DISANTISLAND

Florida’s Brazen Assault on Public Sector Workers Puts Unions in Survival Mode

More than 50,000 Florida workers have lost their union membership in the advent of S.B. 256.

MCKENNA SCHUELER

JUNE 5, 2024

IN THESE TIMES

Unionized teachers and firefighters join together at a rally to protest budget cuts proposed by then Florida Gov. Rick Scott

.PHOTO BY JOE RAEDLE VIA GETTY IMAGES

TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA — Early one February morning, Chris Pagel, a retired U.S. Army combat engineer and physical education teacher, begins his three-and-a-half hour drive from Nassau County to the Florida Capitol in Tallahassee. He’s opposing a bill designed to build on S.B. 256 — an anti-union law passed last year that has, so far, already caused more than 50,000 public employees to lose their union representation.

Later, standing in front of lawmakers, he questions why he bothered making the drive at all. ​“I’ve been here before,” he says during public testimony. ​“The Republicans have already made up their mind. Democrats fight it.”

More than a decade in the making, S.B. 256 essentially requires unions to have a lot of dues-paying members while simultaneously making it harder for them to do so. While the law bans public sector unions from deducting dues directly from members’ paychecks, it also requires at least 60% of a bargaining unit to pay dues or risk losing their union status.

Shortly after signing the bill, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis framed it in a statement as an effort to ​“reign in out-of-control unions” that he said take money away from teachers and misuse government funds for political aims. In the same announcement, he specifically mentioned teachers unions, many of which were already required to maintain at least 50% membership under a law approved by then Gov. Rick Scott in 2018.

Pagel is a registered Republican and president of the Nassau Teachers’ Association. When Florida lawmakers and DeSantis approved the legislation in 2023, teachers unions like his — representing a large share of the state’s unionized public sector — declared they were being targeted.


Union supporters and teachers protest austerity in Orlando, Florida, on March 8, 2011, at the beginning of Florida's legislative session.PHOTO BY JOE RAEDLE VIA GETTY IMAGES


Most other public sector unions — which hadn’t previously been subject to any membership threshold—became collateral damage. While some teachers unions lost members due to the payroll deduction ban, not one of the 48 decertified bargaining units represented teachers. Most were decertified due to low membership and represented state and municipal employees (such as utilities and code enforcement workers and non-instructional staff in public schools and universities).

Under the new law, bargaining units reporting low membership can petition for an election to keep their union intact. This must be done within a month of submitting mandatory annual paperwork to the state confirming membership numbers and requires gathering signed cards from at least 30% of employees in support. Then, a simple majority must vote to recertify. If the union doesn’t file a petition at all, they’re decertified. The latter has been the case for all units dissolved so far.

“We have not and we do not intend on losing any local unions in the Florida Education Association."


Andrew Spar, president of the statewide teachers union, is adamant that educators won’t see the same fate. ​“We have not and we do not intend on losing any local unions in the Florida Education Association,” says Spar.

Unions have entered survival mode, mobilizing to recruit and retain members. Several, including the Florida Education Association (FEA), have sued the state over the law.

Erik Hagen, a 31-year-old elementary school music teacher in Hillsborough County, says transitioning members to a new dues payment system has been a ​“huge undertaking,” especially for older teachers. His union rose to the challenge. Nonetheless, he describes the entire situation as a ​“nightmare.”

“I shouldn’t be spending all of this time walking around, just trying to get people who were members back to being members."


“I shouldn’t be spending all of this time walking around, just trying to get people who were members back to being members,” says Hagen. ​“I should be spending my time supporting my teachers, building personal connections.”

The impact, he argued, extends beyond schools and the union hall. ​“Any attack against teachers and labor movements in Florida damages society as a whole,” he adds.

There’s one unintended consequence of the law that troubled its Republican sponsors and DeSantis: its impact on police and firefighter unions. S.B. 256 aimed to exempt these unions from most of the new regulations, including the membership threshold and payroll dues deduction ban. The bill’s sponsors argued that first responders belong to a special category of workers who deserve to be treated differently than others in the public sector.


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But then last summer the state agency in charge of rulemaking determined that some police and firefighter unions must follow the new rules like everyone else because some of their units also contain civilian employees who weren’t clearly carved out of the bill.

Emails I obtained through a public records request for Orlando Weekly show police and firefighter unions consequently lobbied the Republican sponsors of S.B. 256 to exempt all their members. So did lobbyists for out-of-state conservative think tanks, like the Freedom Foundation and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Both have a history of advocating for similar anti-union policies in other states.

