UAW President Gary Jones Abruptly Resigns Amid Corruption Scandal
Former United Auto Workers President Gary Jones speaks during the opening of contract talks with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles in Auburn Hills, Mich., in July 2019. Jones resigned Wednesday.
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The president of the United Autoworkers Union, Gary Jones, abruptly resigned Wednesday just as union leaders announced they would expel him and another top UAW official in an unfolding corruption scandal.
In a related development, General Motors (GM) filed suit against rival Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) alleging that the company bribed UAW officials in order to get favorable labor contracts and disadvantage GM.
Michigan Radio’s Sarah Cwiek reported that the UAW’s International Executive Board unanimously voted to expel Jones.
“That kickstarted the process to remove Gary Jones and another UAW official, Director Vance Pearson.
“Both men have been implicated in a corruption scheme that involved misusing union funds for personal expenses, then covering it up.
“Both Jones and Pearson had already taken leaves of absence. Pearson already faces federal charges, while Jones has so far not been charged.”
An attorney for Jones, Bruce Maffeo of New York, told The Associated Press that union president decided to resign before learning of the board’s action.
Hours earlier, GM filed its federal racketeering lawsuit alleging that FCA bribed UAW officials in order to get contracts allowing the company to pay some newer employees less money — known as two-tier pay — resulting in lower labor costs.
“This lawsuit is intended to hold FCA accountable for the harm its actions have caused our company and to ensure a level playing field going forward,” Craig Glidden, GM Executive Vice President and General Counsel, said in a statement.
The lawsuit alleges that FCA corrupted bargaining agreements in 2009, 2011 and 2015.
FCA responded with a statement dismissing GM’s lawsuit as “this extraordinary attempt at distraction” with claims that “are nothing more than a meritless attempt to divert attention from that company’s own challenges.”
GM’s lawsuit alleges that FCA’s former CEO Sergio Marchionne authorized bribes of more than $1.5 million paid to UAW officials. Marchionne died in 2018.
It also alleges that Marchionne hoped to force higher labor costs onto GM in hopes of furthering a plan to induce the company to merge with FCA.
As Michigan Radio’s Tracy Samilton reports,
“GM’s lawsuit piggybacks on a federal investigation into UAW corruption that began several years ago – resulting in three Fiat Chrysler executives going to prison, along with six guilty pleas (so far) by union officials.
“Federal authorities says the executives were involved in a bribery scheme meant to keep union officials “fat, dumb and happy,” (quoting one of the convicted FCA executives, Alphons Iacobelli) during contract talks.
“GM says normally, the union’s pattern bargaining results in similar labor costs for all three Detroit automakers.”
In ‘Canyon Dreams,’ A Navajo Town Struggles To Survive In An Often Hostile World
College and professional sports have a way of dominating the national headlines. But in some parts of America, high school athletics have become local obsessions.
In Pennsylvania, fans flock to school wrestling matches, while in Texas, high school football teams routinely sell out some of the state’s biggest stadiums.
In many parts of the western U.S., though, it’s the game of “rez ball” that has sports fans enchanted. As Michael Powell writes in his wonderful new book, Canyon Dreams, rez ball — so named because it’s played on Native American reservations — is a unique spin on basketball, “a quicksilver, sneaker-squeaking game of run, pass, pass, cut, and shoot, of spinning layups and quick shots and running, endless running … Play was swift and unrelenting as a monsoon-fed stream.”
And not many teams play it better than the Wildcats of Chinle High School, located in the Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona. Powell, a New York Times columnist, spent a season in the small town of Chinle, watching the Wildcats take to the hardwood, and spending time with those who call the reservation home. Canyon Dreams is the product of his time in and around Chinle, and it’s a remarkable achievement.
Powell focuses heavily Raul Mendoza, the school’s “respected, although perhaps not beloved” basketball coach, whose career leading teams in the Southwest spanned decades: “He had lived a dozen lives in seventy years of wandering.” Mendoza is an old-school coach who’s determined to take Chinle to the state championships; he loves telling “corny jokes and he could name no rapper, past, present, or future.”
At the beginning of the season, Mendoza’s Chinle team has the potential to be a powerhouse, though you wouldn’t know it to look at them: Only three of the players on his team are over 6 ft. tall; the Wildcats’ point guard, Josiah Tsosie, stands at 5 ft. 4 in. Still, they’re scrappers in the rez ball tradition, which puts a premium on pugnacity and physicality: “Custom dictated that players help their opponents to their feet. They as quickly knocked them down again.”
