01 December 19
Bernie Vs. the Machine
Alexander Burns, The New York Times
Burns writes: "'No longer will they call my victory a fluke,' Mr. Sanders, then 41, wrote in a letter after the election, to a city-planning expert at Cornell University."
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Supporters of impeachment rally at the Capitol in Washington on Thursday, two days after a formal impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump was begun. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
The Takeaway From the Impeachment Hearings: Our Constitution Has Failed
Chris Edelson, In These Times
Edelson writes: "When the House Intelligence Committee began holding hearings as part of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump, some media coverage suggested the proceedings lacked enough 'pizzazz ... to capture public attention.'"
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Metal worker Delmer Joel Ramirez Palma, standing with his son, survived the collapse of the Hard Rock Hotel in New Orleans. (photo: Tania Bueso/WP)
Derek Hawkins and Kim Bellware, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "A metal worker considered a 'crucial witness' in the collapse at the Hard Rock Hotel construction site in New Orleans last month was deported Friday to his native Honduras."
Lawyers for Delmer Joel Ramirez Palma said the 38-year-old may have been targeted for deportation because he voiced concerns about the project — a claim immigration officials have denied.
Palma escaped the 18-story structure by jumping between floors as the steel and concrete from the upper floors came crashing down around him. The Oct. 12 catastrophe left three workers dead and dozens injured.
Two days later, as he was recovering, federal immigration agents arrested Palma while he was fishing at a national wildlife refuge.
Palma was not authorized to work in the United States and had been fighting a removal order since 2016. He was scheduled to check in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in mid-November.
Palma, who worked construction in New Orleans for 17 years, had repeatedly reported safety issues at the Hard Rock site to supervisors and was always told to go back to work, according to his lawyers, who helped him file a complaint with the Labor Department.
The day before the collapse, his lawyers said, he told some of his co-workers that he noticed the floor underneath him was moving, as if being shaken in an earthquake. When they discussed what happened later, they were within earshot of several supervisors, according to his lawyers.
Shortly after the incident, Palma spoke in a video interview with a Spanish-language news outlet about the collapse and his escape, and joined a lawsuit with other injured workers against the contractors and developers.
After spending weeks at an ICE staging facility in Alexandria, La., Palma was put on a Friday morning deportation flight to Honduras, ICE spokesman Bryan D. Cox confirmed to The Washington Post on Saturday.
Cox called claims that Palma was targeted for speaking out about the conditions at the construction site “false” and “wildly irresponsible.”
“Mr. Ramirez-Palma’s latest application for a stay of removal had already been denied by ICE on Oct. 3, more than a week before the incident cited by his supporters,” Cox said in an emailed statement.
The New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, which is assisting Palma with his labor case with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, said Friday that Palma’s deportation “leaves every one of us less safe.”
“The next time a building collapses, we will wonder if it could have been prevented if our federal agencies had prioritized answers and accountability for the survivors of the Hard Rock, we will wonder if the same bad actors are to blame, and we will wonder if potential whistleblowers kept silent because they saw what happened to Joel,” the center’s spokesman, Julien Burns, said in a statement to The Post.
Days before Palma’s deportation, the secretary of the Louisiana Workforce Commission asked the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, to release Palma and stop his deportation proceedings.
In a letter to William P. Joyce, director of ICE’s New Orleans field office, Secretary Ava Dejoie said Palma was a “crucial witness” in the ongoing investigation.
“His detention and pending deportation hamper the ongoing investigations,” Dejoie wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The Post. “If he is deported, the public may never know what key information is being deported with him. The investigations will undoubtedly suffer.”
Agents from the Fish and Wildlife Service questioned Palma as he was fishing at Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge. When he was unable to show them a valid driver’s license, they called Border Patrol agents, who arrested him.
Palma’s deportation is a striking illustration of the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on undocumented immigrants. In New Orleans, where the Latino population has more than doubled in the past two decades, activists and lawyers said they believe it has had a chilling effect on immigrant laborers, potentially discouraging them from cooperating with investigators, as The Post has reported.
Palma’s arrest also raised questions about the status of a long-standing agreement between the Department of Homeland Security and the Labor Department. Under the agreement, which was crafted during the Obama administration, ICE is not supposed to arrest workers who are involved in disputes that are being investigated by the Labor Department.
Amazon warehouse. (photo: VICE)
Alex Lubben, VICE
Lubben writes: "Indiana officials coached Amazon on how to downplay an investigation into a worker's death at one of the company's warehouses, according to a whistleblower who spoke to Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. And Indiana ultimately buried the investigation entirely as it tried to woo Amazon into opening its second headquarters in the state."
Other cities and states offered Amazon lots of incentives, including helipads, cash, and exclusive airport lounges for company executives in an effort to win the bidding for Amazon’s second headquarters — HQ2, as it became known. Indiana, however, had something else to offer: amnesty in the case of a worker’s death, according to the whistleblower.
The investigation was allegedly tamped down through a chain of command that reached all the way to the governor’s office, and the state coaching the company on how to reduce fines related to the worker’s death. But now, the workplace safety inspector who investigated the worker's death is sounding the alarm on the company’s poor track record on safety in its warehouses. And he says he’s got tapes to prove it.
“We are doing what Amazon has asked us to do: coordinating efforts with all interested regions of the state to put our best bid forward,” Gov. Eric Holcomb said in the statement about seeking the bid.
