaland will fight for the urgent needs of the Native American population, the environment and the working class. This presentation is designed to capture the increasingly left-wing and progressive sentiments among workers and youth in order to sow illusions in the Democratic Party in a time of immense social and political crisis.
The Biden administration, like the Democratic Party as a whole, is using identity politics to give a “left” gloss to a conventionally right-wing, pro-capitalist and militaristic administration. At the time of his inauguration, all media attention was on the diversity of the Cabinet members.
At the first official meeting of the Cabinet, held Thursday, the main focus of the media was the contrast between Trump’s Cabinet, 75 percent white males, and Biden’s, with the first gay Cabinet member, nearly half women, the first Native American, the first black Pentagon chief, and so on. Of the 23 Cabinet-level positions filled by Biden, 11 are female, 12 are nonwhite, and only six are straight white males.
All, of course, are proven defenders of the capitalist system and of American imperialism. The gay Secretary of Transportation was an intelligence officer in Afghanistan. The black Pentagon chief oversaw the war in Iraq and then all US military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia. The female Secretary of the Treasury opened the financial spigots for Wall Street during her term as chief of the Federal Reserve Board. The Hispanic Secretary of Education, a former teacher, made his name from his ruthless drive to reopen schools in Connecticut despite the pandemic.
The Native American population faces extremely difficult circumstances of deep poverty and social isolation, compounded now by the pandemic. None of these conditions will be altered by the elevation of a Native American to head the Department of Interior, which includes oversight of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, long the spearhead of the oppression of Native Americans, particularly those living on tribal reservation lands.
Haaland will follow in the footsteps of countless African American and Hispanic mayors and police chiefs, whose installation has done nothing to alter the conditions of poverty and oppression faced by black and Hispanic workers in the major cities. Capitalist politics, whether the faces are white or black or brown, offers nothing to working class. The question is the building of an independent political movement to unite the working class on the basis of a socialist program.
Nathan Rott with National Public Radio wrote on the day of her confirmation, at which she wore traditional Native dress and ornaments: “Her confirmation is as symbolic as it is historic. For much of its history, the Interior Department was used as a tool of oppression against America’s Indigenous peoples. In addition to managing the country’s public lands, endangered species and natural resources, the department is also responsible for the government-to-government relations between the U.S. and Native American tribes.”
Elle magazine published an essay by Crystal Echo Hawk, member of the Pawnee Nation in Oklahoma and nonprofit leader, headlined: “The Revolutionary Power of Deb Haaland.” Echo Hawk wrote: “Deb Haaland’s secretary of the Interior confirmation is transformational for Native people. Finally, a leader who can help Americans understand that we are human beings—not caricatures or mascots. We aren’t peoples that don’t exist anymore. We are here.”
The gushing admiration for Haaland by major media outlets focuses exclusively on her cultural identity and personal story, as well as her support for Green New Deal reforms and environmental protections. These components allegedly make her the woman who will reverse Trump’s reckless environmental policies, combat climate change, fight for working people and resolve the historic oppression of Native Americans in the United States, all within Biden’s next four years.
In reality, Haaland is a longtime representative of the Democratic Party and American capitalism, including the capitalist ventures carried out on tribal lands. Her record as a businesswoman, successful campaigner and fundraiser for Democratic officials, and years as an elected representative in New Mexico have made it clear that she can be trusted to carry out the strategic aims of the Biden administration.
Her presence in the Cabinet is designed to provide Biden with a left cover. The Democratic Party is attempting to hide its true class policy—including the continuation of military aggression against China and Russia, horrific deportations of immigrants, fueling the spread of COVID-19 by reopening schools and workplaces before it is safe to do so—with the promotion of racial, gender and sexual diversity.
Early years and rise to prominence
Haaland was born in Winslow, Arizona. She is an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo, located 45 miles west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her mother is Native American and served in the United States Navy and later the Bureau of Indian Affairs, while her father, a Norwegian American from Minnesota, was an officer in the US Marine Corps and fought in the Vietnam War in the course of his military career.
