AM Quickie

The political stories and election updates you need to know to start your day- all in five minutes or less. Co Hosted by Sam Seder and Lucie Steiner. Powered by Majority.FM

https://fans.fm/amquickie

subscribe
share






May 11, 2021: Israeli Violence Continues; Biden Moves to Restrict Unemployment; Trump-Era Trans Discrimination Lifted


Welcome to Majority.FM's AM QUICKIE! Brought to you by justcoffee.coop

TODAY'S HEADLINES:

Israeli military and police forces continued their campaign of violence against Palestinians on Monday, killing somewhere around 20 people, including 9 children, after responding to sporadic rocket fire with several airstrikes.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden announces some big changes to the country’s pandemic unemployment system, shifting the balance of power right back into the hands of the nation’s bosses.

And lastly, some good news: the Biden administration rolls back a Trump era policy and ensures that health care providers cannot discriminate against transgender patients.

THESE ARE THE STORIES YOU NEED TO KNOW:

Violence continues across Palestine and Israel as the Israeli military launched airstrikes on Monday, reportedly killing as many as 20 people, including nine children.

Israel launched devastating airstrikes on the Gaza strip in retailiation for a flurry of ineffective rocket fire by Hamas forces, following days of police violence against Palestinian protesters.

The airstrikes came after Hamas launched 7 rockets. They would eventually launch more than 150, lightly injuring one Israeli, according to government officials. In retaliation, Israel killed nine children and 11 other people, according to Palestinian officials.

This lopsided violence is nothing new, and it’s worth noting that Hamas’s rocket attacks came after days of police violence on protesters and peaceful worshipers alike at one of Islam’s most holy sites.

Israeli police have fired tear gas and rubber bullets inside the Al-Aqsa mosque, injuring hundreds of people since they first began cracking down on protests on Friday night.

On Monday, right-wing Israelis contributed to the tensions by staging marches through Palestinian neighborhoods.

The current violence stems from a legal effort by Israeli settlers to evict Palestinian families from their homes in Jerusalem’s Old city, but has ballooned into a country-wide campaign of violence. And as usual, only one side wields the vast majority of bombs, guns, and deadly force, while the other side is forced to mourn more deaths.

Biden Moves to Restrict Unemployment

On Monday, President Joe Biden directed the Department of labor to work with states to reinstate the work search requirements for unemployment benefits.

In case you’re not familiar with how things were, during the pandemic the government was guaranteeing that people would receive some base level of unemployment benefits whether or not they were actively looking for a job.

This was, of course, a massive boon to many families who simply couldn’t find work or couldn’t work, for all the reasons that should be evident in a massive global pandemic. It also gave lower-wage workers, particularly in service jobs, some leverage against employers who had underpaid and overworked them for years. Republicans hate this arrangement and blamed it for causing a so-called labor shortage, which of course could be solved simply by offering higher wages.

But on Monday, Biden announced that the era of kinder government benefits was ending. He said, “We’re going to make it clear that anyone collecting unemployment who is offered a suitable job must take the job or lose their unemployment benefits.”

That sounds somewhat reasonable on paper, but what it also means is that people will basically be forced into the first job they get offered or else lose their way to pay rent. That’s a gift to employers who are looking to reinstate the status quo.

29 states have already gone back to the job search requirements that Biden was talking about, but now the final 21 will have to join them.

That means things are going to get that much harder for families who were depending on, or even, dare we say it, benefitting from the increased government assistance during the pandemic.

Trump-Era Trans Discrimination Lifted

However, things weren’t all bad on the Biden front today. Wherever you look, there’s always a barbaric Trump policy to overturn, and today was no different.

The Biden Administration announced on Monday that the Department of Health and Human Services will once again prohibit federally-funded health care organizations from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender.

This reversed a Trump-era policy that, well, said the opposite, specifically saying that the 2010 affordable care act’s anti-discrimination policies didn’t protect trans people.

The Trump administration’s policies weren’t rooted in anything other than bigotry, so this is a pretty easy fix for the Biden administration -- it’s honestly surprising that it took this long.

Still, there’s some work to go to fully untangle them. The New York Times reported that the Biden Administration is still working to hash out formal provisions and new rules, such as whether the provisions apply to health insurers as well as health care providers.

This is all fine print, and of course that’s where a lot of people fall through the cracks. But with some luck and good legal work, the decision should improve some trans peoples’ access to healthcare.

AND NOW FOR SOME QUICKER QUICKIES:

The FDA officially authorized the Pfizer covid vaccine for use in children aged 12 to 15, which means another key demographic of school-age kids can get the jab. Schools have lagged behind in reopening plans, mainly due to the massive hurdles of making sure everyone is safe, and this will be a major help in getting middle and high schoolers back in the classroom.

NBC announced that it will not air the 2022 Golden Globes ceremony, after an L.A. Times investigation and other reports found that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association had a systemic lack of diversity and other questionable labor practices.

The FBI blamed a new hacking group named DarkSide for the massive ransomware attack that took down the Colonial Pipeline on the East Coast this weekend, and vowed to quote “disrupt and prosecute” the group from making future attacks.

The Texas GOP is preparing for an all-out onslaught on voting rights, pushing through a bill that severely restricts access that could get signed into law as early as this week. Texas’s monstrous governor Greg Abbott has already said he’s excited to sign it, which should make it pretty clear what it would do.

AM QUICKIE - MAY 11, 2021

HOSTS - Sam Seder & Lucie Steiner

WRITER - Jack Crosbie

PRODUCER - Dorsey Shaw

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER - Brendan Finn


fyyd: Podcast Search Engine
share








 May 11, 2021  6m