#Staffing Mandate

[hislop3]

CMS Final SNF Staffing Rule

Late yesterday, CMS released the draft of the Final Rule consistently defined as the “staffing mandate rule”. Earlier in the day, I wrote a post about the final staffing rule and the final Medicaid access rule. At the time, CMS had only notified everyone about the final rule(s) contents via a press release. The actual text is now public and available here: Final SNF Staffing Rule 4 22 24 The…

[directactionforhope]

"Starting this month [June 2024], thousands of young people will begin doing climate-related work around the West as part of a new service-based federal jobs program, the American Climate Corps, or ACC. The jobs they do will vary, from wildland firefighters and “lawn busters” to urban farm fellows and traditional ecological knowledge stewards. Some will work on food security or energy conservation in cities, while others will tackle invasive species and stream restoration on public land. 

The Climate Corps was modeled on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, with the goal of eventually creating tens of thousands of jobs while simultaneously addressing the impacts of climate change. 

Applications were released on Earth Day, and Maggie Thomas, President Joe Biden’s special assistant on climate, told High Country News that the program’s website has already had hundreds of thousands of views. Since its launch, nearly 250 jobs across the West have been posted, accounting for more than half of all the listed ACC positions. 

“Obviously, the West is facing tremendous impacts of climate change,” Thomas said. “It’s changing faster than many other parts of the country. If you look at wildfire, if you look at extreme heat, there are so many impacts. I think that there’s a huge role for the American Climate Corps to be tackling those crises.”  

Most of the current positions are staffed through state or nonprofit entities, such as the Montana Conservation Corps or Great Basin Institute, many of which work in partnership with federal agencies that manage public lands across the West. In New Mexico, for example, members of Conservation Legacy’s Ecological Monitoring Crew will help the Bureau of Land Management collect soil and vegetation data. In Oregon, young people will join the U.S. Department of Agriculture, working in firefighting, fuel reduction and timber management in national forests. 

New jobs are being added regularly. Deadlines for summer positions have largely passed, but new postings for hundreds more positions are due later this year or on a rolling basis, such as the Working Lands Program, which is focused on “climate-smart agriculture.”  ...

On the ACC website, applicants can sort jobs by state, work environment and focus area, such as “Indigenous knowledge reclamation” or “food waste reduction.” Job descriptions include an hourly pay equivalent — some corps jobs pay weekly or term-based stipends instead of an hourly wage — and benefits. The site is fairly user-friendly, in part owing to suggestions made by the young people who participated in the ACC listening sessions earlier this year...

The sessions helped determine other priorities as well, Thomas said, including creating good-paying jobs that could lead to long-term careers, as well as alignment with the president’s Justice40 initiative, which mandates that at least 40% of federal climate funds must go to marginalized communities that are disproportionately impacted by climate change and pollution. 

High Country News found that 30% of jobs listed across the West have explicit justice and equity language, from affordable housing in low-income communities to Indigenous knowledge and cultural reclamation for Native youth...

While the administration aims for all positions to pay at least $15 an hour, the lowest-paid position in the West is currently listed at $11 an hour. Benefits also vary widely, though most include an education benefit, and, in some cases, health care, child care and housing. 

All corps members will have access to pre-apprenticeship curriculum through the North America’s Building Trades Union. Matthew Mayers, director of the Green Workers Alliance, called this an important step for young people who want to pursue union jobs in renewable energy. Some members will also be eligible for the federal pathways program, which was recently expanded to increase opportunities for permanent positions in the federal government...

 “To think that there will be young people in every community across the country working on climate solutions and really being equipped with the tools they need to succeed in the workforce of the future,” Thomas said, “to me, that is going to be an incredible thing to see.”"

-via High Country News, June 6, 2024

--

Note: You can browse Climate Corps job postings here, on the Climate Corps website. There are currently 314 jobs posted at time of writing!

Also, it says the goal is to pay at least $15 an hour for all jobs (not 100% meeting that goal rn), but lots of postings pay higher than that, including some over $20/hour!!

[winter-kh-sideblog]

Axel from chain of memories is just so funny as a concept. I’m Obsessed with him

It’s like if the horrifying assassin sent to kill you was a minimum wage employee going through a divorce. And he didnt feel any guilt or apprehension about trying to kill you, (a random child LITERALLY just trying to find and hug your friends) but he Was lazy (depressed) as heck and hated his job. And trying to kill you faster so he could depression nap.

And his one source of joy was scaring the crap out of people and torturing them to death.

And ALSO he was a single dad struggling to work two jobs who loved his kids dearly but that did not make him a Better person or more likely to spare you .

The ONLY chance u have of survival comes down to whether or not he’s lazy enough to give up and depression nap.

The kids maybe make him More likely to stay and kill you because hes secretly worried he’s a bad father and he doesnt have to face up to Having Conversations About Feelings and Admitting He Cares About His Kids for however long hes scaring u.

He has stupid goth makeup with little clown looking teardrops under his eyes and a stupid catchphrase. He barely gets payed and has like no vacation days and is overworked because his company is stupidly short staffed and his ex husband is his manager and keeps sending him to assassinate his few remaining coworkers and hes too low in the company to argue and explain why this is a stupid idea. And management being like “ugh its like you dont even care about this job and you just wanna do the bare minimum and clock out. Now go kill your coworkers”

And ALSO its so funny because you dont know ANY of this

Imagine a scary horror clown man trying to murder you and you are About to die and then the horror clown’s alarm goes off and hes like “oh thank god its union mandated paid ten minute break. They CANNOT make me work in this time Fuck yeah goodbye loser” and he just Teleports across the room and is immediately on the phone like “babe STOP texting me . I DONT want you back. Maybe stop trying to kill our employees if youre so mad about us being short staffed. WAIT did you send me here to die. Was this a murder attempt. Hello?!?! HELLO?!??? DONT HANG UP ON ME?!??” And then he sighs and shrugs and starts reapplying glimmer eyeshadow until another alarm goes off and hea like “ewwwwwww work time.” And he stares at you like hed rather do anything in the world than resume your death fight. And then he stabs you with an on fire weapon and starts evil cackling with his full chest

Literally no one else will ever be him

[justinspoliticalcorner]

John Knefel at MMFA:

The Heritage Foundation — lead organizer of Project 2025, a sprawling effort to provide policy and staffing for a second Trump administration — recently promoted an apprenticeship program that opens up workers to increased exploitation. Heritage also criticized President Joe Biden for ensuring that most federal infrastructure contracting projects are covered by collective bargaining agreements.

In an article headlined, “Harris, Walz Policy Records Undermine Pro-Worker Rhetoric,” Heritage argues for a return to Trump-era apprenticeship policies that left new workers vulnerable by creating a two-tier workforce, and it disparages unions as detrimental to the working class. The result is standard-fare for the conservative think tank, which regularly attacks unions and promotes anti-worker policies like so-called right-to-work laws, which starve unions of funds by denying them the ability to collect fees from all the workers they represent.  As head of Project 2025, Heritage has waged an all-out campaign against unions and the entire working class. The effort’s policybook — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise — calls for the dismantling of New Deal-era wins for organized labor by carving out state-level exceptions to the National Labor Relations Act. It would also eviscerate overtime regulations and open the door to increased child labor exploitation.

