Rail Workers in 11 States and D.C. Rally After Forced Labor Deal With No Sick Days

Masses of rail workers across the country are rallying Tuesday in efforts to draw the public attention toward their demands, including giving rail workers paid sick days, after President Joe Biden signed legislation imposing a labor deal on workers.

Rallies are taking place in Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Utah, Wyoming, and Washington, D.C.

“We demand that Biden sign an Executive Order that he apparently has the capacity to do and allow for 7 days sick time for RR workers like other Government contractors. Done, end of story,” a spokesperson for the Railroad Workers United labor caucus said in a statement to The New Republic. “Why not? And if he refuses, he owes us an explanation for sure.”

Workers are also asking for two-person crews on all trains and eliminating what’s known as “precision-scheduled railroading.”

Precision-scheduled railroading, or, as workers sometimes dub it, “positive shareholder reaction,” manages freight movement by the individual car level, as opposed to the whole train—ensuring train cars are constantly on the move. In practice, this has cut jobs, consolidated dispatch centers, and made trains less safe, as fewer workers have less time to conduct checks on even more train cars.

The rallies come after 72 members of Congress, led by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representatives Jamaal Bowman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib, published a letter outlining how Biden could “guarantee rail workers the seven sick days that they desperately need through executive action.”

The letter followed Biden’s decision to impose a labor contract on workers, in an ostensible effort to avoid a national rail strike.

Despite Biden’s cave to railroad companies, these 72 members of Congress are not relenting.

“We are going to continue to fight. We are going to continue to organize. And we’re going to continue to make sure that labor—the workers who create the wealth for these companies—get their fair share of that wealth,” Bowman bellowed at the Washington, D.C., rally.

“We have corporations making record profits,” Bowman continued. “We allow them as many stock buybacks as they want. But we continue to give workers and labor the short end of the stick.… That’s bullshit.”

The consumer price index, or CPI, a key government measure of inflation, indicates that inflation finally seems to be slowing a bit, according to a report released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The index measures the monthly change in prices paid by U.S. consumers for specific goods.

Here are three things to know about the inflation report, and what it might mean looking forward.

1. It has some of the the lowest increases in almost a year.

Prices rose 7.1 percent in November compared to a year earlier. This is a big slowdown from October, which saw a 7.7 percent increase compared to the previous year, and the smallest yearlong increase since December 2021.

It may seem counterintuitive to celebrate a 7.1 percent increase, but overall, prices in November rose just 0.1 percent from the previous month.

Removing the price increases for food and energy, which are always volatile, even before the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, prices rose 0.2 percent in November. This is the smallest monthly increase since August 2021.

2. But inflation remains high in key areas.

A big contributing factor in the low price increases was energy. Prices for gasoline, natural gas, and electricity fell 1.6 percent from October.

But prices for food and shelter increased. In fact, they went up the most of any sector. Costs for groceries and eating out went up 0.5 percent, and housing costs rose 0.6 percent.

3. Will it affect the Federal Reserve’s decision on Wednesday?

The Federal Reserve begins its policy-setting meeting Tuesday and is expected to announce a 0.5 percent increase in interest rates. The new CPI report is unlikely to affect that decision any further, according to Dean Baker, the senior economist at the Center for Economic Policy and Research.

“The Fed is always worried about pulling surprises,” he explained.

The U.S. central bank is scrambling to achieve a so-called soft landing, or a decrease in inflation without tipping the economy into a recession. The labor market has remained strong overall, causing concerns that the economy has not slowed sufficiently to avoid a downturn. But Baker says a soft landing is “definitely” still possible.

“It is now indisputable that inflation has slowed sharply, without a big rise in unemployment,” he said. “It is not clear yet that it is at a rate that the Fed considers acceptable, but the rate clearly is much lower than it was earlier in 2022.”

During the long-awaited congressional hearings on FTX’s collapse on Tuesday, Democratic Representative Brad Sherman wasted no time making his stance clear on the crypto industry, nor on Sam Bankman-Fried’s role within it.

“My fear is that we will view Sam Bankman-Fried as just one big snake in a crypto Garden of Eden. The fact is, crypto is a garden of snakes,” said Sherman, the only House member to receive an “F” from crypto advocacy group Crypto Action Network.

“Is there a big advantage that crypto has over the U.S. dollar if it actually became a currency, which it’s not yet?” Sherman posed. “Well, there are drug dealers, human traffickers, sanctions evaders who will find that to be a good feature. And as Sam Bankman-Fried would tell you, there’s a hell of a market for bankruptcy court evasion. But the big market is tax evasion. And I know there are some on the other side who cheer every time a billionaire escapes taxes.”