In January 2024, a so-called glitch bill delivering such carve-outs — and new, onerous reporting requirements for nonexempt unions — was born. Florida Rep. Dean Black, one of the GOP sponsors, described the glitch bill to me as a follow-up to last year’s legislation. Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, the bill’s sponsor in the Senate, described it during a public hearing as an effort to clarify the bill’s original intent.


Students walk out of school to oppose Florida education policies outside Orlando City Hall on April 21, 2023.PHOTO BY PAUL HENNESSY/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES


Pagel, the teacher and union president, leans over the speaker podium with purpose while delivering public testimony on the glitch bill.

“As a Republican, I can tell you, I am embarrassed and ashamed that we keep on voting yes when your constituents are telling you no,” Pagel says, staring down the panel of mostly Republican lawmakers. ​“Please get a backbone and vote ​‘No.’”

Despite Democratic opposition, the glitch bill passed the GOP-dominated legislature, with seven Republicans dissenting.

Many units are anxiously awaiting recertification elections, with union leaders hopeful that workers will vote to preserve their unions.


The future of Florida’s unionized public sector remains unclear. But some on the frontlines remain cautiously optimistic. Many units are anxiously awaiting recertification elections, with union leaders hopeful that workers will vote to preserve their unions. Twelve of them, including two teachers unions, already have. But if dues-paying membership falls below 60%, they’ll have to repeat the process next year.

None of this is occurring in a vacuum. At the same time Florida’s unions are fighting to survive the new rules, they’re also fighting for better wages and against book bans and industry-backed rollbacks to the state’s child labor laws.


Johanna ​“Hanna” Folland, a high school history teacher in South Florida, puts it bluntly: ​“We need solidarity and we need help.”

Folland is a member of the United Teachers of Dade (UTD), a union targeted by the Freedom Foundation for decertification. UTD is one of the largest teachers unions in the country, and its president, Karla Hernandez-Matz, ran on a Democratic ticket for lieutenant governor of Florida in 2022. She and her running mate, Charlie Crist, were endorsed by teachers unions and lost to DeSantis. Badly.

“Teachers will stick together” and fight, Folland assures me. We’re sitting at a table inside Chicago’s Hyatt Regency O’Hare hotel on the final day of the 2024 Labor Notes Conference. We’re both exhausted but simultaneously heartened and inspired by the dwindling motley crew of union activists around us. The battle in Florida, she admitted, is one she expects teachers will continue to fight ​“probably every year for the foreseeable future.”

MCKENNA SCHUELER is a staff reporter for Orlando Weekly in Florida, where she covers labor issues, local news and politics. Her work has also appeared in Strikewave, Facing South, Protean Mag and Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.

Capital’s Big Bank

BY RON JACOBS

 JUNE 21, 2024
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Image by Markus Krisetya.

I remember once hearing Michael Parenti say about conspiracy theories that if one thinks there are groups of mostly rich white men gathering in a room and deciding how they are going to tighten their control on the world, they would be partially right. Why? Because there are groups of mostly rich white men who gather in boardrooms and fancy restaurants to decide what they are going to do next to profit even further. The complementary element of this is that these individuals don’t control those boardrooms as much as those boardrooms control their action, at least figuratively. If one accepts this, then there might be fewer boardrooms more powerful than that of the World Bank. Even if one doesn’t accept it, that statement rings true.

This is the essence of the recently updated history of the World Bank by Eric Toussaint. Titled The World Bank: A Critical History, the book was originally published in 1986, a few years before activists worldwide began organizing the Fifty Years is Enough campaign that would result in a series of anti-capitalist protests and actions worldwide. Perhaps the most well-known of these protests was the first international mobilization against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999. The WTO was itself a conspiracy between powerful governments and the biggest capitalists in the world; a conspiracy to keep the Global South enslaved to a Global North dominated in virtually every sphere by the United States.