The new article furthers Heritage’s broadside against organized labor, even while masquerading as being pro-worker. Heritage criticizes what it characterizes as “the Biden-Harris Administration’s multi-front assault against apprenticeship programs,” specifically the administration’s cancellation of “new Industry Recognized Apprenticeship Programs,” or IRAPS, “that were training people in high-demand areas like nursing and technology, which now face significant workforce shortages.” In fact, IRAPs were a Trump-era policy that created a new class of apprenticeship programs that were controlled and overseen by employers — rather than the Department of Labor — and loosened standards meant to protect workers. As the progressive think tank The Roosevelt Institute wrote in response to the Trump-era rule, IRAPs are “likely to lead to a proliferation of programs that are lower-quality,” and could allow employers to exploit “loopholes in minimum wage laws.”

[...] This new salvo from Heritage is just the latest example of right-wing media pretending to endorse a pro-worker agenda, only to advance policies that benefit employers at the expense of labor.

The Heritage Foundation= enemies of workers’ rights.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Donald Trump has lately made clear he wants little to do with Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for the next Republican president that has attracted considerable blowback in his race for the White House.

“I have no idea who is behind it,” the former president recently claimed on social media.

Many people Trump knows quite well are behind it.

Six of his former Cabinet secretaries helped write or collaborated on the 900-page playbook for a second Trump term published by the Heritage Foundation. Four individuals Trump nominated as ambassadors were also involved, along with several enforcers of his controversial immigration crackdown. And about 20 pages are credited to his first deputy chief of staff.

In fact, at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025, a CNN review found, including more than half of the people listed as authors, editors and contributors to “Mandate for Leadership,” the Project’s extensive manifesto for overhauling the executive branch.

Dozens more who staffed Trump’s government hold positions with conservative groups advising Project 2025, including his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and longtime adviser Stephen Miller. These groups also include several lawyers deeply involved in Trump’s attempts to remain in power, such as his impeachment attorney Jay Sekulow and two of the legal architects of his failed bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election, Cleta Mitchell and John Eastman.

To quantify the scope of the involvement from Trump’s orbit, CNN reviewed online biographies, LinkedIn profiles and news clippings for more than 1,000 people listed on published directories for the 110 organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board, as well as the 200-plus names credited with working on “Mandate for Leadership.”

Overall, CNN found nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump, covering nearly every aspect of his time in politics and the White House – from day-to-day foot soldiers in Washington to the highest levels of his government. The number is likely higher because many individuals’ online résumés were not available.

In addition to people who worked directly for Trump, others who participated in Project 2025 were appointed by the former president to independent positions. For instance, Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr authored an entire chapter of proposed changes to his agency, and Lisa Correnti, an anti-abortion advocate Trump appointed as a delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, is among the contributors.

Several people involved in Project 2025 didn’t serve in the Trump administration but were influential in shaping his first term. One example is former US Attorney Brett Tolman, a leading force behind the former president’s criminal justice reform law who later helped arrange a pardon for Charles Kushner, the father of Trump’s son-in-law. Tolman is listed as a contributor to “Mandate for Leadership.”

The extensive overlap between Project 2025 and Trump’s universe of allies, advisers and former staff complicates his efforts to distance himself from the work. Trump’s campaign has sought for months to make clear that Project 2025 doesn’t speak for them amid an intensifying push by President Joe Biden and Democrats to tie the Republican standard bearer to the playbook’s more controversial policies.

In a statement to CNN, campaign spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez said Trump only endorses the Republican Party platform and the agenda posted on the former president’s website.

“Team Biden and the (Democratic National Committee) are lying and fear-mongering because they have nothing else to offer the American people,” Alvarez said.

HERITAGE PLAN BECOMES A POLITICAL HEADACHE

Behind Project 2025 is the Heritage Foundation, a 51-year-old conservative organization that aligned itself with Trump not long after his 2016 victory. Heritage is led by Kevin Roberts, a Trump ally whom the former president praised as “doing an unbelievable job” on a February night when they shared the same stage.

Heritage conceived Project 2025 to begin planning so a Republican president could hit the ground running after the election. One of its priorities is creating a roadmap for the first 180 days of the new administration to quickly reorient every federal agency around its conservative vision. Described on its website as “a movement-wide effort guided by the conservative cause to address and reform the failings of big government and an undemocratic administrative state,” Project 2025 also aims to recruit and train thousands of people loyal to the conservative movement to fill federal government positions.

One organization advising Project 2025, American Accountability Foundation, is also putting together a roster of current federal workers it suspects could impede Trump’s plans for a second term. Heritage is paying the group $100,000 for its work.

Many of Project 2025’s priorities are aligned with the former president, especially on immigration and purging the federal bureaucracies. Both Trump and Project 2025 have called for eliminating the Department of Education.

But Project 2025 has lately become a lightning rod for other ideas Trump hasn’t explicitly backed. Within “Mandate for Leadership” are plans to ban pornography, reverse federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, exclude the morning-after pill and men’s contraceptives from coverage mandated under the Affordable Care Act, make it harder for transgender adults to transition, and eliminate the federal agency that oversees the National Weather Service.

Its voluminous and detailed plans also run counter to Trump’s desire for a streamlined GOP platform absent any language that Democrats could wield against Republicans this cycle.

Roberts recently faced backlash as well for saying in an interview that the country was “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Three days later, Trump posted to Truth Social: “I know nothing about Project 2025.”

“I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote.

In response to Trump’s social media post, a Project 2025 spokesperson told CNN in a statement it “does not speak for any candidate or campaign.”

“It is ultimately up to that president, who we believe will be President Trump, to decide which recommendations to use,” the spokesperson said.

Trump’s campaign has repeatedly said in recent months that “reports about personnel and policies that are specific to a second Trump Administration are purely speculative and theoretical” and don’t represent the former president’s plans. Project 2025 and similar policy proposals coming from outside Trump’s campaign are “merely suggestions,” campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita wrote in a statement.

VAST NETWORK OF TRUMP ALLIES

However, Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025 have already encountered credibility challenges. The person overseeing Project 2025, Paul Dans, was a top official in Trump’s White House who has previously said he hopes to work for his former boss again. Shortly after Trump’s Truth Social post last week, Democrats noted a recruitment video for Project 2025 features a Trump campaign spokeswoman. On Tuesday, the Biden campaign posted dozens of examples of connections between Trump and Project 2025.

CNN’s review of Project 2025’s contributors also demonstrated the breadth of Trump’s reach through the upper ranks of the vast network of organizations working to move the country in a conservative direction – from women’s groups and Christian colleges to conservative think tanks in Texas, Alabama and Mississippi.

New organizations centered around Trump’s political movement, his conspiracy theories around his electoral defeats and his first-term policies are deeply involved in Project 2025 as well. One of the advisory groups, America First Legal, was started by Miller, a key player in forming Trump’s immigration agenda. Another is the Center for Renewing America, founded by Russ Vought, former acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, who wrote for Project 2025 a detailed blueprint for consolidating executive power.

Vought recently oversaw the Republican Party committee that drafted the new platform heavily influenced by Trump.

In addition to Vought, two other former Trump Cabinet secretaries wrote chapters for “Mandate for Leadership”: Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller. Three more former department heads – National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe, acting Transportation Secretary Steven Bradbury and acting Labor Secretary Patrick Pizzella – are listed as contributors.

