LABOR, ECONOMY & THE CLIMATE - page 2

Republicans look set this week to fill the vacancy on President Trump’s embattled National Labor Relations Board. The Senate on Tuesday voted 50-47 to limit debate on John Ring, the nominee to fill the seat previously held by former NLRB chair Phil Miscimarra. Ring is currently a partner with Morgan Lewis & Bockius, a union-busting management side law firm, based in Philadelphia. Some of his recent major clients include Amazon, Marriott, Xerox, and Google, according to financial disclosures. Miscimarra stepped down in December, after quickly… Keep Reading

Heavy-handed racialized punishment starts at an early age, the Government Accountability Office confirmed on Wednesday. The federal watchdog released a report finding that Black students are over-represented among severely reprimanded elementary, middle and high school students. While Black children and teenagers make up 15.5 percent of all public school students, they’re disproportionately represented among the number of students who have received out-of-school suspensions (38.7 percent), school-related arrests (34.9 percent), and expulsions (30.1 percent). And while boys are over-represented among students who receive major punishments, Black… Keep Reading

President Trump’s top environmental regulator on Tuesday unveiled his proposal to reverse Obama administration standards on vehicle emissions. Scott Pruitt touted the move in an announcement at the Environmental Protection Agency, amid a new storm of controversy over his ethics practices. “This President has had tremendous courage in saying to the American people that America is going to be put first,” Pruitt said. The move, if upheld, will cancel new rules on models slated to come out in the middle of next decade. Pruitt has… Keep Reading

House Democrats cried foul as their Republican counterparts rammed through legislation to keep the government funded until September. And then most of them supported the underlying bill, anyway. The lower chamber passed a $1.3-trillion omnibus funding bill on Thursday, in a 256-167 vote, one day before the last short-term funding bill was set to expire. Most Democrats backed the measure, after every member of the party but one rejected the terms of debate, which were controversially adopted by the House in a procedural motion just… Keep Reading

The chief House Republican overseeing the banking industry is trying to tack on nearly thirty additional bills to the deregulatory package that just passed the Senate with the help of centrist Democrats. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) on Wednesday applauded the upper chamber’s approval of legislation paring back the framework enacted in 2010 by the Dodd-Frank Act. Parts of the proposal will relax rules on some of the country’s largest banks. “I look forward to combining them with our helpful House bipartisan banking bills and getting… Keep Reading

The US Department of Agriculture announced Monday it would rescind a regulation aimed at improving animal conditions at certain slaughterhouses. In an announcement to be published in the Federal Register, the department claimed the rule exceeded its statutory authority. The regulation would have affected participants in the National Organic Program, requiring them to take a number of steps to improve the well-being of poultry and livestock. In order to keep their organic certification, the rule stipulated that producers must ensure chickens have free movement within… Keep Reading

Last minute changes to the Senate’s financial deregulation bill could expose sensitive private information to additional malefactors, while weakening remedies for those harmed by negligent cybersecurity practices. “Corrections” to the legislation offered late Wednesday evening by co-sponsors include language that would forbid Americans from suing bungling credit reporting agencies like Equifax, according to Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio.) The eleventh hour amendments would also permit “credit card companies to tap the Social Security Administration database to verify identities,” Brown said late Thursday morning. “There hasn’t been… Keep Reading

Congress is set to consider a long-term spending measure next week, and the Democrats’ leader in the House offered up disappointing news about the process to Dreamers and gun reform advocates. Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that her caucus would not insist on a DACA fix or new gun control measures as part of the omnibus spending bill coming down the pike. The government runs out of money again on March 23, providing Democrats with leverage to demand Dreamer… Keep Reading