Starbucks Is Closing All Stores in a Main Union Stronghold

Last year, Ithaca, New York, became the first town in the country where every Starbucks worker was unionized. Now, by the end of the month, Starbucks will have forcibly shut down all three of its unionized Ithaca locations.

The company announced its intention to close Ithaca’s two remaining stores (in a town in which a large chunk of the population is caffeinated college students) on Friday.

In a recent press release, the company said they “​​continue to open, close and evolve our stores as we assess, reposition and strengthen our store portfolio.” But given that all of Ithaca’s stores, all unionized, have been shut down within a year, the actions seem more than simply earnestly strategic.

Last June, Starbucks shut down a location near Cornell University, a handful of weeks after the location voted 19–1 to unionize. “The College Ave location may be the single most prime property in all of Upstate NY,” former Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick wrote on Twitter. “Over 15,000 pedestrians cross it every day. There’s no way it isn’t profitable. This looks like union busting.”

Last week, emails were revealed to show that Starbucks higher-ups were actively concerned with bad press and the workers’ striking in the lead-up to their decision to shut down the campus location. Workers had complained of their hours being cut and stores being understaffed, seemingly in efforts to wear down the workers and consequently the stores themselves.

“The under-scheduling is genius on their part,” Stephanie Heslop, who worked at one of the two soon-to-be-closed locations, told Jacobin. “Customers and our pitiful paychecks punish us and Starbucks can claim that it’s about ‘business needs.’”

Such efforts to push out employees holds potential resonance, with another Starbucks store in Buffalo, New York—among the first locations to unionize—now filing to decertify from the union. Last April (the same month Ithaca’s campus location unionized), the Buffalo store voted 18–1 to unionize. Since then, it seems management has done whatever it could to turn back the clock.

“Almost every union leader at the store was fired or forced out because of the environment of intimidation and fear that Starbucks management created,” a spokesperson for Workers United told local TV outlet WGRZ. “In fact, the company is currently being prosecuted for the discriminatory treatment of workers at the Del-Chip store.”

It appears that if Starbucks can’t outright close locations down, it’s looking to simply wear out and replace the workers who unionized them. Such a notion is affirmed by the aforementioned emails, which reveal efforts from management to refuse time-off requests for student workers to go home for spring break and even double-schedule them, all in self-fulfilling anticipation of “expected turnover” for “10-14 partners in the next four weeks” (emphasis in the original email). That specific email was sent on March 4: four weeks before the store would hold its unionization vote.

With the closure of the college campus location, the two remaining locations in Ithaca logically would have only increased in foot traffic. Yet somehow, Starbucks purports that the closure of those two final locations—again, in a town whose population is significantly made up of students and faculty—is part of some ongoing detached-from-union-efforts business optimization scheme.

To be fair, Starbucks is not wholly dishonest in its logic of why it is forcibly closing stores. The closures are optimizing—just not for customer satisfaction, nor for basic worker protection and dignity, but simply for executive profits.

The revelations are not surprising. Just over a month ago, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz accidentally admitted that nonunion stores received better benefits than unionized stores, and he couldn’t even say “no” to the question of whether he has threatened workers for unionizing.

Donald Trump is patiently waiting with bated breath like the rest of us to see if a jury will find him guilty of raping a woman in the mid-1990s and of defaming her when she accused him of assault decades later.

Yeah, right!

A jury began deliberating Tuesday on whether the former president raped and defamed writer E. Jean Carroll, and Trump is already lying about it.

“Waiting for a jury decision on a False Accusation where I … am not allowed to speak or defend myself,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. In reality, Trump refused to testify during the trial (despite an offer from the judge presiding over the case that he could do exactly that). Instead, he has repeatedly posted about it on social media, leading the judge presiding over the case to reprimand both Trump and his lawyer.

“I will therefore not speak until after the trial, but will appeal the Unconstitutional silencing of me, as a candidate, no matter the outcome!” Trump said, seemingly not seeing the irony of announcing his silence.

Carroll accused Trump in her 2019 memoir of raping her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She has sued him twice for defamation: first in 2019, when he said she made up the rape allegation to promote her book, and again in November for posts he made about her on social media.

She is not the only woman to accuse him of sexual assault: At least 26 other women have done so, two of whom testified during the trial. But Carroll’s case is the first to make it to a courtroom.

On Sunday, a Louisiana man shot a 14-year-old girl in the back of the head as she played hide and seek with a few friends outside his home.

Detectives say that the children were playing hide and seek outside the home of David Doyle, who told detectives that he saw shadows outside his home and then grabbed his gun. When he came back outside, he apparently saw people running away from his property and began haphazardly shooting at them. It is not clear whether Doyle even asked who was there.

The girl has been receiving treatment for non-life-threatening injuries.

