The layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services slashed the staffs of major federal aging, disability and anti-poverty programs, leaving the future of those programs uncertain.

At least 40% of staff got layoff notices and many were turned away at the front door Tuesday when they showed up for work at the Administration for Community Living, or ACL, which coordinates federal policy on aging and disability. That's according to the agency's former director under the Biden Administration, Alison Barkoff, who says she talked to multiple members of her former staff.

The agency funds programs that run senior centers and distribute 216 million meals a year to older and disabled people through the Meals on Wheels program.

"The programs that ACL implements improve the lives of literally tens of millions of older adults, people with disabilities and their families and caregivers," says Barkoff, now director of a health law program at George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health. "There's no way to have these RIFs and not impact the programs and the people who rely on them."

Last week, the announcement of the coming layoffs at HHS said that ACL's responsibilities would go to different parts of HHS.

But Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's guide for reshaping government, had suggested ACL take on work on special education services once the Department of Education was dismantled. It's not clear where that work will be done now.

In addition, every staffer was laid off from the Division of Energy Assistance, according to two employees who lost their jobs on Tuesday, Andrew Germain and Vikki Pretlow. The office runs the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, which helps 5.9 million low-income households pay heat and cooling bills and pay for home repairs to boost energy efficiency.

The staffers said layoffs of about 20 workers came as a surprise and they expressed concern about whether the program would continue once funding runs out at the end of September and impoverished people face rising heating bills in fall and winter.

LIHEAP provides "life-saving services," says Germain. One way the funds are used is to help low-income people pay their electric bills when they rely upon oxygen or other medical devices or need to keep the refrigerator running to store insulin or other medicines.

Germain ran compliance monitoring to make sure states used the LIHEAP money correctly. He said fraud is rare. But LIHEAP was scrutinized by Project 2025. It noted a "loophole" – fixed by Congress more than ten years ago, in 2014 – that was used by about 10 states to give minimal energy assistance in a way that then qualified impoverished people for a bigger SNAP, or food stamp, payment.

Congress appropriated $4.1 billion to LIHEAP in fiscal year 2024. Germain says without federal staff to run the program, it's unclear how it will continue after the current appropriation ends in September.

Pretlow, who lost her job as a program specialist in the LIHEAP office, said: "You can be paid much more in a different place, you can be praised more in a different place, you can be appreciated more in a different place. But the people I worked with have a great heart for service."

Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and an international banking group have quietly concluded that climate change will likely exceed the Paris Agreement's 2 degree goal and are examining how to maintain profits.

Two appeals courts have recently rejected efforts by private parties to use copyright to restrict access to the laws that most directly affect ordinary citizens: regulations that ensure our homes, workplaces, devices, and many other products, are safe and fit for purpose. Apparently hoping the third time will be the charm, a standards organization is asking the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to break ranks and hold that a private party that helps develop a law also gets to own that law. In an amicus brief filed with co-counsel Abigail Burton and Samuel Silver of Welsh & Recker, P.C., on behalf of multiple entities— including Watch Duty, iFixit, Public.Resource.Org, and multiple library associations—EFF urged the court to instead join the judicial consensus and recognize that no one owns the law.

EFF urged the court to join the judicial consensus and recognize that no one owns the law.

This case concerns UpCodes, a company that has created a database of building codes—like the National Electrical Code—that includes codes incorporated by reference into law. ASTM, a private organization that coordinated the development of some of those codes, insists that it retains copyright in them even after they have been adopted into law, and therefore has the right to control how the public accesses and shares them. Fortunately, neither the Constitution nor the Copyright Act support that theory. Faced with similar claims, some courts, including the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, have held that the codes lose copyright protection when they are incorporated into law. Others, like the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in a case EFF defended on behalf of Public.Resource.Org, have held that, whether or not the legal status of the standards changes once they are incorporated into law, making them fully accessible and usable online is a lawful fair use. A federal court in Pennsylvania followed the latter path in this case, finding that UpCodes’ database was a protected fair use.

The Third Circuit should affirm the ruling, preferably on the alternative ground that standards incorporated into law are necessarily promoted to the public domain. The internet has democratized access to law, making it easier than ever for the public —from journalists to organizers to safety professionals to ordinary concerned citizens —to understand, comment on, and share the myriad regulations that bind us. That work is particularly essential where those regulations are crafted by private parties and made mandatory by regulators with limited public oversight and increasingly limited staffing. Copyright law should not be read to impede it.