Many of Mendoza’s players aren’t quite sure what to make of their laconic, reserved coach; some resent him for leaving them on the bench, while others don’t appreciate his often caustic assessments of their on-court performance. Despite his hard edges, though, Mendoza clearly cares for his players, especially those who have had to endure difficulty:
“Mendoza harbored special affection for the lost. … To take a well-adjusted kid and train and mold him was rewarding; to break through to the desperate, to give hope where there was none, was another mission entirely.”
And none of the players on the team have had easy lives. Chinle, like many nearby towns, has been beset by poverty, unemployment, domestic violence and alcoholism: “I knew of no player on Mendoza’s team whose family had not lost a relative to the bottle and fetal alcohol syndrome deformed some infants,” Powell writes.
He spends time with a wide array of people who live on the reservation, and presents their stories with a sympathy that’s never condescending. The results of his interviews can be heartbreaking: At one point, he takes a walk with a Navajo jeweler who used to play rez ball as a teenager; the next day, Powell learns that the man passed out the night before, the result of drinking too much, and froze to death.
Canyon Dreams is a book about basketball the same way that Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights is a book about football — while sports are the ostensible focus, Powell’s real interest is the community that drives the team. That’s not to say Powell’s coverage of Chinle’s games isn’t fascinating; indeed, he recaps the matches with an expert pacing, and creates an atmosphere of suspense as the Wildcats’ season progresses. He’s an excellent sportswriter with an obvious love for the game, and he does a great job explaining what makes rez ball so unique.
But it’s his deep dives into the lives of those associated with Chinle and its high school that sets Canyon Dreams apart. He profiles not just the players and coaching staff, but also teachers, townspeople and activists, and the result is a moving portrait of what it’s like to live on the reservation. Powell even incorporates memoir into the book, writing about his own explorations of the town, and how he came to be so invested in its people.
Canyon Dreams is difficult to categorize, but it’s unmistakably beautiful. Powell is a gifted and giving writer, and his book is at once a reflection on youth and ambition and a fascinating chronicle of a town’s struggle to survive in a world that’s often cruel and hostile. “Nothing about a basketball season is easy,” as Mendoza says. “Neither is life.”
Snarky Puppy: Tiny Desk Concert
Credit: Emily Bogle/NPR
Seconds before we hit record, Snarky Puppy‘s bandleader, Michael League leaned in to ask if he could “do a little crowd work.” I suspect he waited until the last second on purpose, but it’s been easy to trust this band when they have an idea, judging by the three Grammy Awards they get to dust off at home after every tour run.
What resulted was a Tiny Desk first: League divided the audience into two sections, one side clapping out a 3/4 beat and the other half a 4/4 beat, creating a polyrhythm that I’m sure a handful of coworkers didn’t feel so confident trying to pull off. But this band pulls you in with simple instruction and a little faith.
Snarky Puppy has been a force for a while now, earning the ears of millions for more than a decade. And their secret sauce? A long-simmered recipe of jazz, funk and gospel. The band started as college friends in the jazz program at the University of North Texas back in 2003. But the formative era came a few years later, after League became a part of the gospel scene in Dallas and eventually brought the jazz students to church, where music plays a different role than it does in the classroom. In the pulpit, it’s a channel for spiritual healing, a communal experience between players and congregation. As an experiment, League pulled his jazz friends and his gospel bandmates into one ensemble, where the two groups bonded together and established ground-zero for building the sonic identity of Snarky Puppy.
Thirteen albums later, you can still hear these gospel and jazz orbits crashing into each other. They’re masters of theme and variation, offering anyone with a listening ear a place to grab hold. And people do. They’re a band whose lyric-less melodies are still yelled (sung back) to them at their concerts around the world, as a shared catharsis for everyone in the room.
SET LIST
- “Tarova”
- “Xavi”
MUSICIANS
Michael League: Bass; “JT” Thomas: drums; Nate Werth: percussion; Shaun Martin: keys; Bobby Sparks: keys; Justin Stanton: keys, trumpet; Jay Jennings: trumpet; Chris Bullock: saxophone, flute; Chris McQueen: guitar; Zach Brock: violin
CREDITS
Producers: Colin Marshall, Morgan Noelle Smith; Creative Director: Bob Boilen; Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin; Videographers: Bronson Arcuri, Jack Corbett, CJ Riculan, Morgan Noelle Smith; Associate Producer: Bobby Carter Executive Producer: Lauren Onkey; VP, Programming: Anya Grundmann; Photo: Emily Bogle/NPR
America’s ‘Shame’: Medicaid Funding Slashed In U.S. Territories
Sandra King Young runs Medicaid in American Samoa, a U.S. territory that faces dramatic funding cuts to islanders’ health care unless Congress acts. “This is the United States’ shame in the islands,” she says.