First and foremost, this book is a historical explanation of the World Bank’s role in maintaining and expanding the dominance of the US-centered system of global capitalism since the end of World War Two. It exposes the lies and deceptions behind the Bank’s original conception regarding its intent and delineates the actual implementation of bank policies and practices that were always designed by Washington and its co-conspirators to maintain the domination of the Global South’s economies and governments. Using country studies, bank policy statements, United Nations surveys and other sources, Toussaint breaks down the truths about how the World Bank works, who it serves and what its intentions are. During his discussion, it becomes clear that many of the same leaders and officers employed by the World Bank and its affiliates (the International Monetary Fund, for example) were and are members of US capitalism’s elite corps of managers and warmakers. Foremost among those names are Robert McNamara, a former Ford Motor company executive who was a major architect of the US war on the Vietnamese while serving under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in the 1960s, and Paul Wolfowitz, a neocon whose involvement in the US war on Iraq under George W. Bush is well-documented and as worthy of war crimes charges as McNamara’s work around Vietnam.

The economic policies described in this history prove over and over again that developing independent and local economies of what were once called third-world nations has never truly been the purpose of this bank. Indeed, in certain cases where local governments rejected the demands of the World Bank to build export-based economies, the governments and the countries they governed were penalized until they buckled to the bank’s demands. In example after example, Toussaint’s text makes it clear that any development sponsored by the World Bank would be the development that benefited Wall Street and punished independent governments and independence itself. This later phenomenon is most stark in those countries that were either granted independence by their former colonizer or won it after a war. Any loans granted to the former colonial regimes were forced on to the new government of independence. In certain scenarios, this meant that the colonial government intentionally over-borrowed from the Bank knowing full well the individuals in that government could abscond with the millions and leave the new national liberation government with the bill. In turn, the new governments most often ended up having to pay off the loans to get new money to address their people’s needs. Debt servitude writ large.

There is a lot to digest in this book. This edition is current up to the COVID-19 pandemic. It ends with a call to end the World Bank, the IMF, and other such institutions that were designed solely to maintain the imbalance of power that US capitalism requires. It’s a call supported by those in and out of power who understand that the pursuit of uncontrolled profit and power by that system is ever more rapidly and certainly leading us to an ugly, unnecessary and tragic denouement. It’s a call that echoed worldwide during the protests mentioned at the beginning of this review. Of course, that was before Washington chose endless war after 9-11 instead of addressing the gross inequalities that partially informed those attacks.

Ron Jacobs is the author of Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. He has a new book, titled Nowhere Land: Journeys Through a Broken Nation coming out in Spring 2024.   He lives in Vermont. He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com

 

Why Does the Government Borrow When It Can Print?

by Ellen Brown / June 19th, 2024

In the first seven months of Fiscal Year (FY) 2024, net interest (payments minus income) on the federal debt reached $514 billion, exceeding spending on both national defense ($498 billion) and Medicare ($465 billion). The interest tab also exceeded all the money spent on veterans, education, and transportation combined. Spending on interest is now the second largest line item in the federal budget after Social Security and the fastest growing part of the budget, on track to reach $870 billion by the end of 2024.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal budget deficit was $857 billion in the first seven months of fiscal year 2024. In effect, the government is borrowing at interest to pay the interest on its debt, compounding the debt. For the lender, it’s called “the miracle of compound interest” – interest on interest compounds exponentially. But for the debtor, it’s a curse, compounding like a cancer to the point of devouring assets while still growing the debt. As Daniel Amerman, a chartered financial analyst, writes in an article titled “Could A Compound Interest Wildfire Threaten U.S. Solvency?”:

[T]he greatest debt-related threat to the solvency of the United States government and the value of the dollar could be the fact that the U.S. isn’t actually making any net principal or interest payments on its debt.

That is, the U.S. government is borrowing money to make the interest payments, even as it borrows to roll over the principal payments – even as it borrows still more to fund the general spending which is in excess of taxes collected.

This creates the risk of a potential compounding and acceleration of interest payments on that debt. …

In other words, the US government is effectively insolvent, absent some major changes. Which is exactly why we need to anticipate that there will be major changes.

The Committee for a Responsible Budget similarly concludes, “Without reforms to reduce the debt and interest, interest costs will keep rising, crowd out spending on other priorities, and burden future generations.” In fact, we are that future generation. The chickens have come home to roost. According to USDebtClock.org, the debt is now $34.8 trillion. Estimates are that we would need to tax everyone at a rate of 40%, without deductions, to balance the budgets of our federal and local governments, an obvious nonstarter. Reforms are necessary, but of what sort?

Why Does the Government Borrow Its Own Currency?

This question was asked of economist Martin Armstrong, who responded:

The theory was that if you borrowed rather than printed money, you were NOT increasing the existing money supply, and therefore, in theory, it would not be inflationary.