Moving from broader critiques of the industry, Sherman then focused on Bankman-Fried. “Now, Sam Bankman-Fried, or should I say inmate 14372, had one purpose in all of his efforts here in Congress … to keep the SEC out of crypto. To provide a patina of regulation, baby regulation, from the CFTC,” Sherman continued, before addressing his colleagues.

“I have one comment for my colleagues: Don’t trash Sam Bankman-Fried and then pass his bill,” he added, referring to bipartisan-backed legislation pushing for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to become the primary regulator overseeing crypto, rather than the Securities Exchange Commission. The former would oversee crypto with less scrutiny than the latter.

“I fear that could happen, because Sam was not the only crypto bro with PACs and lobbyists—and there is no PAC or lobbyist here to work for efficient tax enforcement, or sanctions enforcement.”

Sherman closed with a focus on Republicans, citing a letter signed by 19 Republican members that was “attacking the SEC for paying attention to, and I quote, the purported risks of digital assets,” and comments from eight members “that were designed to attack the SEC as being a Luddite and anti innovation for their efforts.”

While Republicans—and some Democrats—will assert that Bankman-Fried and company were simply bad apples, Sherman continues earning his F from crypto advocacy groups, bashing all who try to defend it and its proven potential for massive fraud.

On Monday, Talking Points Memo reported on at least 34 Republican members of Congress who exchanged text messages with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

One message in particular stuck out for its illustration of how blatant these efforts were and, perhaps too, how dumb they were.

On January 17, 2021, Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina texted Meadows:

“Mark, in seeing what’s happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of � no return � in saving our Republic!! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO.”

Beyond appearing to be a seditionist, Norman seems to think “martial law” is spelled like “Marshall”—similar to messages released previously between Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Meadows, in which she wrote: “In our private chat with only Members, several are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call for Marshall law.” Perhaps Norman just copied and pasted the spelling from the world’s worst possible group chat.

But who is Ralph Norman?

In 2018, while meeting with members from Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, Norman placed his loaded handgun on a table during the conversation to prove “guns don’t shoot people; people shoot guns,” making the activists feel unsafe.

At an election debate in 2018, Norman joked about the sexual assault allegations against then–Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. “Did y’all hear this latest late-breaking news on the Kavanaugh hearings? Ruth Bader Ginsburg came out saying she was groped by Abraham Lincoln.”

In 2019, Norman led the charge to try reinstating Representative Steve King to his committee assignments, after King had made one of his career’s many racist comments and asked when “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” became offensive language.

Norman was also one of 126 House Republicans who signed onto a lawsuit contesting the 2020 election results.

In February 2021, Norman and 12 other Republican House members skipped votes, citing Covid-19; instead, they were all happily attending the Conservative Political Action Conference. Norman, the agent of the personal responsibility party that he is, blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for apparently changing “the voting to interfere with CPAC.”

In June 2021, Norman was one of 21 House Republicans who voted against giving honors to officers who defended the Capitol on January 6. That same month, he was one of 14 House Republicans who voted against establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday. And in July 2021, he was one of just five Republicans who voted against appropriations for granting visas to Afghan allies and enhancing Capitol security.

Norman has repeatedly criticized President Biden for forgiving student loan debtors; Norman himself—with a net worth of over $20 million—had at least $306,520 of PPP loans forgiven.

Based on his history, Norman is the perfect example of someone who’d throw whatever integrity he did have on the line for an individual like Donald Trump.

Representative Brian Babin was among at least 34 Republican members of Congress who texted former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows about attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

The chilling messages, first reported on by Talking Points Memo, include some notable names, but the rest read like a veritable “who’s that?” of election deniers in Congress.

Texas Representative Babin texted Meadows at least 21 times, starting before the election, but TPM was only able to verify a paltry four responses. He also signs his texts, which is not an indication of culpability but is weird.

Babin urged Meadows to “fight like hell” to win, warning that a Joe Biden victory would usher in a “corrupt Marxist dictatorship.”

He also expressed concerns that other members of Congress would try to do the right thing and stop him and his cohort from overturning the election. He asked Meadows to reach out to then–Vice President Mike Pence to help them.

Throughout his texts, Babin repeated baseless claims that the election had been stolen. He described the vote as a “theft” and, in late December, sent Meadows an article describing claims from Pennsylvania Republicans that the votes didn’t “add up.”

