paid sick leave

belated 6/17

back big covid,

an 8 25

'Gut punch': Missouri workers 'disgusted' by GOP repeal of paid sick leave mandate

https://www.alternet.org/fox-news-bogus-sick-days/

we just cough all over each other

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https://this.kiji.is/611298914282439777?c=592532205600719969

no lnx

philly inq will bunch

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Will Bunch: 'Disaster socialism': Will coronavirus crisis finally change how Americans see the safety net?

2020/3/13 16:43 (EDT)3/14 05:43 (EDT)updated

©The Philadelphia Inquirer

Diana Hernandez has one foot in the Ivy League, where she’s an assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and another in the grittier streets of the South Bronx, the mostly working-class area where she lives. Walking down a Bronx boulevard the other day, she witnessed scenes much different from the TV news version of the coronavirus crisis, where suburbanites stuff payloads of squeezably soft toilet paper and price-gouged Purell in the back of luxury SUVs.

Instead, Hernandez wrote that she witnessed Bronx shoppers at her local Dollar Tree stocking up on bleach, a tiny four-pack of toilet paper or a three-pack of Cup Noodles — stockpiles for families that lack cash for day-to-day emergencies, let alone the uncertainties of a global pandemic. She called it emblematic of how hard the coronavirus crisis is for people living on the margins — who can’t simply work from home when their job is cleaning hospital floors or frying fast-food burgers, who can only get around on crowded buses or subways, who can’t take paid sick days or don’t have child care when their kids’ schools shut down.

“The black and brown folks who work for these corporations have to show up on their line or at their cleaning facility, because they’re taking care of the things that can’t be taken care of remotely,” Hernandez told me by phone. I’d called her after reading her op-ed on how a public health crisis has laid bare what so many have tried to ignore for so long — the many ways that the cruel inequalities of modern U.S. capitalism weigh on working people.

The public health emergency even has some lawmakers who’ve worked for decades to cut the social safety net now supporting a universal paid sick leave — at least for this one virus, if not for the 900 or whatever other things that could make workers ill — and or even funding what might be called “Medicaid for All” … people with coronavirus symptoms, so that the uninsured or under-insured will get free testing, at least.

In 2020, a liberal is a conservative who’s been exposed to the coronavirus. It was almost surreal to watch a suddenly kinder, gentler-sounding Mike Pence declare that “(w)hen we tell people, ‘If you’re sick, stay home,’ the president has tasked the team with developing economic policies that will make it very, very clear that we’re going to stand by those hard-working Americans.” Aren’t these the same people fighting in court to deny health insurance to hard-working Americans with other types of preexisting medical conditions? (Spoiler alert: Yes, they are.)

It’s fascinating to watch how a pandemic-inspired fear of the unknown — flavored by the fact that COVID-19 initially tended to spread through the things that more affluent Americans do, like travel overseas, book cruise ship vacations or attend business conferences — has finally caused at least a slight bump in awareness of the kind of problems that everyday folks, working two or three jobs in a gig economy, have been screaming about for years.

Many experts noted that America’s mad scramble to suddenly guarantee paid sick days or coverage for necessary medical procedures must look strange to Europeans, or other developed societies with a generous safety social net, where leaders don’t think the only solution to every problem is to throw more tax breaks at corporations and pray that a few dollars trickle down. The New York Times recently noted that Germany, France, Denmark and the Netherlands are among the nations where workers have a right to paid sick leave — and that sense of security, along with the knowledge that folks won’t get surprise medical bills, have dampened both the economic fallout and some of the fear from the pandemic.

On this side of the Atlantic, in the land of unfettered free-market capitalism and “rugged individualism,” things are a little different. With no federal law in place, about a dozen, mostly blue states, D.C., and about 30 municipalities (including Philadelphia, for most employers, in 2015) have mandated paid sick leave, often over the objection of business lobbyists offering dire predictions of profit shrinkage.

