News & Op-Eds

By Alex Seitz-Wald

MSNBC

Two years, seven congressional committee investigations, 25,000 pages of documents, 50 briefings, nine reports, and at least eight subpoenas later, Congress is trying once again to get to the bottom of Benghazi. 

On Wednesday, the House Select Committee on the 2012 terror attack in Libya will hold its first hearing, putting the incident front and center again just as Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state during the attack, is stepping out onto the 2016 stage with a visit to Iowa.

Republicans, led by Select Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, say they’re just after the truth, but Democrats view the revival of the issue as pure partisan politics, and criticize the GOP for spending millions of dollars on a new investigation they say isn’t needed. 

Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus are calling on Speaker John Boehner to do away with the Benghazi committee and “refocus its attention” on issues they say are more important to Americans.

“We urge you to establish a Select Committee on Income Inequality to focus on the issues that everyday people face instead of spending more than $3.3 million of taxpayer money on an investigation that will not help families put food on the table,” they wrote in a letter to Boehner obtained by msnbc. 

“If House Republicans are serious about focusing on jobs and our economy,” the 25 progressive members of Congress continue, the GOP would create a committee to “investigate and develop common sense solutions to our country’s widening income gap.”

Of course, there’s almost zero chance that Boehner will heed the call, but the letter underscores Democrats’ lack of faith in Republicans’ ability to keep politics out of any Benghazi investigation.

On Thursday, the anti-Clinton Stop Hillary PAC will launch a $100,000 advertising campaign in the early presidential states of Iowa, South Carolina, and New Hampshire demanding that Clinton testify under oath before the committee. The ad will run in key media markets, including Gowdy’s district.

“We still need to hear answers,” the commercial says. “But Hillary Clinton prefers silence.”

Meanwhile, the Democratic super PAC American Bridge and its pro-Clinton offshoot Correct the Record have created a website to defend Clinton and the White House from charges the group dismisses as “conspiracy” theory. 

Gowdy faces tremendous pressure from the conservative base to subpoena Clinton and use the committee to try to stymie her presidential ambitions, but he has repeatedly promised that he won’t let politics get in the way of the committee’s work.

While the Democratic members of the select committee include the ranking members of relevant committees, such as the House Oversight and Armed Services committees, Republicans did not include the chairman of those committees on their roster, suggesting they wanted a start fresh. That means many of their members are less likely to be familiar with the work that has already been done on the Benghazi, Democrats fear.

Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the committee, said in a statement that he “sincerely hopes” the Select Committee will “make full use of the extensive investigations that have already been completed to define our scope, avoid duplication, and conserve taxpayer dollars.” 

Gowdy has so far inspired some confidence among the Democratic members of his committee, in part by selecting an idea proposed by a Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff for the first hearing.

That first meeting will focus on the implementation of recommendations from the internal State Department report probing the Benghazi attack to determine whether the government is following through on its own ideas. Improving the security of American diplomatic outposts is an uncontroversial topic that even Democrats say is important.

And it’s a topic that gets to the heart the policy questions at the center of the controversy over the attack, says Mitchell Zuckoff, a journalism professor who co-wrote a new book on Benghazi with members of the team that defended the CIA complex in the Libyan city that night. 

Even so, Zuckoff acknowledged, it will be difficult to divorce the policy questions from the politics. “I think it’d be naive for anyone at this point to not worry about politics when they talk about Benghazi. The story became political before it became factual. We’ve been playing catch up for the past two years,” he told msnbc.

By Alan Pike

Think Progress

Hundreds of striking fast food workers and their supporters were arrested Thursday while protesting to demand higher wages and the right to unionize, strike organizers say. Workers walked off the job in 159 different cities on what was at least the 10th day of strikes in the 21 months since the campaign for a $15 hourly wage and full labor rights began in New York City just after Thanksgiving 2012.

The arrests were scattered around the country and included 50 in Chicago, 42 in Detroit, 11 in Little Rock, 10 in Las Vegas, and 52 in Kansas City, according to a partial list provided by organizers. Police in Detroit reportedly ran out of handcuffs at one point while arresting peaceful strikers who were blocking traffic during their demonstration. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) was among the 25 workers and supporters arrested in Milwaukee, and several other members of the House Progressive Caucus joined worker actions in various cities. Moore said she was given a $691 ticket for disorderly conduct after she and other protesters defused to clear the road they were blocking.

