The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
[118th Congress] of the United States: Spoken For
moniker
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
In Congress:
Our continuing experiment in self government ambles along
United States Senate:
48(D) - 3(I) - 49(R)
The Democratic Coalition has gained one seat to have an actual majority, rather than an even split with a power sharing agreement under Vice President Kamala Harris. Resulting in somewhat more authority throughout committees, to which they have full control over the gavels, and for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
United States House of Representatives:
213(D) - 222(R)
After 15 rounds of voting to elect McCarthy (R-CA-23) Speaker with a minority of the vote, the Republican Conference majority is going to try and have another few, just to be sure.
That's quite a government you've got there. What do you call it?
The 118th Congress!
*************
Please keep other thread topic discussion to their relevant threads.
moniker on
+5
Posts
When do the right-wing grift podcasts record for the day? They have to schedule around that
As many bridges as he's burned and as many times he's been caught being a two faced shit weasel I hope every Democrat flips him the bird in person, double birding for emphasis.
For completely different reasons, an agreement with dems to keep the gavel with McCarthy is going to be even harder for him to manage than the impossible situation he’s in with the Freedom Caucus. He’s 90% aligned with Boebert and Gaetz and 0% with dems.
So this week we might see McCarthy booted out of the speakership. We might see Gaetz get expelled. We might see both happen or we might not see either happen. Frankly, I'd love to see both happen.
House Republicans aren't worried about ethics, they're worried about heresy. If Santos is still there Gaetz definitely isn't going anywhere.
Butler was president of SEIU (Service Employees International Union) Local 15 in Californoa for almost a decade, representing hundreds of thousands of service workers
Cool, right?
Except that her more recent employment has been advising and representing Uber during their Proposition 22 push that classified Uber's drivers as "independent contractors" rather than employees, the better to avoid having to compensate them and be liable for good working conditions.
While simultaneously advising Kamala Harris' presidential campaign on labor relations.
And then doing a stint as director at AirBnB.
"Democratic politician does stint as labor champion until they can get a gig as a corporate lobbyist" seems a bit cliche, and yet it keeps happening.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
May he get sunk in an Earthquake.
Dude, he picked a lesbian black woman with years of union/labor credentials to steward the seat until january 2025 after california gets to elect someone for the chair. Congrats on finding a specific angle to be mad about, but this is literally about as good as it gets unless you are saying fuck democracy and let governors pick senators for the people instead of elections.
Who, exactly, would you want him to choose that wouldn't have made him a liar to the people he represents?
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Chef kiss
"Didnt personally help deliver one of the biggest blows to American labor in years" shouldnt be too much to ask.
All I can find is "represented uber in 2019" with various amounts of scare quotes depending on which website is saying it. There are no quotes or anything I can find for what she actually did.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Woah woah woah, we don't ask for details or more information or nuance here. C'mon.
3DS Friend Code: 3110-5393-4113
Steam profile
Advised them on how to deal with the unions.
Katie Porter
Which is a statement that could be read as charitably or uncharitably as you want. It's a Rorschach ink blot.
I think someone with her background is actually the kind of person I would want uber paying to understand how to deal with and work with labor. That they followed through on her advice, or what her advice even was, is absent from any commentary I am seeing here or elsewhere.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Newsom put himself in a hard position to do when he said he would appoint an African American to position.
To the point that most folks were expecting Congresswoman Barbra Lee or Karen Bass to the position.
Porter wasn't going to be appointed. But at the same time with the fact that Butler is a suppose to be a seat warmer till either Porter, Lee, or Schiff can win the seat next year this doesn't seem a terrible outcome.
She is running. Putting her in the chair would have fucked over the primaries. Something that Gavin explicitly said he would not do.
He also said he was going to put a black woman in the chair.
So, he would have lied multiple times to make that choice.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-11-05/laphonza-butler-first-black-woman-to-lead-emilys-list
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-laphonza-butler-20181207-story.html
Three relevant articles, from the before times
protip; Under Google's advanced options, you can choose date range filters to escape breathless reporting and algorithms around current news. 1/1/2016 to 1/1/2022 was useful here.