Growing up in a military family, she moved throughout her life, then finally settled in Albuquerque, where she graduated from Highland High School. She often refers to her military background with pride, even serving on the Armed Services Committee and taking a trip to the Middle East during her two years in Congress.
After receiving her Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of New Mexico in 1994, she struggled to support her newborn child as a single mother, relying on food stamps at certain points until she graduated from UNM Law School in 2006. Haaland also started a small salsa business for additional income.
In 2007, she participated in a program with Emerge New Mexico, a nonprofit organization that develops women to run for elected office under the Democratic Party. This prepared her for her role in the Democratic Party and the management of tribal businesses, during which she established her own career while channeling social discontent among Native American and working class voters behind the Democrats in the aftermath of the 2008 recession.
By 2010, Haaland served as the Native American Vote Manager for the Democratic Party in the gubernatorial election won by Republican Susana Martinez. In 2012, she led the state’s Native American voter drive for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, while also being the Native American Caucus Chair for the Democratic Party of New Mexico.
From 2013 to 2015, she was an administrator for the San Felipe Pueblo tribe. Then she ran for Lieutenant Governor of New Mexico in 2014 on the ticket with then-Attorney General Gary King, who has a record as an energy consultant for the state and federal governments. This ticket was defeated as Martinez won a second term.
Between 2015 and 2017, Haaland was the chair of the Democratic Party of New Mexico, praised for her hand in producing record fundraising and voter turnout. In a Rolling Stone interview from August 2018, she explained her time as chairwoman. “We had lost our Statehouse in 2014 after 60 years, and the party had accumulated seven years worth of debt. I said I would pay off the debt and win back our Statehouse, and we did both.”
As chair of the state’s Democratic Party, she did not endorse either Sanders or Clinton in the race for the 2016 presidential nomination. Once it was clear that Clinton had won the primary contest, Haaland endorsed her and led the state party’s drive to get out the vote for her in 2016. A similar situation took place during the 2020 primaries, although Haaland was considered more favorable to Elizabeth Warren, who later advocated for her position in the Biden Cabinet.
In 2018, she ran in the Democratic Party primary election for the First Congressional District, for the seat left open when Representative Michelle Lujan Grisham ran for governor. In a contest with a heavy focus on identity politics, multiple Hispanic candidates split the vote and Haaland won the primary with 41 percent. She won the general election easily, joining Sharice Davids of Kansas as the first two Native American woman ever elected to Congress.
Her congressional record includes supporting every major element of the Democratic Party’s platform. She supports “comprehensive immigration reform,” which is code for a supposedly “humane” deportation of undocumented immigrants. She encourages “business-friendly policies” to lure businesses to areas with low tax rates to “create jobs.” During the pandemic, she voted for the CARES Act in March 2020, which funneled around $4 trillion into the financial markets while allowing COVID-19 to spread throughout the country.
Her support for the Democrats’ pro-corporate and anti-worker policies is masked behind her focus on token measures to address “environmental justice, climate change, missing and murdered indigenous women, and family-friendly policies [at workplaces].”
Laguna Development Corporation and the Native elite
Notably, in the course of her political activity between 2010 and 2015, Haaland also served on the Laguna Development Corporation (LDC) Board of Directors and became the first appointed chairwoman of the organization.
LDC is a business management firm led by a board of Native American, Hispanic and Caucasian executives, who oversee tribal retail, gaming, food and beverage, entertainment and hospitality enterprises. They currently manage Route 66 Casino, Thunder Road Steakhouse & Cantina, Legends Theater, Dancing Eagle Casino and over two dozen other sites. Its website states that the LDC’s “vision is to be a multi-billion dollar diversified corporation. Through its people and successful business development we will achieve a return on shareholder equity greater than our industry.”
The profits generated from these corporate enterprises are presented as ways to fund welfare programs, education and other public resources on tribal lands, needed since the federal government provides abysmally low levels of resources and support. In 1988, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was passed to allow tribes to operate full-scale casino gambling to generate revenue to use however they wish. By 2013, annual Indian gaming revenue reached $28.3 billion.
A tiny elite layer of the Native population has profited from this arrangement, while the vast majority of the Native community exists as the most oppressed social layer in American society. Tom Love, for example, is a member of the Chickasaw Tribe in Oklahoma with a net worth of $5 billion from his ownership of the “Love’s Travel Stops and Country Stores” chain.