When Phillip Lee Terry grabbed his wrench and slid under a forklift to try to fix a piece of equipment in September 2017, the 1,200-pound piece of equipment dropped down and crushed the 59-year-old grandfather. Two hours went by before one of his coworkers saw the blood seeping out from underneath the lift.
The next day, an inspector, John Stallone, from Indiana’s occupational safety agency showed up at the warehouse to investigate the death. He quickly figured out that a pole should’ve been used to prop up the equipment and asked Amazon for documentation that Terry had been trained on how to use the equipment.
But Terry had only been informally trained on the job by a coworker. And Terry’s coworkers said in signed statements that the culture of safety at the warehouse was lax. The emphasis, instead, was on getting the product moved as quickly as possible.
“There’s no training, there’s no safety. It’s ‘Get ’er done,’” one of the coworkers said in a statement, according to Reveal.
Stallone issued four workplace safety citations to the company, which carried a total fine of $28,000. Then the pushback from his bosses started.
The head of Indiana’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Julie Alexander, suggested on a call with Amazon high-ups that they could group the citations together to lower the fines — and pitched a partnership between her agency and Amazon to promote workplace best-practices in the logistics industry, according to Reveal.
Concerned about what he was hearing, Stallone secretly recorded the conversation.
He later met with Indiana Labor Commissioner Rick Ruble and Indiana Gov. Holcomb, who allegedly told Stallone how much it would mean to the state to win the HQ2 bid. Both officials deny the meeting ever happened.
Stallone resigned on Dec. 6, 2017 and soon sent an email to a worker at the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration that suggested that the reason his investigation had been dropped was because Indiana wanted to win the HQ2 bid.
That same day, Amazon donated $1,000 to Holcomb’s reelection campaign — the company hadn’t donated to him before and hasn’t since.
A few months later, after Amazon appealed the citations, the state deleted all of them.
“There’s a dramatic level of under-recording of safety incidents across the industry — we recognized this in 2016 and began to take an aggressive stance on recording injuries no matter how big or small,” the company said in a statement about the investigation.
But this isn’t the first time the company has come under fire for its safety practices. Last year, 24 Amazon workers were hospitalized after a robotic arm punctured a can of bear spray. In September, another worker died on the job after suffering a heart attack in the warehouse. He laid on the floor for 20 minutes before receiving any medical attention.
And just this week, Gizmodo got its hands on leaked internal Amazon documents that show workplace injuries at the company’s Staten Island warehouse occur at three times the logistics industry average.
Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke talks to the media at the Louisiana Secretary of State's office after registering his candidacy for the November 8 ballot as a Republican in Baton Rouge, La., on, July 22, 2016. (photo: Max Becherer/AP)
Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
Schwarz writes: "My troubles began last March when I made a joke on Twitter about Fox News host Tucker Carlson. I have some advice for you: Do not ever do this."
The short version of the story is that I made fun of Tucker Carlson; Carlson’s fans notified David Duke, the former KKK Grand Wizard and current Twitter personality; Duke dug up an earlier joke I’d made in 2015; Duke’s minions reported the 2015 joke to Twitter; and Twitter told me my 2015 joke violated its Terms of Service and my account would be frozen unless I voluntarily deleted it. Now, eight months later, I’ve finally given in and bowed to Twitter’s degrading demands.
The long version of the story is below. The details are as fascinating as any 1,000-tweet Twitter thread. In other words, if you end up reading it all, you will feel queasy and have no one to blame but yourself.
The whole saga has been an education for me in corporate America’s cravenness, as well as the insoluble problems of the internet. But more than anything, I’ve learned this: David Duke is unbelievably stupid.
Back in March, the media monitoring organization Media Matters dug up some old radio appearances in which Carlson said, among other things, that the people of Iraq are “semi-literate primitive monkeys.” Ha ha! You have to admit that is funny, especially given that the U.S. has killed at least a million Iraqis.
When criticized, Carlson responded that he was being attacked by “the people who write our movies and our sitcoms.” This language is coded about as deeply as it is when you make your password “passw0rd.” No one will be able to crack that.
Hank Skinner and his wife, Carol, are no strangers to pain, having collectively experienced multiple illnesses and surgeries. Hank relies on a fentanyl patch but is now being forced to lower his dosage. (photo: Salwan Georges/WP)
James D. Hudson, The Washington Post
Hudson writes: "One of the first things I learned about pain was its value."
EXCERPT:
Fixing our health-care system isn’t as easy. Financial incentives are set up to increase health-care delivery, not the overall health of the population, and Medicare-for-all wouldn’t address this problem. But one fix is for insurers to scrub the rules that make it cheaper for patients to continue failed pain treatments, surgeries, injections and medications. Instead, they should push for conservative care, such as physical therapy, pain neuroscience education and multidisciplinary pain rehabilitation programs, which are low-risk, high-reward enterprises that focus on improving a patient’s function. These interventions require an intensive period of treatment, but they’ve been shown to be cost-effective, giving patients a shot at becoming the people they used to be.
A plastic bottle. (photo: PBS)
Most Americans Would Pay More to Avoid Using Plastic
Laura Santhanam, PBS News Hour
Santhanam writes: "Two-thirds of Americans are willing to pay more for everyday items made out of environmentally sustainable materials instead of single-use plastic, according to a survey from PBS NewsHour and Marist Poll."
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