That would be true if the debt were paid back, but today the government does not repay the debt but just keeps rolling it over, paying off old bonds as they come due with new bonds – currently at higher interest rates. Armstrong concludes:

We borrow, which is worse than printing because we have to pay interest on constantly rolling the debt. This year, we will spend about $1 trillion on interest, the total national debt when Reagan took office in 1981 .…

Had we printed the money instead of borrowing, it would have been less inflationary and the capital would have created more jobs instead of investing in government debt which has only funded the Neocons’ wildest dreams [which he explained as “establishing military bases everywhere”]. [Emphasis added.]

A report issued by the Grace Commission during the Reagan Administration concluded that at that time, most federal income tax revenues went just to pay the interest on the government’s burgeoning debt. A cover letter addressed to President Reagan stated that a third of all income taxes were consumed by waste and inefficiency in the federal government. Another third of any taxes actually paid went to make up for the taxes not paid by tax evaders and the growing underground economy, a phenomenon that had blossomed in direct proportion to tax increases. The report concluded:

With two-thirds of everyone’s personal income taxes wasted or not collected, 100 percent of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the Federal debt and by Federal Government contributions to transfer payments. In other words, all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services which taxpayers expect from their Government.

As Thomas Edison observed in 1921:

If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good, makes the bill good, also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets money brokers collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%, whereas the currency pays nobody but those who contribute directly in some useful way.

It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30 million in bonds and not $30 million in currency. Both are promises to pay, but one promise fattens the usurers and the other helps the people.

It is cheaper to print money outright than to borrow money at interest that is never repaid. The Greenbackers who marched on Washington in 1897 were right. We should be printing the money – not for speculative ventures (“unearned income”) but for productive endeavors. The Greenbackers sought a return to the system in which Lincoln’s government issued U.S. Notes or Greenbacks directly, in order to avoid a crippling debt to British bankers. They were marching for the economic producers — the farmers and factory workers, represented by the Scarecrow and Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, which took its plot from that first-ever march on Washington.

Won’t just printing the money result in hyperinflation? Not necessarily. Price inflation results from too much money chasing too few goods. When the money is used to create new goods and services, prices remain stable. This was demonstrated by the Chinese when they increased the money supply by a factor of 1800% (18 times) in the 23 years between 1996 and 2020. The new money went toward infrastructure and other forms of productivity, increasing GDP at the same rate; and price inflation remained consistently low during that period.

But hindsight is 20/20. What can be done now about the ballooning federal debt and interest bill?

Possible Treasury Solutions

Hypothetically, the Treasury could buy back its debt. But under our current system, this would have to be done with more debt, at even higher interest rates. In fact, the Treasury is doing that now, but in modest  proportions and for a different purpose. Its goal is to create a liquid market in long-term Treasuries, the sort of bonds that Silicon Valley Bank was forced to sell at a deep discount, generating insufficient funds to ward off the massive run on its deposits in March 2023. Nearly 200 banks were found to be in similar straits and equally vulnerable to runs. However, it would be counterproductive for the Treasury to buy back major portions of its debt with more debt at higher interest, which would just compound the debt and the interest burden.

Alternatively, it could issue 35 trillion-dollar coins.

The idea of minting large denomination coins to solve economic problems was evidently first suggested by a chairman of the Coinage Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives in the early 1980s. He pointed out that the government could pay off its entire debt with some billion-dollar coins – effectively just “printing” or “coining” the money.  The Constitution gives Congress the power to coin money and regulate its value, and no limit is put on the value of the coins it creates. Of course, today these would need to be trillion dollar coins.

In legislation initiated in 1982, however, Congress chose to impose limits on the amounts and denominations of most coins. The one exception was the platinum coin, which a special provision allowed to be minted in any amount for commemorative purposes.

In 2013, an attorney named Carlos Mucha, blogging under the pseudonym Beowulf, proposed issuing a platinum coin to capitalize on this loophole; and with the endless gridlock in Congress over the debt ceiling, it got picked up by serious economists as a way to checkmate the deficit hawks. Philip Diehl, former head of the U.S. Mint and co-author of the platinum coin law, confirmed that the coin would be legal tender:

In minting the $1 trillion platinum coin, the Treasury Secretary would be exercising authority which Congress has granted routinely for more than 220 years … under power expressly granted to Congress in the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8).

Minting trillion dollar coins evokes images of million-mark notes filling wheelbarrows. But as economist Michael Hudson observes:

Every hyperinflation in history has been caused by foreign debt service collapsing the exchange rate. The problem almost always has resulted from wartime foreign currency strains, not domestic spending.