The Laguna Development Corporation incorporates this privileged capitalist layer of the Pueblo tribes in New Mexico. Board members often have a background with oil and gas companies, agricultural business. One current member, Maxine Velasquez, managed the Laguna Construction Company, which held multiple contracts with the US Air Force and military.
Throughout her own time on the board, the “unequivocally progressive” Haaland completely accepted this capitalist framework and ties to the US war machine (which she grew up in) and was praised as a corporate leader, who pushed Laguna to adopt “commitments to earth-friendly business practices.”
A “left” face in the right-wing Biden administration
Her actual political record runs counter to the conventional narrative that Haaland will fight for the urgent needs of the Native American population, the environment and the working class. This presentation is designed to capture the increasingly left-wing and progressive sentiments among workers and youth in order to sow illusions in the Democratic Party in a time of immense social and political crisis.
The Biden administration, like the Democratic Party as a whole, is using identity politics to give a “left” gloss to a conventionally right-wing, pro-capitalist and militaristic administration. At the time of his inauguration, all media attention was on the diversity of the Cabinet members.
At the first official meeting of the Cabinet, held Thursday, the main focus of the media was the contrast between Trump’s Cabinet, 75 percent white males, and Biden’s, with the first gay Cabinet member, nearly half women, the first Native American, the first black Pentagon chief, and so on. Of the 23 Cabinet-level positions filled by Biden, 11 are female, 12 are nonwhite, and only six are straight white males.
All, of course, are proven defenders of the capitalist system and of American imperialism. The gay Secretary of Transportation was an intelligence officer in Afghanistan. The black Pentagon chief oversaw the war in Iraq and then all US military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia. The female Secretary of the Treasury opened the financial spigots for Wall Street during her term as chief of the Federal Reserve Board. The Hispanic Secretary of Education, a former teacher, made his name from his ruthless drive to reopen schools in Connecticut despite the pandemic.
The Native American population faces extremely difficult circumstances of deep poverty and social isolation, compounded now by the pandemic. None of these conditions will be altered by the elevation of a Native American to head the Department of Interior, which includes oversight of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, long the spearhead of the oppression of Native Americans, particularly those living on tribal reservation lands.
Haaland will follow in the footsteps of countless African American and Hispanic mayors and police chiefs, whose installation has done nothing to alter the conditions of poverty and oppression faced by black and Hispanic workers in the major cities. Capitalist politics, whether the faces are white or black or brown, offers nothing to working class. The question is the building of an independent political movement to unite the working class on the basis of a socialist program.
AOC on What's Happening At The Border (In-Depth)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGJXVG6yMFE&ab_channel=HardLensMedia
March jobs growth dominated by low-wage sectors
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/03/jobs-a03.html
Shannon Jones
12 hours ago
Despite a better than expected jobs report for the month of March, one month after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the US remains blighted by high levels of unemployment, including a stubbornly high number of long term unemployed.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that employment rose 916,000 in March, a number boosted by large numbers of hotel, restaurant and other service workers returning to work as states moved rapidly and prematurely to remove COVID-19-related restrictions. Employment in education also rose significantly as the Biden administration moved ahead with the forced reopening of public schools.
People wait for a distribution of food in the Harlem neighborhood of New York, April 18, 2020. (Credit: AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)
The official unemployment rate fell to 6.0, still well around the pre-pandemic figure. However, a more realistic measure of the unemployment rate, which takes into account so-called discouraged workers and those forced to work part time who want full time work, stands at 10.7 percent. Known as the U6 rate, this figure gives a more accurate picture of the degree of social distress.
Reflecting the reentry of lower-paid workers into the labor force, average hourly earnings fell slightly in March.
In another indication of the depth of the social crisis, more than 4.2 million have been out of work for more than six months, and that number rose slightly in March from the previous month.
The largest job gains in March came from leisure and hospitality with a 280,000 increase. Bars and restaurants added 176,000 jobs, while arts, entertainment and recreation saw 64,000 new hires. These three sectors, typically low-wage and seasonal, accounted for well over half of the March job gains.