In arguably the most well-timed paper in the history of American academia, research co-led by a Temple University professor — and dropped by the National Bureau of Economic Research on Monday, in the heat of the coronavirus debate — found that the economic costs of paid sick leave are surprisingly low while other gains are high.

Temple economist Johanna Catherine Maclean and her two colleagues, using a treasure trove of wage and benefit data reported to the U.S. Labor Department from 2009 to 2017, when a number of state and local mandatory paid-leave laws were enacted, found workers in those jurisdictions took just two more sick days a year. There was no significant effect on business, and the researchers calculated the per worker cost at 20 cents per hours. But the workers were healthier and better off, and probably had better morale. And they weren’t making their co-workers sick when they could afford to stay home — even before the coronavirus reached America.

Maclean told me on Wednesday that “sometimes it takes a crisis” for leaders to see the benefits of something like paid sick leave, even though polls before the coronavirus showed roughly 75% of Americans support such laws. “We see this pattern,” she said, “where it takes a troubling development to rise the value of a policy change to policy makers.”

Well, yes and no. As is so often the case in today’s American oligarchy, corporations are responding faster and better to the public outcry than government. In the last week we’ve seen big businesses like Amazon and gig economy icon Uber agree to some form of coronavirus sick leave — the same kind of thing they’ve been fighting against for workers came down with, say, influenza classic, which may kill 30,000 Americans this year.

But up on Capitol Hill, GOP Sen. Lamar Alexander — even while making the concession, seemingly remarkable for a top Republican, that a bill mandating 14 days of paid sick leave in a national health emergency is “a good idea” — then blocked that good idea (which also allowed workers to accrue seven days of conventional paid sick days a year) because he believes that government and its bottomless pasta bowl of debt should pay the tab, not the industrialists who coincidentally finance the Republican Party.

The new plan from House Democrats is people-oriented — sick leave, widespread free testing, food aid and unemployment insurance — while Trump is talking typical GOP corporate welfare and tax cuts. But the pressure of a worsening crisis could be the thing — maybe the only thing, in 2020’s divided America — that leads to common ground.

There’s a notion that’s gained credence over the last decade or two — “the shock doctrine,” as named by the writer Naomi Klein, also known as “disaster capitalism” — that our modern kleptocracy uses tragedies, from natural (like hurricanes) to man-made (like, um, stock market crashes) to impose policies such as privatization of government services that the public would never go for in normal times. But can it work in reverse? Can the shock of a pandemic — and the realization that our cruel capitalist constructs have made it harder to deal with — cause a reversal of fortune?

Will the coronavirus crisis spark a kind of “disaster socialism,” to finally embrace the social safety net that’s the norm in so many other countries?

The political irony is that 2020 started out with two high-profile presidential candidates calling for the kind of radical change that would have made a public health crisis like the current moment easier for everyday Americans: Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Now Warren is gone and Sanders is on their ropes, as voters in the earlier stage of the coronavirus crisis focus less on policy and more on the kind of familiar leadership offered by Joe Biden.

But despite their flaws, the thing about Biden and, arguably, President Trump is that both men are not rigid ideologues. They have been known to bend to the moment. Trump, after all, used to be a pro-choice Democrat while Biden was a Catholic moderate of the 1970s who evolved into championing gay marriage. Today, rising to meet this crisis means embracing the security that working Americans need to pay their medical bills or call out sick or put their kid in child care. If there was ever a time for a Nixon-in-China transformation, it’s now.

And if calling this “disaster socialism” makes you politically uncomfortable, then just call simply a more humane America. But the coronavirus has exposed an underlying sickness in modern U.S. society that too many of us have tried to avoid for too long. It’s time to embrace the cure.

