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      The trials of SBF and DJT: Trump isn’t clean on crypto but he did warn us about it

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      The New York fraud trial of Sam Bankman-Fried kicked off this week. The 31-year-old former crypto billionaire faces two substantive counts of wire fraud, for acts allegedly perpetrated against the customers of FTX, the crypto-futures exchange he founded, and five related counts of conspiracy. If convicted on all charges, he faces up to 110 years in prison.As fate would have it, his case is being heard a few buildings away from where one Donald J Trump sits on trial for fraud. Like the 45th president – DJT, if you will – SBF has a tough row to hoe.Even if Bankman-Fried is acquitted, he stares at another trial, slated for March 2024, on five more counts of fraud. The men’s paths remain entwined. At that same moment, Trump will be both deep into the Republican primary and likely standing trial in connection with January 6.Furthermore, filings show that as of early August, Trump held $2.8m in a cryptocurrency wallet, with as much as $500,000 in ethereum, a cryptocurrency. On top of that, his collection of non-fungible tokens generated $4.87m in licensing fees. The NFTs are a collection of virtual trading cards, featuring illustrations of Trump as superhero, cowboy or astronaut. Really.Not that Trump has always been in favour of crypto.“I am not a fan of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” he tweeted in 2019.Sound familiar? Prosecutors say Bankman-Fried relied on smoke and mirrors to gain access to political power. According to his indictment, he used customers’ assets “to lobby Congress and regulatory agencies to support legislation and regulation he believed would make it easier for FTX to continue to accept customer deposits and grow”.He is also alleged to have “misappropriated customer money to help fund over $100m in political contributions in advance of the 2022 election”, while seeking to “conceal the source of the funds used for the contributions”.Trump and his party, however, were not the chief recipients of such largesse. Bankman-Fried tended to donate to Democrats. Conservatives were therefore annoyed. They sought to portray Bankman-Fried as a leftist, on top of being a crook. Once upon a time, though, he met Ron DeSantis for no apparent reason other than the fact Florida’s hard-right governor wanted to meet. Now, as a presidential candidate, DeSantis has emerged as a crypto advocate. His campaign continues to sink, however.We know more about such meetings now, thanks in large part to Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, a new book by Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball, The Big Short and other bestsellers about how capitalism works – and doesn’t.For instance, Jerry Jones, a Republican and owner of the Dallas Cowboys NFL team, showed up at a Beverly Hills party also attended by Hillary Clinton, a passel of Kardashians, Doug Emhoff, the husband of the vice-president, Kamala Harris – and Bankman-Fried.Bankman-Fried had allure. Exactly why continues to puzzle political players. His money doesn’t explain everything. But it does shed light on plenty.In summer 2022, Lewis writes, Bankman-Fried met Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, with the goal of stopping Trump-aligned extremists snagging Republican nominations. It was a high-level meeting – high enough that for one evening, Bankman-Fried even swapped his beloved cargo shorts for a suit.“At that moment, Sam was planning to give $15m to $30m to McConnell to defeat the Trumpier candidates in the Senate races,” Lewis writes.Bankman-Fried also explored paying Trump $5bn not to run in 2024, Lewis writes. Nothing came of that.Now, as Bankman-Fried sits in court, McConnell, 81, remains in the minority, his health in public decline. But McConnell remains a reliable soldier, his hold on his caucus unchanged.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe crypto industry, meanwhile, scrambles to salvage its image from the damage done by Bankman-Fried.“The idea that one man and one company dictated an entire industry was frustrating for a lot of people,” Kara Calvert, head of US policy at Coinbase, recently told Politico. “At the end of the day, the industry is so broad-based. Nobody wants to let the whole future of technological development in the United States be dictated by a criminal.”Bankman-Fried has not been convicted of anything. But it does seem extraordinary that he rose so high so fast, and that so many political leaders were so eager to help.“From the beginning, I had thought that crypto was pretty dumb,” wrote Zeke Faux, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg and a fellow at New America, in Number Go Up, his unflattering take on crypto and Bankman-Fried. “And it turned out to be even dumber than I imagined.“There was no mass movement to actually use crypto in the real world … from El Salvador to Switzerland to the Philippines, all I saw were scams, fraud, and half-baked schemes.”In September 2021, El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender, the first country to do so. The rightwing Heritage Foundation ranks the country’s economy the 114th most free. Freedom House, more mainstream, rates El Salvador partly free. It’s not a flattering ad for crypto.In the US, major advocates include Eric Adams, the mayor of New York; Robert Kennedy Jr, a conspiracy theorist and likely third-party presidential candidate; and Cynthia Lummis, the Wyoming Republican senator who opposed certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 win just hours after the attack on Congress.Such names should tell us something – as should Trump’s crypto holdings mentioned above. But anyone who still believes might also care to recall Trump’s earlier words.“Unregulated crypto assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity,” he tweeted, more than four years ago. “We have only one real currency in the USA … it is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the world, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States Dollar!”Strange as it seems to say it, the man had a point. More