With 159 cities striking on Thursday, fast food workers have approximately doubled the size of the battlefield over the past year. Strikes hit 60 cities in August 2013, the first day to see strikes in a double-digit number of cities. A December strike day featured 100 cities, and about 150 cities saw walkouts in May. Over the nearly two years since the campaign began, the strikes have leaped from New York and other northern cities to every corner of the continental U.S.

But beyond the geographic spread, Thursday’s strikes are the first example of a tactical escalation that workers and organizers promised at a convention earlier this summer. A July gathering of more than 1,300 fast food workers produced a resolution to begin using civil disobedience and nonviolent protest to advance their cause.

“We had over 100 people arrested, but however they respected every police officer,” Rev. W. J. Rideout told Detroit’s ABC affiliate WXYZ on Thursday. “And we also chanted, ‘Police need a raise also.’ EMS need a raise, firefighters need a raise. So we’re not against anyone here, we’re against the corporations, we’re against McDonald’s.”

McDonald’s was recently found to be responsible for its workers’ treatment by the National Labor Relations Board. That might sound obvious, but for decades the fast food industry has used franchise agreements to shrug off legal liability for labor violations by the owner-operators who run the vast majority of fast food chain stores. That legal facade crumbled this summer after workers’ attorneys presented evidence that McDonald’s is responsible for setting the rules that lead store owners to commit wage theft by falsifying time sheets, forcing people to work off the clock, and requiring workers to pay for their own uniform upkeep, among other widespread company practices.

The unrelenting worker pressure on the ground and the gradual shift in how labor regulators treat the fast food business model could make it difficult for these companies to maintain the status quo for much longer. At present, CEOs are paid 1,200 times more than workers in the industry. Frontline fast food workers — the vast majority of whom are adults, many with families to support — earn poverty wages that require them to turn to public assistance programs to survive despite having a job. This taxpayer subsidy of low fast food wages costs the American public well over a billion dollars a year (and when accounting for similar dynamics in other low-wage industries, the cost is closer to a quarter-trillion dollars). Worse, even those meager wages often don’t get paid properly. Nine out of 10 fast food workers reports being victimized by some form of wage theft.

By Ned Resnikoff

MSNBC

The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) isn’t passing a lot of legislation these days. The math doesn’t allow it, not when Republicans control the House and hold enough seats in the Senate to block any unwanted attempt at cloture. As a result, plans to legislate an increase in the federal minimum wage are perpetually on hold, stymied by an unfriendly House majority that seems likely to become even more powerful after the 2014 election.

Yet over the past several months, the CPC has managed to win a handful of small but crucial policy victories. In February, the caucus – led by co-chairs Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., and Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz. – successfully lobbied President Obama into issuing an executive order that sets a $10.10 minimum wage for federally contracted workers. On Thursday afternoon, he signed yet another ordercracking down on labor law violations among federal contractors. This time, the president gave a personal shout-out to several members of the caucus, including Ellison and Grijalva. Those two – along with Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and CPC members Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C. – “always stand up for America’s workers,” said the president.

The president’s executive orders regarding federal contractors were a victory in particular for Rep. Ellison, who was present at Thursday’s signing. For over a year, he has been lobbying the White House and doing media appearances to talk about the need for lifting federally contracted workers’ labor conditions. But he and other CPC members have also been taking an unusual step for members of Congress: On repeated occasions, they’ve joined the picket lines of striking federally contracted workers.

While other Democratic members of Congress might sometimes profess their solidarity with a particular social movement, the CPC has taken steps to blur the line between electoral politics and movement organizing. According to Rep. Ellison, that’s all part of a conscious strategy.

“We really see ourselves as the legislative wing of the progressive movement,” he said during a panel at the progressive convention Netroots Nation in late July. “We work hand in glove with our progressive partners.”

Those progressive partners include Good Jobs Nation, the group organizing federally contracted workers, and its parent organization, the labor coalition Change to Win. For Ellison, they also include the fast food workers’ movement, which over the past two years has led a series of increasingly large day-long strikes at fast food locations around the country. Ellison has attended fast food strikes in the past, and listened in on movement strategy sessions; in late July, he delivered a speech at the first-everfast food workers’ convention outside of Chicago.

