Christian Nationalist Eyes Appropriations Chairmanship
Aderholt voted against measure to avert shutdown because it had LGBTQ+ funds and money for hospitals where abortions happen
March 28: Obamacare’s preventive-care coverage … State Medicaid shrinkage … Appropriations chair battle … California minimum wage …
Court Eyes Chopping Preventive-Care Coverage
The federal Court of Appeals that hears cases from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas is poised to overturn the Obamacare requirement that insurance companies cover preventive services.
A three-judge panel from the Fifth Circuit earlier this month heard a case filed by right-wing conservative activists challenging the federal laws that let a Health and Human Services task force decide which preventive services are covered by Obamacare.
As The Lever reports, two of the judges were appointed by then-somehow-Pres. Donald Trump, who succeeded in killing Obamacare about as well as he succeeded at getting Mexico to pay for a border wall, but vows to finish the job if he’s somehow re-elected.
If the Fifth Circuit does effectively overturn the preventive-services coverage, the case will then go to the right-wing Supreme Court. The high court has a mixed record on Obamacare, but has consistently chopped away at executive power to fight corporations and is literally the most conservative, corporate-friendly Supreme Court in a history that includes letting corporations literally run entire towns.
Biden Extends Obamacare for Medicaid Castouts
More than 19 million low-income people have been kicked out of Medicaid health-care programs since federal COVID measures stopped forcing states to include them. Most of the people who’ve lost their coverage weren’t removed for failing to qualify, but for paperwork bullshit reasons that red states took advantage of to thin their rolls the way Jesus would.
So today Pres. Joe Biden is announcing he’s extending a signup window to let all those folks join Obamacare. Which D4FRFP1 Donald Trump has said he’ll “terminate,” whatever that means, the way he didn’t when he was somehow actually the president for four entire hallucinatory years.
So far, only 15% of those people kicked off Medicaid, about 2.4 million people, have switched over to Obamacare. That’s in part because some of those aforeassholeish red states either aren’t using Obamacare’s full slate of options to enroll people or simply don’t tell people what they can do to protect themselves and their families.
Biden’s announcement will give people up to Nov. 30 to sign up, and by that point Obamacare’s annual enrollment period will have started, as well.
Aderholt Eyes Powerful GOP Spot
Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) is mulling submitting his name as the potential chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee.
And I am mulling a bid to submit that sentence as the most boring sentence possible.
But the reason I’m talking about it is that Aderholt isn’t just really really very really conservative, as outlets like Roll Call will tell you — even for this House of representatives — he’s also one of the growing numbers of generals in the congressional Christian army.
Aderholt’s wife sits on the board of the (mostly) right-wing, (very) Christian organization Concerned Women for America. And on the board of the National Prayer Breakfast foundation.
I’m only citing his wife because she’s the source of some of our insights about how her husband views the distinction between government and his religion namely that there isn’t one.
As I previously reported, his wife has said, “We are of the belief that our vocation is our ministry. Our faith informs all aspects of our lives.”
And Aderholt “often espouses Christian nationalist rhetoric,” Freedom From Religion Foundation Action Fund President Annie Laurie Gaylor told me last year.
Aderholt has:
Voted against certifying Joe Biden as president
Voted for making Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH speaker of the House
Voted against the recent spending package that averted a government shutdown.
And the reason Aderholt was willing to risk a potentially catastrophic government shutdown was that he failed to strip out Senate earmarks that provided funding for LGBTQ+ services and for hospitals that perform abortions. Not funding for hospital abortions, any funding for anything in any hospital where abortions even take place.
According to Roll Call, Aderholt has the seniority edge for the chair. But he’s not the favorite. That’d be Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), one of the dwindling ranks of still-recognizable Republicans in the House who still understands that governments spend money. Cole has the support of many subcommittee chairs on the powerful House Appropriations Committee.
But Aderholt is more in line with most House Republicans. And it’s unclear whether current-but-maybe-not-for-long Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) wants a spending czar who’s down with spending money or one who’s down with Jesus.
Campaign Watch
NO LABELS Former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) has dropped out as a potential 2024 presidential candidate.
NEVER-TRUMP REPUBLICANS If you’ve thought, as I have and probably still do, that former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) won’t move the needle much or at all in the presidential race, I just want to flag that she spoke in Des Moines, IA, last night. This, according to Twitter, is a picture from the event that I would not have expected to see:
Trying something new! In an effort to increase both free and paid subscriptions, I’m considering various experiments. One thing I tried yesterday was posting a story that only subscribers could read. It went out yesterday for paid subscribers only and is reprinted below for free subscribers.
I’ve been advised I should reconsider how I’m formatting my work. Does clumping it all together, for instance, inhibit effective sharing? I dunno, but I’m considering different models for how to do this. And I could use some help! If you’re interested, and if you’ve ever raised your hand to pitch in, please get in touch and lemme know what you’re interested in. Thanks for all your support — I do see you folks out there who are sharing TFN newsletters and reporting with kind words of endorsement. Thank you!