Project 2025’s proposals for reforming the country’s immigration laws appear heavily influenced by those who helped execute Trump’s early enforcement measures. Former acting US Customs and Border Protection chief Mark Morgan and former Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief Tom Homan – the faces of Trump’s polarizing policies – contributed to the project, as did Kathy Nuebel Kovarik, one of the policy advisers pushing to end certain immigrant protections behind the scenes. The Project 2025 chapter on overhauling the Department of Homeland Security was written by Ken Cuccinelli, a top official at the department under Trump.

Some of Trump’s most contentious and high-profile hires are credited with working on “Mandate for Leadership,” including some whose tenures ended under a cloud of controversy.

Before Trump adviser Peter Navarro went to prison for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena as part of the House investigation into the January 6, 2021, US Capitol attack, he wrote a section defending the former president’s trade policies and advocating for punitive tariffs.

Other contributors include: Michael Pack, a conservative filmmaker who orchestrated a mass firing at the US Agency for Global Media after he was installed by Trump; Frank Wuco, a senior White House adviser who once promoted far-right conspiracies on his talk radio show, including lies about President Barack Obama’s citizenship; former NOAA official David Legates, a notable climate change skeptic investigated for posting dubious research with the White House imprint; and Mari Stull, a wine blogger-turned-lobbyist who left the Trump administration amid accusations she was hunting for disloyal State Department employees.

The culmination of their work, spread across 900 pages, touches every corner of the executive branch and would drastically change the federal government as well as everyday life for many Americans. In summarizing the undertaking, Roberts wrote in “Mandate for Leadership” that Project 2025 represented “the next conservative President’s last opportunity to save our republic.”

“Conservatives have just two years and one shot to get this right,” Roberts said. “With enemies at home and abroad, there is no margin for error. Time is running short. If we fail, the fight for the very idea of America may be lost.”

[froody]

I’m so happy about the nursing home minimum staffing mandate. It’s small, it’s not enough but God if it is not progress. Nursing home barons shitting and farting and pissing and utterly irate and throwing up about it.

[macgyvermedical]

So, in PA there is a bill in the senate called the Patient Safety Act that mandates nurse:patient ratios. Obviously, I am a big fan of this bill as it would ease pressure on nurses and improve patient safety outcomes. It is also very bipartisan, with both republicans and democrats being for and against it in similar ratios. The big criticism of the act as it stands is that there are little to no considerations for small, rural hospitals who would find it difficult to meet those ratios without going under (don't have enough nurses, will have to close beds/hospitals). I thought the solution to this was to obviously increase protections for rural hospitals (like making the ratios for them say 1:6 instead of 1:5 for example.) But this has the unintended consequence of making it more difficult for rural hospitals to entice nurses to work for them (who wants to work in a rural hospital with worse ratios when you can make more money with better conditions somewhere else?) It's already difficult for rural hospitals to find staff. Do you have any ideas on solutions to the problem? I was surprised to find out how nuanced this situation really is, and how it isn't just "put in ratios plz" and everything would be fixed.

You're right in that this situation is extremely nuanced, especially when it comes to the fact that we are (as usual*) in a nursing shortage nation wide.

Staffing ratios only work when there are enough nurses to meet demand. A lot of times the goal of staffing ratios is to incentivize hospitals to hire more nurses, but if there are no nurses to hire that doesn't work. So you have to then consider alternatives, like you mentioned- either closing hospitals, or closing beds.

Consider, though, that if hospitals go the route of closing beds to maintain ratios, the acuity (care difficulty/complexity) of those patients the nurses are caring for goes up because lower acuity patients get triaged out.

The "sweet spot" of acuity to number of patients then relies on the number of nurses available to serve a population. That means that populations with a smaller number of nurses have either a higher number of patients per nurse, or a higher acuity patient load than a population with a relatively large number of nurses.

And pretty much everywhere right now, rural areas specifically, there are just too few nurses to make staffing ratios possible at scale.

So. How do you go about providing a high standard of care for patients when there are fundamentally too many patients and too few nurses? The system needs to change. I present a few possibilities below:

Bring LPNs back to the bedside in hospitals: While I don't mind Magnet as an entity and think they do some good things, IMO they royally screwed the pooch by mandating RNs (particularly BSN prepared RNs) only on hospital floors. You can make LPNs a lot faster and cheaper (10-18months, $20,000) than you can make RNs (3 years, $40,000), or BSN-RNs (4-5 years, $80,000). And while you still need an RN license to do things like push IV meds and interpret assessment findings, just about everything else can be done by an LPN. So we need to be using that resource to make more nurses fast.

Institute Team Nursing: You know how you use LPNs efficiently? It's not by giving them a group of patients and having them run around to find an RN every time they need to push an IV med. It's either by having them as a dedicated tasker (doing the time-consuming skilled tasks like wound care, catheter placement, IV placement, etc... for many RNs) or incorporating them into a team. With team nursing, you have an RN, an LPN, and an STNA/Tech all caring for 12-15 patients instead of an RN and an LPN caring for 5 each with a tech helping. The RN does the tasks only an RN can do (assessments, IV meds, plans of care) and communicates with the doctors, the LPN does most of the med pass and skilled tasks, and the STNA does the basic patient care. Since there's 3 people working together instead of separately, it's easier to find someone to help with 2-person tasks like boosting a patient in bed. You would not believe how much time this saves and how much more patient care can actually get done.

Institute Advance Practice Providers (or at least universal contact methods): I'm not saying we have a ton of these either, but you only need about one per floor. See, I can't tell you how much time I used to spend just trying to figure out who to contact about a problem, and how they wanted to be contacted. Because God forbid you text Doctor A instead of paging or page Doctor C instead of calling. Now I work on a floor with an APP and you can just go straight to them and they can either write the order you need themselves or contact the doc who can. Probably a good 15% of my time is back and I'm not even exaggerating.

Change culture around nursing duties: this is a controversial one, but as nurses are spread more thinly than ever and medical acuity has gotten so much higher, the basic care is genuinely getting worse. I have seen this happen over the last 8 years I've been in my job. So. Re-teach families how to care for loved ones in the hospital. Make it culture that if you have a family member in the hospital someone is with them. And when I say with them, I don't mean just visiting. I mean actively caring for the family member. Helping them to the bathroom, helping them dress and eat and clean themselves. Helping them do basics. Entertaining them, distracting them, comforting them. Things we used to be able to do when our patients weren't actively trying to die at all times.

*technically, we have been in a nursing shortage since WWII. But a lot of factors, COVID-19 specifically and a shortage of student slots in RN-level nursing schools, have made things particularly bad in recent years.

[mariacallous]

Mexico is in the throes of its first presidential campaign with two women leading the race. Former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum and former Sen. Xóchitl Gálvez top polls ahead of the June 2 general elections, virtually guaranteeing that the country will soon inaugurate its first female head of state.

It is a milestone both for Mexico and for Latin America. Countries across the region have embraced mandatory gender quotas in public offices, and none with more fervor than Mexico. A 2019 constitutional reform mandated that elected and appointed positions at all levels of government must be gender-balanced. As a result, political parties looked to women to fill senior candidate slots.

