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New York City Council Bill Would Help Stem High Fatality Rate at Construction Sites
Statement of Keith Wrightson, Worker Safety and Health Advocate, Public Citizen
WASHINGTON
At 10 a.m. today, the New York City Council Committee on Economic Development will hold a hearing on bill 1169-2013, which would set worker training and transparency requirements for certain city development projects receiving city financial assistance. Keith Wrightson, worker safety and health advocate at Public Citizen, will testify in favor of the measure at the hearing.
This hearing is both timely and necessary.
During 2011 and 2012, 36 New York City construction industry workers lost their lives on the job. These fatal injuries imposed an estimated cost of $187.2 million on New York City's economy. This alarming trend is appearing as the construction industry is undergoing a strong recovery in the city, following the 2008 recession.
In 2011, there were 16 construction fatalities; eight construction workers died from slips, trips and falls, five from contact with an object or equipment, and three from other hazards. In 2012, construction industry fatalities rose to 20. Eight workers died from slips, trips and falls, eight from crushing/collapse and four from contact with an object or equipment.
On-the-job safety training has been proven to reduce construction industry injuries and fatalities, but the existing laws mandate only that it be provided by employers operating under city contracts.
The city also funds construction projects through "public benefit corporations," entities that publicly finance projects through tax incentive financing. But these projects lack the same worker training requirements as projects under city contractors.
Bill 1169-2013 would ensure training for all construction workers on projects funded by taxpayers, not just those working on city contracts. It also would require construction companies to disclose violations of labor, safety and health, or tax laws, which would give city officials an opportunity to "weed out" less scrupulous developers and contractors.
The bill would mandate that construction companies working on taxpayer-supported projects run apprenticeship programs, which help create a highly skilled workforce that is less susceptible to injury.
The Committee on Economic Development needs to pass 1169-2013 now, and the council chair needs to then bring it to the floor for a vote.
Construction industry workers deserve safer workplaces. This bill takes a big step in the right direction.
Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people - not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country.
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Ted Cruz Says His Bill Will Allow DOJ to 'Prosecute' Those Who Fund No Kings Protests, Which Have Been Overwhelmingly Peaceful
"They want to ban protests," warned journalist Mehdi Hasan. "They want to kill the First Amendment."
Oct 16, 2025
Doubling down on efforts by Republicans to smear the peaceful "No Kings" protest movement as "terrorism," Sen. Ted Cruz on Wednesday called for the passage of legislation he introduced earlier this year to "prosecute" those funding the protests.
This weekend, organizers expect millions to gather in over 2,500 locations around the country in protest against President Donald Trump, including at the National Mall in Washington, DC.
In a Fox News interview on Wednesday, Cruz (R-Texas) claimed that the rallies were funded by the billionaire liberal donor George Soros, whom the Trump administration has indicated it plans to target using the criminal division of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
"You look at this No Kings rally and there's considerable evidence that George Soros and his network is behind funding these rallies, which may well be riots all across the country," Cruz said. "So I've introduced legislation called the Stop FUNDERs Act that would add rioting to the list of predicate offenses for RICO."
Cruz said that the legislation would allow the Department of Justice to "prosecute the money that is funding the antisemitic protests on campuses," (referring to pro-Palestine protests), "the pro-open border protests in [Los Angeles] and other cities" (protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and these 'No King' protests."
RICO refers to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which has historically been used to prosecute organized crime leaders for violence carried out by members of their organizations.
In the wake of the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller suggested that RICO should be used as part of an effort to "dismantle" left-wing nonprofits, which he claimed have incited violence and terrorism through First Amendment-protected speech criticizing Kirk's views.
Subsequent reporting from Reuters last week confirmed that the Trump administration was waging a "crackdown on the finances and activities of liberal nonprofits and groups opposed to his agenda," describing it as "a multi-agency effort with top White House aide Stephen Miller playing a central role."
Several Republicans, including Trump, have accused liberal nonprofits of funding "domestic terror networks" throughout the country, though they've presented little evidence for the assertion.
Soros' group, the Open Society Foundations, has pushed back on the administration's claims with a spokesperson stating: "Neither George Soros nor the Open Society Foundations fund protests, condone violence, or foment it in any way. Claims to the contrary are false."
While Cruz stated that his Stop FUNDERs Act, introduced in July, would protect "freedom of speech and peaceful protest," the acronym "FUNDERs" is short for "Financial Underwriting of Nefarious Demonstrations and Extremist Riots," which implies that even nonviolent protests deemed objectionable by the DOJ could be targeted.