Local outlet KPLC-TV reports that the shooting happened on a dead-end road on which the only three homes are owned by Doyle, the victim’s family, and a relative of the victim’s family. The man has been charged with aggravated assault, battery, and illegal discharge of a firearm, and his bond has been set at $300,000.

The shooting of a 14-year-old girl playing hide and seek follows a string of similarly appalling cases, like 16-year-old Ralph Yarl being shot after accidentally ringing the wrong doorbell, or 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis being shot and killed after her friend accidentally turned into the wrong driveway, or two teenage cheerleaders being shot after one of them accidentally pulled on the wrong car door handle.

Louisiana is among the states with a so-called “stand your ground” law that can be used to justify the use of deadly force in the context of self-defense. Such laws, spread even further after the murder of Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012, have been linked to an 11 percent rise in gun homicides in America.

Angry, radicalizing figures have fomented social distrust in this country. That has sparked increasingly vicious instances of violent crime, seen just days ago in the mass shooting carried out in Allen, Texas, by a neo-Nazi inspired by the likes of Libs of TikTok and Nick Fuentes. And codified law has affirmed this social distrust, encouraging people to internalize it and allowing it to metastasize into murderous instincts.

A Florida school district has banned a book about segregation after one parent complained, part of a disturbing trend of state schools blocking discussions of racial justice.

The Wakulla County school district decided in October to remove the graphic novel Little Rock Nine from its libraries after reviewing a complaint from a parent. The school that initially banned the book did not give more details on why the parent complained but said it had decided that even though the book is historically accurate, its subject matter is “difficult for elementary students to comprehend.”

Florida schools begin teaching about segregation in fourth grade, but the book—which is written at a third-grade level—has been deemed “above the understanding” of all elementary students.

Instead, it will only be allowed in middle and high school libraries because “some students in middle or high school might be at a third grade reading level and could gather knowledge from the material,” the school principal and librarian said.

This book ban is the latest instance to come to light of Florida restricting what can be taught or even read in schools, usually on topics involving race, gender, and sexuality. In March, an elementary school in Pinellas County banned the movie Ruby Bridges after one parent complained that she didn’t like how it depicted race relations in 1960s America. Earlier this year, Pinellas County school officials also banned high school students from reading The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison—again after just one parent complained.

Florida is increasingly restricting what can be taught in schools at all levels. Governor Ron DeSantis has declared war on “wokeism” and has promised to defund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on college campuses. He has backed the Stop Woke Act, which restricts teaching about race in colleges, and announced plans to mandate Western civilization courses. His administration was also in close contact with the College Board as it gutted the A.P. African American Studies course.

But the book bans go a step further, as they aren’t even about changing the school curriculum but preventing students from reading the books at all. In public schools, one school district has banned 23 different books from school libraries. Teachers in other school districts have also been told to hide their classroom book collections until all the books have been vetted and approved. But the vetting process is opaque, and there is no policy clarifying how long a complaint review process should take. As a result, books and films are withheld from students for months on end.

“Why is it permissible to teach white scholars Black folks were enslaved but not permissible to teach them about African American contributions to America and the world and the struggles they encountered and continue to experience as citizens of the United States of America?” former St. Petersburg police chief Goliath Davis asked in an op-ed for The Weekly Challenger after Ruby Bridges was banned. “Black history, Native-American history and Hispanic history, though not always glamorous, are American history and cannot be denied.”

On Monday night, residents of New York City gathered in downtown Manhattan for a vigil and protest in honor of Jordan Neely, a homeless man choked to death by 24-year-old Daniel Penny on the city’s subway.

And of course, in a story already rife with injustice, the police had to make sure that their failings were front and center. Longtime photojournalist Stephanie Keith was among 11 people arrested at the protest.

At a press conference that night, New York Police Department Chiefs Jeffrey Maddrey and John Chell said those taken into custody had violated laws by using a loud microphone, blocking the street, or even because some apparently had “assaulted themselves.”

The police chiefs have not yet clarified what “assaulted themselves” exactly means.

Video shows Chell himself barking at his officers to “lock her up,” after Keith simply stepped into the sidewalk to take a photo.

In Keith’s case, Chell said at the conference, the photographer faces charges of disorderly conduct and interfering with three arrests. The New York Daily News reports that Keith was released and given a summons later in the night.

Keith’s own words, and video open for all of us to see, undermine the police’s account of what happened.

“I was trying to photograph what I thought was an arrest, but I never even got a chance to see since they grabbed me as soon as I tried to photograph,” she told the Daily News. “I said, ‘I’m press,’ and they said, ‘You’re not, you’re arrested.’”

It’s almost too perfect. Penny has yet to be charged for killing Neely—an incident documented clearly on video. The police instead questioned the murderer and released him back onto the streets with little ado. Meanwhile, also on video, one of the most powerful police officers in New York City ferociously commanded his subordinates to lock up a journalist who was simply documenting his officers responding with more force to protesters than to a murderer.