Prof. Randall Wray explained that the coin would not circulate but would be deposited in the government’s account at the Fed, so it could not inflate the circulating money supply. The budget would still need Congressional approval. To keep a lid on spending, Congress would just need to abide by some basic rules of economics. It could spend on goods and services up to full employment without creating price inflation (since supply and demand would rise together). After that, it would need to tax — not to fund the budget, but to shrink the circulating money supply and avoid driving up prices with excess demand.

If issuing 35  coins worth a trillion dollars each seems too radical, the Treasury could issue just one trillion-dollar coin annually, earmarked specifically to cover the interest. A similar hybrid approach worked for the Pennsylvania colonists when they formed their first government-owned bank in the early 18th century. Other colonies were issuing “Colonial scrip,” but it was easier to issue the scrip than to tax it back, and they typically issued too much, inflating the money supply and devaluing the currency. The Pennsylvania colonists formed a “land bank” and issued money as loans to the farmers at 5% interest. To cover the interest not created in the original loans, the government was able to issue paper scrip directly to fund its own budget. As a result, Pennsylvania became the most productive economy in the colonies.

What About Tapping Up the Federal Reserve?

The Fed is in a position to issue money interest-free, not as the bank-created deposits circulating as our M2 money supply, but as the reserves needed by banks to meet interbank transfers and withdrawals. When the Fed buys federal securities, it is mandated to return the interest to the Treasury after deducting its costs.

In 2011, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul proposed dealing with the debt ceiling by simply voiding out the $1.7 trillion in federal securities then held by the Fed. As Stephen Gandel explained Paul’s solution in Time Magazine, the Treasury pays interest on the securities to the Fed, which returns 90% of these payments to the Treasury. Despite this shell game of payments, the $1.7 trillion in U.S. bonds owned by the Fed is still counted toward the debt ceiling.

Paul’s plan: “Get the Fed and the Treasury to rip up that debt. It’s fake debt anyway. And the Fed is legally allowed to return the debt to the Treasury to be destroyed.”

Congressman Alan Grayson, a Democrat, also endorsed this proposal.

But since June 2022, the Fed has not been buying securities but has been selling those it already has, reducing its balance sheet in an effort to fight price inflation by shrinking the money supply through “quantitative tightening.” The central bank is considered “independent” of Congress, but arguably Congress could revise the Federal Reserve Act to require the Fed to buy federal securities.

A Financial Transaction Tax

Barring those alternatives, another possibility is a very small financial transaction tax. In a 2023 book titled A Tale of Two Economies: A New Financial Operating System for the American Economy, Wall Street veteran Scott Smith argues that we are taxing the wrong things – income and physical sales. In fact, we have two economies – the material economy in which goods and services are bought and sold, and the monetary economy involving the trading of financial assets (stocks, bonds, currencies, etc.) – basically “money making money” without producing new goods or services.

Drawing on data from the Bank for International Settlements and the Federal Reserve, Smith shows that the monetary economy is hundreds of times larger than the physical economy. The budget gap could be closed by imposing a tax of a mere 0.1% on financial transactions, while eliminating not just income taxes but every other tax we pay today. For a financial transactions tax (FTT) of 0.25%, we could fund benefits we cannot afford today that would stimulate growth in the real economy, including not just infrastructure and development but free college, a universal basic income, and free healthcare for all. Smith contends we could even pay off the national debt in 10 years or less with a 0.25% FTT.

Are these proposals too radical? Perhaps, but existential crises call for radical solutions.

• This article was first posted as an original to ScheerPost.com.FacebooTwitter

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Ellen Brown is an attorney, co-chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 400+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com. Read other articles by Ellen.

DESANTISLAND

Recreational marijuana amendment sparking discussion of potential economic benefits

Kylie Jones
Thu, June 13, 2024 

TAMPA - In less than five months, Floridians will vote on whether to legalize marijuana for recreational use.

If it passes, Amendment 3 would allow anyone 21 years or older to possess, buy or use marijuana products for personal, non-medical use.

The amendment would also allow Medical Marijuana Treatment Centers and other licensed entities to sell products for this use.

PREVIOUS: Florida Supreme Court approves abortion, marijuana amendments for November ballot

The amendment has garnered a lot of support and opposition from leaders around Florida.