The Supreme Court has explained that “every citizen is presumed to know the law, and it needs no argument to show that all should have free access” to it. Apparently, it needs some argument after all, but it is past time for the debate to end.

At midnight one day in spring 2023, a team of animal rights investigators decked out in biosecurity gear snuck onto a massive chicken farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, an hour and a half drive from Baltimore. The operation was raising some 75,000 birds for Mountaire Farms, the nation’s fourth-largest chicken company.

When the investigator Joseph Allman entered one of the facility’s sprawling barns, he found chickens packed wall to wall, including three dead, decaying birds. The place smelled “awful and noxious,” he said, and as he waded through the barn’s “blanket of chickens,” Allman found plenty more dead animals. Right outside the barn, Allman told me recently, there was a massive pile of manure “completely littered with dead bodies and body parts.”

Over the following year, the investigators returned to the farm and also visited another operation in the area raising birds for Mountaire, where they found similar conditions. In January, Sherstin Rosenberg — a veterinarian who reviewed the footage — wrote that there were multiple birds “unable to reach food or water due to severe limb deformity and disease, or because they are stuck on their backs and unable to get up.” Several dead birds, the footage showed, had been “left to decompose for days to weeks,” according to Rosenberg.

The investigators also obtained a trove of inspection documents from two Mountaire Farms slaughterhouses through a Freedom of Information Act request, which revealed instances of birds being scalded alive, buried alive, suffocated to death, amputated, diseased, and contaminated with feces.

Bonnie Klapper, a former assistant US attorney, reviewed the investigators’ footage and wrote an opinion in January arguing that the conditions documented constitute criminal animal cruelty under Maryland state law. The activists have sent Klapper’s opinion and Rosenberg’s veterinary analysis to a number of county and state authorities requesting an investigation into the company and charges for animal cruelty. They haven’t received much interest.

Mountaire alleges that early one morning in mid-February, Allman and his colleague Adam Durand posed as AT&T contractors to gain access to a Mountaire slaughterhouse in Delaware. They were later arrested for criminal impersonation — a charge which was soon dropped — and trespassing, to which they agreed to a plea deal to remove the charge from their records in exchange for one year of no contact with Mountaire, Allman told me. Mountaire sued the two in early March for trespassing.

“This lawsuit isn’t about protecting their business — it’s about silencing whistleblowers,” Allman wrote to me in response to the lawsuit. Durand declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Mountaire Farms declined an interview request for this story, but emailed a statement to Vox. The company said it requires its contract farmers to “follow sound poultry management practices that conform to practices of good animal husbandry and animal welfare.” Mountaire declined to comment further on the allegations lodged by Allman and his fellow investigators.

However grisly the investigation into Mountaire’s operations was, they’re far from unusual. At US chicken factory farms, overcrowded, unhygienic conditions are so common that 6 percent of the nation’s 9 billion chickens raised for meat — chickens that have been bred to be unhealthily large — die on the farm each year before they can even be trucked to the slaughterhouse. That adds up to more than half a billion unnecessary deaths.

The alleged conditions on Mountaire’s chicken facilities show one of the major ills of the factory farming system in the US, one shared by other companies in the industry: an almost willful disregard for the welfare of the animals they raise. But Mountaire also demonstrates to a greater extent than any other poultry company a less widely known way in which the factory farming system’s tentacles work their way into American life: the industry’s ties to a right-wing, deregulatory political agenda.

While Republican politicians and meat companies have long been intertwined — almost 80 percent of the industry’s political contributions in the 2024 election cycle went to Republicans — Mountaire and its wealthy but little-known CEO Ronald Cameron show just how deep those ties can go. Cameron, who at times has been a top donor to President Donald Trump, far outspends others in the poultry industry in an apparent effort to bend US politics toward his hard-right beliefs, and seemingly to protect and expand a poultry empire that produces roughly 1 out of every 13 chickens consumed in America today, even if relatively few people have ever heard of it.

How Mountaire Farms has fueled a right-wing business and political agenda

In 2016, Cameron and his wife gave millions to Trump-aligned PACs, which made him one of the biggest donors to Trump. Across the 2020 and 2024 election cycles, Cameron gave another $4.7 million.

Cameron has also contributed to several current and former House Freedom Caucus members and far-right Senate candidates, as well as over $14 million to political action committees (PACs) linked to the Koch Brothers and over $2 million to PACs operated by the Club for Growth.

All told, Cameron has given around $75 million to candidates, PACs, and state parties since 2014 — over 99 percent of it to Republicans — making him one of the 50 biggest political contributors in recent election cycles.