———

ABOUT THE WRITER

Will Bunch is the national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/how-the-coronavirus-crisis-revealed-the-danger-of-the-decades-long-conservative-movement/

aha: typically gop does exactly what they accuse dems of, wishlist:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/how-the-coronavirus-crisis-revealed-the-danger-of-the-decades-long-conservative-movement/

no lnx

How the coronavirus crisis revealed the danger of the decades-long conservative movement

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon March 13, 2020

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell smelled an evil liberal conspiracy on Thursday, one designed to steal away his decades of tireless work to kneecap the federal government. The Democratic-majority House had passed a large emergency bill, designed to combat the coronavirus pandemic, and McConnell was absolutely certain Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were trying to pull one over on him.

“Unfortunately, it appears at this hour that the speaker and House Democrats instead chose to produce an ideological wish list that was not tailored closely to the circumstances,” McConnell said. He accused Democrats of exploiting this situation, saying the bill addresses “various areas of policy that are barely related, if at all, to the issue before us.”

There’s a lot at stake here, but apparently the big sticking point for McConnell was a provision requiring employers to offer paid sick leave to employees, which McConnell claims would “put thousands of small businesses at risk.”

In reality, of course, this is just common sense. As the New York Times editorial board noted, companies that don’t offer paid sick leave “are endangering their workers and customers.” A lot of workers with public-facing jobs — such as food service workers and retail employees — come into close contact with dozens or hundreds of people a day. But they are the people least likely to be allowed to stay home without losing their jobs, or at least losing a paycheck.

McConnell is so poisoned by his right-wing ideology that he can’t see this, or chooses not to. Instead, he’s standing firm on the long-standing Republican tendency to view employers as feudal lords who should be allowed to treat employees however they wish — even, apparently, if that means allowing a deadly disease to rip through the population, potentially killing hundreds of thousands of people if it is not checked.

So far, most of the panic over the coronavirus outbreak has been driven by the undeniable incompetence of Donald Trump. At every turn, Trump has made this situation worse — even going so far as to try to discourage testing to bamboozle the public and, I suspect, tanking the markets by screwing up an Oval Office address because he’s too vain to wear glasses so he can see well enough to read a teleprompter.

That’s all true. But it’s also important to understand that the larger Republican Party, even without Trump, is also to blame for what looks to be a serious public health crisis. Right-wing ideology, often marketed as “rugged individualism” but perhaps better understood as an aversion to the very concept of a common good, is one major reason why the U.S. government, hamstrung for decades by Republican power, isn’t better equipped to handle a crisis.

This isn’t just a Trump problem. This is a widespread Republican problem. For decades, GOP strategy has been consistent: Whenever they get power, they slash regulations and gut spending, with the goal of making government less effective. This is a deliberate strategy to make the public broadly distrustful of government, and therefore increasingly open to shifting more and more power to the wealthy individuals who control the private sector.

This ideological commitment to an every-man-for-himself ideology, which is terrible in any circumstances, is exposed as particularly dreadful in the face of a pandemic. Disease is a reminder that humans are a herd species, wholly dependent on each other for survival, and that government must be a way to formally organize that joint survival pattern. It’s not some villain in a racism-inflected right-wing morality fable about the importance of “personal responsibility.”

Simply put, we need our government to be able to protect us from disease. Republicans have spent years tearing it down, and even in a crisis are incapable of accepting that “small government” is not always a good thing.

As Max Moran at Talking Points Memo argued, the fact that Vice President Mike Pence — deemed a “normal” Republican — is in charge of the coronavirus comforts some people, because they believe he is more adult and responsible than Trump. Pence’s track record suggests otherwise. As governor of Indiana, he oversaw an HIV outbreak that led to 10% of the population people in a single county becoming infected because Pence thought preaching the value of personal responsibility was better than following the recommendations of public health experts.

“[A] Pence-led response is dangerous, not in spite of, but precisely because he is a typical Republican,” Moran writes, because normal Republicans “apply their competence and considerable resources” to the task of “protection for the powerful, callousness for the afflicted, and a special disdain for the ‘other.'”

The right-wing idiocy that is going to get people killed is all over the Republican response to this situation. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy joined McConnell in denouncing the Democratic bill, even though everything in it — including expanding food-stamp spending — will either help slow the spread of the disease or stimulate the American economy to offset the inevitable slowdown caused by this epidemic.