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      ‘Trump show is over,’ says New York attorney general as third day of fraud trial ends

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      The New York attorney general, Letitia James, told reporters on Wednesday that “the Trump show is over” as the third day of the former US president’s civil fraud trial wrapped up in Manhattan.James and Trump both returned to the trial a day after Trump ran afoul of the judge by denigrating a key court staffer in a social media post.Outside court, James called Trump’s appearance at the civil trial – which he is not required to attend – a “political stunt” and a “fundraising stop”.Trump has spent the first three days of the trial attacking James and Judge Arthur Engoron in press gatherings outside court. He is expected to return to Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday.“I will not be bullied,” James said. “Justice will be served.”The former US president and Republican frontrunner in the 2024 presidential race is voluntarily taking time out from the campaign trail to attend the trial. James’s lawsuit accuses Trump and his business of deceiving banks, insurers and others by providing financial statements that greatly exaggerated his wealth.Trump formally appealed a judge’s refusal to dismiss James’s civil fraud lawsuit against him and his family business on Wednesday. The appeal was filed as Trump sat in a the courtroom, watching an accountant who used to work for him testify as the state’s first witness.Engoron already has ruled that Trump committed fraud by inflating the values of prized assets including his Trump Tower penthouse. The ruling could, if upheld on appeal, cost Trump control of his signature skyscraper and some other properties.Trump denies any wrongdoing. With familiar rhetoric, on his way into court on Wednesday, he called James “incompetent”, portrayed her as part of a broader Democratic effort to weaken his 2024 prospects and termed the trial “a disgrace”.Trump has frequently vented in the courthouse hallway and on social media about the trial, James and Judge Engoron, also a Democrat.But after he assailed Engoron’s principal law clerk on social media on Tuesday, the judge imposed a limited gag order, commanding all participants in the trial not to hurl personal attacks at court staffers. The judge told Trump to delete the “disparaging, untrue and personally identifying post”, and the former president took it down.The non-jury trial concerns six claims that remained in the lawsuit after Engoron’s pretrial ruling, and the trial is to determine how much Trump might owe in penalties. James is seeking $250m and a ban on Trump doing business in New York.On Wednesday, an accountant who prepared Trump’s financial statements for years was to continue testifying as a witness for the state. James’s lawyers are trying to show that Trump and others at his company had full control over the preparation of the statements.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe accountant, Donald Bender, told the court on Tuesday that the Trump Organization didn’t always supply all the documents needed to produce the statements, despite attesting in letters to the accounting firm that the company had provided all financial records and hadn’t “knowingly withheld” relevant data.During cross-examination, Bender acknowledged he missed a change in information about the size of the Trump Tower apartment.The defense lawyer Jesus Suarez seized on that, telling Bender that Trump’s company and employees were “going through hell” because “you missed it”.Bender responded: “We didn’t screw it up. The Trump Organization made a mistake, and we didn’t catch it.”Trump plans to testify later in the trial.Agencies contributed to this article More

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      Letitia James: the fearless attorney general threatening Trump’s business