On Thursday, leaders from Tampa Bay held a roundtable to discuss how the legalization of marijuana for recreational use could have a major impact on the economy.

"This opens it up to a lot more people and the state will benefit from that, taxwise. So I think it’s kind of a win-win," Attorney Jim Shimberg said.

Some leaders believe the legalization of marijuana for recreational use is inevitable, so they want to be proactive in discussing how it should be regulated.


However, leaders like Governor Ron DeSantis, have voiced strong opposition to the amendment.

"If that marijuana passes, this will smell like marijuana," DeSantis said.

On Thursday, leaders discussed where the revenue from sales would go, if Amendment 3 passes.

"I don’t want us to establish a monopoly," Hillsborough County attorney Sean Shaw said. "But you’ve got to get it here first, and then you’ve got to allow the legislature, hopefully, to regulate it in a manner that opens it up. That allows it to do what you want to do. Then more people get access to it. But you’ve got to have it first."

Leaders say, if Amendment 3 passes, they want Floridians to be able to benefit.

"It’s about the fact that we have black markets right now, and then we have monopolies, essentially, being made in Tallahassee when you give only a few licenses to a few specific companies," Tampa Bay Young Republicans Executive Director Jake Hoffman said.

READ: Judge halts law requiring city officials share financial information as cities still feel effects

Many leaders agreed that they would want to see the revenue go to local governments and fund things like public safety, education, mass transit, housing and mental health.

"Hopefully some of this money will be allocated for specific needs of Florida, which they’re great," Shimberg said.

It’s also unclear how recreational marijuana would be regulated by law enforcement.

"How do we make the distinction between medical and recreational, and who bought it on the black market? Who didn’t buy it on the black market?" Hoffman said.

Some leaders argue legalization would take a burden off the criminal justice system.

"The time that police officers are spending going after petty possession charges," Morgan Hill, with Smart & Safe Florida, said.

However, some law enforcement officers around Florida have been outspoken against legalization of recreational marijuana, arguing that it would only lead to more crime.

"The amendment language says that there can be no penalties for use or possession, civil, criminal, anything," DeSantis said. "I think it's going to be very difficult for businesses to operate without that infringing on them."

Amendment 3 is a single-subject amendment, so if it passes, the regulations and rules around the recreational use of marijuana would still have to be decided upon by the state legislature.

If the amendment passes, some leaders say they want to ensure that the future regulations imposed are ones that will benefit the majority of Floridians and the economy.

"We have the situation in front of us, and it’s good to go back to the legislature and say, ‘Hey, now, work on it. Make this better, and create a framework that makes this work for everybody in the state of Florida,'" Hoffman said.

The amendment is expected to bring a lot of voters to the polls in November.

Marijuana could be legalized on NC tribal land by August

Sydney Heiberger
Wed, June 12, 2024 

Marijuana could be legalized on NC tribal land by August


CHEROKEE, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — The sale and use of recreational marijuana could become legal as early as this summer for anyone over the age of 21, as long as it’s bought and consumed on the Qualla Boundary of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

Tribal council members voted to approve the new ordinance on June 6, just a few weeks after opening North Carolina’s first medical marijuana dispensary.

Officials estimated The Great Smoky Cannabis Company could generate $385 million in gross revenue in its first year if it sold to anyone over the age of 21, compared to $200 million if it catered to only medical patients.

In September, EBCI members voted in a referendum about whether they would support recreational marijuana sales. 70 percent said they would.

Medical marijuana dispensary opens on 4/20 with NC bill still pending

Now that the ordinance has passed, leaders said recreational sales will likely begin to tribe members in July and will expand to anyone over the age of 21 by mid-August.

“We exercised our sovereignty, and we use the best practices possible,” said Carolyn West with Qualla Enterprises, the Cherokee-owned company that manages the tribe’s cannabis operation.

The Great Smoky Cannabis Company started selling medical marijuana to adults with medical marijuana cards on April 20.

Meanwhile, marijuana use in North Carolina remains illegal. Any cannabis purchased on the Qualla Boundary cannot be taken off of it.

A bill to legalize medical marijuana in the state is still sitting in the general assembly, but Speaker Tim Moore said he doesn’t believe it has enough support to get off the ground.


KENTUCKY

Will medical marijuana be allowed in JCPS schools? What a proposed policy says

Krista Johnson, Louisville Courier Journal
Updated Thu, June 13, 2024 

Marijuana is grown at the University of Mississippi's Coy Waller Laboratory for research in Oxford, Miss., seen on Friday, Oct. 27, 2023. UM expects to have classes open for a two-year masters program in medical cannabis and dietary supplements in Fall 2024.


