SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
executive order
Critics Warn RNC 'Bloodbath' a Preview of What Project 2025 Would Do If Trump Reelected
"There's already a recruitment and training program for MAGA militants underway," said one journalist focused on the issue.
Mar 12, 2024
Over 60 staffers at the Republican National Committee have reportedly been let go following the change in leadership instigated by presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, and critics warn this could be a preview of what Trump would do to the federal government should he win reelection in November.
"In a letter to some political and data staff, Sean Cairncross, the RNC's new chief operating officer, said that the new committee leadership was 'in the process of evaluating the organization and staff to ensure the building is aligned' with its vision. 'During this process, certain staff are being asked to resign and reapply for a position on the team,'" Politico reports.
2025 Project: First they came for the RNC... https://t.co/7FHBGA3Va4
— Andrea Chalupa (@AndreaChalupa) March 12, 2024
For some political observers, the purge at the RNC should serve as a preview of Project 2025, an initiative led by The Heritage Foundation and Trump allies, that would, in part, replace over 50,000 civil servants in the federal government with Trump loyalists. This would be accomplished through an executive order referred to as Schedule F that would allow Trump, if back in the White House, to fire large numbers of career government workers who currently have protected status.
Trump issued this executive order at the end of his first term, but he was not able to implement the plan before President Joe Biden took office and rescinded the order.
Trump fired 60 RNC staffers? There’s already a recruitment + training program for MAGA militants underway. See my upcoming report on the undersides of Project 2025.
— Anne Nelson (@anelsona) March 12, 2024
The idea behind Project 2025 is that Trump would be able to wield more power and face fewer obstacles to accomplishing his goals if he had a federal government stocked with loyalists.
Trump has made it clear he wants the RNC to be loyal and ideologically aligned with his agenda. Meanwhile, the right-wing effort to push forward Project 2025 as a blueprint for Trump's second term has his political opponents on high alert about a similar kind of purge—but one with much more dire consequences for the nation than a reshuffling of RNC leadership.
Having dozens of people fired after he's installed a new leader there could reflect the kind of thing he plans to do if he gets to implement Project 2025. As Axios reported last week, the Biden campaign plans intends to outline the dangers of this plan consistently throughout the general election.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Biden Applauded for Executive Order Targeting 'Insidious' Anti-Worker Practices
The president's new order takes aim at a "growing trend of employers requiring workers to sign away their rights."
Jul 09, 2021
Among the 72 initiatives packed into the far-reaching executive order President Joe Biden signed Friday are steps that labor advocates welcomed as important victories for U.S. workers, including a provision calling for the limitation of noncompete clauses that drive down wages by preventing employees from quitting for better-paying jobs.
"The measures encouraged by this EO represent a wish list progressives and other pro-competition advocates have been promoting for years, and in some cases decades."
--David Segal, Demand Progress Education Fund
Presented as an effort to promote competition in an economy increasingly dominated by a handful of massive corporations, Biden's sweeping order calls on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)--now headed by antitrust law expert Lina Khan--to "ban or limit non-compete agreements," which the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen described as "insidious" ploys to restrict worker mobility and suppress wages.
Biden echoed that message in a speech on Friday, declaring that corporations use noncompete clauses "for one reason: to keep wages low."
Analysts estimate that tens of millions of private-sector workers are currently under some form of noncompete clause preventing them from leaving their jobs to work for--or start--a competing business within a certain period of time.
HuffPost labor reporter Dave Jamieson noted that while noncompete clauses have "traditionally been used to protect closely guarded business secrets in high-income fields... they have proliferated so much in recent years that they touch all income levels, even low-wage service work."
"In many cases, noncompete clauses are only 'agreements' in theory, since not signing one means not getting the job," Jamieson observed.
Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), said Thursday that "noncompetes are ubiquitous, harmful to wages and to competition, and part of a growing trend of employers requiring workers to sign away their rights."
Biden's decision to take aim at noncompete clauses as part of a broader effort to tackle corporate concentration won applause from unions and progressives advocacy groups, who said the president's order is an important step toward reversing the decades-long trend of stagnant wages and declining worker power.
"We support President Biden's focus on workers and consumers as we seek a more competitive economy," Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, said in a statement. "A successful economy must serve the people who produce the goods and services that improve our lives."
Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, said he is "especially pleased to see the administration move to protect America's most powerless workers and farmers."
"We hope the Biden administration stays on this path and truly stands with the people against those who seek to monopolize all opportunity, wealth, and power for themselves alone," Lynn added.
Other elements of Biden's executive order that seek to empower workers include a provision encouraging the FTC and Justice Department to "strengthen antitrust guidance to prevent employers from collaborating to suppress wages or reduce benefits by sharing wage and benefit information with one another."
"This EO sends a clear and unambiguous message that corporate concentration throughout our economy is a crisis-level problem."
--Alex Harman, Public Citizen
In recent years, major corporations--from Google and Apple to McDonald's and Burger King--have entered so-called "no poaching" pacts agreeing not to hire each other's workers, deals that critics say serve to drive down wages and benefits.
The president's order also urges the FTC to prohibit "unnecessary" occupational licensing restrictions, which can hinder workers from moving across state lines to find better-paying jobs in their field.
"The measures encouraged by this EO represent a wish list progressives and other pro-competition advocates have been promoting for years, and in some cases decades," David Segal, director of the Demand Progress Education Fund, said in a statement.
"From a ban on non-compete agreements that suppress wages and keep employees tied to jobs they would rather leave, to pushing for importation of cheaper prescription drugs from Canada--and from helping people switch between banks to addressing anti-competitive behavior in online marketplaces, these initiatives would improve the wellbeing of workers, small and mid-sized businesses, and consumers across essentially all major sectors of the American economy," Segal added.