Indolent thinkers often call any number of things “Orwellian,” but if anything warrants the oft-used designation, it’s the lack of arrest of someone caught on film committing murder and the active arrest—also caught on film—of a photojournalist trying to record the police state violently repressing people who were protesting that injustice.

An FBI public safety video highlights just how bad gun violence in America is: The government is telling people it’s their responsibility to survive a mass shooting instead of implementing gun control laws.

The video, titled “Run. Hide. Fight,” shows people at a bar when a patron gets angry and opens fire, and includes tips on how to protect yourself. The video was released two years ago, but it resurfaced on Twitter over the weekend following multiple tragedies in Texas, including a shooting at a crowded mall.

It’s messed up that mass shootings are so common in the United States that the FBI is teaching us how to survive them with a video and a catchy tagline, like the old “Stop, drop, and roll” fire safety lessons. Schools have also been having mass shooting drills for years.

The worst part is that, somehow, this is seen as the solution to mass shootings: putting the onus on victims to survive instead of implementing protections at a national level.

And that disturbing reality looks unlikely to change anytime soon. In his first public address since his state was rocked by multiple tragedies in one weekend, Texas Greg Abbott didn’t mention the attacks. He spent the whole speech on Monday demonizing migrants instead.

The day before, he straight up said there would be no increase in gun regulation. Instead, he said he wants to focus on improving public mental health—something he clearly hasn’t addressed before, considering Texas ranks fortieth in the country for total spending on mental illness.

Nineteen children and two teachers were killed last year at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Another eight people were viciously shot at a mall last weekend. That does not include any of the other 200-some mass shootings across the country just this year—many of them in Texas. And in the context of all this, Texas Republicans are barely allowing even moderate gun reforms explicitly supported by the families of the victims in Uvalde to pass—and now they are trying to actively weaken gun laws even more.

Texas’s Community Safety House Committee has advanced House Bill 2960, which rolls back existing law directing the postage of “No Firearms Allowed” notices on properties, and consequently would relax prosecution of those found violating such notices. The committee passed the bill 7–3, and the bill has been placed on the general calendar to be voted on by the entire state House.

To be clear, this is the same committee that did not advance a bill to raise the minimum age to purchase an AR-15-style rifle from 18 to 21 until concerned mothers and families of the victims of the Uvalde school shooting flooded the Capitol Monday, demanding that lawmakers push it forward. Even so, five Republicans voted against advancing it; the bill moved forward at a vote of 8–5.

What cannot be understated is the sheer culpability of these conservatives. The shootings at Uvalde and the Allen mall are just drops in Texas’s bloody bucket. In 2018, a 17-year-old student killed 10 people and injured 13 more at Santa Fe High School. In 2019, two mass shootings took place in rapid succession—one by a white supremacist at an El Paso Walmart, killing 23 people and injuring another 23; another killed seven people and injured 22, including a state trooper and two police officers, in Midland and Odessa.

These and incidents involving hundreds of other victims have revealed, over and over again, how sneeringly unconcerned this party is with, perhaps, stopping the bodies from piling up. It’s almost appalling, given how both Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear and Tennessee Governor Bill Lee both lost individuals they knew personally in recent mass shootings in their state; for some reason, power structures and dollar signs still somehow enrapture Republican politicians to the point they fail to imagine that a stray bullet may just hit close to their home too.

Meanwhile, people in communities like Uvalde have been brought to fend for themselves as statewide Republicans don’t even pretend to advocate for them or the spirits of the loved ones they’ve lost until the national spotlight is on them, as it was on Monday. Even then, Republicans could not unanimously advance a bill that simply decrees that teenagers ought not be able to buy AR-15s.

In the meantime, Republicans are jumping on board to repeal even the most minute and niche gun safety policies, like the simple act of posting “No Firearms Allowed” signs.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott made his first public address Monday since his state was struck by double tragedies—and he spent the entire time demonizing migrants.

A gunman opened fire at a mall north of Dallas on Saturday, killing at least eight people and wounding seven others before authorities shot him to death. The shooter is reported to have held extremist and white nationalist beliefs. The next day, an SUV driver slammed into a crowd outside a migrant shelter in the border city of Brownsville, killing eight people and injuring at least 10 others.

During a press conference at the Austin Bergstrom International Airport, Abbott announced he was deploying a new border control unit to El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley, ahead of when Title 42 ends later this week. Title 42 is a federal immigration policy employed by the Trump administration at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic to expel migrants without having to consider them for asylum. The Biden administration has kept the policy going.