Pennsylvania’s Department of State had thoroughly debunked the article and roundly rebuked the state representative pushing the so-called “analysis,” but Meadows replied to Babin that he had forwarded the piece to the Department of Justice.

A former dentist, Babin has been a Trump supporter and apologist since the former president took office. In September 2020, he insisted Trump took every possible preventive measure to stop the spread of the coronavirus. He defended Trump against accusations that he had downplayed Covid-19’s deadly nature, and even compared him to Franklin Delano Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor.

In 2021, Babin voted against multiple major bills, including Build Back Better, the American Rescue Plan, the Women’s Health Protection Act, and the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act. Last week, he also voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, which protects same-sex and interracial marriage.

Senator Joe Manchin would not say Monday whether he would follow his colleague Kyrsten Sinema and switch his party affiliation to independent from Democrat—but he didn’t shut the door on the option, either.

Sinema made waves Friday when she announced she was changing to independent, putting the Democrats’ hard-won Senate majority at risk.

“I’ll look at all of these things. I’ve always looked at all those things, but I have no intention of doing anything right now. Whether I do something later, I can’t tell you what the future is going to bring,” Manchin told CNN reporter Manu Raju.

“I’m not a Washington Democrat.… We’ll have to look. People are registering more for independent than any other party affiliation,” Manchin added.

If Manchin does switch parties like Sinema, their move would sharply curtail the Democrats’ power in Congress and would once more give the two centrist senators outsize influence over legislation.

Senate Democrats were elated when Raphael Warnock won the Georgia runoff election, giving them a 51–49 majority. This meant that they would control committees and could more easily approve judicial appointments. They could block dangerous legislation or investigations from the Republican-controlled House.

Crucially, it meant that if a senator stonewalled, major legislation would no longer automatically tank. Manchin and Sinema have spent the past two years stalling bills, including President Joe Biden’s signature Build Back Better plan.

Sinema’s change to independent has thrown the Democrats’ assured control up in the air once more. If Manchin follows suit, the two of them will become the deciding factors on every decision.

Senator Bernie Sanders, previously the only registered independent in the Senate, told CNN Sunday that Sinema’s decision likely had to do with her “political aspirations”—although she said the move had to do with her values.

When asked by Dana Bash if he thought Sinema had the “guts” to take on powerful special interest lobbies, Sanders replied: “No, she doesn’t.”

“She is a corporate Democrat who has, in fact, along with Senator Manchin sabotaged enormously important legislation,” he said.

After intervening on behalf of the former president who gave her her job, federal Judge Aileen Cannon has now admitted she never should have done so in the first place.

On Monday morning, Cannon dismissed a months-long order she enacted that hindered the investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged smuggling of classified government documents to his Mar-a-Lago resort home. This after Trump had specifically appealed to her in order to derail the investigation in the first place.

“The case is dismissed for lack of jurisdiction,” Cannon wrote in a short, defeated order.

Cannon’s order initially mandated the use of a special master to review classified, stolen documents seized by the Justice Department from Mar-a-Lago in August.

The order also barred investigators from “[using] the seized materials for investigative purposes.” In other words, she personally stopped federal investigators from investigating someone who had stolen a stash of national secrets.

On December 1, however, a three-judge panel from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals rebuked Cannon’s order. “It is indeed extraordinary for a warrant to be executed at the home of a former president … [but to] create a special exception here would defy our Nation’s foundational principle that our law applies ‘to all, without regard to numbers, wealth, or rank,’” the panel wrote in its ruling.

The panel consisted of three Republican appointees—two being Trump’s own.

Trump’s failure to maintain Cannon’s stalling of the investigation follows an earlier attempt to ask the Supreme Court to intervene in the probe and appoint a special master specifically to review classified papers. The judges rejected Trump’s plea in a short, unsigned order, with no noted dissents.

Now, with Cannon’s dismissal, the Justice Department is cleared to continue its investigation into the stolen documents with no further delay.

Meanwhile, that a federal judge was able to intervene so summarily in the federal investigation of the man who appointed her perhaps warrants its own serious legal inquiry.

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel refused Monday to say whether Donald Trump was to blame for the Republican Party’s flop during the midterm elections.

After the promised “red wave” failed to materialize in November, Republicans have been split on why that might be—despite the majority of MAGA candidates losing across the country. When asked on Fox Business whether Trump was at fault, McDaniel refused to lay the blame on him.

“I don’t like this, I don’t like these parceling out” of responsibility, she said. McDaniel said she felt there needed to be more analysis of what went wrong, particularly “the amount of ticket-splitting.”

“Why are Republicans going and voting for one Republican and not the other?” she asked.

When host Stuart Varney repeatedly insisted it was Trump, and whether that candidate campaigned on his message, McDaniel pushed back.

“I’m not into the blame game right now. I think we’ve got to do an analysis,” she said. “I think you can’t parcel out, ‘Well, this endorsement helped this one’...It’s the whole message. It’s, ‘What did each candidate do?’”

Except the biggest thing each candidate did was embrace Trump. Across the board, dozens of candidates who denied the 2020 election, spouted MAGA theories, and campaigned with Trump lost their race.

The list includes Kari Lake and Blake Masters in Arizona, Herschel Walker in Georgia, and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. More than 35 Trump-endorsed gubernatorial, House, and Senate candidates lost the election.

The Washington Post reported Monday that Lake had been strongly advised to distance herself from Trump but refused. She became so focused on mimicking Trump that she failed to address actual issues that Arizonans were concerned about.

The RNC has launched a council to advise the Republican Party on how to perform better in future elections. One council member is Masters, who is definitely the person to consult on winning races.

Trump himself said that he should only be considered responsible if the candidates he endorsed won during the midterms. But as loss after loss rolled in, it became clear that voters and the party were tiring of him.

One of his former employees went so far as to call him a “loser.”

“Dave, what should I say?”

This is how Elon Musk waded into live comedy at Dave Chappelle’s show in San Francisco Sunday night, after forcing his material upon every Twitter user for weeks. Musk—so used to encouraging cry-laughing emojis from his adoring fans online—learned that Twitter is sometimes not real life.

Musk’s performance was doomed from the beginning, given how Chappelle introduced him. “Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for the richest man in the world,” Chappelle said, almost inviting boos from the 18,000-seater stadium.

Musk paced back-and-forth across the stage while Chappelle attempted to redeem the moment.

“It sounds like some of the people you fired are in the audience,” he quipped. He could have left it at that. But alas.

“All those people who are booing, and I’m just pointing out the obvious, you have terrible seats,” Chappelle said, falling on the sword for Musk by calling everyone booing poor.

Chappelle seemed to argue Musk is above the rest of us, so the booing wouldn’t even faze him. “[He’s] not even trying to die on Earth. His whole business model is fuck Earth, I’m leaving anyway,” Chappelle said, instead tacitly admitting Musk’s basic disregard for the planet we live on.

When Musk asked Chappelle what he should say, Chappelle seemed aware things were beyond rescuing. “Don’t say nothing. It’ll only spoil the moment,” he said. “Do you hear that sound, Elon? That’s the sound of pending civil unrest.”

Years ago, Musk attempted to start a comedy “media empire” called Thud, which ironically is exactly the sound it made after it failed just over a year later.

That hasn’t stopped Musk from trying. “Comedy is now legal on Twitter,” he proudly proclaimed after he purchased the company. While his adoring fans will respond with glee to any of Musk’s “jokes,” we are already being assured that Sunday night’s boos are not making Musk mad at all.

The White House came out swinging Monday against Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comments that had she organized the January 6 insurrection, it would have been successful.

The Georgia MAGA Republican spoke Saturday night at the New York Young Republican Club gala, where she joked about accusations that she helped organize the January 6 riot along with far-right figure Steve Bannon.

“I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed,” she said to applause.

The White House slammed her remarks Monday, telling CBS it “goes against our fundamental values as a country for a Member of Congress to wish that the carnage of January 6th had been even worse, and to boast that she would have succeeded in an armed insurrection against the United States government.”

“This violent rhetoric is a slap in the face to the Capitol Police, the DC Metropolitan Police, the National Guard, and the families who lost loved ones as a result of the attack on the Capitol. All leaders have a responsibility to condemn these dangerous, abhorrent remarks and stand up for our Constitution and the rule of law,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement.

Republican leadership has yet to speak out about her comments, including House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy. Greene has sought to establish herself as a McCarthy ally in recent months, urging the GOP to unite behind his bid to become House speaker in January.

McCarthy has shown he is very much still under the sway of Donald Trump, dragging his feet when it comes to condemning the former president’s recent outrageous behavior such as meeting with Holocaust deniers and demanding to terminate the Constitution.

Trump—and by extension, Greene—still holds a lot of influence in Congress, and McCarthy will need both their support to achieve his goals once the Republican-majority House is sworn in.