TL;DR Alert: Attacking California’s Minimum-Wage Hike
California’s new fast-food minimum wage hike goes into effect Monday, April 1, and you may already have been led to believe it’s the cause of massive new layoffs.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that restaurants in the state have already cut worker hours and laid off employees “ahead of [the] state minimum-wage increase.”
And despite all those missing delivery workers, that narrative is getting delivered piping-hot all over the place, as other outlets pick it up from the Journal, including USA Today, Salon, and business-news outlets like Inc..
The original Journal story has a number of red flags.
All of the language connecting the layoffs to the new $20/hour minimum wage uses terms of correlation, rather than causation. Restaurants are cutting jobs “as” wages are set to rise, rather than “because.” And “ahead of the wage law’s start” rather than “because of” it.
And laying off in anticipation of a wage hike makes little sense. If the workers contribute to profitability under the current wage, why not reap those benefits up through March 31?
Franchises and restaurant owners could also try raising some menu prices or delivery fees to offset the costs. After the law takes effect, they could then resort to layoffs if price hikes prove unviable.
So what’s really going on here? For one thing, most of the coverage takes for granted the idea that companies don’t want to lay off workers.
Consider the first sentence in Inc.’s story on this: “All business owners would love to treat employees to big pay increases,” the story says, “especially for people working fast-paced, often underappreciated jobs in businesses with high employee turnover.”
That’s simply not true. It may be true of some business owners, but definitely not all. Wage theft is so rampant it has spawned regulatory bureaucracies and an entire legal field.
In reality, companies, especially publicly held companies, love to lay workers off. That’s what automation and AI are all about: Increasing productivity, which requires fewer workers to be just as productive.
My team at TYT and I covered this in pretty granular detail when then-Pres. Donald Trump was marketing his proposed tax cuts as job creators. As we demonstrated, big companies use financial windfalls not to hire people but to engage in activity that lowers headcount: Automation, outsourcing, offshoring, and mergers and acquisitions.
Reducing headcount — or as its known on Wall Street, “improving efficiencies” — is rewarded by investors, which boosts share prices, which in turn leads to bigger compensation packages for the executives who laid people off. In other words, corporate and financial incentives today actively reward executives for cutting jobs.
Odds are, you’ve noticed how many of your own local restaurants no longer use their own delivery staff, but outsource deliveries. It’s not only California restaurants laying off delivery staff.
And it turns out that the companies that own all those fast-food companies actually supported California’s new law. That was in exchange for unions dropping their efforts to hold the companies liable for labor-law violations.
Who’s liable instead? The same franchise owners who pay the rising wages. In other words, those owners will have to bear the costs of both increased wages and any fines they incur for violating labor laws.
As I and others have written, some of the greatest burdens on franchise owners actually come not from regulators or supposed government bureaucracies, but from the massive companies that franchise out their brands. But those costs are never blamed for layoffs.
One of the big brands the Journal cites is Pizza Hut, which is owned by Yum! Brands. Last month, the top executives of Yum! Brands held an earnings call with Wall Street analysts, discussing factors affecting their business.
U.S. weather volatility in early 2024 was mentioned. So was inflation. The Yum! Brands executives also alluded to the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel. No mention of California.
What the Yum! Brands executives did talk about was automation. CEO David Gibbs said, “We made massive strides in scaling our proprietary digital and AI-driven ecosystem,” adding, “we have accelerated the deployment of our proprietary technologies to optimize back-of-house operations and make it easier to run our restaurants.”
Regarding Pizza Hut specifically, Gibbs credited one executive who “partnered with our global operations and technology leaders to deliver new levels of ease to our customers and improved unit economics for our franchisees.”
What else happened last year? “We also ramped up the deployment of our Dragontail AI platform,” CFO Chris Turner said. “We now have Dragontail in place in nearly 7,000 restaurants across Pizza Hut and KFC.”
As Yum! Brands explained when it bought Dragontail for $93 million three years ago, the proprietary AI is “optimizing and managing the entire food preparation process from order through delivery.” This “automates the kitchen flow combined with the process of dispatching drivers.”
It doesn’t just streamline dispatching, it cuts down on the number of hours needed from delivery staff by “planning optimal delivery routes and combining delivery orders by location.”
Then there’s Yum! Brands’ “Easy Operations capabilities, which … helps our franchisees drive productivity,” Turner said. He added that this will help franchisees economically, but not to satisfy their love of treating employees to big pay increases.
Instead, Turner said, it “allows them to invest in building new stores.”
Is it possible that the new law will genuinely force some restaurant owners to lay people off after it takes effect on Monday? Sure, but none of the reporting on the layoffs so far actually ties them solely or specifically to the coming law. And neither do the executives who supported the law.
In fact, despite the gloomy economic picture others are painting on the canvas of rising wages in California and elsewhere, Gibbs, the Yum! Brands CEO, assured Wall Street just last month that, “While the business faced persistent inflation across the globe … the future is brighter than ever.”
TCB
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Go get ‘em, kids…!
D4FRFP = Disgraced, quadicted, fraudster, rapist, former President.
"NO LABELS Former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) has dropped out as a potential 2024 presidential candidate." Yeah I guess you could say that. He certainly dropped, alright. With a resounding *thud*