June, 26 2014, 03:01pm EDT
Senators Call for Emergency Action to Stop Price Spikes Caused by Oil Speculators
WASHINGTON
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today introduced legislation cosponsored by 14 senators to give federal regulators emergency power to stop speculators from taking advantage of turmoil in Iraq to drive up oil prices and make motorists pay more for gasoline.
"I am getting tired of big oil companies and Wall Street speculators using Iraq as an excuse to pump up oil and gas prices," said Sanders, a member of the Senate energy committee. "The fact is that high gasoline prices have less to do with supply and demand and more to do with Wall Street speculators driving prices up in the energy futures market."
Wall Street has pushed up the price of crude oil by more than 5 percent since June 12, when militants attacked and took control of several Iraqi cities. In the longer term, oil prices rose 53 percent since 2009.
While developments in Iraq have had no impact on the supply of gasoline in the United States today, gas is more expensive now than it's been in six years at the beginning of the summer driving season, according to AAA. The increase has occurred despite the fact that the supply of gasoline is 4.3 percent higher and demand is 1 percent lower than it was five years ago, when national gas prices averaged $2.69 a gallon.
Sanders' legislation would force the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates oil markets, to use to use all of its authority, including its emergency powers, to eliminate excessive oil speculation.
The Senate bill is cosponsored by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Ed Markey (D-Mass), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.).
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) introduced a companion bill in the House.
Nationwide, the average price of a gallon of gas yesterday was $3.70-a-gallon, according to the Energy Information Administration, a buck more than five years ago. In Burlington, Vermont, where gas stations already charge some of the highest prices in the country, the average price today was $3.77 a gallon, according to gasbuddy.com. That's only 3-cents-a-gallon more than a month ago but 21-cents more than one year ago and a 91-cent increase in five years.
There is mounting evidence linking excessive speculation on oil to the high pump prices for gasoline. Exxon Mobil, Goldman Sachs, the International Monetary Fund, the St. Louis Federal Reserve, the American Trucking Association, Delta Airlines, the Petroleum Marketers Association of America, the New England Fuel Institute, the Consumer Federation of America and others have blamed excessive oil speculation for significant increases in oil and gas prices. Goldman Sachs, perhaps the largest speculator on Wall Street, has acknowledged that excessive oil speculation costs Americans at least 56 cents a gallon at the pump.
To read the legislation, click here.
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Cluster Bombs Killed, Wounded Nearly 1,000 Civilians in 2022 as 73 Countries Refused to Join Global Ban
"It's unconscionable that civilians are still dying from cluster munition attacks 15 years after these weapons were outlawed," said one advocate.
Sep 05, 2023
The refusal of countries including Russia, Ukraine, and the United States to end the use and transfer of cluster munitions caused nearly 1,000 civilian deaths and injuries in 2022, according to the latest international report on the use of the widely banned weapons.
In the Cluster Munition Monitor 2023 reporton Tuesday, a coalition including Human Rights Watch (HRW), Humanity & Inclusion, and the Colombian Campaign to Ban Landmines reported that cluster munitions killed or wounded at least 1,172 people last year.
Nearly 1,000 people were killed or injured by cluster bomb attacks—including 890 in Ukraine, which has been under invasion by Russia since February 2022—while at least 185 people were killed or wounded by the remnants of cluster munitions.
Cluster munitions explode in the air after being fired by rockets or aircraft and can disperse numerous submunitions across a wide area, creating de facto landmines in residential neighborhoods and other places frequented by civilians and making the bombs deadly for years after they initially explode.
The "immediate and long-term civilian harm and suffering" caused by cluster munitions are the reason they have been banned by 112 countries that have ratified the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, said Mary Wareham, arms advocacy director at HRW.
"It's unconscionable that civilians are still dying from cluster munition attacks 15 years after these weapons were outlawed," she said in a statement.
Twelve additional countries have signed the convention, signaling a willingness to abide by its ban on the use, production, stockpiling, or transfer of cluster munitions.
More than 70 countries, however, have yet to sign onto the agreement, leaving civilians in countries including Ukraine, Myanmar, and Syria in danger of the bombs.
In 2022, the remnants of cluster munitions killed or maimed civilians in Azerbaijan, Iraq, Laos, Lebanon, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen, with 71% of the casualties recorded among children, who sometimes mistake unexploded ordnance for harmless metal balls and pick them up to play with them.
