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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
No Republican senators have signed onto a bill to give federal contractors backpay after the shutdown Many have pushed for backpay for government employees, however.
While Sen. Tina Smith (MN), one of the legislation’s chief sponsors, has now racked up support for the bill from more than 20 Democrats, not a single Republican has officially backed it so far, according to a spokesperson for Smith. Lawmakers are hopeful this could change, however.
“I don’t know of any Republican opposition to this,” says Sen. Chris Van Hollen (MD), a bill sponsor, adding that he hopes the legislation could be added to any final spending package that funds the government. In the House, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (MA) has also introduced a companion bill.
Many federal contractors, unlike other government employees, are not expected to get back pay for the paychecks they missed during the 35-day shutdown. Because they work for a third-party company that the government pays for its services, contractors don’t get paid when these services aren’t used. During past shutdowns, contractors have been forced to simply chalk up this gap in pay as a loss.
As many as 580,000 contractors, including cafeteria workers, security guards, and IT consultants could be affected by the shutdown in this way, according to NYU public service professor Paul Light. (Depending on the company they work for, some contractors may have received their pay uninterrupted during the shutdown.)
For those who did see breaks in their wages, it’s a gaping hole they’re being asked to recover from with little recourse. “Thirty-five days is a historically long shutdown,” says Van Hollen. “The economic pain and damage was more severe [than past ones.] There are lot of people who were left out in the cold for no fault of their own.”
I think it's probably safe to dismiss Starbucks guy. Unlike Trump, he's basically an unknown figure in the public sphere, whereas Trump had been a household name for about a decade before he announced his candidacy. Trump had also been a high profile and high visibility political opinion-spouter on social media in the years before his candidacy - most notably perhaps heading the birther conspiracy theory.
Starbucks guy is just literally - who? I don't even remember his name.
"...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."Uh no, there have been dozens if not hundreds of joke or unserious candidates who never amount to anything. You're just taking Trump and unjustifiably extrapolating him.
There are reasons that Trump won, most of which have to do with winning the Republican primary. Douchebag-CEO-centrist guy has no such advantages, there isn't any reason to assume he's anything other than an egomaniac who has no chance.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Jan 30th 2019 at 9:52:13 AM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangPod Save America did an interview with Kirsten Gillibrand
, where she laid out some of her platform. I've taken some choice bits here, edited slightly for clarity:
I also was able to bring people together on Don't Ask Don't Tell repeal. Even Democrats at the time and advocates at the time were saying, "look you can't do this and this is not a convenient time or this is the right strategy." And I just was very clear that when is civil rights convenient? You have to fight for it for the right reasons because you have to fight for it because It's necessary. These are men and women who will die for this country and they're being denied the ability to serve based on who they love...
I do not back down from a fight especially if it's the right fight for the right reasons. And it doesn't matter if it's hard. I will fight especially if it's hard and I've shown that I could do that by taking on the generals in the Pentagon over sexual harassment in the military... Being willing to take on special interests on on all hosts of ideas and making sure that we do the right thing even when it's hard and especially when it's hard.
I think Medicare for-All is the right solution. I campaigned on Medicare-for-All in 2006 in my 2-to-1 Republican district and I made it really simple for folks back then. They just said, "Our insurers charge us too much money, co-pays are too high, deductibles are too high. It keeps going up." I said, "Well how would you feel if you could just buy into Medicare at a percentage of your income something like 5%? Would that be something you're interested in?" And they said, "Of course!" Because they knew #1, creates competition because you're having a not-for-profit public option that will drive competition with the for-profit insurers. And #2, they knew Medicare's good. It covers most things - the things they want. And even after this last presidential election I would talk to voters in upstate New York and the thing I'd hear is "I'm angry that my neighbor makes five thousand dollars less than me and he gets access to Medicaid and I don't and it's unfair." So, folks want access to basic health care.
So there's a school in upstate New York where they teach green energy and it's what they do. And so the kids learn how to build a home that's LAED certified. They learn how to install solar panels, and wind, and wind turbines and they learned how to do energy efficient appliances everything. And what I was told when I toured that school they said 98 percent of our graduating seniors have three or more job offers before graduation. Well now that's a true statistic. That's pretty amazing. But that's what, that's what the green economy can look like. You're just actually creating the vision for how to create a faster growing economy.