Sheinbaum has at least a 15 percent advantage over Gálvez in most recent polls. But even the third-ranking, male presidential candidate Jorge Álvarez Máynez reflects the reach of Mexican feminism: He chose a veteran feminist politician, Patricia Mercado, to coordinate his platform for part of the campaign; Mexican magazine Quién called her the “third woman” in the race.

Although they stand for different political ideologies—Sheinbaum represents the governing left-leaning Morena party, Gálvez heads a more pro-market opposition alliance, and Álvarez fronts a centrist group—the candidates agree on many gender-related issues.

All three say they support the Mexican Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to decriminalize abortion in federal health centers. They also promise to launch a publicly funded system to provide different types of care work and pledge to reduce gender-based violence. In Mexican politics today, openly criticizing feminism usually leads to candidates “being canceled on social media and losing votes,” abortion rights lawyer Ninde Molina told Foreign Policy.

Still, Molina and many other activists are approaching the milestone election with a mindset of determination rather than euphoria. The fact that a politician is a woman “does not guarantee that she is a democrat or a defender of human rights” or feminist principles, Molina wrote for Este País this month.

According to Molina, the woman presidential candidates have shied away from offering detailed stances on abortion during the campaign, other than to support the Supreme Court decision. The same goes for Álvarez. That nuance matters because 19 of Mexico’s 32 federal jurisdictions have yet to decriminalize the procedure. Many public hospitals don’t offer abortions even where they are legal, Molina added, and Mexico’s public health care system is often short on abortion pills.

The candidates have been more specific about their plans to combat gender-based violence. All three pledged to create new violence prevention programs and strengthen prosecutors’ capacity to investigate femicides.

As Mexico City mayor, Sheinbaum carried out similar policies on the local level, Mexican doctoral candidate Ana Sofía Rodríguez Everaert wrote in a profile of the politician for Foreign Policy. These included staffing prosecutors’ offices with female lawyers trained to work from a gendered perspective. During Sheinbaum’s tenure, lethal violence in the capital fell by 32 percent, according to estimates made by feminist group Intersecta.

Plans for a national care system endorsed by all three candidates, meanwhile, have advanced in Mexico’s congress but not yet become law. Broadly, the program would devote more public money to funding care workers and facilities for newborns, children, the elderly, and disabled people. It would also reorganize existing day-care, disability, and pension systems to allow people without formal work contracts to pay for and receive care.

When it comes to feminist demands in Mexico, there is significant consensus—including on the ideological right, political scientist Mónica Tapia told Foreign Policy. The challenge is translating that agenda into results. “Our big lesson learned here in Mexico is that parity is necessary, but not sufficient” to advance progressive gender goals, Tapia said.

To help promote lasting change, Tapia helped co-found Aúna, a group that recruits and trains female candidates for political office who are committed to a range of policies intended to reduce gender and economic inequalities and boost environmental protection.

Aúna has coached candidates from both left-wing and right wing-parties; some have later cooperated on legislation while serving in the Mexico City government. Aúna is inspired by similar initiatives for women and nontraditional candidates in the United States, Colombia, and Brazil. Fifty Aúna candidates are running in the June 2 elections at the legislative and gubernatorial level.

While parity requirements have helped lead Mexico to its symbolic presidential election, Tapía said, “a wider ecosystem” of activists is moving feminist demands forward across the country.

[antidrumpfs]

Trump Claims To Know Nothing About Far-Right Plan Pushed By His Own Aides

“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it” - donOLD tRUMP

In fact, at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025, a CNN review found, including more than half of the people listed as authors, editors and contributors to “Mandate for Leadership,” the project’s extensive manifesto for overhauling the executive branch.

Dozens more who staffed Trump’s government hold positions with conservative groups advising Project 2025, including his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and longtime adviser Stephen Miller. These groups also include several lawyers deeply involved in Trump’s attempts to remain in power, such as his impeachment attorney Jay Sekulow and two of the legal architects of his failed bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election, Cleta Mitchell and John Eastman.

Source: CNN

[fairandfatalasfair]

By September of 2023 initial meetings took place between WestJet and AMFA where the union’s negotiating committee identified major concerns with the workplace and ultimately some of the reasons they decided to unionize. They identified that the company did not respect seniority, the irregularities in pay scale and some work privileges were eliminated without notice or rationale.

Many of the union’s proposals were “boilerplate” and quickly agreed to tentatively, however there were serious concerns and discussions around staffing still being below pre-COVID levels causing “levels of fatigue that are detrimental to aviation safety.” These concerns continued into December, when further charges were filed against WestJet for staffing concerns and significant changes to the positions inspecting the aircraft.

Throughout bargaining WestJet has been in the driver’s seat getting closer and closer to a labour dispute. It was the company that put the parties on course for a lockout or strike by filing for mediation with the CIRB. It was also the company that alluded to outsourcing the jobs during the collective bargaining process. ...

Following multiple negotiation dates, the employer decided to further the adversarial approach and delivered a 72-hour lockout notice to the negotiation committee and would commence if the parties did not reach a deal by May 7th. A tentative deal was in fact reached by May 5, 2024, which avoided any work stoppage at that time. Throughout the month of May employees reviewed and discussed the tentative agreement which resulted in an overwhelming rejection of 97.25% of employees stating no with a 99% participation rate.

The union took this direction from their membership seriously. They began immediately providing a survey to their membership to get clear direction from them on what they would need for a fair collective agreement. A 97.25% rejection sends a clear message to an employer that they have missed the mark, this is also incredibly important when looking at the participation rate. These employees are involved in their union and are affected deeply by the negotiations of their first collective agreement.

“Members were particularly bitter with the bad faith at the negotiating table.  For months at a time, WestJet refused to respond to Union proposals.  Frequently, WestJet rejected our proposals without an explanation or with the disdainful rationale that AMEs were not entitled to the same benefits or work rules as pilots.  The airline violated the status quo mandated by the Canada Labour Code by outsourcing maintenance work and reducing benefits. WestJet’s lack of respect for its AMEs [Aircraft Maintenance Engineers] contributed mightily to the contract rejection.” Bret Oestreich – AMFA National President

The employer’s response? Cancel scheduled bargaining dates and request the Canadian government to impose a collective agreement on the workplace rather than negotiate a deal between the parties. ... The CIRB has ultimately made the right decision to force the employer to continue with collective bargaining as intended.

[hislop3]

Regulation Monday: SNF Staffing Mandate and Medicaid Access Rule

Just announced this morning, CMS has finalized two hotly debated proposed rules into final rules. The final rules involve the SNF staffing mandate proposed last year and the Medicaid Access Rule, requiring 80% of payments for Medicaid HCBS programs go to compensation for direct care workers. The Medicaid Rule follows the original proposed rule while the staffing mandate INCREASES the number of…

[kakita-shisumo]

In which I sound off for much too long about PF2 (and why I like it better than D&D 5E)

So, let me begin with a disclaimer here. I don’t hate 5E and I deeply despise edition warring. I like 5E, I enjoy playing it, and more, I think it’s an incredibly well-designed game, given what its design mandates were. This probably goes without saying but I wanted it on the record. While I will be comparing PF2 to D&D 5E in what follows and I’ve pretty much already spoiled the ending by the post title (that is, PF2 is going to come out ahead in these comparisons most of the time), I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding about my position or intention. My opinions do not constitute an attack on anybody. For that matter, things I might list as weaknesses in 5E or strengths of PF2 might be the exact opposite for other people, depending on what they want from their RPG experience.