There were no new cluster bomb attacks in Iraq in 2022, but 15 people were killed by their remnants and 25 were wounded, according to HRW. Ninety people were wounded by remnants in Yemen, where there were also no new attacks, and five were killed.
"This weapon must be stopped," said Beatrice Fihn, former executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, after HRW's study was released.
According to HRW's report, Russia used old stockpiles of cluster munitions as well as new weapons in 2022 and the first half of this year. This past July, the U.S. began transferring to Ukraine cluster munitions that have a 6%-14% rate of delivering unexploded ordnance.
HRW says that the progress made by countries that have ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions suggests that casualties caused by the bombs would be drastically reduced if the U.S. and other countries signed the treaty.
"The greatest obstacle to countries working to eradicate cluster munitions are governments that are unwilling to join the convention and that undermine its principles by using or transferring the weapon," Wareham said. "Overall, countries that have banned cluster munitions are making steady progress to destroy their stockpiles and clear contaminated areas, despite wide-ranging challenges."
There have been no confirmed reports of new use, production, or transfers of cluster munitions by any of the countries that have ratified the agreement.
State parties that have signed onto the treaty have collectively destroyed 99% of their cluster bomb stockpiles, amounting to 1.47 million munitions and 178.5 million submunitions.
Bulgaria destroyed the last of its stockpile in June, and Belgium destroyed 95% of its munitions in 2022. Eleven countries have retained live cluster munitions "for permitted research and training purposes," according to HRW.
"Cluster munitions are widely stigmatized weapons for ethical, legal, and humanitarian reasons," Wareham said. "Governments that buck the stigma against cluster munitions should reconsider their position in light of the terrible harm these weapons cause and join the international ban."
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Senator Files Ethics Complaint Accusing Alito of Scheme to Thwart Congressional Action
"Justice Alito was involved in an organized campaign to block congressional action with regard to a matter in which he has a personal stake," reads the complaint filed by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse.
Sep 05, 2023
Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse filed an ethics complaint against Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Tuesday, accusing the right-wing judge of improperly interfering with congressional efforts to reform the scandal-plagued high court.
The complaint points to Alito's comments in a recent Wall Street Journal interview conducted in part by David Rivkin, an attorney for notorious Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo. Rivkin is also representing the plaintiffs in a case that could preemptively ban lawmakers from enacting a wealth tax.
In their write-up of the Alito interview, Rivkin and Journal editor James Taranto specifically mention Whitehouse's Supreme Court ethics legislation, which passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in a party-line vote in July. The bill, which has not yet received a vote in the full Senate, would require the Supreme Court to adopt a binding code of ethics—something every other federal court in the U.S. has done.
Rivkin and Taranto follow their brief summary of the legislation with a quote from Alito, who said, "No provision in the Constitution gives [Congress] the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period."
Whitehouse argued in his new ethics complaint that Alito's "decision to opine publicly on the constitutionality of that bill may well embolden legal challenges to the bill should it become law."
The complaint, which was sent to Chief Justice John Roberts, continues:
Justice Alito's opining will also fuel obstruction of our Senate investigations into these matters. To inform its work on my bill and other judicial ethics legislation, and oversee the performance of the statutory Judicial Conference in this arena, the Senate Judiciary Committee is investigating multiple reports that Supreme Court justices have accepted and failed to disclose lavish gifts from billionaire benefactors.
Separately, the Senate Finance Committee is investigating the federal tax considerations surrounding the billionaires' undisclosed gifts to Supreme Court justices. Both committees' inquiries have been stymied by individuals asserting that Congress has no constitutional authority to legislate in this area, hence no authority to investigate. Justice Alito's public comments prop up these theories.
Alito's comment about Congress' supposed powerlessness to regulate the high court prompted outrage and rebuttals at the time, with New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie calling it "a categorical statement of judicial supremacy that also stands as a glimpse into the arrogance of one justice on a court that falsely sees itself as the only and final authority on what the Constitution means."
Whitehouse's complaint emphasizes that Alito's comment was made to an individual who is representing Leo—a key architect of the right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court—as the Senate investigates him over "actions to facilitate gifts of free transportation and lodging that Justice Alito accepted from Paul Singer and Robin Arkley II in 2008."