Instead, McCarthy is resorting to racism instead of sensible public health measures, calling the coronavirus the “Chinese coronavirus” for no apparent purpose except to feed the assumptions of the Fox News base than their whiteness and their racist attitudes will somehow protect them. (This assumption, by the way, is leading many older Americans to take serious and completely unnecessary risks with their health.)

The right-wing ideology poisoning is so bad that the coronavirus bill was held up in part because Republicans wanted to inject some anti-abortion language into it. There is absolutely no reason to believe that helping people protect themselves against a viral epidemic will lead to more abortions, but that’s the modern GOP for you: They’re always worried that somehow or other the Democrats have a sneaky agenda to “let” women have sex. (Which women will undoubtedly do, whether the Democrats authorize it or not.)

https://www.salon.com/2020/03/12/gop-delays-coronavirus-bill-in-part-over-complaints-that-it-doesnt-bar-federal-funds-for-abortion/

Even the so-called Republican “moderates” are to blame for this situation. For instance, Politico reporter Michael Grunwald uncovered this little tidbit about Sen. Susan Collins of Maine from his book about the Obama era.

Michael Grunwald

@MikeGrunwald

I had forgotten my own reporting that @SenatorCollins stripped $870M for pandemic preparations out of the 2009 stimulus.

Zooming out, it’s easy to see how decades of damage to our government are likely to make this epidemic worse. Republicans have been stingy about health care spending and have blocked Democratic efforts to increase access, especially when it comes to the Medicaid expansion under the Obama administration. The result is that we have fewer doctors and hospitals ready to handle what we know is coming, and we will probably have a lot of infected people who won’t get tested, either because they can’t afford it or don’t even know where to go for testing and treatment.

By all means, blame Trump for the current crisis. His incompetence is especially central to the panicked reaction of the financial markets. Even a slightly steadier president, whatever his or her party or ideology, would bolster investor confidence a whole lot more.

But this isn’t just about Trump. Republicans have a profound hostility to good government, and whatever slapdash response they may grudgingly accept in an effort to save their skins at the ballot box this November will be hamstrung by the fact that they refused, for decades, to invest in the infrastructure necessary to weather the big shock that is hitting us right now. Viruses are the ultimate reminder that humans are interconnected and need each other, and that the ideal of “rugged individualism” is childish and often racist nonsense.

no lnx ref

GOP delays coronavirus bill in part over complaints that it doesn't bar federal funds for abortion

"Very on-brand for pro-lifers to refuse to save a whole bunch of lives," feminist writer Jill Filipovic says

IGOR DERYSH

MARCH 12, 2020

The White House and congressional Republicans refused to support House Democrats' coronavirus relief bill, in part over claims that it does not safeguard against federal funds being used to provide abortions.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., announced Thursday that the Senate will not go on its scheduled recess next week to continue negotiations on the legislation. The announcement came after McConnell rejected the bill proposed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., calling it an "ideological wish list." President Donald Trump also objected to what he claimed were Democratic "goodies" in the bill.

Among the Republicans' hangups are a provision that would provide paid sick leave to workers,NBC News reported, and a complaint about an unrelated issue: abortion.

"The White House believes provisions in the Pelosi bill that pertain to the Violence Against Women Act could open the door to federal funds for abortion," the network reported." In response, the White House wants to add Hyde Amendment language to the bill — restricting the use of federal funds for abortion."

Several senior White House officials told the far-right outlet The Daily Caller that Pelosi lobbied for up to $1 billion in reimbursements for laboratory claims, which the officials claimed "would set a precedent of health spending without protections outlined in the Hyde Amendment."

"A new mandatory funding stream that does not have Hyde protections would be unprecedented," a White House official told the outlet. "Under the guise of protecting people, Speaker Pelosi is working to make sure taxpayer dollars are spent covering abortion — which is not only backwards, but goes against historical norms."