“The cartels are working in collaboration with President [Joe] Biden and the federal government to facilitate that illegal cross-border,” Abbott said. “We are being overrun by our own federal government. Texas is being undermined by our own federal government in our efforts to secure our border.”

Normal stuff for a governor to say as his state still reels from dual tragedies.

Abbot went on to propose penalties such as potential felony offenses for anyone who crosses the border without papers.

His remarks come a week after another time Abbott demonized migrants. On April 28, a man in Texas shot dead five of his neighbors, including a 9-year-old boy, after one of them asked him to stop firing shots in his yard so the family’s baby could sleep. Abbott claimed in a press release that the shooter was “in the country illegally and killed five illegal immigrants.”

The governor came under fire for his statement, which is still up on his website, with critics accusing him of using the tragedy to fearmonger instead of enacting meaningful change.

“There is no limit to the depravity of Greg Abbott and his Texas Republican cronies,” Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa said in a statement. “To use a mass shooting, in which five innocent souls were slaughtered execution-style … to fearmonger and lie about migrants and the victims’ immigration status.… This type of sick behavior is truly beyond the pale.”

After the most recent tragedies, Abbott similarly has resisted calls for change. He told Fox News Sunday that rather than pass more gun control laws, he would focus instead on mental health issues, a favorite Republican scapegoat for gun violence.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell laid out Republicans’ big plan for 2024: Win everywhere possible.

Republicans are gearing up for the 2024 elections, and they only need to flip two seats to take control of the Senate. McConnell told CNN Monday that they have a few key states they’re focusing on, but really, they just want to win.

“We don’t have an ideological litmus test,” McConnell told reporter Manu Raju. “We want to win in November.”

“We’ll be involved in any primary where that seems to be necessary to get a high-quality candidate, and we’ll be involved in every general election where we have a legitimate shot of winning—regardless of the philosophy of the nominee.”

Republicans have allowed pretty much any and everyone into their party, including election deniers, conspiracy theorists, and just plain liars. But previously, those people had to earn their way into the party mainstream. McConnell has made it clear now that as long as you say you’re Republican, you’ll be welcomed.

McConnell said the GOP would focus primarily on flipping seats in Ohio, where Sherrod Brown is running for reelection, Montana (Jon Tester), West Virginia (Joe Manchin, who has been acting like a Republican anyway), and Pennsylvania (Bob Casey). The minority leader said he’s not confident his party can retake the Senate, but he plans to work hard to try.

Part of that will be backing former President Donald Trump should he secure the Republican nomination again in 2024. McConnell did not explicitly say whether he would support Trump, instead saying he would back whoever the GOP nominates. But he does think that having Trump as a nominee could help Republicans win Senate battles too.

McConnell did not yet have a clear plan for Arizona, where independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema has not yet announced if she will run for reelection. Failed gubernatorial candidate and election-denier Kari Lake, who won Trump’s endorsement, has hinted she will run for Senate on the Republican ticket. McConnell refused to disavow Lake and said that GOP leadership would probably wait to see who wins the GOP primary in Arizona before getting involved.

Even if Lake wins the nomination, “what I care about in November is winning and having an ‘R’ by your name,” McConnell said.

McConnell didn’t seem too concerned with Republicans’ actual policy proposals during the interview. And no matter who runs, Republicans will have a hard battle ahead. A recent Fox News poll found that most voters across the country want increased gun control and abortion rights—two things on which the GOP seems absolutely unwilling to budge. If the Republican Party fails to switch up its policies on these issues, then it may ultimately not matter who its candidates are.

It took masses of concerned mothers and families of the victims of the Uvalde school shooting to convince just two Republicans to get the stones to support incredibly modest public safety regulations.

On Monday, large groups of protesters flooded the Texas state Capitol as one Republican committee chair threatened to kill a proposed bill that would raise the minimum age to purchase an AR-15-style rifle from 18 to 21. The bill, endorsed by families of the victims of the Uvalde school shooting, was introduced in February but didn’t even get a wink of hearing time until April.

Cheers erupted in the chamber on Monday as the committee advanced the bill.

Monday was the final day the bill could advance. Originally, the committee chair, Ryan Guillen (a former Democrat), said he was not interested in advancing the bill. In face of the mass protests, he seemed to waver, allowing the bill to go to a vote.

And upon voting, two Republicans swung to vote with the Democrats, advancing the bill on an 8–5 vote.

The moment showcases the power of people to actually demand their government act on the wave of gun violence sweeping the nation, and yet still the appalling fecklessness of Republicans to have forced such protests at all. After Uvalde, Republicans have done nothing. After another mass shooting, they had to be convinced, not empowered, by the people to even advance a bill out of committee.

And even then, five Republicans (a majority of Republicans on the committee) still found it within themselves to look at the families of those who have lost their children to gun violence, and still vote the incredibly modest gun reform down.