ALSO SEE: Democrats Reintroduce $15 Minimum Wage Bill

Bernie Sanders in New Push for $15 Minimum Wage Under Biden: 'For Me, It's Morally Imperative'

By Steven Greenhouse, Guardian UK

26 January 21

Leftwing senator tells Guardian the chances of raising the federal minimum are better than ever with new president in White House

enator Bernie Sanders says the widespread suffering caused by the pandemic-induced economic crisis has made it “morally imperative” to increase the US’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. And in an interview with the Guardian, Sanders and other lawmakers pushing for a higher minimum wage say the chances of enacting a $15 minimum are better than ever before now that President Joe Biden has called for a $15 federal minimum as part of his emergency Covid legislative package.

Raising the minimum to $15 would more than double the current $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage, but many Republicans oppose the move, saying it would hurt business.

In an interview, Sanders, who championed a $15 minimum wage as a presidential candidate in 2016 and 2020, voiced excitement about the prospects of raising the minimum wage, which hasn’t increased since 2009, the longest stretch without an increase since Congress first enacted a minimum wage in 1938.

“This country faces an enormous economic crisis that is aggravated by the pandemic,” Sanders said. “We’re looking at terrible levels of unemployment. We’re looking at growing income and wealth inequality. What concerns me as much as anything is that half our people are living paycheck to paycheck. Millions of people are trying to survive on starvation wages. For me, it’s morally imperative that we raise the minimum wage to a living wage that’s at least $15 an hour.”

The House voted last July to raise the minimum wage to $15 in steps through 2025, but then Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell blocked a vote on it. With the White House, Senate and House under Democratic control, Sanders said the chances are good to enact a $15 minimum, although he said it would be hard to attract 10 Republican Senators to support it, making it hard to overcome a filibuster.

Sanders, the incoming chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, sees another route to passage, saying it could be done under the “budget reconciliation” – a process where measures deemed to have budgetary impact can be approved by simple majority vote.

“It clearly has to be done by reconciliation. That’s something I’m working very hard on,” said Sanders.

Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which played a pivotal role in backing the Fight for $15, sees considerable momentum behind a $15 minimum.

That push has come a long way since the Fight for $15 began in 2012, when 200 fast-food workers in New York went on a one-day strike. “We are incredibly proud that the momentum around $15 solidified as part of the presidential campaign, and that the Biden-Harris administration is so committed to get it done that they’ve put it in the first action of Congress for Covid emergency relief,” Henry said. “There is wind at our backs.”

Henry noted that Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff campaigned for a $15 minimum in their successful Senate races in Georgia. Moreover, Florida voters, while backing Donald Trump, voted overwhelmingly – 61% to 39% – to raise that state’s minimum to $15 by 2026.

“A $15 minimum is the single most concrete way to reduce racial inequality, put money in people’s pockets and make material change in people’s lives,” Henry said. The Economic Policy Institute, a progressive thinktank, found that raising the minimum to $15 would help 25% of Black workers, 19.1% of Hispanic workers, 13.1% of White workers and 10.8% of Asian workers.

A Pew poll found that Americans favor increasing the minimum to $15, by 67% to 33%. Henry warned that “any elected official in Congress who dares to stand against us on this is going to pay a big political price”.

Rita Blalock, a McDonald’s cook in Raleigh, North Carolina, prays for a $15 minimum. Blalock, who earns $10 an hour after nearly 10 years at McDonald’s, said she often relies on food pantries and can’t afford her $200 rent every two weeks at a rooming house. “Fortunately, I can eat free at work,” said Blalock, whose work schedule has been cut to 20 hours many weeks.

Asked what a $15 minimum would mean, Blalock, 54, said: “Oh my God, I could afford rent. I could eat a little better. I could finally buy me some clothes.”

Blalock has participated in many of the Fight for $15’s one-day strikes. “I feel if it doesn’t pass in [Biden’s] first 100 days, it’s going to be swept under the rug,” she said.

A $15 minimum faces strong Republican opposition from senators including Pat Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, who has said that “if the federal government mandates a universal $15 minimum wage, many low-income Americans will lose their current jobs and find fewer job opportunities in the future.”

Michael Saltsman, managing director of the Employment Policies Institute, a corporate-backed research group, also said it would be a bad time to enact a $15 minimum.

“You’ve got a lot of businesses hanging from a thread,” he said. “A $15 minimum is an irresponsible proposal at any time, and it’s particularly so right now.”

Saltsman said the Senate should not vote on a $15 minimum via reconciliation, arguing that its budgetary effect would be minimal. With the Senate divided 50-50, he questioned whether Democrats could muster 50 votes for a $15 minimum, suggesting that centrist Democrats like Joe Manchin of West Virginia might balk at it.