As ProPublicareported in June, Leo "helped organize" the undisclosed luxury fishing vacation that Alito took with Singer, a billionaire hedge fund tycoon who later had business before the Supreme Court. Singer also had financial ties to supporters of legal challenges filed against President Joe Biden's initial student debt cancellation plan, which Alito and the rest of the high court's conservative supermajority struck down in June.
"The timing of Justice Alito’s opining suggests that he intervened to give his friend and political ally [Leo] support in his effort to block congressional inquiries," Whitehouse's complaint states.
The complaint also points to the "unpleasant fact" that "Alito's opining apparently at the behest of his friend and ally's lawyer, props up an argument being used to block inquiry into undisclosed gifts and travel received by Justice Alito."
"In the worst case facts may reveal, Justice Alito was involved in an organized campaign to block congressional action with regard to a matter in which he has a personal stake," the complaint reads. "Whether Justice Alito was unwittingly used to provide fodder for such interference, or intentionally participated, is a question whose answer requires additional facts. The heart of any due process is a fair determination of the facts. Uniquely in the whole of government, the Supreme Court has insulated its justices from any semblance of fair fact-finding."
"The obstructive campaign run by Mr. Rivkin and Mr. Leo, fueled by Justice Alito's opining, appears intended to prevent Congress from gathering precisely those facts," the complaint adds. "The Supreme Court should not be helpless when it comes to policing its own members' ethical obligations. But it is necessarily helpless if there is no process of fair fact-finding, nor independent decisionmaking. I request that you as chief justice, or through the Judicial Conference, take whatever steps are necessary to investigate this affair and provide the public with prompt and trustworthy answers."
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Bernie Sanders Champions '32-Hour Work Week With No Loss in Pay'
"Needless to say, changes that benefit the working class of our country are not going to be easily handed over by the corporate elite. They have to be fought for—and won."
Sep 05, 2023
As part of his Labor Day message to workers in the United States, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday re-upped his call for the establishment of a 20% cut to the workweek with no loss in pay—an idea he said is "not radical" given the enormous productivity gains over recent decades that have resulted in massive profits for corporations but scraps for employees and the working class.
"It's time for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay," Sanders wrote in a Guardian op-ed as he cited a 480% increase in worker productivity since the 40-hour workweek was first established in 1940.
"It's time," he continued, "that working families were able to take advantage of the increased productivity that new technologies provide so that they can enjoy more leisure time, family time, educational and cultural opportunities—and less stress."
According to Sanders:
Moving to a 32-hour work week with no loss of pay is not a radical idea. In fact, movement in that direction is already taking place in other developed countries. France, the seventh-largest economy in the world, has a 35-hour work week and is considering reducing it to 32 hours. The work week in Norway and Denmark is about 37 hours a week.
Recently, the United Kingdom conducted a four-day work week pilot program of 3,000 workers at over 60 companies. Not surprisingly, it showed that happy workers were more productive. The pilot was so successful that 92% of the companies that participated decided to maintain a four-day work week because of the benefits to both employers and employees.
A Morning Consult survey in August found that 87% of employed U.S. adults "were very or somewhat interested" in a four-day workweek, and slightly less than that (82%) said they believed widespread implementation would be successful.
Research published in July by 4 Day Week Global, a firm that advocates for a shorter week, found that not one of 41 companies involved in 4-day workweek trials in Canada and the United States planned to return to five-day weeks after the conclusion of the test period.
Professor Juliet Schor of Boston College, who led the research team, noted that the "continued reduction in hours was not achieved via increased work intensity where people had to speed up and cram five days of tasks into four. Instead, they operated more efficiently and continued to improve these capabilities as the year progressed."
Unionized autoworkers in the U.S. are now pushing for the same demand as they pressure the three major car manufacturing companies for better contracts. With a possible strike looming this month, UAW President Shawn Fain has laid out a series of demands that include a 46% pay raise, a return to traditional pensions, and a four-day workweek capped at 32 hours.
"Our union's membership is clearly fed up with living paycheck-to-paycheck while the corporate elite and billionaire class continue to make out like bandits," said Fain in a statement last week. "The Big Three have been breaking the bank while we have been breaking our backs."
It won't be an easy demand to achieve, Sanders conceded in his Labor Day op-ed. "Changes that benefit the working class of our country are not going to be easily handed over by the corporate elite," he wrote. "They have to be fought for—and won."
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