While the direction of Cameron’s dollars isn’t unusual in the meat industry, the scale of giving dwarfs that of his competitors. Since 1990, the largest chicken companies have given — through their employees — anything from tens of thousands to a few million dollars each, with similar spending in direct lobbying. (Mountaire, it should be noted, doesn’t spend on lobbying at all.) The only company that comes close is Tyson Foods, which has spent $35 million on lobbying since 1998 and whose employees have given approximately $7.7 million to political candidates and organizations since 1990. However, Tyson Foods is a much bigger company than Mountaire, with 20 times the annual revenue. It’s a top producer of beef and pork, too.

All the while, according to Glassdoor salary reporting, Mountaire Farms’ frontline slaughterhouse employees make minimum wage or slightly above it to perform one of the most dangerous jobs in America. Mountaire workers have accused the company of retaliation, discrimination, denial of bathroom breaks, union-busting, wage-fixing, and exposure to harmful chemicals. In 2020, an employee interviewed by the New Yorker called the work “slavery.” Mountaire did not respond to Vox for a request for comment about allegations made by its employees.

The company has also been accused of creating severe environmental pollution. In 2021, Mountaire agreed to a historic $205 million deal to settle a lawsuit alleging that one of its slaughterhouses had contaminated the drinking water and air quality of nearby residents. “While Mountaire does not believe that it caused any damage to any of the plaintiffs, it chose to settle the case in order to achieve a final resolution and to allow construction of a new wastewater treatment plant to proceed,” the company said in a statement at the time.

Environmental pollution is a consistent problem for the meat industry, and Cameron’s political generosity has coincided with beneficial political action for Mountaire on exactly that subject.

In Maryland, where corporations are restricted from giving political candidates large sums of money, Mountaire funneled $250,000 into the Republican Governors Association days before the 2014 election, which it spent on ads to elect Republican Maryland governor Larry Hogan.

On inauguration day, Hogan rescinded regulations pertaining to how much animal manure can be spread onto crop fields as fertilizer — a notorious source of water pollution on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where Allman and his colleagues investigated Mountaire chicken operations. Weeks later, Hogan proposed a watered-down version with a loophole for the poultry industry. A spokesperson for Hogan told the Wall Street Journal that Hogan “had no knowledge of [Mountaire’s] involvement with the Republican Governors Association.”

In the middle of April 2020, Trump picked Cameron to serve as an economic adviser to the White House on its strategy to reopen parts of the economy in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Two weeks later, Trump signed an executive order mandating that slaughterhouses remain open to their extent possible, even as they became Covid hot spots — including Mountaire slaughterhouses.

That same day, the Department of Labor issued a statement that essentially immunized meat companies from being held accountable if they didn’t adhere to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid-19 guidelines so long as they had at least demonstrated a “good faith” effort to do so. Around the same time, the US Department of Agriculture permitted 15 slaughterhouses — including one of Mountaire’s — to speed up their slaughter lines from 140 birds per minute to 175.

Why the meat industry gives so much to Republicans

Mountaire may stand out in the size of its contributions to right-wing politicians and groups, but the broader meat and dairy industry gives overwhelmingly to Republicans.

The industry’s political favoritism can be explained in part by geography; animal agriculture is concentrated in rural states where politicians are much more likely to be Republican. But it can also be explained in part by ideology; Congressional Republicans tend to prefer deregulation, which benefits meat, dairy, and egg companies.

Cameron and his company — along with his competitors — benefit from deregulation at each link in the supply chain that Congress and regulatory agencies could change but don’t. Poultry farms are exempt from numerous animal welfare laws and are largely exempt from key environmental laws. The Department of Labor, across Republican and Democrat administrations, has failed to keep slaughterhouse abuses in check. A lot of the farmers that raise chickens for big poultry companies get screwed over, too.

But while Republicans may financially benefit disproportionately from the industry’s largesse, Democrats tend to be anything but tough on the meat industry.

“While conservatives have consistently pushed more aggressive, pro-agribusiness policies,” food policy expert Nathan Rosenberg and journalist Bryce Wilson Stucki wrote in a 2017 story for The Counter, “liberals have often responded with pro-agribusiness policies of their own, even when that meant undermining their own natural allies: small and mid-sized farmers, farm workers, rural minority populations, and the small, independent businesses they support.” I saw that reality myself when I wrote last year about the cozy relationship between the meat industry and Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris’s VP pick.