Youre stuck kind of reading between the lines on what "Uber has also retained Laphonza Butler, a senior Harris campaign strategist, to advise the company on its dealings with organized labor." means, in connection with her involvenement as a political labor consultant.
Retaining the advice of a pro-labor organizer doesnt mean much, to me. Uber asking for advice on making people happy without giving them anything they dont want to means understanding their positions etc
Keep your friends close, enemies closer
It’s paywalled for me, any chance you could provide a cliff notes?
Advised them on how to deal with the unions.
I mean its possible I guess that she advised them to not try to fuck over labor but I doubt it. Idk what details we're hoping to uncover that makes her lobbying work morally acceptable.
This is a good explanation I saw elsewhere of why her work for gig economy companies has people upset:
Not that Id ever put "remove paywall" into google and choose any of the first few sites myself
It isn't very cliff notable? She did stints as a labor organizer, she got tapped for consulting work for campaigns. She has ties to Kamala Harris and is probably a backchannel for her. as VP, probably acted as one during her AG stint.
Big "all christmases to come at once" energy on those. Not holding my breath. But I will admit the thought just brought a fleeting smile to my withered husk.
Or, like, even understand the position of labor. They need to talk to people who understand the positions, who are experts in the space, and I don't think it is right to expect those folks to do it for free.
I also don't think its a good thing for companies to just fly blind and not get expert analysis from SMEs.
Companies pay for expert advisors who provide views into competition or opposition to better understand those positions.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
One is her taking over Emily's List which supports women running for office and her background. From a poor family in Mississippi. Went to an HBCU. Helped build out the SEIU she ended up leading. Fought tooth and nail with Schwarzenegger and Brown. Good friends with VP Harris and worked with her on her first campaigns. Joined the consulting firm in 2019, this is where people are grumpy, that is tied to Harris and Newsom. Worked on VP Harris's presidential campaign as a consultant and is still friends with VP Harris. Moved on to Emily's List where she focused on trying to get women of all types able to join and successfully run for office.
Here is the bit about Uber.
Like Synd said it is an inkblot. You can read anything you want into this.
The gig economy and labor are intrinsically opposed - in the past, piece labor (which is what the gig economy is, fundamentally) is the sort of thing that unions organized against.
Yes, they want insight into unions and organized labor so that they can beat them and keep their labor force poor. Which is where Butler's lobbying work came in. You couch it in terms of understanding and insight and skip over to what end.
Working for change from inside the system; not even once
And yes Uber probably wanted insight for both in case they didn't get law repealed but also what it will look like for those who support the law.
This feels more like folks are mad more she just isn't a unicorn because she did end up working in the firm attached to Harris, who I believe some people still really dislike here, and she isn't going to accelerate anything. She is going to be a consistent vote for Dems and by 2025 this will be irrelevant as you will have Schiff, Barbra Lee, or Porter in that seat.
A good choice to continue to diversify the Senate, solid labor background, and helps keep the primary fair. Cool.
105,000 to a firm she was connected to could mean that she sat in on 1-2 meetings and maybe wrote some analysis up on how labor may respond to their efforts. Chances are she was not working alone on this and her actual cash draw would be so small as to be largely irrelevant to her annual income.
She almost certainly wasn't helping them draft the legislation or using her influence to push it through on that kind of cash. That's ridiculous.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
We know what Uber was doing during the time period she was advising and consulting for them. They ran a deceptive ad campaign to bamboozle voters into thinking that voting for Prop 22 was a good thing for workers, instead of a terrible blow to workers' rights.
When someone is hired by a corporation to advise and consult "on relations with organized labor," is it always because the corporation is looking to impede unionization efforts and smother dissent.
More details on Prop 22 and their campaign to get it passed via the National Employment Law Project
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
That sounds fine.
As Audre Lorde put it, "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." The gig economy and organized labor are intrinsically opposed by their very nature, and these companies hire progressives as a form of reputation whitewashing. Now if you want to argue that this should be seen in context with her career, that is something different - but this idea that her work for some of the worst offenders in the gig economy is "no big deal" shows an unawareness of the issues involved.