Alex Harman, the competition policy advocate for Public Citizen, hailed Biden's order as "the most significant executive action against corporate monopolies in generations."
"This EO sends a clear and unambiguous message that corporate concentration throughout our economy is a crisis-level problem," said Harman. "That clarion call has been absent for decades, as administrations of both parties have let antitrust and antimonopoly enforcement fall into disrepair and decay."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Too Little, Too Late, Better Than Nothing': Torture Ban Passes Senate Despite GOP Opposition
Rights campaigners praise legislation but give mixed assessments of whether it goes far enough
Jun 17, 2015
The U.S. Senate's Tuesday passage of a limited ban on torture is being met with mixed enthusiasm from human rights advocates, who alternately praise it as a "historic" victory and "too little, too late, but better than nothing."
Co-authored by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act passed 78 to 21, with all those voting against the torture prohibition coming from the Republican Party.
"Such legal fixes won't carry weight in the future if those responsible for torture in the past aren't brought to justice."
--Laura Pitter, Human Rights Watch
The legislation requires that U.S. government agencies--including the FBI, CIA, and Pentagon--only use interrogation and detention tactics permitted in Army Field Manual 2-22.3 and mandates that the Red Cross be given access to people detained in U.S. custody.
If passed, the amendment would codify a 2009 executive order from President Barack Obama aimed at eliminating acts of torture, including what is euphemistically referred to as waterboarding. Rights advocates have been concerned that a future administration would seek to overturn this presidential decree.
However, there is a key problem with Tuesday's legislation. Appendix M of the Army Field Manual permits use of tactics--including sleep and sensory deprivation--that many, including the United Nations Committee Against Torture, have warned entail torture or inhumane treatment.
The appendix "could conceivably be read as permitting techniques like the now banned so-called 'frequent flier program,' in which detainees were moved continuously between cells to deprive them of sleep and keep them disorientated, 112 times in 14 days in one documented case," wroteSlate journalist Joshua Keating on Tuesday.
Rebecca Gordon, author of Mainstreaming Torture and the forthcoming book American Nuremberg, told Common Dreams that the manual also does not address extraordinary renditions: "Nothing in the field manual prevents us from shipping people to other countries to be tortured. That is a practice I believe still goes on."
The Senate amendment purports to deal with these omissions by mandating that the manual be reviewed and updated--and be made available to the public.
Melina Milazzo, senior policy council for the Center for Victims of Torture, told Common Dreams, "We have long had concerns about Appendix M," but expressed confidence that those concerns will be addressed through the revision processes.
"I think that the passage of the amendment to the NDAA was a historical bipartisan vote that demonstrates that an overwhelming majority of senators across the political spectrum oppose torture," Milazzo said. "I think that the legislation goes far enough in that it will prevent any future torture program from being established in the United States. This will make it difficult for the CIA torture program to ever exist again in the future."
Gordon, however, had a different take: "I have no confidence whatsoever that the field manual will be updated to protect people captured by the U.S. government."
"What I will say is it that the amendment is an important repudiation of torture--a step towards what we really need: a public repudiation of the things that have been done in the War on Terror that are crimes against humanity."
--Rebecca Gordon, author
"I don't think it's likely the amendment will survive the House," said Gordon. "What I will say is it that the amendment is an important repudiation of torture--a step towards what we really need: a public repudiation of the things that have been done in the War on Terror that are crimes against humanity."
Gordon's ultimate assessment was: "It's too little, too late, but better than nothing."
A coalition of groups, including the Center for Victims of Torture, Physicians for Human Rights, and the ACLU, released a statement last week supporting the measure as an important protection against the prospect of future torture. "Had the McCain-Feinstein amendment been in place following the 9/11 attacks we believe it would have significantly bolstered other prohibitions on torture and made it far more difficult, in not impossible, for the CIA to establish and operate their torture program," the groups wrote.
Laura Pitter, senior national security counsel for Human Rights Watch, echoed this point in a statement released last week: "Requiring the CIA and other U.S. agencies to abide by one uniform set of interrogation rules will help prevent torture. But such legal fixes won't carry weight in the future if those responsible for torture in the past aren't brought to justice."
Keating called the amendment an "important step" but noted "it's absurd that such a measure is necessary. These techniques are prohibited under international law by the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention on Torture, both of which the U.S. has ratified. The 'cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment' of detainees was further banned by a previous 'McCain Amendment' to the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act."
Among anti-torture campaigners, there appears to be universal agreement on one thing: the Senators--all Republicans--who voted against the anti-torture protections, however limited, are on the wrong side of history. Their names are as follows:
- Sen. Jeff Sessions, Alabama
- Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas
- Sen. Michael Crapo, Idaho
- Sen. James Risch, Idaho
- Sen. Daniel Coats, Indiana
- Sen. Joni Ernst, Iowa
- Sen. Pat Roberts, Kansas
- Sen. Mitch McConnell, Kentucky
- Sen. David Vitter, Louisiana
- Sen. Thad Cochran, Mississippi
- Sen. Roy Blunt, Missouri
- Sen. Deb Fischer, Nebraska
- Sen. Benjamin Sasse, Nebraska
- Sen. Jim Inhofe, Oklahoma
- Sen. James Lankford, Oklahoma
- Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina
- Sen. Tim Scott, South Carolina
- Sen. John Cornyn, Texas
- Sen. Orrin Hatch, Utah
- Sen. Mike Lee, Utah
- Sen. John Barrasso, Wyoming
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular