You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty. KFI AM six forty. It's a Bill Handle show. He's on vacation, Dwayne Resnick sitting in. Some of the stories were following for you. At least eight LA County Shriff's deputies, including some sergeants, have been relieved of duty. It's pursued to a federal investigation into the beating of a man last year in a seven to eleven parking lot.
He drove by a deputy who was talking to somebody on a call and flipped off the deputy, and the deputy chased him down and got him at the seven eleven and roughed him up pretty good, and there were some other indignities after he was booked. So that deputy has agreed to plead guilty in the incident. He had admitted lying to the FBI about what happened, and numerous other sheriff's officials and officers are accused of helping him obstruct it. And when I say accused, I've already seen
some of the evidence against them. I don't have secret access. It's out there publicly and there are text messages and some other things that show that they concocted a story to cover up the fact that it looks like this guy was targeted and beaten up just because he pissed off the cop by flipping him off. Also, that plane crash Azerby John Airline's plane crash killed thirty eight entered twenty nine more crashed yesterday in a heavily militarized part
of the Russia Ukraine conflict. And the speculation is that the airport where they were trying to land as an emergency landing was also being bombarded by Ukraine with drones and that Russia may have accidentally shut down a shotdown excuse me, this airplane. So the last story we did in Handle on the news is about the Starbucks works who had staged some wildcat strikes over the Christmas holiday. They're all back to work, but they're not done fighting.
There also was a strike and is a strike going on by some Amazon employees. And these two situations have a lot in common and they reflect a larger trend that is happening in the workplace. So we'll talk about each of them, but the big picture is that we have a new administration coming in, so you know, there's this National Labor Relations Board, and they can make rules and regulations affecting how companies deal with employees who want
to unionize and the current administration. Under the current administration, they have issued some rulings that have been very pro labor organizing. One of them, for example, and this is maybe the most important thing that's happened under the current administration in this regard, is a decision from twenty twenty three that says, when you have employees who a majority of them want to unionize, but they haven't yet conducted a representation election, you must still deal with them. You
have to negotiate with them. You have to recognize the union even though they haven't yet officially voted to be represented, and you have to bargain with them, or you as the employer, have to get an election going within fourteen days. You cannot just refuse to acknowledge them and carry on
per usual. And that's what's been behind that ruling, is what's been behind a lot of these organization attempts, particularly at Starbucks, because you're supposed to be able to get something going with your boss even though you haven't fully become unionized yet. Well, the new administration is highly likely to simply undo that ruling, in which case the companies
will go back to the way it was before. So at Amazon, the main beef at Amazon is that they employ a lot of people, well employ I guess finger quotes employ. They have a lot of people working for them. The reason it's hard for me to express it in words is I don't know what to call it, except that they consider these people to be independent contractors. This is mostly the delivery partners, they call them delivery service partners. Those people do not work directly for Amazon. They work
for third party companies that Amazon has contracts with. Up in Palmdale, there is a company called Battle Tested Strategies and it was a group of drivers working for that company who were the first in this triunion back in April of last year. And after that happened, guess what Amazon did. So you have a group of drivers. They work for this company, it's not Amazon, but they have contracts with Amazon. They unionize, and then Amazon ends its
contract with the company. The union of the teamsters. They say that's retaliation. Amazon said no, Actually, the delivery company breached the contract a lot of times, so that's why they weren't doing what they were supposed to be doing, and a regional director for the National Labor Relations Board here in LA did throw out the retaliation claim, so that person found, nah, it probably was not retaliation. So now that's happening all over the country with Amazon, and
it's this big, huge, which question. If you work for a company and that company works for Amazon, should Amazon have to deal with you when it comes to being unionized? Should Amazon have to negotiate with you? Or is it none of their business and none of their responsibility because you don't work for them? And this is what Amazon is saying. They don't work for us, they're not our employees. How can we negotiate with them? Which makes sense on
paper you look at it. Why should any company be required to negotiate anything with people who don't work for them? Of course, the reason that Amazon can say this is because corporations have set up over the last I mean this kind of started, I'm gonna say, big time when the gig economy started up with Uber and Lyft and then the food delivery arms of Uber and so forth. Companies have arranged to put themselves at arm's length from people who do work work on their behalf they do
work that benefits them. But because of this independent this rise of the use of independent contractors, companies are technically, I guess correctly able to say they don't work for us, we have no obligation to them. And the thing with Starbucks is not the same thing, because in the case of Starbucks, those people do work for Starbucks. So in the case of Starbucks, it has to do with their claim that Starbucks simply will not deal with them even
though they are employees. Starbucks can't say they're not our employees the way Amazon can, but that Starbucks just kind of slow rolls everything and is not interested in negotiating and good faith, which is what the union say. Starbucks says, hey, unionizing would make it worse, and we treat our people very well and there should be no need for this.
So one of these cases, the Amazon case, at some point there's going to have to be a court ruling that definitively says once and for all what the obligation of an Amazon is to the people who drive for the benefit of Amazon but aren't directly employed by Amazon. The Starbucks thing is going to be a matter of whether or not these baristas can cause enough hurt financially and enough hurt in the court of public opinion to make Starbucks start to believe that it's in their best
interest to be more union friendly. Now LA Unified and the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, those are the two parties in a lawsuit over how money is being doled out for poor students in the district. LA Unified, of course, runs public schools primarily, and the Catholic Archdiocese they have their own kind of school district. Then they have their private Catholic schools, and they are entitled to the same pool of money that the public schools are under Title one,
this is funding for low income students. Well, apparently LA Unified was playing a game of hide the ball and cutting the amount of money from this Title I funding that they were giving to the Catholic schools, not just cutting it a little bit here and a little bit there, apparently cut that funding by more than ninety percent over the peer period of the agreement that's in question here, the funding went from nine and a half million dollars
to seven hundred and fifty seven thousand dollars. Man So this goes back to nineteen sixty eight when Congress said Title one funding for poor students should go to private schools and religious schools because we want to boost the chances for all poor students. However, we don't want and really can't, have the government directly giving money to religious schools.
So here's what we're going to do. We're going to let the local what do you call secular school district handle the money, decide what the eligibility requirements will be, and talk with the schools about what services the students should get. So LA Unified, which mostly runs public schools, also gets to decide who's eligible, including the students who are going to private schools, religious schools, who's eligible and what they get, and how that money is gold out.
So how do you gain that system? Well, let's start with this. Why would you gain that system if you're LA Unified, Because you would like to keep as much of that money for your schools and give as little of it as possible to the private schools and the religious schools. And because I'm not aware, and if somebody knows of cases, please bring them to my attention. But I'm not aware of any big lawsuits from secular private
schools accusing LA Unified of doing this. It makes me think, it makes me wonder if they had a bias specifically against religious schools and maybe even more specifically against Catholic schools in doing what they did. There are different ways that you can determine who's eligible for this money. So the simple one, the one that is best for private schools and the one that's used in most big urban school districts, is you just look at the census data.
You look at the level of poverty in a particular neighborhood, and you use that to calculate the eligibility of the students basically proportionately. Well, apparently LA Unified did this for a while and then Austin Butner came to be the superintendent and they changed the eligibility requirements, They changed the process, They used a different formula which was much less fair, if you will, to the private religious schools. And they didn't tell the schools that they were going to do
that before. They gave no prior notice. They just one day said, oh, by the way, here's what you have to do now. And it had to do with getting surveys of families to determine their income, to look at federally subsidized meal programs and how many students are registered in those. In other words, instead of just looking at statistics, it became very granular, and it put a lot of responsibility on the Catholic schools and the families to kind
of prove that they're eligible. And then they monkeyed around with the deadlines. At one point, apparently over a holiday break. Oh, it was a summer break, forgive me, over a summer break. They gave the archdiocese schools twelve days to come up with income surveys for the families, and any schools that couldn't do it were just removed from eligibility for the money. And that doesn't seem very fair at all. Well, I'm not the only one who so. Obviously the church thinks so,
and that's why they filed the big lawsuit. And now it looks like LAUSD has maybe come to their senses a little bit, because that lawsuit has been settled and the district is gonna pay three million dollars that it
withheld from the schools. It agrees now with I guess oversight of the court, that it'll comply with all the federal regulations about being transparent and talking to the in this case the archdiocese about what you're gonna do, and they've agreed to do it, But they didn't agree to settle until the church was successful in getting a judge to order LAUSD to turn over a bunch of documents
and emails and other records pertaining to this issue. So, in other words, as long as they thought they could hide the ball, they weren't interested in settling the lawsuit. But as soon as they knew they couldn't anymore, then they wanted a quick settlement. And this three million dollars that they're going to pay, that is only a fraction
of what was improperly denied. But sometimes you know, when you have a group acting badly like LAUSD and you have to go to a long court thing, sometimes you know, you take a fraction of what really you should be getting. So that's what happened the beginning of a clean energy boom when the Inflation Reduction Act was signed in twenty twenty two. And this was a big, a big thing in the Biden administration, one of their big accomplishments that they will point to. And when I say a boom,
there's a group called the Rodium Group. They're a research group that focuses on energy. And then there's also a little place called MIT heard of it. They keep track of data and they agree that in the third quarter of this year, seventy one billion dollars in clean investment. This is renewable energy, it's also things like electric cars and batteries and solar panels, and it's been a big
boon for that industry. Now we have a new administration coming in and President Elect Donald Trump called the Biden policies the green new scam during the campaign. So what's going to happen Because probably the new administration is not going to want to continue handing out subsidies to these industries and probably wants to undo regulations that were intended.
But all industries that are interested in what do they call it decarbonization, because you may not be making solar panels or evs, but you might be making something else and there'll be economic reasons from the government for you to try to make those things in a cleaner way. Well, that may go away. It's a matter of to what extent will it go away and will it end this boom? And it might be directly by for example, pulling back subsidies.
It might be bindirectly. One of the things we know that President elect Trump wants to do is extend the twenty seventeen tax cuts. He's going to have to reduce spending somewhere to do it, So a likely target would be clean energy tax credits, which you're going to be if he doesn't touch them. It'll be about three hundred and fifty billion dollars over the next three years. And that's according to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, so
that's not a partisan motivated read. And the more they're paired back, the more that these clean investment projects don't make sense financially. And this speaks to this relatively new clean energy industry having the same problems as any other industry.
One of the truths about the United States of America and the economy, and it may be true of other countries as well, but we're not talking about other countries right now, is that they're very, very few industries that operate purely on capitalism, which is to say, they make their products or they provide their services, they charge whatever they charge, and based on the money that they bring in from their customers, they continue to operate and make
a profit. No, virtually every industry in this country benefits from favorable tax treatment from government subsidies and all and all kinds of other consideration. And the same is true of the clean energy industry. They rely on government subsidies to make some of their projects attractive to investors. If those go away, people aren't going to want to put
their money into it. Now, it may not all be gloom and doom for the green energy and clean investment industries, because one thing that happened is a lot of the money from the Inflation Reduction Act, I'll go ahead and call it a Joe Biden, you know, thing that he pushed and he championed. A lot of that money disproportionately ended up in Republican state states that voted for Donald Trump.
So if the Trump administration decides that whether it's to extend the twenty seventeen tax cuts or whether it's because they prefer fossil fuel industries and therefore don't want to help renewable energy industries, that they start cutting some of this money, they will disproportionately be taking money away from states that were supportive of Donald Trump in the election.
If people in the new administration understand that and consider it to be relevant, they might not want to cut or cut very much, especially at a time when the demand for energy is going up for the first time in quite a long time. It's also true that generally now, renewable energy is a bipartisan thing. Generally speaking, Republicans, Democrats,
everybody agrees renewable energy is a good idea. They may disagree about how much money to throw at it and how to make it happen, whether or not to mandate it, or whether to let the market work to have it rise in prominence, but they all agree it's a good idea. So it remains to be seen exactly what's going to happen.
But there's some people, the gloom and doomers are saying what's going to happen is the policies are gonna shift and the old fossil fuel industries will become the favored industries again, and the clean energy and the renewable energy people will be left out in the cold. But other people who are looking at with a little more nuancer saying it might not really go that way, And as
with anything like this, we won't know until it's happened. Now, let's get into this store about a demonstration out at a shooting range in San Bernardino last month. A couple of dozen people out there to watch a guy throw a rock at glass, hit glass with a metal baseball bat, and shoot a gun at this glass. And he's not just any guy, obviously. He is the head of a company called safe Haven Defense. His name is Stephen Johnson.
And he was not demonstrating the glass. It was the film that had been applied to the glass that he wanted to show off. So he throws the rock, he hits the thing with the baseball bat, and he's got an employee of his company like down behind the glass. He's saying, look, I'll put this person in some danger here. That's how confident I am. And here's that's what happened. Apparently the glass did break, but it didn't go anywhere. It stayed within the sheets of film and the bat
could not penetrate the glass. Then he fires a gun at the window and the bullet boom in the glass. So what is the point of this, Well, this has to do with a new trend. School districts spending millions and millions of dollars not to put in bulletproof glass, but to apply special films to their existing windows in order to try to stop shooters from shooting through the
windows and getting into the school. There are at least two states that I can think of that have mandates now, actual mandates that all public schools have to put in some kind of window security measure. You could put in bulletproof glass or some kind of a window film on your existing windows, but the idea is they they're mandating that schools make their windows resistant to people shooting through them and shattering them and being able to get into
the school. I know Utah is one that has this mandate, and Texas is the other one that I know of. I know that another state, Tennessee. I believe it is if you are a new school, or you're remodeling your school, you are going to have to put some kind of window film on your windows. So, as you might imagine, this is a growth industry for window film companies. Now. Most of the big manufacturers of window film, like three M,
they say, hey, we can't. We don't have any film that can stop a bullet or stop a person from shooting through a window and coming in, but there still are some dealers that are saying that they can. Now a lot of these are false claims. They're just false claims. Some of them are exaggerated claims, and in some cases
there may be something to it. Schools around the country are already over one hundred million dollars into chasing this idea of you apply a film to your windows and maybe the kids are safe, because bulletproof glass simply costs way way more. And that's why you have these live demonstrations because obviously smaller companies in particular want to drum up business and the only way you could do it is to have a demonstration that shows that it does something.
And that's what that demonstration was last month, and it would appear that it did have some benefit. Now the skeptics are saying, well, look in this demon they used, they used a particular kind of glass called annealed glass, and it was thicker than the typical tempered glass that would be in a school. And so maybe that's a little you know, screwing around by using a thicker, different kind of glass. But here's the thing. Both of these kinds of glass. I'm not a I'm not a glazier folks.
But I know that the main difference, if I understand it, is tempered glass. If it breaks, it breaks into little like pebbles almost, which won't cut you as badly, and annealed glass, uh, breaks into big shards which can hurt you, but it's less expensive. So he was using a mealed glass. And here's the thing. So so some people said, well, look he's he's juking the demon by using a thicker, different kind of glass than a school's gonna have. But he said, and this makes some sense, is yeah, but
it's weaker. I actually used a weaker glass in my demonstration. If you put this on a tempered glass window, you would get or could get even more protection. The thing about it is, right now, it's kind of the wild West out there. There's really no regulations about claiming that you have a window film that can stop a bullet or at least stop the window for breaking, or at least stop the window from shattering. And so schools I fear that they're gonna throw a lot of money at
stuff that may end up not working. And to the extent that protecting the windows is an important part of hardening the schools against these shootings. I feel like maybe let's look at some way to come up with the money to do it right. And by right, I mean bulletproof glass. I know it's very expensive, Well, how much would you pay? I'm bringing it down just to the personal level now, how much of your salary or savings or what have you would you pay to stop me
from shooting your kid? It might be expensive, but I can see how it would be worth it. This is KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show. Catch my show Monday through Friday six am to nine am, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.