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      New York attorney general Letitia James has never shied away from taking on powerful adversaries – from the National Rifle Association to former New York governor Andrew Cuomo.On Monday she will take on her biggest case yet: a fraud trial that threatens the very foundation of Donald Trump’s New York real estate empire.Critics have accused the 64-year-old career prosecutor of using her office, with 1,700 staff and over 700 assistant attorneys general, for political purposes. To others, the Democrat is a heroic figure: the first woman elected as New York’s attorney general and the first Black person to serve in the role. A fearless prosecutor who has taken on cases others would walk away from.Like Trump, “Tish” James was born and raised in New York City. It’s about the only thing they have in common. Raised with her seven siblings in Brooklyn, James attended public schools in the city before getting her law degree at Howard University in Washington DC.She started her law career as a public defender before entering New York politics as a councilmember and then as public advocate, the first Black woman to hold the watchdog role. James’s passions were clear from the start – she filed a record number of suits on behalf of tenants, seniors and people with disabilities. James became New York state attorney general in 2018.Few think her ambitions stop there. Top state prosecutor has often been the jumping off point for a run for New York’s governorship, which James briefly attempted last year.The Trump trial will thrust James further into the spotlight and she is off to an impressive start. James has already claimed one victory in the case. Last week, the New York judge Arthur Engoron ruled the real estate developer had committed fraud for years as he built his empire by inflating the value of his holdings. In an early win for James, Engoron revoked the business licenses of Trump and his adult sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, essentially barring them from doing business in the state.This week, Engoron will hear arguments on a potential fine, which could be at least $250m.“I come from a long line of very strong, tough women. We stick to our principles and stand up for what we believe in, which is fundamental fairness, which is my raison d’être,” James told Elle Magazine in 2017.As attorney general, she has worked for more funding for pre-trial services, the reform of bail laws for minor offenses, treatments for the mental health crisis, cracking down on ghost guns and defending the state’s gun laws restricting the public carrying of firearms.James has also said she wants to prioritize antitrust investigations and consumer protections, and focus on reducing tenant evictions amid skyrocketing rents in the city and state.Last year, James suspended her campaign for New York governor, saying she wanted to “finish the job” with her ongoing investigations, including overseeing a sexual harassment investigation into former governor Cuomo that led to his resignation, an inquiry into the NRA and fraudulent financial practices of the former president.In interviews during her campaign, James said that not pursuing evidence of wrongdoing by Trump or the NRA would have been a “dereliction of my duty” and rejected claims that her legal pursuits were not on behalf of New Yorkers but her “own personal ambitions”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I make no apologies, because this is who I am, and this is what I do,” James added.On the same day that she ended her campaign, reports said she was looking to sit Trump for a deposition as part of her civil investigation into his business practices. Trump has called James “a renegade and out of control prosecutor”, dismissed the case as “crazy” and a “witch-hunt”, and invoked his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination 400 times.Trump maintains his innocence and his lawyers are appealing the pre-trial ruling. But outside observers believe this case will be a real test of Trump’s – often successful – bluster.Andrew Lieb, a real estate attorney and legal political analyst, says James is doing no more or less than what attorneys general do. The fact that Trump received a pre-trial ruling in his fraud trial shows just how clear the case against him was.“He was so outrageous, pompous and immune to order and business practices that someone had to do something about it. It was like spitting and saying it’s raining,” Lieb said. “It’s not like he took a $10m property and said it was worth $11m. He took a $10m property and said it was worth over $100m.”James, he says, will go down as an effective attorney general. “She’s effective in that she won. No one remembers how you played the game, they just remember that you won.” More

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      Voter drive: Biden and Trump battle for blue-collar votes in auto heartland