As I said before, 5E is an exceedingly well-designed game that does an exceptional job of meeting its design goals. It just so happens that those design goals aren’t quite to my taste.

# A Brief History of the d20 RPG Universe #

I’m going to indulge myself in a little history for a second; some of it might even be relevant later, but for the most part, I just want to cover a little ground about how we got here. By the time the late ‘90s rolled around TSR and its flagship product, Dungeons and Dragons, were in trouble. D&D was well over two decades old by that point and showing its age. New ideas about what RPGs could and even should be had taken over the industry; TSR had finally lost its spot as best-selling RPG publisher to comparative upstart White Wolf and their World of Darkness games; the company even declared bankruptcy in 1997. Times were grim.

That, however, was when another comparative newcomer, Wizards of the Coast, popped up and bought TSR outright. Flush with MtG and Pokemon cash, they were excited to try to revitalize the D&D brand and began development on a new edition of D&D: third edition, releasing in August 2000.

Third edition was an almost literal revolution in D&D’s design, throwing a lot of “sacred cows” out and streamlining everywhere: getting rid of THAC0 and standardizing three kinds of base attack bonus progressions instead; cutting down to three, much more intuitive kinds of saving throws and standardizing them into two kinds of progression; integrating skills and feats into the core rules; creating the concept of prestige classes and expanding the core class selection. And of course, just making it so rolls were standardized as well, using a d20 for basically everything and making it so higher numbers are basically always better.

At the same time, WotC also developed the concept of the Open Gaming License (OGL), based on Open Source coding philosophies. The idea was that the core rules elements of the game could be offered with a free, open license to allow third-parties develop more content for the game than WotC would have the resources to do on their own. That would encourage more sales of the base game and other materials WotC released as well, creating a virtuous cycle of development and growing the industry for everyone.

Well, long story short (too late!), it worked like fucking gangbusters. 3E was explosive. It sold beyond anyone’s expectations, and the OGL fostered a massive cottage industry of third-party developers throwing out adventures, rules material, and even entire new game lines on the backs of the d20 system. A couple years later, 3.5 edition released, updating and streamlining further, and it was even more of a success than 3rd ed was.

At this point, we need turn for a moment to a small magazine publishing company called Paizo Publishing, staffed almost exclusively by former WotC writers and developers who had formed their own company to publish Dungeon and Dragon, the two officially-licensed monthly magazines (remember those?) for D&D. Dungeon focused on rules content, deep dives into new sourcebooks, etc., while Dragon was basically a monthly adventure drop. Both sold well and Paizo was a reasonably profitable company. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly.

Except. In 1999, WotC themselves were bought by board game heavyweight Hasbro, who wanted all that sweet, sweet Magic: the Gathering and Pokemon money. D&D was a tiny part of WotC at the time and the brand was moribund, so Hasbro’s execs hadn’t really cared if the weirdos in the RPG division wanted to mess around with Open Source licensing. It wasn’t like D&D was actually making money anyway�� until it was. A lot of money. And suddenly Hasbro saw “their” money walking out the door to other publishers. So in 2007, WotC announced D&D 4th Ed, and unlike 3rd, it would not be released under an open license. Instead, it would be released under a much more restrictive, much more isolationist Gaming System License, which, among other things, prevented any licensee from publishing under the OGL and the GSL at the same time. They also canceled the licenses for Dungeon and Dragon, leaving Paizo Publishing without anything to, well, publish.

At first, Paizo opted to just pivot to adventure publishing under the OGL. Dungeon Magazine had found great success with a series of adventures over several issues that took PCs from 1st all the way to 20th level, something they were calling “Adventure Paths,” so Paizo said, “Well, we can just start publishing those! We’re good at it, the market’s there, it will be great!” And then, roughly four months after Paizo debuted its “Pathfinder Adventure Paths” line, WotC announced 4th Ed and the switch to the GSL. Paizo suddenly had a problem.

4th Ed wasn’t as big a change from 3rd Ed as 3rd Ed had been from AD&D, but it was still a major change, and a lot of 3rd Ed fans were decidedly unimpressed. Paizo’s own developers weren’t too keen on it either. So they made a fateful decision: they were going to use the OGL to essentially rewrite and update D&D 3.5 into an RPG line they owned: the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. It was unprecedented. It was a huge freaking gamble. And it paid off more than anybody ever expected. Within two years Paizo was the second-largest RPG publisher in the industry, only behind WotC itself, and for one quarter late in 4E’s life, even managed to outsell D&D, however briefly. Ten years of gangbuster sales and rules releases followed, including 6 different monster books and something over 30 base classes when it was all said and done. It was good stuff and I played it loyally the whole time.

Eventually, though, time moves on and things have to change. The first thing that changed was 4E was replaced by D&D 5E in 2014, which was deliberately designed to walk back many of the changes in 4E that were so poorly received, keep a few of the better ones that weren’t, and in general make the game much more accessible to new players. It was a phenomenal success, buoyed by a resurgence of D&D in pop culture generally (Stranger Things and Critical Role both having large parts to play), and its dominance in the RPG arena hasn’t been meaningfully challenged since. It also returned to the use of the OGL, and a second boom of third-party publishers appeared and thrived for most of a decade.

The second thing was that PF1 was, itself, showing its age. RPGs have a pretty typical life cycle of editions and Pathfinder was reaching the end of one. It wasn’t much of a surprise, then, when, in 2018, Paizo announced Pathfinder 2nd Ed, which released in 2019 and will serve as the focus of the remainder of this post (yes, it’s taken me 1300 words to actually start doing the thing the post is supposed to be about, sue me).

There’s a coda to all of this in the form of the OGL debacle but I don’t intend to rehash any of it here - it was just like six months ago, come on - beyond what it specifically means for the future of PF2. That will come back up at the very end.

# Pathfinder 2E Basics #

So what, exactly, makes PF2 different from what has come before? There are, in my opinion, four fundamental answers to that question.

First: Unified math and proficiency progression. This piece is likely the part most familiar to 5E players, because 5E proficiency and PF2 proficiency both serve the same purpose, which is to tighten up the math of the game and make it so broken accumulations of bonuses aren’t really a thing. In contrast to 5E’s very limited proficiency, though, which just runs from +2 to +6 over the entire 20 levels of the game, Pathfinder’s scales from +0 to +28. Proficiency isn’t a binary yes/no, the way it is in 5E. PF2’s proficiency comes in five varieties: Untrained, Trained, Expert, Master, and Legendary. Your proficiency bonus is either +0 (Untrained) or your level + 2(Trained), +4 (Expert), +6 (Master) or +8 (Legendary). So if you were level five and Expert at something, your proficiency bonus would be level (5) plus Expert bonus (4) = +9.

Proficiency applies to everything in PF2, really - even more than 5E, if you can believe it, because it also goes into your Armor Class calculation. You can be Untrained, Trained, Expert, Master, or Legendary in various types of armor (or unarmored defense, especially relevant for many casters and monks), and your AC is calculated by your proficiency bonus + your Dex modifier + the armor’s own AC bonus, so AC scales just as attack rolls do. Once you get a handle on PF2 proficiency, you’ve grasped 95% of how any game statistic is calculated, including attacks, saves, skill checks, and AC.