Bill Dauster, a top aide to former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, wrote in a recent editorial that raising the minimum would have clear budgetary effects and could be voted on through reconciliation.

Many Republicans say the federal minimum should remain at $7.25, leaving any increases to individual states. Walmart chief Doug McMillon says that if there is a minimum wage increase, it should take “geographic differences” into account, considering the differing costs of living in, say, California and Mississippi.

The Congressional Budget Office forecast that 1.3 million workers would become jobless due to an increase to $15. That study also forecast that 27 million workers would receive pay increases thanks to a $15 minimum, and the number of people in poverty would decline by 1.3 million.

Arindrajit Dube, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, said a review of economic studies shows that “more ambitious minimum wage policies have yet to produce any clear impact on jobs, even though it has certainly raised wages and reduced inequality”.

“Overall, the body of literature shows it has very little effect on low-wage jobs,” Dube said. “My work shows it leads to a reduction in poverty and increased family earnings, and maybe 35¢ on the dollar goes back to the government through reduced public assistance.”

Differing with Dube, economists David Neumark and Peter Shirley, in a newly released review of minimum wage research, conclude that “most of the evidence indicates the opposite – that minimum wages reduce low-skilled employment,” with the strongest effects on teens, young adults and the less-educated.

Senator Sanders said it’s outrageous that the purchasing power of the minimum wage has declined 30% since the late 1960s. “The fact that President Biden moved aggressively on this is important to the workers who will benefit,” Sanders said.

“It signals to the entire country that workers cannot continue to live on starvation wages, and I hope that message gets out to employers all across the country.”

Putin's Unchanging, Unthinking Response to Alexey Navalny

By Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

26 January 21

lexey Navalny’s latest video report has been viewed more than eighty-eight million times in the seven days since it was posted. Navalny, who has been in jail for the past week, bills the film as his anti-corruption organization’s biggest investigation to date. In the course of nearly two hours, the activist narrates the story of a giant palace that Vladimir Putin has built on the Black Sea; the convoluted system of kickbacks and involuntary contributions that financed it; the even more convoluted system created to conceal who owns it; and, most impressively, the tasteless, overpriced, over-the-top lacquer-and-plush interiors of the in-palace theatre, the hookah room, the domestic casino, the miniature race-car room, the twenty-seven-hundred-square-foot master-bedroom suite, and the expansive empire of adjacent vineyards and colonized vistas. Drone footage, archival photos, and 3-D reconstructions of the palace from floor plans are interspersed with Navalny speaking, wearing a blazer and a shirt with its collar unbuttoned; at times, the viewer can see the scar from the tracheal tube through which he breathed during the weeks he spent in a coma after he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok last August.

Navalny’s investigation is by far the most detailed study of a palace that Russians first heard about almost a dozen years ago, when one of its original financiers became a whistle-blower. (Sergei Kolesnikov has been living in exile since.) The project is nearly as old as Putin’s Presidency. In fact, as Navalny’s study reveals, the palace was completed years ago but fell into disrepair; pipes burst, mold grew, and the palace had to be reconstructed before it was ever inhabited.

What was Putin thinking? Why has he poured unimaginable resources into a palace that he will never use—more than a billion dollars, spent in extreme and resource-intensive secrecy, and, apparently, many hours of discussing, drawing up, imagining a regal monstrosity with two helipads and an underground hockey rink? He cannot use it while he is President, because that would expose him as the owner. Perhaps he dreams of retiring there after his Presidency ends. But, if Putin doesn’t die in office, he will be unable to stay in Russia without facing prosecution for extensive abuses of power. The desperate determination with which he holds on to power indicates that he understands this. On some level, not too far below the surface, he must know that he will never be able to use his palace.

Putin’s palace is a toy—a gigantic Lego project of a deranged, obsessive mind. In his film, Navalny stresses that some of the most absurd elements of the project—such as a seven-hundred-euro toilet brush for a bathroom in one of the vineyard houses on the outskirts of the palace complex—serve no practical function; they were placed there in case Putin ever has the occasion to acquaint himself with that implement in that particular room in that particular corner of an estate the size of a small European country. In fact, the whole project was built not for pleasure, and certainly not for show, but to satisfy some insatiable fantasy of wealth. Putin will never sit on the twenty-six-thousand-dollar leather couch or dine at the fifty-thousand-dollar table.