And we've made a mistake in the last 10 years because you know Congress always, hems and haws, and doesn't provide these tax benefits for innovation. We've let the tax credits lapse and expire. And so industries that would normally be investing over and over again chose not to. And you know what happened? All that innovation all that manufacturing went to China. So now China is in a better position to innovate than America is because they took on the goal of making green energy a real part of their economy. So make it a real part of the economy.
You should put a price on carbon because what you're doing is you're incentivizing good behavior you're saying "If you want to be a polluter - fair enough, but you're going to pay a lot more because you're harming the rest of us and we're going to have to pay all those hospital bills." That's going to come to the taxpayer eventually. So you don't get the benefit of being a big polluter unless you're gonna pay for it. But if you're going to be the inventor and the innovator who's going to create the new energy efficient processes you get the benefit. And so I love putting a price on carbon as well.
In upstate New York one of our local manufacturers needed advanced welders and they said "We couldn't find any being 500 mile radius of our manufacturing plant." So they went to the community college and said "Will you offer this coursework? We'll hire every-one it's a $70,000 a year job." Sure enough it works perfectly. So now they have all the welders they need.
So, my vision for full employment is making job training really accessible and funding that because that's what our community colleges and state schools and these not for profits do so well. They're already doing it. So amplify their work investing in that directly. So you know if you're underemployed or unemployed and you want... You want a better job or higher wages you have someplace you can go and know that there's a path for you.
So I believe that public service is life changing for people. I believe that if you give someone a chance to put others before themselves it changes their hearts. It changes who they are. Changes what they care about and I think you've you told every young person in America if you do a year of public service we're going to give you two years of community college free. And if you do two years of public service we'll give you four years free for a community college your state schools or any not-for-profit training program. And so I would combine that so with your full employment goal so that young people can also get good training.
And so we need to build that. And it should be under the Department of Justice. It should be part of a humanitarian issue certainly for asylum seekers. And as a humanitarian issues and immigration is an issue of families making sure families who desperately want to be reunited can be reunited and those communities can be strong and economic and making sure that we ultimately rightsize immigration. And so that's why you need a comprehensive immigration approach. And you're going to do all of it so you're not going to sacrifice national security and anti-terrorism work. There needs to be fully funded as part of Homeland Security.
But immigration is about so much more. It's not a criminal issue it's not a national security issue. It's about who we are as a nation and what makes us strong. And immigration is going to be part of that. And so you've got to make it work. You have to have a pathway to citizenship for the 11 or 12 million folks that are here. You have to let people who are here start buying into Social Security and buying into, paying their taxes and making sure they're investing in our schools. So you have to create a pathway for that to happen.
And then you have to look at asylum very differently because we have a lot of reasons why asylum seekers are coming here. You've got things happening in South America and Central America that frankly we're turning a blind eye to that we should be actually addressing working with the international community with political solutions and diplomatic solutions to try to end the gun violence gang violence and terrorism that's happening these communities that are making mothers send their young boys to travel by themselves to America. So they just don't get recruited into a gang. Think about the problem that these people were facing. How many women are, are seeking refuge because of gang violence and rape and and being treated so horribly that they can't survive.
So if you don't start with the human story about what's actually happening in these families you're not going to create the right solution. I promise you. Locking them up in a for-profit prison or sticking lots of young boys in a Wal-Mart with no windows is not the solution to the horror their lives are facing or our immigration challenges. And so I would do comprehensive and I would try to solve each problem based on what is the actual problem and and get at it from the root.
I'll give you one example. So when I first got elected in 2006 I was put on the Armed Services Committee and I'm sitting next to Gabby Giffords and a bunch of new freshmen women and we were having a hearing on military readiness and you know a lot of the men were talking about equipment... it was all about the the function of military readiness from an equipment perspective. From what are we gonna buy and what we gonna build? But the women just instinctively were looking at other data and saying, well, why is the divorce rate as high as it is right now? Why is the suicide rate as high as it is? Domestic violence rate as high as it is? And we realize that military readiness also has to do with the troops... they're being pulled to the thinnest, they're not having rotations at home, their deployment times are longer than they've been in other conflicts. And there's no rest time, and no dwell time, and they're struggling.