Second: Three-Action Economy. Previous editions of D&D, including 5E, have used a “tiered” action system in combat, like 5E’s division between actions, moves, and bonus actions. PF2 has largely done away with that. At the start of your turn, you get three actions and a reaction, period (barring haste or slow or similar temporary effects). It takes one action to do one basic thing. “Attack” is an action. “Move your speed” is an action. “Ready a weapon” is an action. Searching for a hidden enemy is an action. Taking a guarded step is an action. Etc. The point being, you can do any of those as often as you have the actions for them. You can move three times, attack three times, move twice and attack once, whatever. Yes, this does mean you can attack three times in one turn at 1st level if you really want to (though there are reasons why you might not want to).

Some special abilities and most spells take more than one action to accomplish, so it’s not completely one-to-one, but it’s extremely easy to grasp and quite flexible at the same time. It’s probably my favorite of the innovations PF2 brought to the table.

Third: Deep Character Customization. So here’s where I am going to legitimately complain just a bit about 5E. I struggle with how little mechanical control I, as a player, have over how my character advances in 5E.

Consider an example. It’s common in a lot of 5E games to begin play at 3rd level, since you have a subclass by then, as well as a decent amount of hit points and access to 2nd level spells if you’re a caster. Let’s say you’re playing a fighter in a campaign that begins at 3rd level and is expected to run to 11th. That’s 8+ levels of play, a decent-length campaign by just about anyone’s standards. During that entire stretch of play, which would be a year or more depending on how often your group meets, your fighter will make exactly two (2) meaningful mechanical choices as part of their level-up process: the two points at 4th and 8th levels where you can boost a couple stats or get a feat. That’s it. Everything else is on rails, decided for you the moment you picked your subclass.

Contrast that with PF2. In that same level range, you would get to select: 4 class feats, 4 skill feats, two ancestry feats, two general feats, and four skill increases. At every level, a PF2 player gets to choose at least two things, in addition to whatever automatic bonuses they get from their class. These allow me to tailor my build quite tightly to whatever my idea for my character is and give me cool new things to play with every time I level up. This is true across character classes, casters and martials alike.

PF2 also handles multiclassing and the space that used to be occupied by prestige classes with its “pile o’ feats” approach. You can spend class feats from class A to get some features of class B, but it’s impossible for a multiclass build to just “steal” everything that makes a single class cool. A wizard/fighter will never be as good a fighter as a regular fighter is, and a fighter/wizard will never be the wizard’s match with magic.

Fourth: Four Degrees of Success. 5E applies its nat 20, nat 1, critical hits, etc. rules in a very haphazard fashion. PF2 standardizes this as well, in a way that makes your actual skill with whatever you’re doing matter for how well you do it. Any check in PF2 can produce one of four results: a critical success, a regular success, a regular failure, or a critical failure. In order to get a critical success on a roll, you have to exceed your target DC by 10 or more; in order to get a critical failure, you have to roll 10 or more less than the DC. Where do nat 20s and nat 1s come in? They respectively increase or decrease the level of success you rolled by one step. In practice, it works out a lot like you’re used to with a 5E game, but, for instance, if you have a +30 modifier and are rolling against a DC 18, rolling a nat 1 nets you a total of 31, exceeding the DC by more than 10 and earning you a critical success, which is then reduced to just a normal success by the fact of it being a nat 1. Conversely, rolling against a DC 40 with a +9 modifier can never succeed, because even a nat 20 only earns a 29, more than 10 below the DC and normally a crit failure, only increased to a regular failure by the nat 20.

Now, not every roll will make use of critical successes and critical failures. Attack rolls, for instance, don’t make any inherent distinction between failure and critical failure. (Though there are special abilities that do - try not to critically fail a melee attack against a swashbuckler. The results may be painful.) Skill rolls, however, often do, as do many spells with saving throws. Most spells that allow saves are only completely resisted if the target rolls a critical success. Even on a regular success, there is usually some effect, even on non-damaging rolls. That means that casters very rarely waste their turn on spells that get resisted and accomplish nothing at all. It also doubles the effect of any mechanical bonuses or penalties to a roll, because now there are two spots on a die per +1 or -1 that affect the outcome; a +1 might not only convert a failure to a success but might also convert a success to a crit success, or a crit fail to a regular fail.

# What About Everything Else? #

There is a lot more to it, of course. As a GM I find PF2 incredibly easy to run, even at the highest levels of game play, as compared to other d20 systems. The challenge level calculations work, meaning you can have a solo boss without having to resort to special boss monster rules to provide good challenges. I find the shift from “races” to “ancestries” much less problematic. PF2 has rules for how to handle non-combat time in the dungeon in ways that standardize common rules problems like “Well, you didn’t say you were looking for traps!” Everything using one proficiency calculation lets the game do weird things like having skill checks that target saves, or saves that target skill-based DCs. Inter-class balance, with some very specific exceptions, is beautifully tailored. Perception, always the uber-skill, isn’t a skill at all anymore: everyone is at least Trained in it, and every class reaches at least Expert in it by early double-digit levels. Opportunity Attacks (PF2 still uses the 3rd Ed “Attack of Opportunity” - but will soon be switching over to "Reactive Strike") isn’t an inherent ability of every character and monster, encouraging mobility during combats, and skill actions in combat can lower ACs, saves, attacks, and more, so there are more things to do for more kinds of characters. And so on.

Experiencing all of that is easiest just by playing the game, of course, but suffice it to say PF2 has a lot of QoL improvements for players and GMs alike in addition to the bigger, core-level mechanical differences.

# The OGL Thing #

Last thing, then. In the wake of the OGL shit in January, Paizo announced that it would no longer be releasing Pathfinder material under the OGL, opting instead to work with an intellectual property law firm to develop the Open RPG Creative (ORC) License that would do what the OGL could no longer be trusted to do: remain perpetually free and untouchable for anyone who wanted to publish under it. The ORC isn’t limited specifically to Paizo or to Pathfinder 2E or even to d20 games; any company can release any ruleset under it and allow third-party companies to develop and publish content for it.

Shifting away from the OGL, though, required making some changes to scrub out legacy material. A lot of the basic work was done when they shifted to 2E, but there are still a lot of concepts, terminologies, and potentially infringing ideas seeded throughout the system. These had to go.

Since this meant having to rewrite a lot of their core rules anyway, Paizo opted to not fight destiny and announced “Pathfinder 2nd Edition Remastered” in April. This is a kind of “2.25” edition, with a lot of small changes around the edges and a couple of larger ones to incorporate what they’ve learned since the game first launched four years ago. A couple classes are getting major updates, a ton of spells are either getting renamed or swapped out for non-OGL equivalents, and a couple big things: no more alignment and no more schools of magic.

The first book of the Remaster, Player Core 1, comes out in November, along with the GM Core. Next spring will see Monster Core and next summer will give us Player Core 2. That will complete the Remaster books; everything else is, according to Paizo, going to be compatible enough it won’t need but a few minor tweaks that can be handled via errata. So if you’re thinking about getting into PF2, I’d give serious thought to waiting until November at least, and maybe next summer if you want the whole Remastered package.

And that’s it. That’s my essay on PF2 and what I think makes it cool. The floor is open for questions and I am both very grateful and deeply apologetic to anyone who made it this far.

[artielu]

Listen up.

Another nightmare 6-3 decision.