Another White House official not named in the report went a step further, accusing Pelosi of pushing for an abortion "slush fund."

But The Daily Caller acknowledged in its story that Politico had already reported that the "two sides resolved issues over federal funding of abortion in a separate bill."

Ilyse Hogue, the head of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said the White House claims were a "straight up lie."

"The fact that the GOP would use the [coronavirus pandemic] to spread more falsehoods and grind an ideological ax is sickening and perverse," she said.

Planned Parenthood accused Republicans of using the COVID-19 pandemic to score political points.

"Using this very real public health emergency to attack abortion coverage shows a despicable lack of concern about the severity of this crisis," the organization said. "These politicians will do anything to advance their anti-abortion agenda."

"Yet again, Republicans prove they'll do anything to attack abortion – including co-opting a public health crisis to further their agenda," the National Women's Law Center said in a statement. "People need care – not to be used as political bargaining chips."

The Democratic-led House is expected to approve the bill Thursday, but the Republican-led Senate will hold off until Pelosi negotiates an agreement with the White House.

"I am glad talks are ongoing between the administration and Speaker Pelosi," McConnell said. "I hope Congress can pass bipartisan legislation to continue combating the coronavirus and keep our economy strong."

Pelosi said at a news conference that Democrats were "addressing" some Republican concerns as she pushed back on Republican plans to delay the negotiations into next week.

"We need to just make a decision to help families right now," she said. "We are responding to their concerns, we don't want them moving the goalposts and that's it. I'm not sticking around because they don't want to agree to language."

But Republicans' attempts to delay the funding bill over an unrelated issue like abortion left Democrats apoplectic amid the administration's bungled response to the pandemic.

"I'm enraged beyond words right now," Hogue said.

"Very on-brand for pro-lifers to refuse to save a whole bunch of lives," feminist writer Jill Filipovic added, "[and] put millions of people at risk so they can do a little performative politicking that won't actually prevent a single abortion."

IGOR DERYSH

Igor Derysh is a staff writer at Salon. His work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald and Baltimore Sun.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/grotesque-level-of-greed-jeff-bezos-whole-foods-wants-workers-to-pay-colleagues-sick-leave-during-coronavirus/

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/2/13/as_deadly_flu_sweeps_the_us

week marks 25 years since Bill Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, which gave employees in the U.S. the right to unpaid time off to care for themselves and family members. A decade later, San Francisco became the first city to approve paid sick leave. Today some 14 million workers in 32 municipalities and nine states have paid sick leave policies. On Thursday, Austin city councilmembers will vote on an ordinance that would make it the first city in the South to require paid sick leave from private employers. But the measure is facing strong opposition from aKoch brothers-backed lobbying group called the National Federation of Independent Business, which is fighting paid sick leave policies across the country. This the same lobbying group that led the opposition to the Affordable Care Act. For more we speak to Gregorio Casar, the Austin city councilmember who introduced the paid sick leave measure.

Bradley Foundation Fueled "Independent Women's Forum" Campaign Against Paid Sick Leave Laws

By Lisa Graves — The Bradley Foundation underwrote new efforts to undermine popular public policies that help women and families, such as paid sick leave laws through funding for the controversial Independent Women's Forum.

Each year, Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller marks “Equal Pay Day” by publishing a piece attacking the idea that women are paid less than men or trying to rationalize the pay gap.

This year, The Daily Caller criticized Google for highlighting the pay gap through Cheryl Sandburg’s Lean In initiative and a Funny or Die video about women being paid 20% less than men.

The piece, attributed to Carlson’s non-profit charity, the Daily Caller NewsFoundation, was illustrated with a photo of a woman “showered with money.”

The author, a recent college grad who is a Breitbart alum and former Koch intern, noted without irony that “the so-called wage gap only makes sense if hours worked, years of experience, and education of male and female laborers are considered.” It might help to read that “critique” again.