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      Joe Biden became the first sitting US president to join a picket line when he stopped at a General Motors facility just outside Detroit to show support for striking United Auto Workers last week. “Stick with it. You deserve a significant raise,” Biden told the crowd.A day later, Donald Trump told raucous blue-collar supporters at a speech north of Detroit: “Just get your union guys, your leaders, to endorse me and I will take care of the rest.”The tug-of-war remarks represented the unofficial opening salvoes of the 2024 election season as the parties’ likely candidates set out to woo blue-collar voters in Michigan, a critical bloc in a state that’s a must-win in any White House bid.“Politically, Michigan is ground zero right now because of the auto strike,” said Bill Ballenger, a conservative state political analyst. Biden, he said, was seeking to shore up his slipping support among unions, while Trump had spotted a “weakness in Bidenomics” that the former president was set on exploiting as the strike pushes into its third week.Trump won Michigan, an upper midwest swing state, by about 12,000 votes in 2016. Biden took the state by nearly 150,000 votes in the next election. Michigan is a heavily unionized state, and Biden won with 64% support among union members. But August polling found support among Michigan union members hangs at 49%, and Biden and Trump are in effect tied.“Clearly there’s division among the rank and file,” said pollster Bernie Porn, president of Epic MRA, a Michigan-based survey research firm. Political observers say Michigan is very much in play in the 2024 election.The dueling visits showcased two very different visions for America’s future. Trump criticized the Biden administration’s support for the auto industry’s shift to electric vehicles, which unions fear because they require fewer workers to make. “You can be loyal to American labor or you can be loyal to the environmental lunatics,” Trump told the crowd in a meandering, hour-long speech. (Later he insisted he would make “sex changes for children” illegal.)Biden’s minutes’ long pitch zeroed in on the unions: “The fact of the matter is that you guys, the UAW – you saved the automobile industry back in 2008 … You made a lot of sacrifices. But now they’re doing incredibly well. And guess what? You should be doing incredibly well too.”The visits also put on display two competing styles. Despite the historic nature of Biden’s visit, the daytime visit was a low-key, invite-only event among a small crowd of UAW members. The tone was supportive, good-natured. At the nearby Ford Michigan Assembly plant, Biden’s supporters viewed it as a morale boost.Trump, by contrast, set up at night in a non-union shop in Macomb county, an Obama-to-Trump blue-collar swing county. Hundreds of boisterous supporters lined the streets, banging on drums and shouting “Freedom!” and breaking into chants of “USA! USA!” and “Back the blue!” The Trump campaign dismissed Biden’s visit as a “cheap photo op”, and said the rank and file support him, not Biden. Some of his supporters echoed that.“We’ve always known that the blue-collar workers are behind Trump, but the party heads and elites have such a command of the microphone that the floor worker is really underrepresented,” said Trump supporter James Anthony Minnick Jr after attending the former president’s Wednesday speech.Biden’s visit seems to convey an understanding of that, political observers say, but despite that the UAW leadership has been very clear in who it supports.“I see no point in meeting with [Trump] because I don’t think the man has any bit of care about what our workers stand for, what the working class stands for,” the UAW president, Shawn Fain, said before Trump’s visit. “He serves a billionaire class, and that’s what’s wrong with this country.”Biden had attended the UAW picket at Fain’s invitation, but the union has yet to officially endorse anyone, which could signal an understanding of rank-and-file divisions, or could be read as leverage to gain continuing White House support.Scott Malenfant, 47, an Obama-to-Ted Cruz-to-Trump supporter and union rep, was among those on the picket line outside Ford’s Michigan Assembly plant on Tuesday who split from UAW leadership. After Biden’s speech, the 23-year line veteran said Democrats lost him and other union members over the EV transition and their support of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Democrats are “on the record saying those jobs are never coming back”, Malenfant noted.“Trump is the first one who said ‘We’re going to bring these jobs back,’” he added while acknowledging that Republicans are typically anti-union. But Trump was different, he said: “All he cares about is whether the country does well … and at least he’s the one pushing for workers.”Biden’s Tuesday message that auto companies need to reward workers did resonate with some who are undecided, or describe themselves as “not political”, like Lisa Carter, 53, who works in the plant’s stamping department. She has two jobs despite 17 years on the line, and she cannot afford to buy a new Ford.“If you’re for the people, then I’m for you,” Carter said. “And Trump can stay where he’s at because when he was president he said we make too much money.”Biden needs to address the EV concerns, Porn said, and talk to union members about how batteries and chips could be produced by autoworkers in the state. The visit also comes in the wake of another Trump indictment, and Porn said the former president’s mounting legal numbers appear to be a drag on his favorability numbers, which are down to 37%.Some of that may be down to Trump’s ever mounting legal troubles. But those cases are unlikely to shake his diehard supporters “because they see him as he likes to see himself – a victim, a martyr being crucified by the deep state”, said Ballenger.For now, with more than a year to go before the election, Porn and Ballenger each say Biden has the edge in the state despite his concerning poll numbers. But Ballenger warned the race was far from decided. Just like in 2016: “It could be deja vu all over again,” Ballenger said. More

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      ‘Fed up’ US autoworkers expand strikes against GM and Ford