With Kentuckians set to gain access to medical marijuana next year, school districts across the state are now tasked with deciding whether or not their students can use the drug on campuses.

The Board Policy Committee for Jefferson County Public Schools met Monday to draft a policy regarding medical marijuana, with members agreeing students who have a prescription from a medical professional should be able to take it at school.

State law dictates that if a district allows the drug on school property, families can either choose to let a school nurse or staff member administer it to their child, or a guardian can come to the school to do it.

Medical marijuana, also called cannabis, is often prescribed to individuals who have seizures.

JCPS' proposed policy would require administration to be done out of the view of other students.

Board members ultimately have the power to adopt the policy or not. They are set to discuss the committee's proposal during their Tuesday, June 25 meeting, said JCPS spokesman Mark Hebert.

"If approved by the board, this would be no different than school nurses, nurse practitioners or other trained school staff administering other tightly controlled substances like Ritalin or Adderall to a student," Hebert said.

"We anticipate most medicinal cannabis will be given to students at home, but there may be times when the doctor or prescription calls for the medicine to be given during school hours," he added.

Medical cannabis will not be available in the state until at least Jan. 1, 2025. Licenses for cannabis businesses are expected to be awarded this October, and production cannot start until then.

Easing federal marijuana rules: There’s still a long way to go

Jacob Fischler
Wed, June 12, 2024





LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - MAY 24: In this photo illustration, marijuana joints and buds, also known as 'flower', are viewed on May 24, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. A new study by Carnegie Mellon University has found that marijuana consumption has overtaken alcohol as more Americans now use marijuana on a daily or near-daily basis than those who drink alcohol at a similar frequency. (Photo Illustration by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Nearly three weeks after the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration proposed loosening a federal prohibition on marijuana, the next phases of policy fights over the drug’s status are starting to take shape.

Public comments, which the DEA is accepting on the proposal until mid-July, will likely include an analysis of the economic impact of more lenient federal rules.

Administrative law hearings, a venue for opponents to challenge executive branch decisions, will likely follow, with marijuana’s potential for abuse a possible issue.

Congress, meanwhile, could act on multiple related issues, including banking access for state-legal marijuana businesses and proposals to help communities harmed by the decades of federal prohibition.

U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat from Oregon and longtime advocate for legalizing marijuana who’s retiring at the end of the year, is encouraging his colleagues to build on the administration’s action by taking up bills on those related issues.

The politics of the issue should favor action, even in the face of an upcoming campaign season that typically slows legislative action, Blumenauer said in a May 17 interview, noting the popularity of a more permissive approach to the drug.

“Congress may not do a lot between now and November, but they should,” the 14-term House member said. “Because it’s an election year, there’s no downside to being more aggressive.”
Economic impact

In a proposed rule published in the Federal Register last month, the DEA specifically asked commenters to weigh in on the economic impacts of moving the drug from Schedule I to the less-restrictive Schedule III list under the federal Controlled Substances Act.

That will likely mean the agency will consider the impact of allowing state-legal marijuana businesses to deduct business expenses from their federal taxes, Mason Tvert, a partner at Denver-based cannabis policy and public affairs firm Strategies 64, said in an interview. Under current law, no deductions are allowed.

That issue is seen by advocates, including Blumenauer and fellow Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, who chairs the tax-writing U.S. Senate Finance Committee, as paramount for the industry.

Thousands of state-legal businesses struggle to earn a profit or operate at a loss under the current system, Blumenauer said.
Potential for abuse

The DEA typically looks at three factors when assessing how strictly to regulate a drug: its medicinal value, potential for abuse relative to other drugs and ability to cause physical addiction.

A 2023 analysis by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that looked at data from states where medicinal marijuana is legal showed that “there exists some credible scientific support for the medical use of marijuana.”

That finding could lead DEA to look at other factors, Tvert said.

“The battleground that we’ll see will be around how we define potential for abuse,” he said.
Agencies split?

But the DEA proposed rule revealed a divided view among government agencies about the drug’s potential harms, Paul Armentano, the deputy director for the longtime leading advocacy group National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, told States Newsroom.

The text of the proposed rule shows “a lack of consensus” among HHS, the Attorney General’s Office and the Drug Enforcement Administration, he said.