On Saturday, tens of thousands of protesters in more than a hundred and ten cities around Russia took to the streets—some in extremely cold weather (in Yakutsk, in eastern Siberia, temperatures of minus fifty-eight degrees Farenheit were reported), all in extremely risky conditions—to protest Navalny’s arrest a week ago. On January 17th, the activist returned to Russia from Germany, where he had been recovering from the effects of the poisoning. More than thirty-seven hundred people were arrested during the protests or in connection with them, a record number for a single weekend in Russian protest history, according to OVDInfo, an organization that tracks arrests and political prosecutions. Yulia Navalnaya, Alexey’s wife, was briefly detained in Moscow. The majority of those who were detained either have been released without charge or will face an administrative fine, but a handful of criminal prosecutions have been launched in cities from Vladivostok in the east to St. Petersburg in the west, certain to add to the list of dozens of Russian political prisoners, which includes Navalny himself.

Protests used to scare Putin. In his lone official biography, a slim book published when he emerged as Russia’s anointed leader two decades ago, Putin recalled being terrified of the crowds when East Germany erupted in protests in 1989, when Putin was working for the K.G.B. there. When protesters came to the building where he worked and the Soviet troops stationed in East Germany weren’t mobilized to protect the K.G.B., Putin said, he “got the sense that the country doesn’t exist anymore. I realized that the Soviet Union is ill. It was a terminal, incurable illness called paralysis—the paralysis of authority.” Soon after, Putin returned to the Soviet Union, where protest had just become possible. Hundreds of thousands of people would gather in Moscow, tens of thousands in Leningrad. Soon, the Soviet Union collapsed, apparently cementing Putin’s view that a large number of people in the streets signals the end of a regime.

Since Putin became President, several post-Soviet states have seen so-called color revolutions, mass protests that brought about the change of regime: the Rose Revolution in Georgia, in 2003; the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, in 2004; the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, in 2005; the Lilac Revolution in Moldova, in 2009; and more, including more revolutions in the same countries. (In Russian, the words “color” and “flower” have the same root, making it easier to combine all of these revolutions in one category.) Each of these revolutions clearly frightened Putin, but the Orange Revolution and the next Ukrainian revolution, the Revolution of Dignity, in 2014, became obsessions. In their terror, Putin and his supporters and advisers seemed oblivious to the differences between the two countries. Unlike Russia, Ukraine never restored autocratic rule after the collapse of the Soviet Union but has remained in a state of prolonged transition. Unlike Russia, it created and kept a judiciary and a parliament that enjoy a measure of independence from the executive branch. These institutions, albeit weak, provided the levers through which mass protest created political change: in 2004, the high court ordered a revote when the people were protesting a rigged election; in 2014, the opposition in parliament exerted pressure on the President.

In Russia, by contrast, democratic institutions were dismantled during Putin’s first term as President. Russia has long been impervious to protest because nothing connects the streets to the government. But Putin seemed not to realize this. Faced with mass protests from 2011 to 2012, the Kremlin cracked down, passed punitive legislation, staged a show trial of two dozen randomly selected protesters, forced most protest leaders into exile, and imprisoned one. In 2015, another protest leader, Boris Nemtsov, was killed. That left Navalny, who single-handedly inspired mass protests in 2013, between 2017 and 2018, and in 2019.

As my colleague Joshua Yaffa wrote following Saturday’s protests, Putin and Navalny are locked in battle. Navalny’s approach is wide-ranging, creative, and strategic. He is not only spectacularly brave but also fantastically inventive. He has built an investigative-journalism organization, an electoral organization that challenges Putin’s monopoly on power, and a system for organizing protests. He thinks several steps ahead, as he showed when he released his film about Putin’s palace after he was arrested. “We came up with this investigation while I was in intensive care,” Navalny says in the video, “but we immediately agreed that we would release it when I returned home, to Russia, to Moscow, because we do not want the main character of this film to think that we are afraid of him and that I will tell about his worst secret while I am abroad.”

Putin responds with blunt force: arrests, trials on trumped-up charges, assassination attempts, more arrests, more trumped-up charges. In this, he is like Alexander Lukashenka, the Belarusian dictator who has responded to months of mass protests by marching around carrying a machine gun and overseeing arrests and torture, followed by more arrests and more torture. An autocrat has the option of responding to mass unrest by trampling on and ignoring it. Watching Belarus, while Navalny was recuperating from the assassination attempt, may have made Putin less afraid of protests.

Still, one might wonder, what is Putin’s ultimate plan? If he has Navalny put away for many years, as he apparently intends to do—even if he finally has Navalny killed—what does he think is going to happen with the tens of thousands of Russians who are willing to risk their safety, indeed their lives, to protest? What about the structures that Navalny has built? What about Yulia Navalnaya, who has emerged as a popular symbol of wisdom, patience, and love? What about international pressure and likely stepped-up sanctions? What is Putin thinking? He is not.