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      The United Auto Workers union escalated its strike against the big three US automakers on Friday as the industrial action entered its third week.In a livestream updateon the strike on Friday, the UAW president, Shawn Fain, said another 7,000 workers would be joining the action. About 25,000 workers are now on strike.Fain said: “We are fed up with corporate greed and we are fed up with corporate excess. We are fed up with breaking our bodies for companies that take more and more and give less and less.”Fain said bargaining with Ford and General Motors had not made meaningful progress in the past week, adding Ford’s Chicago assembly plant and a GM plant in Lansing, Michigan, to the strike. Action at Stellantis was not escalated this week due to progress made in talks.The strike has become a hot-button issue in political circles with Joe Biden and Donald Trump visiting Michigan this week to address autoworkers.“This strike is absolutely about the worker and listening to the worker,” Haley Stevens, a Democrat representing Michigan’s 11th congressional district, told the Guardian. “This strike has opened up new channels to hear from workers in ways that we haven’t seen in a very long time in the country.”Stevens served as chief of staff to the US Auto Rescue Task Force under the Obama administration and has appeared on the strike picket lines in support of autoworkers. She recently reintroduced a bill to protect union autoworkers in Congress.She said the concessions autoworkers made to help the auto industry recover from the 2008 economic recession have not been returned. She also praised the work auto employees did to get the industry through the Covid-19 pandemic.“Now is the time to recognize that work, and their fair share of the profit, and ensure that anyone who works at the automakers is treated fairly, and dealt in to the profits and to the transition that’s under way,” Stevens added.Shaun Collier, a Stellantis assembly worker in Sterling Heights, Michigan, said: “The big three have been making record profits, giving themselves increases, while us UAW members are the ones doing all of the work, putting wear and tear on our bodies, missing our kids’ extracurricular activities because we are forced to be here to build a product we can’t even afford.“All we want is a livable wage, a work-life balance, and job security.”Biden joined the UAW picket line in Michigan on Tuesday, the first sitting president ever to do so.“The fact of the matter is you guys, the UAW … you saved the automobile industry back in 2008 and before. You made a lot of sacrifices, gave up a lot. The companies were in trouble. Now they are doing incredibly well, and guess what? You should be doing incredibly well too,” Biden said.Trump held a rally at a non-union auto parts plant outside of Detroit on Wednesday, coinciding with the Republican presidential primary debate. More

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      Trump’s pitch for autoworker votes in car heartland is short on autoworkers

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      As the rain came down a small crowd was still left outside Drake Enterprises, a non-union automotive manufacturing plant in Clinton Township, Michigan, on Wednesday night waiting for former president Donald Trump.“We want to take our country back! Let Biden sleep in his hospital bed! We want guns! We want Trump!” shouted one of the 50 or so people still waiting as Trump’s motorcade pulled away from the sodden event. He declined to give his name.Trump spoke at the plant a day after President Joe Biden had joined a picket line in nearby Wayne in support of the United Auto Workers (UAW) strike against Detroit’s big three auto companies.Before the speech began, hundreds of Trump supporters lined the street in an industrial park, erupting in cheers as the former president’s motorcade pulled in.The gathering had all the festive, and sometimes chaotically surreal, energy that is often part of Trump rallies. Supporters banged on drums, breaking to yell “Freedom!” and drawing loud cheers from up and down the street. Many were draped in Trump 2024 flags. Another flag showed Trump as a Rambo-like figure holding a grenade launcher. Passing traffic blared their horns in support.Inside the event, Trump gave a rambling speech for more than an hour. Union workers should support him because electric cars would take their jobs, said Trump. China and other foreign powers were the real enemy, not low wages or incompetent bosses. “Your current negotiations don’t mean as much as you think,” said Trump.By Trump standards, the crowd was small but there was no doubting their enthusiasm and they did not seem to mind the twisting word salad of the speech as it touched on trans rights, the Taliban, grudges against Hillary Clinton and Trump’s current 2024 Republican opponents.Clinton Township is in Macomb county, a crucial battleground in 2024’s election, and the one thing that Trump and Biden have in common is a recognition that voters here are crucially important in the race for the White House.Unsurprisingly given the nature of the event, the crowd was firmly behind Trump.Ed Sands, a 73-year-old retired auto supplier employee, said Trump is “the only one who gives a shit about working people.“Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Obama – they were all terrible for Macomb county, jobs went to China, south, and you see all these people here today because Trump will bring them back,” Sands added.The former US president’s return to office is all but guaranteed, Sands said. “Look around you, look at these people. Do you think he is going to lose? Do you?”Christopher Demopolis, 35, who works in heating and cooling, echoed that sentiment, and said his UAW base will play a role. “I don’t see why he won’t win Michigan next time around – a lot of this is going to determine it,” he said, motioning to the lively crowd. “Trump supports the workers, Biden supports the leaders.”Though the focus of Trump’s event was on auto unions, it was unclear how many union members were there. Several of those who spoke with the Guardian said they were small business owners, or work for small businesses, but their numbers in this swing county are high.“That’s the thing – there are people who are union, but there’s also a whole bunch of us who are not and who work for small businesses, and we are more pro-Trump,” said Laura, who lives in nearby Mount Clemens, she declined to give her last name.Trump’s speech came a day after a New York judge ruled that the former president’s business fortune was built on rampant fraud and blatant lies.None of that seemed to faze his supporters. “I don’t care if he didn’t pay taxes,” said a supporter who declined to give his name. “He shouldn’t even have to pay taxes!” More

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      Trump urges UAW to endorse him in speech at non-union car parts maker

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      Donald Trump tried to woo US autoworkers in a rambling speech in Michigan on Wednesday night that took potshots at Joe Biden, electric vehicles and Barack Obama while pushing culture war issues and fell far short of supporting the core issues that have many car workers currently on strike.The speech came a day after Joe Biden spoke to striking United Auto Workers members on a picket line nearby. Biden’s historic appearance was the first time that a sitting president has walked a picket line.Trump dismissed that as a “photo op” at Drake Enterprises, a non-unionised car parts maker in Macomb county, a few miles from where Biden spoke to striking employees picketing a Ford facility.The former US president and other prominent Republicans have consistently attacked unions but many are now being more supportive of the UAW strike. Trump is the overwhelming frontrunner in the Republican 2024 nomination race and Michigan and other rust belt states are seen as crucial battlegrounds in the race for the White House.“Your leadership should endorse me and I will not say a bad thing about them again,” said Trump, though he did not substantively address the issues at stake in the strike beyond expressing support for getting better wages.At one stage Trump said that the UAW leader, Shawn Fain, should endorse him and called him “a good man … he’s got to endorse Trump”. In the run-up to the visit Fain, however, has been withering in his opinion of Trump and declined to meet him.“I see no point in meeting with him because I don’t think the man has any bit of care about what our workers stand for, what the working class stands for,” Fain said before Trump’s visit. “He serves a billionaire class, and that’s what’s wrong with this country.” Biden had attended the UAW picket at Fain’s invitation.Several hundred people attended the speech, which was timed to coincide with the latest Republican presidential debate.“When you look at the thousands of people outside, why couldn’t you get a bigger plant?” said Trump.The crowd appeared to be in the hundreds and while the speech took place, it thinned to less than a hundred as the rain came down. At one moment Trump – who has a long history of exaggerating crowd sizes at his events – falsely claimed that there were “10,000” people outside the venue.“Just get your union guys, your leaders, to endorse me and I will take care of the rest,” said Trump. “Under a Trump presidency, gasoline engines will be allowed and sex changes for children will be banned. Is that OK?”Trump consistently attacked electric vehicles (EVs) and said US autoworkers would lose their jobs if the country made the shift to EVs. He pledged to support gas-powered cars. “We will drill baby drill and it will have zero environmental difference,” he said.Michigan is a crucial battleground for the 2024 election. Hillary Clinton lost the state to Trump in 2016 but Biden took it back from Trump in 2020. It looks set to be a hard-fought race next year.Ahead of the speech, the crowd shouted “Freedom” and “Fuck Joe Biden”.Auto worker Christopher Demopolis, 35, said: “I don’t see why he won’t win Michigan next time around – a lot of this is going to determine it,” he said, motioning to the lively crowd. “Trump supports the workers, Biden supports the leaders.”Debbie Swolfs, a retired caterer who also owned a cleaning business, ran through a litany of complaints of life under Biden: inflation, gas prices, illegal immigrants, the move to electric vehicles.“We need Trump back!” she said. “Do you remember how wonderful things were three years ago? I want that back,” she said. “Biden is compromised by China and he doesn’t need to be impeached – he needs to be put in handcuffs.” More

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      A meat processer killed a 16-year-old. Yet US lawmakers want more child labor | Akin Olla

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      This July the body of 16-year-old Duvan Tomas Perez “became entangled” in meat processing machinery in Mississippi, according to a statement from Mar-Jac Poultry, the company where the boy was working. Perez was too young to be working there, according to Mar-Jac, which blamed an outside staffing company for failing to verify Perez’s age and identity. Perez was not the first worker to die at the plant in recent years, and he was not the first 16-year-old to die at work in the US this summer.American legislators should be working to crack down on child labor, here and abroad, but instead, politicians – including Democrats – in at least 11 states have introduced or passed bills that weaken child labor laws. At a time when adult workers are demanding a fairer slice of the increasingly behemoth pie of corporate profits, child labor is a capitalist work-around to increase the labor pool and lower the wages of all those who have to work for a living.I’m embarrassed to be writing an anti-child labor article in the year 2023, as if this is some Charles Dickens novel leaking gruel and cruel men. It is not as if child labor had ever disappeared, of course; children around the world toil in fast-fashion sweatshops and among the mountains of garbage in other countries but produced by Silicon Valley. This is unfortunately where capitalism is heading, and has always been heading: children competing with their parents for jobs amid the ruins of societies we sacrificed for profit. But for awhile it seemed like child labor might have escaped the empire to live primarily in its colonial subjects.Child labor was once as rampant in the US as it is in the countries of the developing world. In 1900, one out of five American children – including children as young as 10 – were employed. A quarter of textile workers in the American south were under the age of 16. In the north, factories relied on child labor so heavily that some areas suffered from “boy shortages” that led to corporate agents traveling the country in search of orphaned children to put to work.It is difficult to calculate the total number of legal and illegal child workers in the US today. In the agricultural industry alone, there are likely hundreds of thousands of children, largely from Central America. A New York Times investigation earlier this year found that many US brands directly or indirectly use child labor, including Lucky Charms, Nature Valley, Ford and J Crew. While some of that work is legal, the federal government, at least, has been cracking down on illegal child labor. The number of minors in child labor violations has increased by 283% since 2015, according to the Economic Policy Institute. According to the US Department of Labor, over 800 companies illegally employed children in the past fiscal year, and one meatpacking company was fined for employing children across 13 different plants.Legal child labor may seem like an odd turn of phrase but child labor isn’t at all banned in the US. The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act created a federal minimum wage and banned children under 16 from “hazardous” work, but left agricultural workers out of many of its reforms. This is why so many children are “legally” employed, and why many agricultural workers in the US do not have a right to a minimum wage.These policies allowed the US to maintain its long history of relying on slavery and near slavery for its agricultural wealth and give companies the ability to replace adult workers with children when adult workers demand decent pay – an increasingly common occurrence since Covid reminded workers of how important they are, and how little they are valued.The pandemic killed over a million Americans, many of them workers or potential workers, and brought on a wave of retirements that left an even larger hole in the labor market. Holes like this can increase the value of individual workers and allow them to negotiate for higher wages, a trend that followed the bubonic plague in Europe. The meat-processing company where Duvan was working alluded to the underlying conditions that landed the company with child workers: “Due to an unprecedentedly tight labor market, Mar-Jac MS relies on staffing companies to fill positions at its facility,” a statement the company issued in July said.While some companies are turning towards automation, others are turning towards taking our teens from schools and into factories. Instead of cutting CEOs’ record salaries, corporate leaders – and their political allies – are fighting to maintain low wages by any means necessary.Iowa has moved to allow children as young as 14 to work in industrial laundries and meat coolers, as well as created a special license to allow some 14-year-olds to drive up to 50 miles for work between 5am and 10pm. Nebraska has moved to join other states in allowing employers to pay people under 20 less than minimum wage – as low as $4.25 an hour. These laws are being pushed by groups such as Americans for Prosperity, various chambers of commerce, and restaurant associations aiming to hire younger bartenders.Some legislators characterize the work that killed Duvan as potential sources of revenue for struggling immigrant families. But this is a macabre policy solution birthed by a sanguinary system. Instead of putting children to work, we ought to ask ourselves if a system that cannot rid itself of child labor is worth keeping.
      Akin Olla is a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian US More