This is as big a deal as losing Roe. This is achieving a major ultraconservative goal that is decades old.

Basically, for 40 years, Congress could pass vague laws like 'let's create the EPA Environmental Protection Agency and give it a mission and give it some money in the budget and have experts in that field (which we are not because we are Congress) make regulations about that mission.'. Congress can delegate some of its power to an agency instead of handling it directly through Congress, which is slow and not made of experts.

Congress has done this dozens of times.

See also:

the FDA, Food and Drug Administration, which regulates medication safety, which approved medication abortion as safe

The FTC Federal Trade Commission, which regulates fair competition

The SEC Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the stock market

The EEOC Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission, which regulates discrimination at work

The OSHA Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which regulates workplace safety

Etc

-> the vast majority of regulations come out of agencies. Conservatives hate it because they hate regulation.

For decades, the courts have given deference to agencies full of experts as knowing best how to figure out what needs to be done and then doing it, even if Congress didn't say 'do x, y, and z exactly like this.' Because Congress is busy, there's so much to regulate in this enormous complex country, and congress is slow.

Think of it like this: your parent says "I want you to clean your room. Go do that." and the kid doesn't do anything. Later, parent comes and says why is your room still messy??! Kid says 'you didn't tell me what to do exactly, so I did nothing.' you have to tell me specifically, and I'd like a list. Parent says "you know what I meant, I shouldn't have to spell it out for you, that's a waste of my time argh.'

The kid's response is legit for kids and anyone whose executive functioning is still developing or impaired.

But most neurotypical abled adults know damn well what cleaning a room means and can do it. You don't need to be told to put away your clean clothes, put dirty laundry in the hamper, put books back in bookshelf nicely, make bed, take out trash, put toys back in bins, etc., or exactly how to do any of those things. You look around and can see what needs to be done and you don't need your parent to tell you or how. And claiming that you need your parent to tell you exactly what to do and how is just a bullshit delay tactic.

And this ultraconservative Court just killed it. It's saying Congress has to specifically list out in legislation exactly what it wants the agency to do, or the agency can't do it. And whether Congress has been specific enough, and whether the agency's actions are appropriate (the agency staffed by EXPERTS) will be up to judges (who are NOT experts in all the things).

-----

"The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday undid decades of regulatory law, making it far more difficult for federal agencies to issue rules and regulations that carry out broad mandates enacted by Congress. Along ideological lines, the court reversed a 40-year-old precedent that has governed what agencies can and cannot do in interpreting federal statutes.

The decision overturned Chevron v. The Natural Resources Defense Council, a 1984 decision that was not particularly controversial when it was announced 40 years ago. Indeed, the vote was unanimous in declaring that when a statute is ambiguous, courts should defer to reasonable agency interpretations of what it means."

[ . . . ]

"In dissent, the liberal justices countered that abandoning Chevron deference will have a ripple effect throughout the government, making it difficult to respond to urgent new problems and limiting the ability of agencies to carry out Congressional mandates on everything from the environment to food and drug safety."

-----

This is what Trump's first election created, putting Kavanaugh and Gorsuch and Coney Barrett on the Court.

Do not give him a chance to put two more ultraconservative judges in their 40s/50s in the bench to replace conveniently retiring Thomas and Alito, and maybe another if Sotomayor's health continues to decline.

You need to vote for Biden. You need to elect a Democratic Congress to pass legislation to fix this. Because we're about to have a massive wave of deregulation and it's going to be awful.

[racefortheironthrone]

What are your thoughts on government intervention to end labor disputes in general? On one hand, forced settlements almost always favour management, and if management knows that the government will intervene, they have an incentive to stall negotiations and run out the clock, so to speak. On the other hand, some shutdowns will have far reaching negative effects on society as a whole, particularly if the strike involves the public service or things like railroads or ports.

In terms of my take on government intervention to end labor disputes, I'm fully in favor of procedural hypocrisy (or, as a philosophy PhD might put it, consequentialism) because the only question that really matters is whose side the government is intervening on behalf of. (This is where I'm going to make a massive plug on behalf of my colleague Erik Loomis' book A History of America in Ten Strikes, and in particular recommend his chapters on the Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902 and the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1937.)

As a labor historian, I would say that as a rule, the state almost always intervenes in labor disputes at some level, whether it's the local cops and local government, the state militia, the U.S Army, or the courts. For most of labor history, the state has intervened on behalf of capital, and was broadly succesful in using its police power to crush strikes and keep the trade union movement economically marginal.

Where the union movement has been most successful is not when the state is neutral (because capital versus labor is not historically a fair fight between opponents of equal weight), but when the state intevenes on behalf of labor. So yeah, government intervention in labor disputes is awesome - when it's Governor Frank Murphy sending in the National Guard to keep the cops and the strikebreakers out of the plants in the Flint Strike, or the "Madden Board" NLRB enforcing the Wagner Act through the work of the Economic Division and the Review Division, or the National War Labor Board ordering Little Steel to recognize SWOC and agree to the union's terms.

Specifically on the issue of forced settlements, whether they're a good thing or a bad thing depends entirely on whose terms the settlement is made, which in turn depends on how labor law is written and enforced (and staffed). The whole reason why the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 mandates that "neither party shall be under any duty to accept, in whole or in part, any proposal of settlement made by the [Federal Mediation] Service" is because one of capital's biggest grievances against the "Madden Board" NLRB was that the Board's orders and settlement proposals had systematically favored workers between 1935-1947.

I think the numbers tell the tale - when the state was at its most "neutral" at the turn of the 20th century, union density hit a ceiling of 10% of the workforce. The only time that the labor movement broke through that ceiling was during WWI and then the New Deal, when the state shifted to supporting unions. And then when the state began to shift back in the direction of capital and labor law increasingly favored management, the union movement began to shrink.

This is why I always tell my students that the state is like a great stationary engine, and the only thing that changes is where that engine's power is being sent to. If you refuse to engage in electoral politics and only rely on direct action, the engine doesn't go away - it just gets harnessed by the other side and the power is used against you.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Alicia Sadowski, Isabella Corrao, Helena Hind, and Jane Lee at MMFA:

The extreme policy positions and toxicity of Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s initiative to provide policy and personnel to the next Trump administration — have prompted leader Paul Dans to resign from his position at the Heritage Foundation and former President Donald Trump to publicly disavow the effort. (Heritage's president has said that Trump trying to create distance from Project 2025 is a “political tactical decision” and that Heritage still has a “very good” relationship with Trump and his team.) Fox News has maintained that Trump was not aware of Project 2025 and attempted to distance Trump from its extremism. But the pro-Trump network’s personalities have repeatedly signaled support for many of Project 2025’s proposals.

[...]

Personnel and staffing

Project 2025’s plan to staff the next Trump administration involves potentially firing thousands of nonpartisan federal civil service workers — what MAGA figures usually refer to as the “deep state” — and replacing them with Trump loyalists. This would be accomplished by reinstituting a Trump-era executive order called “Schedule F,” which would reclassify civil service employees as “at-will” workers who can be more easily fired. And Project 2025 has already created a training academy to instruct potential staffers on “rolling back destructive policy and advancing conservative ideas in the federal government.” 

Christian nationalism

In the foreword to the effort’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts warned that “the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism,” adding that “they will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent.”