Local, state and private education added 190,000 jobs in March as schools reopened in cities across the US under the pressure of the Biden administration and Democratic Party politicians, who see the schools as a child care service for potential workers. This homicidal policy will only serve to add new fuel to the pandemic, which despite vaccinations, is surging in Michigan and a number of other states.
Construction added 110,000 jobs in March, while manufacturing added 53,000. Manufacturing is down 515,000 jobs since February 2020. Altogether, through March the US economy is still down 8.4 million jobs since before the pandemic.
While some economists predict that April will also show strong employment gains and an optimistic report by the Wall Street Journal predicted monthly job gains averaging 500,000 for the rest of the year, that would leave overall unemployment below pre-pandemic levels. According to the Federal Open Market Committee, a return to the 3.5 percent unemployment rate prior to the pandemic would take until the end of 2023 in the unlikely event there are not intervening economic shocks.
Another measure, the labor force participation rate, which measures the percentage of the population employed or actively seeking work, was little changed in March at 61.5 percent. That compares to the prepandemic level of 63 percent. The number of workers forced to work part time who wanted full time employment stood at 5.8 million, 1.4 million higher than February 2020. The number of discouraged workers stood at 523,000, unchanged from the previous month.
The release of the jobs report follows the publication of the Department of Labor report on weekly unemployment claims that showed an increase of 61,000 state claims from the previous week to 719,000. This marks more than one year of historically unprecedented numbers of new unemployment filings. In addition there were 237,025 new claims filed under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program that provides assistance to contract and self-employed workers not covered by regular unemployment benefits.
In the face of the rising employment numbers, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell rushed to reassure markets that the cash spigot would be left open despite signs of an improving economy. The US central bank has been propping up equities markets through the purchase of $120 billion in bonds each month while keeping interest rates near zero. Were this flow of money to be stopped or even slow down, the inflated stock market would likely crash.
The precarious nature of the financial boom was illustrated earlier this week by the stock selloff around the collapse of investment firm Archegos Capital that resulted in massive losses for major banks. The degree to which the failure of even a relatively small firm could threaten to spark a panic in the markets testifies to the highly leveraged and unstable character of the world financial system, inflated by the infusion of ultra-cheap money.
In a sign of continuing social distress, food banks report no let-up in demand. According to a local news report, the Alameda County Food Bank in the San Francisco Bay Area is continuing to see high demand. In March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, the food bank distributed 3.2 million pounds of food. In March 2021, that number was 6.0 million. The food bank went from helping one in five residents of the county to rising over the course of the past year to one in four.
At the Mission Food Hub in San Francisco, donations are collected for farm workers. It has gone from distributing food to 300 families a year to over 9,000. "The pandemic has caused them to get COVID and they can't work. And when they can't work they get no money. They don't have savings and 401Ks," organizer Roberto Hernandez told KTVU News. "You have people who lost their jobs a year ago. And they won't be able to go back to those jobs because a lot of those businesses are gone."
According to a report released by the Georgia Food Bank Association, an additional 344,000 residents of the state have been forced into food insecurity since the start of the pandemic. The report said that 1.7 million people in the state face food insecurity, including 562,000 children.
Nationwide food bank network Feeding America projects that 1.4 million New York City residents will struggle to secure adequate food this year. Enrollment in food stamps had increased 12 percent to 1.66 million city residents as of January.
Food Bank for New York City, which distributes food through a network of 1,000 food banks and charities, has seen a 61 percent increase in demand over the prior year. Zac Hall, vice president of programs for the nonprofit, told the Wall Street Journal, “I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think the same level of response that we have today is going to at least be needed for the next couple of years.”
The official unemployment rate fell to 6.0, still well around the pre-pandemic figure. However, a more realistic measure of the unemployment rate, which takes into account so-called discouraged workers and those forced to work part time who want full time work, stands at 10.7 percent. Known as the U6 rate, this figure gives a more accurate picture of the degree of social distress.
Reflecting the reentry of lower-paid workers into the labor force, average hourly earnings fell slightly in March.