For good measure, the Daily Caller ran a second piece that day, a reprint of a blog claiming Elizabeth Warren paid women less than men. That spin bounced through the rightwing echo chamber from the Washington Free Beacon to the Daily Caller, Breitbart, and Fox, before it was refuted by Warren’s payroll data. No correction was issued by any of the outlets that spread the attack on Warren. (The Beacon has described itself as an “aerial hunting operation” and it has attacked watchdogs like the Center for Media and Democracy.)

But that’s par for the course for The Daily Caller. Though its website has more than 16 million visitors and a huge staff of writers who produce content for it through its non-profit the Daily Caller News Foundation, the site routinely relies on rightwing bloggers and groups to provide many of the “facts” it asserts as true in its news stories.

During the presidential election season, The Daily Caller was rife with articles attacking Hillary Clinton, including a piece by the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF)that reinforced Trump’s nicknaming Clinton as “crooked,” which some might consider projection given his documented history of cheating contractors out of their full pay or the Trump University scam or more.

IWF’s smear piece published in The Daily Caller in the run-up to the presidential election could have been written this year about the policymaker-in-chief: “The bigger problem is that she doesn’t think the rules should apply to her in the first place. HRC – or Her Royal Crookness – sees herself as a Queen, existing in a realm above the minions who work for her, and even higher above her lowly subjects. Queens don’t have to bother with the system meant for ordinary schlubs. She doesn’t have to accept facts or findings; we peons are expected to accept her version of events, rather than trust our own lyin’ eyes.”

IWF is a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity that is theoretically barred from intervening in an election by criticizing the character of a candidate. That story by the head of IWF concludes with: “Americans recall that we are supposed to be a nation of laws, after all, and those laws are meant to apply to everyone, even those with titles like Secretary or Senator. That’s bad news for Her Royal Crookness, Hillary Clinton, who epitomizes the elitism that Americans resoundingly reject.” IWF has not issued, and The Daily Caller has not published, a follow-up on that take in light of Trump’s acts as president.

Last summer, CMD released a major report detailing IWF’s history and role in the War on Women, a story that was broken by Joan Walsh in The Nation. CMD also documented that almost all of the publicly known funders of the IWF”s affiliated (c)(4), the “Independent Women’s Voice,” were men. CMD also filed an FEC complaint against IWV last November contending that the group violated election laws, which IWV denies.

CMD also documented how as IWF was claiming there was no “war on women,” IWV was running ads and doing calls to aid politicians like Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that IWF has sponsored a forum where its panelists contended that “rape culture statistics have been blown out of proportion in the United States, and that this is largely a product of the media’s focus on rape and sexual assault.” That’s the description from The Daily Caller’s coverage of the event. Another piece, titled “Restraining Orders Hurt Women” also credited IWF’s analysis.

IWF, by the way, has opposed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) for years and its renewal, despite the strong support for its protections by groups that represent women’s interests in not getting killed by a violent partner. VAWA helps fund a coordinated community response to help women who are beaten, raped, or stalked–and it helps ensure that those restraining orders are enforced across jurisdictions to help protect women where ever they may flee for safety.

IWF’s out-of-step assertions as a mainstream “women’s voice” have found a ready distribution channel in The Daily Caller. Take, for example, an article headlined “Stay vertical a bit longer, ladies: Study claims men as winning the game of love,” which featured IWF’s claims about marriage and sex. IWF’s rep expressed concerns about women engaging in “commitment-less sex” because “when it comes to marriage there is certainly a marketplace and many factors have changed that marketplace.”

That Daily Caller story also cited the controversial academic Mark Regnerus, who as CMD recently noted, has “claimed, for example, that ‘liberal’ and ‘very liberal’ women want to have much more sex than other women [and to] speculate that liberal women want more sex than other women because they’re not religious enough.Specifically, Regnerus theorizes that sex provides the “transcendent” feeling others achieve through faith – that these liberal women are getting in bed, as it were, what they’re not getting in church. ‘Basically,’ Regnerus writes, ‘liberal women substitute sex for religion.’ (Insert obligatory ‘Oh, God! Oh, God!’ joke here.)”