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Right now, there are dozens of patients — U.S. citizens — in New Zealand hospitals who are fighting the clock. They have only a few weeks to recover and get home to the tiny island of American Samoa, a U.S. territory in the South Pacific.
“We have a cancer patient that is coming back in December,” says Sandra King Young, who runs the Medicaid program in American Samoa. “We can only give him six weeks of chemo, radiation and surgery. He has a good chance of survival if he has the full year of treatment, but not six weeks. The patient and family understand, and since they have no money, they have agreed to come back.”
The federal money to fully fund the Medicaid program in American Samoa and in all other U.S. territories is about to run out. As a consequence, the off-island referral program to treat conditions that the territory doesn’t have the local capacity or facilities to treat — the program that brought these patients to New Zealand — is getting shut down.
“It’s devastating for those people who need those lifesaving services,” King Young says. “People who need cancer treatment won’t get it. Children with rheumatic heart disease won’t get the heart surgeries that they need.”
All five of the U.S. territories affected — collectively home to more than 3 million Americans — are now desperately trying to figure out how to keep Medicaid running with only a fraction of the money they’ve had for the last several years. If Congress doesn’t increase the amount of designated money by the end of the year, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam say they would need to cut their Medicaid rolls in half; Puerto Rico says it would need to cut back dental and prescription drug services.
This is what people working on the issue have come to call the “Medicaid cliff.”
How did we get here?
When it comes to Medicaid, the federal government treats U.S. territories differently from how it treats states.
In U.S. states, the amount that the federal government contributes to Medicaid varies based on a formula in the law that relies on per capita income in each state. For instance, Alabama has a match rate of 72%; what this translates to is that for every dollar Alabama spends on Medicaid, the federal government contributes about $2.57 to the program.
But that’s not how it works in the territories, where even though the populations are all low income, the federal government’s match rate is set in statute at 55%. What this translates to is that for every dollar a U.S. territory spends on Medicaid, the federal government contributes $1.25.
The other significant difference is that the federal contribution to Medicaid in the territories is capped, with a set allotment of federal funds every year. Federal spending on Medicaid in states is not.
The low matching rate and the annual cap — that’s pretty much how it has always been for Medicaid in the territories, says Robin Rudowitz, who co-directs the Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “These particular provisions historically have always been part of how they have been financed,” she says.
Here’s how the territories found themselves peering over the “Medicaid cliff.” For the last few years, the territories have had billions of dollars more in federal funding to run their programs than their usual capped allotments. First, the Affordable Care Act provided a one-time grant of $7.3 billion (which kicked off in 2011) for the territories’ Medicaid programs. Then, in 2017, after two Category 5 hurricanes ravaged Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, an extra $4.9 billion designated for their Medicaid programs was added to the 2018 Bipartisan Budget Act.
The Family Health Center Susana Centeno on remote Vieques island, part of Puerto Rico, was forced to close after it suffered damage from Hurricane Maria in 2017.
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Now, we’ve come to the cliff’s edge. Most of these two pots of money ran out at the end of September, with just a bit of funding from the ACA still available through the end of 2019.
That leaves, essentially, just the capped allotment of federal dollars for each of the territories — far less than what the territories have come to rely on to provide care to their Medicaid enrollees in recent years.
“The capped financing amounts were low and did not meet all of the needs of the population in the territories,” says Rudowitz. If the additional federal contributions are gone for good, she says, “given the share that they represent of the financing for Medicaid in these territories, it would mean major changes and reductions in care.”
The territories have known that this funding cliff was coming for years — the end to a major portion of the money was written into the ACA. Island health officials and care providers hoped Congress would have legislated a more permanent solution by now, but it hasn’t.
In recent months, Congress has passed continuing resolutions that have allowed the territories’ Medicaid programs to keep limping along. But without legislation that appropriates more money, the territories’ Medicaid programs all are in serious trouble.
The Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission, known as MACPAC, a nonpartisan government group that advises Congress on Medicaid policy, projected in July that all the territories will have budget shortfalls in 2020. When considered altogether, according to MACPAC’s report, their Medicaid programs will be more than $1 billion short.