And so the military readiness that we're talking about is both equipment and personnel. And so for that for America that was a better answer for them because the combination of our voices was strong.
And then you give them a few facts like well you know if you're a black woman in New York City and you went to go have a baby you are 12 times more likely to die in childbirth because of institutional racism. If you explain to someone law enforcement really isn't that fair.
And if you are black or brown man you are 10 times more likely to be arrested than a white man in New York City and four times more likely then rest the country for marijuana possession. So that's why I'm for decriminalization because how it is, how people are treated is unacceptable. It isn't. And when someone's been arrested and put in jail for possession of marijuana you know how their lives change? They might have missed work that day. They might be fired. They might have just lost the one job it took them a really long time to get if their mom lives in one of the housing authorities in New York City and they wish... Well they want to go visit her on Thanksgiving. They can't. If that somehow gets in their record and they go for a job interview and this employer says "have ever been arrested?" And he has to say "Well yeah when I was 18 I-" the job interviews over.
And so criminal justice has to be important. And in the economy. Like you'll see one of the issues you guys have talked about is postal banking. 30% of our country doesn't have access to a savings account. Do you know what? It's very expensive to be poor in this country. It means that you have to wire some money to your your mother who is in Puerto Rico, they're gonna charge you maybe 20% of what you just sent her or if you want to buy a couch for your house well your only option is layaway and the predatory lending aspect of that you're going to pay $500 dollars for a couch that was $200 because you had to, you couldn't pay it all in one go. So I think as a white woman it is my responsibility to take on these, these issues of institutional racism as if they were my own because that's my job and it is not, should not be left as a burden for black and brown people to fight these, their own on their own. It should be me who can lift up their voices can can make sure their voices are heard. And so that we could end it.
And so those are my responsibilities as a woman who seeks to serve. So I will talk about that in red, purple, and blue places and I promise you if I told any mom in America that if you're a black lady and you go to have a baby you're going to more likely die they're going to be as mad as I am because it's not OK. It's not OK. So you just have to take time.
I was away for a few days. Did I miss anything important that didn't pop up in the WTFJHT feed?
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.![]()
Expanded job training schemes and funding for community college is.. not a Federal Job Guarantee. It's probably a good idea anyway, but calling it that is a bit of a misnomer. You would still have the dogs-and-bones problem unless you just plan to shuffle every unemployed person into some form of education so they don't count as unemployed anymore. If there aren't enough jobs they still obviously can't get them.
This seems to me like the same kind of impulse that led to Tony Blair turning all Britain's old polytechnics into universites and tons of "skills gap" talk, and that got us the square root of nothing. This seems somewhat better thought through but still very much a fudge.
Edited by DeathorCake on Jan 30th 2019 at 3:32:49 PM
Now that's just infuriating! What the hell, some dickhead in the government decides to paralyze the administration, and the workers and business owners are the one who end up paying the bill!? Fuck. That.
Starbucks guy isn't "too ridiculous to be relevant" though. No-one's claiming he's in that category. He's bland and unknown with very little of the qualities and factors that suggest he'd get enough support to last very long as a candidate. Trump had his own brand of charisma and was riding a populist wave. Coffeeman doesn't have that going for him.
Edited by GoldenKaos on Jan 30th 2019 at 3:34:24 PM
"...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."![]()
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2019/01/29/howard-schultz-heckled/2708340002/
"Don’t help elect Trump, you egotistical billionaire a——-e!" a man screamed Monday night as Schultz discussed the possibility of running. The interruption came as Schultz was being interviewed during the first stop on his tour promoting his new book, "From the Ground Up."
Edited by sgamer82 on Jan 30th 2019 at 8:45:25 AM
Au contraire, it's far from clear that Schultz would get Trump re-elected.
What I am questioning more is

I suspect that the 2020 Democratic primary candidates will make more of an attempt to diversify themselves then the 2016 Republican candidates did; seriously, what would have been the actual difference between a Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, or Scott Walker presidency?
I also expect some of the 2020 Democratic primary candidates to not flat out ignore a crackpot who starts getting popular the way the 2016 Republican primary candidates refused to attack Trump on the theory that he would fade away and that it was more important to attack Ted Cruz.