There’s no clear path to breaking the meat industry’s grip over American politics on the horizon, but there is something anyone can do — starting today — to push back against the kinds of horrific allegations made against Mountaire and other poultry giants: Eat less chicken.

In 2022, the US raised and slaughtered a record-breaking 9.2 billion of them — 24 per person after accounting for poultry exports. Chicken may be branded as a healthier, more sustainable alternative to beef and pork, but its mass production and consumption — whether from Mountaire or its competitors — relies on unimaginable human and animal suffering.

“We’re up against a really big system that seems really entrenched right now,” said Durand, one of the activists, “and we are just trying to do whatever we can to disrupt that.”

We the People, endeavoring in an ever more perfect Union. Establish the Progressive Party of the United States. Party members will emphasize the value of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. As these are understood to be the foundation of Freedom.

For too long, has outside influence driven our politics. We seek to end Citizens United. The only money in politics should be our own.

The Two Party System, must come to an end. We shall seek to have Ranked Voting in each State of the Union.

We will seek a tax rate of no less, than ninety percent. On the wealthiest in this Country.

Higher taxes on the ultra-wealthy, along with a robust corporate tax reform. Will provide the necessary funds to enhance our existing infrastructure, and new national projects.

Of these projects, are the creation of a High Speed Rail Network, and heavy investments for public sector research into AI and Fusion technologies.

We believe that a strong military is needed for defense. However, wars of aggression and conquest are counter to the peace that we seek.

An educated populace, is a strong populace. We will seek to make higher education, available and free to all People.

We believe that we are a part of this world, and shall seek to restore and maintain our relations with our long term allies.

Discord: https://discord.gg/SYfpZhYQEm

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27808013

February 28, 2025

"On February 7, about a dozen masked men, some of them carrying AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, drove a U-Haul truck to a freeway overpass at Lincoln Heights’ edge. The men, dressed in black, shouted racist slurs and waived black flags with red swastikas on them. Enraged Lincoln Heights residents soon approached to counter protest. Local police who converged on the scene from the nearby town of #Evandale, across the highway, appeared cordial toward some of the white supremacists. As the crowd of Lincoln Heights residents swelled, the ultra rightists got back on their truck and drove off. Counter protesters burned the Nazi flags left behind. "

The Tlaib amendments to the DETERRENT Act would have required universities to disclose investments in countries defending war crimes or genocide cases at the International Court of Justice or countries whose leaders are facing active arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court, among other criteria, and to disclose donations from countries facing similar conditions.

The House voted down the amendment on investments by a 410-3 vote, with only Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) siding with Tlaib. It voted down the other amendment on donations by a 404-4-1 vote, with Omar, Pressley and Rep. Al Green (D-TX) voting with Tlaib and Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) voting present.

Grieving Palestinian Americans are demanding an arms embargo from their lawmakers as Israel escalates its genocide.

History department power couple Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore and philosophy professor Jason Stanley will begin teaching at the University of Toronto’s renowned Munk School in fall 2025.

President Donald Trump’s recent election executive order is more than just a lawless overstep of presidential power — it’s another example of the ways in which Trump’s Justice Department has become an extension of the White House and is involving itself in all of the President’s grievances.

“Free, fair, and honest elections unmarred by fraud, errors, or suspicion are fundamental to maintaining our constitutional Republic,” the executive order, issued Tuesday, reads. “The right of American citizens to have their votes properly counted and tabulated, without illegal dilution, is vital to determining the rightful winner of an election.”

The sweeping 12-page order contains a number of provisions, including a documentary proof of citizenship requirement to vote in federal elections as well as a requirement that all ballots be received by Election Day – both of which fall outside of the executive branch’s authority to mandate.

But, there’s also a section, buried deeper in the order, that, if implemented, would give Trump’s Justice Department the authority to pick and choose what states get federal funding for election administration. It would require states to loop the DOJ in on supposed violations of election law that it encounters. But it also mandates that basic information about voter roll maintenance be shared with the DOJ as well.

If states are unwilling to enter into what is referred to as an “information-sharing agreement” with the Attorney General regarding “suspected violations of state and federal elections laws,” the Attorney General is allowed to withhold grants and other funds from those states, the executive order says.

“If there is any effort to apply an entirely new criteria to receiving funding that is not in any law that Congress passed, I think that’s likely to be found to be an excess use of power by the president,” David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research similarly TPM during a media briefing this week.

In the words of the order, if there is a break in this information pipeline between the state and the DOJ, the Attorney General is given the authority to “review for potential withholding of grants and other funds that the Department awards and distributes, in the Department’s discretion, to State and local governments for law enforcement and other purposes, as consistent with applicable law.”