In another indication of the depth of the social crisis, more than 4.2 million have been out of work for more than six months, and that number rose slightly in March from the previous month.
The largest job gains in March came from leisure and hospitality with a 280,000 increase. Bars and restaurants added 176,000 jobs, while arts, entertainment and recreation saw 64,000 new hires. These three sectors, typically low-wage and seasonal, accounted for well over half of the March job gains.
Local, state and private education added 190,000 jobs in March as schools reopened in cities across the US under the pressure of the Biden administration and Democratic Party politicians, who see the schools as a child care service for potential workers. This homicidal policy will only serve to add new fuel to the pandemic, which despite vaccinations, is surging in Michigan and a number of other states.
Construction added 110,000 jobs in March, while manufacturing added 53,000. Manufacturing is down 515,000 jobs since February 2020. Altogether, through March the US economy is still down 8.4 million jobs since before the pandemic.
While some economists predict that April will also show strong employment gains and an optimistic report by the Wall Street Journal predicted monthly job gains averaging 500,000 for the rest of the year, that would leave overall unemployment below pre-pandemic levels. According to the Federal Open Market Committee, a return to the 3.5 percent unemployment rate prior to the pandemic would take until the end of 2023 in the unlikely event there are not intervening economic shocks.
Another measure, the labor force participation rate, which measures the percentage of the population employed or actively seeking work, was little changed in March at 61.5 percent. That compares to the prepandemic level of 63 percent. The number of workers forced to work part time who wanted full time employment stood at 5.8 million, 1.4 million higher than February 2020. The number of discouraged workers stood at 523,000, unchanged from the previous month.
The release of the jobs report follows the publication of the Department of Labor report on weekly unemployment claims that showed an increase of 61,000 state claims from the previous week to 719,000. This marks more than one year of historically unprecedented numbers of new unemployment filings. In addition there were 237,025 new claims filed under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program that provides assistance to contract and self-employed workers not covered by regular unemployment benefits.
In the face of the rising employment numbers, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell rushed to reassure markets that the cash spigot would be left open despite signs of an improving economy. The US central bank has been propping up equities markets through the purchase of $120 billion in bonds each month while keeping interest rates near zero. Were this flow of money to be stopped or even slow down, the inflated stock market would likely crash.
The precarious nature of the financial boom was illustrated earlier this week by the stock selloff around the collapse of investment firm Archegos Capital that resulted in massive losses for major banks. The degree to which the failure of even a relatively small firm could threaten to spark a panic in the markets testifies to the highly leveraged and unstable character of the world financial system, inflated by the infusion of ultra-cheap money.
In a sign of continuing social distress, food banks report no let-up in demand. According to a local news report, the Alameda County Food Bank in the San Francisco Bay Area is continuing to see high demand. In March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, the food bank distributed 3.2 million pounds of food. In March 2021, that number was 6.0 million. The food bank went from helping one in five residents of the county to rising over the course of the past year to one in four.
At the Mission Food Hub in San Francisco, donations are collected for farm workers. It has gone from distributing food to 300 families a year to over 9,000. "The pandemic has caused them to get COVID and they can't work. And when they can't work they get no money. They don't have savings and 401Ks," organizer Roberto Hernandez told KTVU News. "You have people who lost their jobs a year ago. And they won't be able to go back to those jobs because a lot of those businesses are gone."
According to a report released by the Georgia Food Bank Association, an additional 344,000 residents of the state have been forced into food insecurity since the start of the pandemic. The report said that 1.7 million people in the state face food insecurity, including 562,000 children.
Nationwide food bank network Feeding America projects that 1.4 million New York City residents will struggle to secure adequate food this year. Enrollment in food stamps had increased 12 percent to 1.66 million city residents as of January.
Food Bank for New York City, which distributes food through a network of 1,000 food banks and charities, has seen a 61 percent increase in demand over the prior year. Zac Hall, vice president of programs for the nonprofit, told the Wall Street Journal, “I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think the same level of response that we have today is going to at least be needed for the next couple of years.”
US and Iran Finally Start Talking About Deal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZqCZqKu8tQ&ab_channel=HardLensMedia
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