Here's the best of our work at The Appeal, this week:

The Briefing: Corporate Abuse of Workers During the Pandemic. Major corporations like Amazon are raking in billions during COVID-19, but are doing little to protect their workers. On ‘The Briefing,’ Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Reb. Debbie Dingell discuss what Congress can do to hold companies accountable. 

The Briefing streams daily on The Appeal's Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages.

The LA Mayor’s ‘Unacceptable’ Budget Would Deprive Those In Need And Accelerate The City’s Slide Toward A Police State. If a budget is a statement of priorities, then Mayor Eric Garcetti’s are clear: continue LA’s descent into a police state where huge numbers of poor people, especially Black people, are deprived of services even in a city with unimaginable wealth. Garcetti’s proposed budget for the 2020-21 fiscal year makes cuts to nearly every department, reducing vital services that Angelenos rely on and imposing furloughs on nearly 16,000 city workers—but the Los Angeles Police Department is getting a raise. All told, Garcetti is proposing that LA spend a staggering $3.15 billion on policing, eating up nearly 54 percent of the city’s unrestricted revenues, which is where most of the money for general services comes from.  

Arkansas Grants Parole To Willie Mae Harris Three Decades After She Was Convicted For Killing Her Husband. The Arkansas Parole Board has agreed to release Willie Mae Harris, who in 1985 was sentenced to life in prison for the shooting death of her husband, a man she said had abused her for years. Harris, now 72 and blind, has been incarcerated at the Wrightsville Women’s Facility, southeast of Little Rock, for 34 years. In March, Governor Asa Hutchinson cleared the way for Harris’s release by announcing plans to commute her sentence and making her immediately eligible for parole. Harris was interviewed by the parole board earlier this month and the panel announced its decision on Monday. “You just don’t understand the joy that I’m feeling right now,” Harris’s daughter, Silvia Harris Wilkins, told The Appeal. Wilkins was 14 when her mother was convicted of first-degree murder.

A Vegan Meat Company Purged Its Pro-Labor Employees. Workers Say An Anti-Union Drive Prompted the Firings. No Evil Foods describes its mission as to “put more good into the world.” The North Carolina company started in 2014 when its owners and founders Mike Woliansky and Sadrah Schadel sold plant-based meat products out of a cooler at Asheville farmers markets. Since then, the company sells products with left-wing names like Comrade Cluck (a mock chicken product), the Pardon (a Thanksgiving-season turkey substitute), and El Zapatista, a vegan chorizo whose name is a nod to the revolutionary indigenous movement in southern Mexico. The venture has been one of the most successful in an increasingly crowded plant-based meat market that features other companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, which went public in 2019 and has a $8.41 billion market cap. In March, No Evil Foods celebrated its products being sold by 5,500 retailers. It’s backed by multiple venture capital firms, and Schadel told Vegconomist in February that the company’s product is now sold in all 50 states and it’s the “fastest growing meat alternative brand in conventional stores.” But earlier this year, the company fought back a drive by employees to unionize its production facility in Weaverville under the United Food and Commercial Workers International union (UFCW).

Why We Shouldn’t Reward Fearmongering in Criminal Justice Reporting. On May 4, the Courier Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, won a Pulitzer Prize for its December breaking news reporting on hundreds of last-minute commutations issued by Republican Governor Matt Bevin before his term in office ended. In a harrowing feat of journalism, the paper, with its print deadline fast approaching, confirmed in a Dec. 11 story that among those pardoned was a man who was serving a 19-year sentence for reckless homicide and robbery—and whose family had raised $21,500 for the governor’s 2015 campaign. The story, a classic case of money and cronyism influencing politics, was shared widely, kicking off weeks of reporting that looked into Bevin’s 657 pardons and commutations at the 11th hour. The Pulitzer Prize committee praised the paper for “its rapid coverage of hundreds of last-minute pardons by Kentucky’s governor, showing how the process was marked by opacity, racial disparities and violations of legal norms.” But in a letter published Tuesday and addressed to the prize board, over two dozen legal and public health scholars, including one of the authors of this commentary, took issue with the board’s decision. The letter rightly lays out the dangers of rewarding criminal justice journalism that is flawed, sensationalistic, and damaging to future reform.

New Documentary Reveals Silicon Valley’s Role in Notorious Bronx Gang Raid. A Silicon Valley data-mining company helped plan the largest gang raid in New York City history, according to internal ICE emails made public through a Freedom of Information Act request. Hundreds of police officers descended on the North Bronx. Families were woken in the early morning hours at gunpoint. One man tried to flee out a window and fell to his death. One hundred twenty people were indicted; although only three are identified as non-U.S. citizens in court documents, ICE billed the operation as a “transnational gang raid.” ICE data obtained through a separate FOIA request shows that this raid fits into a larger trend—the numbers of U.S. citizens arrested under ICE’s transnational gang program have grown significantly since 2006. More than 3,000 U.S. citizens were arrested under the program in the fiscal year 2018. Police said the disruption to the neighborhood was outweighed by the public safety benefit of arresting violent gang members. Residents say the raid terrorized the community indiscriminately, regardless of gang affiliation. Prosecutors accused fewer than half of those targeted in the raid of belonging to a gang. These and other revelations are featured in Part Two of “Raided,” a documentary film project produced for The Appeal. 

Thanks for reading.  We'll see you next week.

Have a tip for The Appeal? Write to us at tips@theappeal.org. A good tip is a clear description of newsworthy information that is supported by documented evidence.