NEWS ROUNDUP
Vigils for patient safety ● Freedom trash ● Our ‘deaths of despair’
Thursday, January 9, 2020
LOCAL
ALSO at The Stand — As community backs workers, progress in Providence talks
► In the (Centralia) Daily Chronicle — Contract talks still ongoing for Providence nurses — Nurses at Providence Centralia are still bargaining over their contract, representatives said, amid news that groups at other Providence hospitals have begun to settle.
THIS WASHINGTON
PREVIOUSLY at The Stand:
— Urge State Legislature to protect public employees’ personal data — Contact your legislators and ask them to support House Bill 1888, legislation that would revise Washington state’s outdated public disclosure law and keep public employee’s birthdates and personal data private.
— Freedom Foundation keeps spending, failing (by Peter Starzynski)
► From Crosscut — Across the entire state, WA voters rank homelessness as the No. 1 issue lawmakers must address — In new Crosscut/Elway Poll, 31% of respondents named homelessness as the state’s top issue, a 10-point increase from 2019.
► From Crosscut — Federal Way made it harder to evict renters without ‘good cause.’ The entire state might do the same — Washington lawmakers could enact similar protections statewide during the 2020 legislative session, which begins Monday.
► In today’s (Everett) Herald — Matt Shea is a man without a caucus. But he has a House seat — The Spokane Valley Republican is accused in a House-sanctioned investigation of engaging in an act of domestic terrorism, intimidating political enemies and training young adults to fight a Holy war. “It is the professional opinion of the investigators,” the report reads, “that on a more probable than not basis, Representative Shea presents a present and growing threat of risk to others through political violence.”
BOEING
THAT WASHINGTON
► In today’s Washington Post — Oops. Some federal workers are not covered by the new family leave law. — Just before Congress recessed in December, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) sought to correct what he called a “technical and drafting error.”
► In today’s Washington Post — Ruth Bader Ginsburg declares she’s ‘cancer free’
NATIONAL
► In the NY Times — Musicians’ pension plan seeks to cut benefits — The plan, the American Federation of Musicians and Employers’ Pension Fund — which covers more than 50,000 people, including Broadway musicians, players in some orchestras, and freelance musicians and recording artists — declared over the summer that it was in “critical and declining status” and would run out of money to pay benefits within 20 years.
► In the Washington Post — Ivanka Trump avoids ruffling feathers in CES speech on retraining blue collar workers — But some here were skeptical about Trump’s promises to help workers. AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler said the Trump administration has been “somewhat quiet” on issues surrounding the future of work, and Ivanka Trump’s CES appearance appeared to be a new focus. “Overall the Trump administration’s record has been a record that has not been standing up for working people,” Shuler said.
TODAY’S MUST-READ
► In the NY Times — Who killed the Knapp family? (by Nicholas Kristof and — Across America, working-class people — including many of our friends — are dying of despair. And we’re still blaming the wrong people… We Americans are locked in political combat and focused on President Trump, but there is a cancer gnawing at the nation that predates Trump and is larger than him. Suicides are at their highest rate since World War II; one child in seven is living with a parent suffering from substance abuse; a baby is born every 15 minutes after prenatal exposure to opioids; America is slipping as a great power. We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation. Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.” Working-class communities disintegrated across America because of lost jobs, broken families, gloom — and failed policies.
EDITOR’S NOTE — In a related story from The Hill — Trump points to stock market gains: ‘How are your 409K’s doing?’
The Stand posts links to Washington state and national news of interest every weekday morning by 10 a.m.