There have already been several No Kings rallies around the country since Trump took office in January. The largest one, which took place on June 14, is estimated by the Crowd Counting Consortium to have had anywhere from 2 million to 4.8 million participants, making it the second-largest single day of nonviolent protest in the Trump era, second only to the nationwide Women's Marches and other demonstrations following Trump's first inauguration in 2017.
The group's analysis, published in August, examined thousands of events across the country and found that 99.5% of the reported protests had no injuries or property damage. Of the 10 documented events that did involve violence or property damage, it was often directed against the protesters. At one demonstration in Salt Lake City, an armed "safety volunteer" shot and killed a peaceful demonstrator and wounded another. In several other cases, police and opponents of the protests have brandished weapons at the demonstrators.
Their report also noted that "the No Kings coalition has hosted several online trainings... that have attracted hundreds of thousands of views. The July 16 virtual training was probably the largest nonviolence training in US history, with over 130,000 registered."
As author Mike Rothschild noted on X, "previous No Kings protests have been so peaceful and anodyne that I've seen far-left folks complaining they aren't accomplishing anything. There's no conspiracy here, no Soros-paid agitators, just people walking and holding funny signs. You can't make something out of nothing."
Despite this, in the days leading up to this weekend's No Kings protests, Republican leaders have attempted to portray it as a violent movement. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) described it as a "hate America rally" that would include "Antifa," a group that the Trump administration has designated as a "domestic terrorist" organization and threatened with lethal military force. Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) said this weekend's marches were being run by the "terrorist wing" of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) said that "we'll have to get the National Guard out" to combat the demonstration, adding: "Hopefully it will be peaceful. I doubt it."
Responding to Cruz's pledge to prosecute the funders of No Kings, Mehdi Hasan, founder of the media outlet Zeteo, warned: "They want to ban protests. It's insane and should scare every American. They want to kill the First Amendment."
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'Pay for Access': Critics Level Corruption Charges at Trump Over White House Ballroom Dinner
Trump's "betrayal of Americans is brazen" said a DNC spokesperson.
Oct 16, 2025
President Donald Trump on Wednesday evening held an event at the White House to thank some of America's richest corporations for financing his planned $250 million ballroom—an event that garnered the latest accusations of corruption against a president who has also raked in billions of dollars in profits in the cryptocurrency market since he took office.
As reported by The Washington Post, Trump "treated donors from Silicon Valley, Wall Street and the defense sector to a candlelit dinner in the East Room on Wednesday as a thank-you, praising them for quickly heeding his call for support and noting some offered as much as $25 million."
Trump also told the guests in attendance that they would likely be inviting to the ballroom's grand opening.
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, several of the most powerful corporations in the US sent representatives to attend the dinner, including Apple, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Palantir. Others expected to attend were Stephen Schwarzman, founder of investment firm Blackstone, as well as prominent cryptocurrency investors Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss.
The White House dinner drew immediate criticism from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which labeled it a "cash-for-access" event that took place as Americans across the country are struggling to afford basic necessities such as groceries and healthcare, and as the Republican Party has refused to negotiate with Democrats on extending healthcare subsidies in exchange for ending the government shutdown.
"This administration’s slogan should be ‘Let them eat cake,'" said Rosemary Boeglin, communications director for the DNC. "Trump is busy wining and dining with his rich friends and wealthy donors while failing to make a deal to end the government shutdown. Instead of trading cash for access, Trump and his Republican loyalists in Congress should be getting back to work to reopen the government and avoid a healthcare crisis."
Boeglin added that Trump's "betrayal of Americans is brazen," and noted that he could find money to bail out his political ally in Argentina but not enough to fund enhanced tax credits that help Americans pay for health insurance.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released a video on Wednesday night that also bashed Trump for hosting an entire dinner at the White House to thank big corporate donors for funding his vanity project.
"Donald Trump has found the time to wine and dine billionaires," she said. "Oh, and apparently to carve his corporate donors' names permanently into the walls in the White House. You cannot make this up! As usual, billionaire corporations are lining up to dump money into Trump's ballroom, possibly in exchange for some favors."
I didn't know draining the swamp meant Donald Trump building a $200 million ballroom for billionaires to bend the knee for special favors. pic.twitter.com/dqKb0glyl6
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) October 16, 2025
Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and vice-chairman for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told The New York Times that the White House event honoring wealthy donors "shows what the ballroom is really all about: pay to play."
"This is payment for access," he added. "Not just to the grounds of the White House but access to the president of the United States."
Many of the attendees at the dinner were from industries that are pushing for loose regulations of artificial intelligence and other technology and companies—such as Amazon, Lockheed Martin, and Palantir—that have contracts with the federal government.
Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in government ethics, told the Post that the ballroom raised serious ethical concerns because "it may or not be money in his pocket, but it’s absolutely to benefit Trump personally because it’s important to him."
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'Textbook Authoritarianism': Trump Aims IRS Criminal Division at Left-Leaning Groups, Donors
Reporting by the Wall Street Journal indicates the active "weaponization" of the agency to target the far-right president's political opponents and groups peacefully organizing against his administration's destruction agenda.
Oct 16, 2025
With reporting that President Donald Trump has ordered "sweeping changes" at the Internal Revenue Service, including aiming the agency's criminal-investigative unit at left-leaning nonprofit groups and individual donors, critics are warning of the chilling impacts of the weaponization of state power against the Republican administration's perceived political enemies.
The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, citing various people familiar with the shift in policy, reports that a "senior IRS official involved in the effort" has already created "a list of potential targets" for the IRS criminal-investigative division, or IRS-CI, which is also being installed with more loyal "allies" of the president to administer the new direction.
According to the WSJ:
The proposed changes could open the door to politically motivated probes and are being driven by Gary Shapley, an adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Shapley has told people that he is going to replace Guy Ficco, the chief of the investigative unit, who has been at the agency for decades, and that Shapley has been putting together a list of donors and groups he believes IRS investigators should look at. Among those on the list are the billionaire Democratic donor George Soros and his affiliated groups, according to a senior IRS official and another person briefed on the list. It couldn’t be determined upon what grounds Shapley would seek to begin such an investigation.
The reporting indicates that the decision to mobilize the IRS-CI for such an effort followed frustration experienced by Trump officials who encountered "obstacles in a separate effort to strip tax-exempt status from certain nonprofits," including universities with whom the president has clashed over student protests and other campus policies.
In recent weeks, various high-level officials in the administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Attorney General Pam Bondi, have been adamant that there's a network of progressive groups and donors that represent a "violent" faction on the left, which must be dismantled and criminally prosecuted. Still, they have offered little to no evidence about who or what this network is or what criminal conduct they are talking about.
Citing people familiar with the new plan at the IRS, the WSJ reports that "some senior IRS criminal tax attorneys are already voicing concern about the methods of investigators while Trump encourages his administration to target donors and nonprofit groups."
They are not the only ones expressing concern.
"This is using the government to destroy dissent," said Denver Lee Riggleman III, an Air Force veteran and former Democratic congressman from Virginia. "This is textbook authoritarianism."
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) responded to the new reporting by warning about the "weaponization" of the IRS by Trump against groups and individuals based on political speech, a clear violation of First Amendment protections and an unlawful use of the agency's enforcement powers.
“Donald Trump believes he’s a king, and he’s determined to wield every agency under his control as a weapon to crush political opposition and silence free speech," said Wyden in a Wednesday night statement.
"The Trump administration will try to legitimize this abuse with legal opinions and procedural lingo, but the implicit threat is that if you give to a progressive cause, they’ll deem you a terrorist and ruin your life," he continued. “Senate Republicans have spent years faking outrage over what they called the weaponization of government. They’ve spent more than a decade moaning about the IRS scrutinizing conservative tax-exempt groups—scrutiny the IRS in fact applied to organizations across the political spectrum."
Now, added Wyden, that "weaponization" the GOP warns about, but which never came to pass with an IRS under Democratic control, "is happening right now in front of their eyes, and unless Republicans stand up and speak out, they’ll be complicit in Trump’s assault on our Constitutional right to free speech.”
Ashley Schapitl, a former Democratic Capitol Hill staffer who served at the US Treasury Department and the US Senate Finance Committee, warned that "the total weaponization of tax enforcement leads down a dark road."
"Needless to say, under normal circumstances," said Schapitl, "political appointees are nowhere near and know nothing about IRS criminal investigations."
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, said that directing the IRS to target specific people for political purposes is not just a misuse of the agency, but a criminal act under federal statute.
"It's a full-blown federal felony crime for anyone in the White House (and all Secretaries but the AG) to order the IRS to target people," said Reichlin-Melnick. "It's not just a crime to DO it, it's a federal crime for an employee not to REPORT such an order to the Treasury Inspector General."
As Trump openly admitted last month, and the WSJ noted in its reporting, the president has ordered Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to identify and target those groups the White House has claimed are fomenting "political violence," but which critics warn is just a vague use of language so Trump can target organizations that protest or organize against his policies.
“Scott will do that," Trump said during a recent cabinet meeting in the White House, referring to the targeting of groups or donors. "That’s easy for Scott."
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