“There are several points in the DEA’s proposed rule where they express a desire to see additional evidence specific to concerns that the agency has about the potential effects of cannabis, particularly as they pertain to abuse potential and potential harms,” Armentano said.

“The HHS addresses those issues, but the DEA essentially says, ‘We’d like to see more information on it.’”

Kevin Sabat, the president and CEO of the anti-legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, agreed that the DEA did not appear to agree with the HHS conclusion that medical uses exist.

The proposed rule “just brings up all these issues with the HHS’s determination and it basically invites comment on all those issues,” he said.
Administrative law hearing

Sabat’s group will also be petitioning for a DEA administrative hearing, he said. An administrative law judge could rule that the proposal should not go through or that it should be amended to remain stricter than the initial proposal described.

“We’re going to highlight the fact that, first of all, this does not have approved or accepted medical use,” he said.

Tvert said the accepted medical value question is likely not to be a major factor in an administrative law hearing. Several medical organizations and states that allow medicinal use have already endorsed its medicinal value, he said.

Instead, the focus will turn to the drug’s potential for abuse, he said.

“What will be critical is looking at cannabis relative to other substances that are currently II or III or not on the schedule, and determining whether cannabis should be on Schedule I when alcohol is not even on the schedules and ketamine is Schedule III.”

As of June 6, nearly 12,000 people had commented on the proposal in the 18 days since its publication.

While opinion polls show that most Americans favor liberalizing cannabis laws — a Pew Research Center survey in March found 57% of U.S. adults favor full legalization while only 11% say it should be entirely illegal — the public comments so far represent a full spectrum of views on the topic.

“This rule is a horrible idea, this should remain in Schedule I,” one comment read. “Marijuana is a gateway drug and ruins lives.”

“There are no negative side effects to its use,” another commenter, who favored “fully” legalizing the substance, wrote. “Its not harmful. The only harm is what the government has done to me and America. Shame on the people that continue to oppose this. Seriously shame on anyone that would stand in the way of this change.”
Congressional action?

Blumenauer authored a memo last month on “the path forward” for reform as the rescheduling process plays out.

He listed four bills for Congress to consider this year.

One, sponsored by House Democrats, would remove cannabis from the Controlled Substance Act schedule entirely and expunge prior offenses.

A bipartisan bill would make changes to the banking laws to allow state-legal businesses greater access to loans and other financial services.

Another, cosponsored with Florida Republican Brian Mast, would allow Veterans Administration health providers to discuss state-legal medicinal marijuana with veteran patients.

Blumenauer has also co-written language for appropriations bills that would prevent the Department of Justice from prosecuting marijuana businesses that are legal under state or tribal law.

“All of these things are overwhelmingly popular, they’re important, we have legislative vehicles and supporters,” he said.

Still, there may be disagreements about what to pursue next.

Recent years have seen disagreements among Democratic supporters of legalization over whether to prioritize banking or criminal justice reforms.

A banking overhaul has much greater bipartisan support, and advocates on all sides of the issue agree it’s the most likely to see congressional action.

But some who support changes to banking laws in principle object to focusing on improving the business environment without first addressing the harms they say prohibition has caused to largely non-white and disadvantaged communities.

As recently as 2021, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer described banking reform legislation as too narrow. Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, called it a “common-sense policy” but said that he favored a more comprehensive approach.

“I’ve gone around with Cory on that,” Blumenauer said. “More than anybody in Congress, I’m in favor of the major reforms, and we’ve been fighting for racial justice and equity … but (racial justice and banking reforms) are not mutually exclusive.”

In September, Booker agreed to co-sponsor the banking reform bill after winning a promise from Schumer that a separate bill to help expunge criminal records would also receive a vote. Neither measure has actually received a floor vote.

In a statement following the administration’s announcement on rescheduling, Booker praised the move, but called for further action from Congress.

That includes passing a bill he’s sponsored that would decriminalize the drug at the federal level, expunge the records of people convicted of federal marijuana crimes and direct federal funding to communities “most harmed by the failed War on Drugs,” according to a summary from Booker’s office.

“We still have a long way to go,” Booker said in the statement on rescheduling. “Thousands of people remain in prisons around the country for marijuana-related crimes. They continue to bear the devastating consequences that come with a criminal history.”

Blumenauer said Congress should act on the proposals that have widespread support from voters.

“This not low-hanging fruit, this is having them pick it up off the ground,” he said. “There is no other controversial issue that has as much bipartisan support that’s awaiting action.”