Election experts confirmed to TPM that this means state election officials may lose the funding they need to hold elections in their states for not agreeing to share information about routine election administration and voter roll maintenance with the Justice Department.

“There is this kind of extensive command for the attorney general not only to search out prosecution of election crimes, but to engage in all this information sharing to try to basically supplant states in their role,” Danielle Lang, Campaign Legal Center’s Senior Director of Voting Rights, explained in an interview with TPM. “But there is this kind of attempt to really force the Department of Justice to be front and center and demand all this information from the states and penalize the states that do not engage in this kind of joint weaponization of prosecution.”

The scope of the information that the EO is directing states to share with the DOJ is broad. If implemented, this “information sharing agreement” would require states to share information on people who have committed amorphous “election fraud,” as well as information on people who registered to vote more than once.

Registering to vote more than once, which more often than not happens because a voter’s old registration was never cancelled, is not actually a crime and is a common mistake that is cleaned up as part of state election officials’ routine voter roll maintenance duties.

“Duplicate registrations end up on the rolls for any number of reasons,” Lang added. “And all of that is just typical list maintenance and it’s not necessarily criminal and in fact is extremely common.”

Why are we taxing working people more than billionaires?

Mark Lowen considered ‘threat to public order’ after reports on nationwide anti-government demonstrations

original source

For months, we urged Senate Democratic leadership to use every tool at their disposal to fight back and raise the alarm. We asked them to stay unified against Trump’s nominees – a cabinet of billionaires and extremists who openly flout the law. We asked them to organize against Maga bills such as the Laken Riley Act, which expands Trump’s mass deportation powers. We asked them to use every procedural tool to halt business as usual. All too often the response has been: “We’re in the minority, we don’t have the votes.”

This argument collapsed with the passage of a funding bill packed with Maga priorities. The funding bill required 60 votes to pass, giving Democrats rare leverage. They could have demanded safeguards against Musk’s raid of the government or at least stopped Republicans from making things worse. This was perhaps their only real chance to take a stand this year.

Schumer’s defense was that avoiding a shutdown would prevent further damage and stop Trump’s rise. But those with the most at stake disagreed. Litigators fighting Trump’s legal battles said passing the continuing resolution hurt their cases more than a shutdown. The federal employees’ union acknowledged that while a shutdown would be painful, a blank check for Trump to continue his rampage was worse. Yes, a shutdown would be an opportunity for Trump to wreak havoc on federal agencies – but he is doing precisely that already while all the lights are on. From the Center for American Progress to House Democrats to Never Trumpers, a broad coalition agreed: Democrats needed to take a stand.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27521725

Generated Summary:

Main Topic: The video discusses the debate within the Democratic party regarding messaging on progressive economic policies and their potential impact on electability. A key focus is on whether combining progressive economic policies (like Medicare for All) with more culturally divisive issues (like transgender athletes in women's sports) is a winning strategy.

Key Points:

• Steven Ratner, a wealthy Democratic donor and advisor, argues that progressive economic policies like Medicare for All are unpopular and should be separated from culturally divisive issues to improve the party's chances of winning elections. He believes that tying these together alienates moderate voters.
• The video's host counters Ratner's argument, suggesting that Ratner's perspective is self-serving, as he doesn't want to pay for policies like Medicare for All. The host argues that the Democratic party should focus on the economic inequality caused by the wealthy and corporations, rather than getting bogged down in cultural issues.
• The discussion highlights the tension between progressive economic policies and more culturally conservative voters. The core question is whether the Democratic party can successfully appeal to both groups simultaneously.
• The video uses Ratner's significant wealth and political connections to illustrate the potential influence of wealthy donors on the party's messaging and policy decisions.
• The video suggests that the deliberate conflation of progressive economic policies with cultural issues is a strategic tactic used to undermine support for both.

Highlights:

• A debate between a wealthy Democratic donor and the video's host regarding the effectiveness of different political messaging strategies.
• The use of clips from various news sources and interviews to support the arguments presented.
• The revelation of Ratner's substantial net worth, highlighting a potential conflict of interest in his political advice.
• The video's concluding message emphasizes the need for the Democratic party to focus on economic inequality and avoid getting sidetracked by divisive cultural issues.

About Channel:

the post-civilization left

Due Dissidence is a multimedia one-stop shop for left politics and gallows humor in written, audio, and video form.

The background is Blue.

The words are MAGA.

I wonder if there is a term for this.