To rectify this threat, Project 2025 offers, as Salon has written, a “blueprint for the Christian nationalist vision for America.”In the chapter on the Department of Labor, former Trump official Jonathan Berry cited the “Judeo-Christian tradition” to justify calling for overtime pay on the Sabbath.

In the chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services, former Trump HHS official Roger Severino criticized the Centers for Disease Control for issuing health guidelines warning against congregating at churches during the COVID-19 pandemic.

He asked, “How much risk mitigation is worth the price of shutting down churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar and far beyond as happened in 2020? What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved?”He also argued that future conservative administrations should “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.”

LGBTQ rights

Project 2025 will have a major impact on LGBTQ students and teachers in public school systems.

The Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke wrote that the next conservative administration should “take particular note of how radical gender ideology is having a devastating effect on school-aged children today” and warned of a supposed intent to “drive a wedge between parents and children.”Project 2025 claims that concepts such as gender ideology “poison our children, who are being taught … to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.”

Burke also called for legislation to force “K–12 districts under federal jurisdiction” to prohibit employees from using a name or pronoun different from the information listed on a student’s birth certificate without written guardian permission.

Project 2025 additionally targets trans athletes in schools, citing “bureaucrats at the Department of Justice” who “force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists.” The plan says the federal government should instead “define ‘sex’ under Title IX to mean only biological sex recognized at birth.”Additionally, in the foreword, Kevin Roberts calls gender-affirming care “child abuse.”

Diversity, equity, and inclusion

Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership proposes the removal of “DEI” references from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists,” claiming that such efforts undermine the purpose of these agencies. The proposal also calls for the investigation and prosecution of supposed discrimination brought on by DEI policies.Fox News has been vocal in the anti-DEI crusade as well, pushing many of the same talking points found in Mandate, including that DEI and pro-LGBTQ policies are a detriment to the U.S. Army’s effectiveness and that DEI policies constitute discrimination: 

GOP propaganda organ Fox “News” and Project 2025 are in lockstep on many key policies, such as opposition to DEI and LGBTQ+ rights, Christian nationalism, and Schedule F.

[gumjrop]

The Weather

All areas of the country are now at High or Very High levels of COVID Transmission.

According to the new CDC National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) dashboard, all regions are experiencing increased COVID wastewater levels, with the Midwest being the highest. Nationally, wastewater levels are “very high.” Driven by the JN.1 variant, we are currently seeing the second highest wastewater levels since BA.1, the first Omicron wave in January 2022.

We continue to stress the importance of mitigating the spread of COVID, especially during this time of increasing transmission. Please continue to wear a high quality respirator mask (such as an N95) in indoor settings of any capacity, and postpone crowded events. In addition, make sure to take appropriate precautions when meeting with others.

Wins

Amidst this new surge, many hospitals – some responding to staffing shortages, and some responding to public pressure – have reinstated mask mandates. We celebrate the work of organizers across the country including those at Care Not COVID Chicagoland, COVID Safe Maryland, COVID Advocacy NY, and MaskBlocs around the country who organized a call-in to hospitals last week to demand they reinstate – and make permanent – masking policies.  A coalition protest by Sacramento Jewish Voices for Peace, Sunrise Movement Sacramento, International Jewish Anti-Zionist network, Bay Area JVP, & Youth 4 Palestine Sac organized a fully masked (N95!) and tested (2 days in a row!) pro-Palestine protest at the CA State Capitol in Sacramento last week.  ACTUP’s New York chapter has voted to require and provide KN95 masks at all upcoming meetings and actions “due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and recent surge, as well as to increase safety from surveillance at protests.”  Solidarity means we protect each other, and these organizers are showing us the way!

Variants

JN.1, a BA.2.86 descendent, is rising to prominence quickly in the United States. Nowcast estimates predict that by 1/6/2024, JN.1 will account for 61.6% of circulating variants. According to preliminary non-peer reviewed data, the newest (XBB.1.5) booster helps to protect against the JN.1 variant. Conversely, older vaccines did not offer significant protection against JN.1.  It is important to receive the updated booster, especially since uptake is currently low–according to a poll conducted by Gallup, only 29% of 6,000 participants surveyed received the updated vaccine as of December 7, 2023. This is in stark contrast to flu vaccine rates, polled at 49%. This is likely due to an imbalance in public health messaging–while efforts were poured into advertising the flu vaccine, not as much emphasis was placed on receiving the updated booster.

Hospitalizations

Weekly COVID hospitalizations continue to trend upward, now at 34,798 for the week ending December 30, 2023. The numbers for currently hospitalized patients with COVID are also increasing, currently at 25,430. In terms of regional trends, the Northeast and Midwest are seeing higher rates of hospitalization. When reviewing these numbers we must also remember that patients who are already admitted for other reasons and are suffering from nosocomial, or hospital-acquired infections, are not accounted for in this data.

Hospitals are overwhelmed. Healthcare workers are demanding support from administrators. Read this account of ER nurses at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx who say that the hospital executives are refusing to open up vacant areas of the hospital to accommodate the surge in patients – leaving the ER dangerously overcrowded and forcing patients into hallway beds.

Long COVID

A new cross-sectional study published in Nature Communications found that Long COVID patients with post-exertional malaise (PEM) exhibit skeletal muscle changes that are exacerbated by exercise. PEM patients are also found to have unique pathophysiological changes, such as amyloid-containing deposits in muscle tissue. These findings contribute to mounting evidence that COVID infection can significantly damage the body, and more research is necessary in order to fully understand manifestations of Long COVID. If readers are curious, summarized findings can be found in this X (Twitter) thread, penned by one of the authors. Long COVID research is important. This is why it is essential that all Long COVID research centers adhere to the strictest infection prevention protocols. Read this account of a person disabled by Long COVID who dropped out of a study because the study personnel refused to mask. We saw this same phenomenon last spring at Stanford during a study of Paxlovid’s impact on Long COVID rates.

Take Action

This week Jewish Currents put out a report on The Epidemiological War on Gaza, which amplified WHO’s January 2nd announcement that “there are currently 424,639 [reported] cases of infectious disease in Gaza,” an area with only 2 million residents total. With the ongoing destruction of hospitals and deprivation of food and water and environmental pollution from continued bombardment, the occupying forces have ensured the conditions for continued deaths even in times of ceasefire. Call your representatives and join a protest this week to demand a ceasefire and the reconstruction of Palestinian medical infrastructure towards fair health access for all peoples! Let us support Massachusetts General Brigham Long COVID patients by telling the hospital to 1) meet all patient accessibility requests including wearing N95 respirators upon request and 2) make universal masking their new standard of care. They can be contacted through their contact form, or by calling 1-800-856-1983. Rashida Tlaib sent out an email blast informing constituents of the current surge. The message included acknowledgment of COVID’s airborne nature, recommendation to wear a well-fitting mask, a link to access free tests through USPS, and information on updated vaccines and COVID transmission. Let’s contact Congresswoman Tlaib and thank her for this invaluable action! 

Future Weather Reports

Starting next week, we will begin to publish the Weather Report on a bi-weekly basis. This will allow our team to focus on crafting action campaigns to push for a comprehensive public health approach to the pandemic, including mask mandates, paid sick leave policies, testing access, Long COVID research, next generation vaccines, indoor air quality regulations, and more. We hope to see you in our expanded actions to end the COVID pandemic soon to come!