“The Progressive Caucus, which I represent, is here in Washington, D.C. We’re here to stand with you here, we’re here to raise your voice, and demand that you get $15 and a union,” he told the crowd of about 1,300 fast food workers.

Speaking to msnbc, Rep. Ellison said that building “durable, sustainable, enduring relationships” with progressive groups was the only way to provide CPC with any meaningful leverage within the Democratic Party.

“There’s nobody to the left of the Progressive Caucus, so we can’t say we’re going to vote with the Greens or something,” he said. “So how do we get some power? Well we partner with our progressive allies. We have strong relationships with labor, with the environmental community, with the civil rights community.”

This version of the Progressive Caucus is a relatively recent phenomenon, and Rep. Ellison wondered aloud whether it could have made a difference in the 2009 health care reform debate.

“What if we could have deployed 50,000 people on the Capitol demanding that single-payer be in the dialogue?” he asked. “Would that change it? I don’t know, but I’d like to try.”

Although the CPC casts a wide net in terms of its partner organizations, its alliance with labor groups like Good Jobs Nation may be the most significant bond it has formed. Change to Win deputy director Joe Geevarghese said Ellison played a key role in promoting the voices of the federally contracted workers on the Hill.

“We would not have gotten the executive orders without Congressman Ellison’s steadfast support, and the steadfast support of all the members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus,” he said.

The relationship between the CPC and Good Jobs Nation began in early 2013 when the latter group brought federally contracted workers to speak at a policy summit hosted by Progressive Congress, the non-profit partner organization of CPC. Three or four low-wage, federally contracted workers told CPC members about their working conditions.

Immediately after they spoke, said Geevarghese, “Congressman Ellison stood up and said ‘this is wrong, this should not be happening on federal property in federal buildings, [and] the CPC is going to send a letter to the president on your behalf.’” Other members of the caucus agreed. When the federal contractors went on their first strike in May 2013, the CPC publicly supported the action.

Now that Good Jobs Nation has won another executive order from the president, the movement will likely go through a retooling period before the next big action occurs. But in the meantime, Ellison plans to introduce a bill that would turn union organizing into a civil right. He’s also indicated that the CPC might eventually change its position on the minimum wage and argue that the president’s favored $10.10 proposal is no longer sufficient. Instead, Rep. Ellison indicated his support for the $15 hourly wage which is one of the fast food strikers’ key demands.

“The Progressive Caucus has not had a vote on introducing a bill at $15, but it is something that I don’t mind telling you that we’ve had informal discussions about,” he said. “We don’t have a formal position on it yet.”

Ellison’s strategy of having the CPC work closely with various social movement groups doesn’t have many analogs in modern federal politics; the closest thing might be on the right, where various Republican legislators jockey to identify themselves with the tea party grassroots. But there is historical precedent on the left as well: Geevarghese suggested Frances Perkins, Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, as one predecessor. Otherwise, the closest points of comparison might be on the local level, where politicians such as Seattle’s Kshama Sawant have explicitly rooted their legislative work in the social movement politics of grassroots organizations.

Now that model has met some limited success on the federal level. The question is whether the CPC and its allies can build on that success, especially given the hard strictures of the legislative branch.

By Edward-Isaac Doverie

Politico

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has a new suggestion for President Barack Obama, who’s said he’s looking for more ideas for new executive orders: guaranteeing wage protections and negotiation rights for federal contractors.

The caucus was one of the leading voices calling for Obama to sign the executive order that raised the minimum wage, which he announced he would in his State of the Union in January. Now, co-chairs Reps. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) say he needs to go further and sign what they’re calling the Good Jobs Executive Order, in a new letter to the president obtained by POLITICO.

That order would guarantee labor and employment law protections and ensure no contractors are exempt from existing laws. It would also give preference to employers which provide a living wage and full benefits, and to those that allow collective bargaining and worker strikes.

While minimum wage for federal contractors was a good start, they say, more is needed to deal with “violations of workers’ rights like wage theft, which includes off-the-clock work and non-payment of overtime, remain unaddressed,” the letter argues.

Twenty-six million workers could be affected by the new protections — many of them women and minorities — and the situation is urgent, the lawmakers said in the letter.

“A Good Jobs Executive Order, which could impact millions of workers, is a logical next step after raising the wage of federal contract workers to $10.10 earlier this year,” the letter states. “We urge you to adopt it as a centerpiece of your ongoing effort to grow and strengthen the middle class.”