It’s not just sex on the brain of The Daily Caller, which regularly features swimsuit models to peddle its spin, like its “story” minimizing the effects of climate change on the day Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris agreement: “These 14 Models Prepared for Trump to Drop the Climate Deal.” The text accompanying the slideshow stated: “As we approach President Trump’s decision on the Paris climate accord, we decided to turn our attention to the models out there who have been hoping for warmer temperatures.”

The Daily Caller’s news presentation has sought to undermine grassroots efforts to secure paid leave and increase the minimum wage. One example is their story “Social Justice Activists Want Olive Garden To Be Nicer to Cows Before Serving Them As Meatballs.” That story emphasized that “Thus far, the coalitions’ campaign is not going well. The group’s attempt to set up meetings with Darden in the fall was an abysmal failure. The company responded with a letter rebuffing meetings and generally rejecting the demands set forth.” Other pieces pushed the rightwing narrative that requiring paid sick leave and increasing the minimum wage would lead to higher unemployment rates.

The Daily Caller has even written against maternity leave pay. One such piece was written by the Independence Institute, which is part of the State Policy Network: “Mandated Paid Maternity Leave: A Bad Idea for Women.” That’s not the view of most women or even of most CEOs, as CMD revealed last year after it was given a detailed survey by Frank Luntz’s group showing overwhelming support for maternity leave, paid sick leave, raising the minimum wage.

That survey of 1,000 executives was commissioned to help the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its global corporate funders and its state affiliates in their efforts to defeat popular paid sick leave policies and efforts to increase the minimum wage. Luntz’s team said the problem was business leaders have

Another Daily Caller piece amplified the assertions of the controversial PR flack Rick Berman–who 60 Minutes helped dub “Dr. Evil”–that “The $15 Minimum Wage Could Lead to More Youth Crime.” Like IWF, the claims of Berman’s front groups get plenty of play in The Daily Caller. CMD recently detailed how Berman’s front groups are funded not just by corporations but also with millions from the rightwing Bradley Foundation, which also funds IWF’s promo of “free market” alternatives to paid sick leave and raises in the minimum wage. CMD also published the audio of Berman bragging about his tactics: “I get up every morning and I try and figure out how to screw with the labor unions” and “marginalize the people on the other side….”

CMD has previously refuted to The Daily Caller’s claims about ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and its assertions on climate change and fracking, but has not responded to every erroneous claim the outlet has made about CMD. Among other things, like other rightwing outfits, the Daily Caller has repeated the claim that CMD is “Soros-funded,” even though CMD has pointed out that it is not funded by George Soros and was awarded a grant from the Open Society Institute several years ago as part of a set of grants to examine national security surveillance of Americans, along with a grant to the Kochs’ Cato Institute–which the Daily Caller has never called “Soros-funded.”

During CMD’s investigation of IWF, its researchers noted the wayThe Daily Caller was readily echoing IWF claims on numerous issues. That led CMD to take a closer look at The Daily Caller’s operations, which resulted in the investigation reported by the Washington Post on June 2, 2017. More details about that research, which showed that Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller had received a six-figure sum from the Trump Campaign in the weeks before the election, are availablehere.

As Callum Borchers noted in the Washington Post story,tax experts have expressed concerns about how Tucker Carlson’s charity benefits his for-profit media outlet,The Daily Caller, which profits from the web traffic and list-building resulting from its content, a substantial portion of which is provided by the non-profit. CMD has also noted that Carlson did not tell FOX News viewers that he had financially benefited from the Trump Campaign cash, as he critiqued other outlets for their purported bias against Trump or when he interviewed Trump for a primetime show on FOX this spring.

How much Carlson received in pay or bonuses from The Daily Caller last year after it received the money from the Trump Campaign is not known.