This is why Medicaid directors in the U.S. territories are all sounding the alarm. King Young, of American Samoa, points to news coverage as far back as the 1960s that described her island as “America’s Shame in the South Seas” because of rampant pollution and neglect.
“Right now, this is the United States’ shame in the islands,” she says. “Tell me if that’s acceptable in the United States, to stand by and say, ‘Oh, sorry, we can’t give you that stent or that pacemaker, so it’s likely that you’ll have a stroke or heart attack and — that’s it.’ That’s what it means not to have enough Medicaid funding for the territories.”
“Full-court press” in Congress
The territories have been lobbying Congress, urging members to appropriate more funds for their Medicaid programs so health officials on the islands can avoid these hard choices — between, for instance, keeping a hospital going and paying for a patient’s cancer treatment.
Each territory has a nonvoting delegate in Congress. Puerto Rico also sent an additional delegation from the island last week to make the case to lawmakers that something must be done to stave off disaster.
“I would say that we’ve been doing a full-court press this entire calendar year,” says Jennifer Storipan, executive director of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration. “Gov. [Wanda] Vázquez has said that Medicaid funding is her highest priority for the island right now.”
A bill to temporarily increase funding to the territories’ Medicaid programs was passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee in July but has yet to make it to the floor for a vote. It would greatly increase the federal match rate for Medicaid in all the territories and allocate a bonus $3 billion a year — but only for the next four years. There is no companion bill in the Senate.
“We’re in active negotiations with the Senate, but there is some opposition to our bill in the Senate,” says Rep. Darren Soto, D-Fla., who introduced the House legislation with Rep. Gus Bilirakis, R-Fla. Both represent districts in central Florida that have huge Puerto Rican populations, and Soto is of Puerto Rican descent. In the House, the bill has bipartisan support.
Opponents of the bill in the Senate say they worry that the billions of dollars that the territories are requesting could be misspent. Some senators have raised particular concerns about Puerto Rico. During a recent corruption probe, a Puerto Rican Medicaid official was arrested — that news emerged just a few days before a committee hearing on the territories’ Medicaid bill in July.
“So that didn’t help,” Soto says. Integrity provisions were added to the House bill, he says, specifically addressing concerns about Puerto Rico. “We do need to take it seriously and make sure that tax dollars are safeguarded,” he says, but adds, “There have been fraud instances in many states too, and we don’t take away their Medicaid funding.”
Some congressional Republicans note that the funding cliff was created by the Affordable Care Act, which gave extra funding to the territories for a limited time. In a letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar in July, several Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee raised concerns about Puerto Rico’s Medicaid spending.
“We are again confronting proposals for what amounts to another extension of boosted funding with no permanence or certainty and without any resolution of the Medicaid funding cliff constructed as part of the ACA,” they wrote.
“It is true: Giving these additional funds with a set expiration date, the legislation itself did create the cliff,” acknowledges the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Rudowitz. However, she says, Congress now should consider “the implications of letting that cliff happen and what that means to the health care systems in these territories.”
Planning for the worst
Medicaid program administrators from each of the territories gathered in an impromptu meeting outside the annual Medicaid directors conference last week. They have spent a lot of time together in Washington recently, testifying before congressional committees about the Medicaid funding crisis as it approaches.
“We were here in May. We were here in June,” Michal Rhymer-Browne, assistant commissioner with the Virgin Islands’ Department of Human Services, told NPR that day. “We pleaded. We shared ourselves — everything that we could.”
Despite their pleas, Congress has yet to act.
There are three options for managing a slashed budget for a program like Medicaid: reduce the size of payments to providers, cut the rolls or cover fewer services. All the territories say there’s no way to go lower on provider payments — Puerto Rico’s struggle with provider flight because of low pay is well known. So cutting the rolls and covered services is where the programs would need to find cuts, representatives of the territories say.
“Guam and [the Northern Mariana Islands] are about to topple over the cliff,” Rhymer-Browne says. “And for the Virgin Islands, we are nearing the cliff and seeing the bottom right now.”
Many of the territories would like to make improvements in the care they provide — invest in better facilities, recruit great health care providers, improve preventive care. All of that comes with upfront costs, they say, and they’ve had so much budget uncertainty that it has been impossible to move forward with those kinds of projects.
Right now, they’re just trying to keep the lights on.
“The urgency is here for us to let our congressional members know — even going to January is extremely dangerous,” Rhymer-Browne says. “It’s already catastrophic for our territories. We really need them to make a move.”
