As protests of Amazon’s 48-hour “Prime Day” continued Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders and a dozen House Democrats demanded a federal probe of workplace conditions employees have described as “grueling” and “unsafe.”

A letter (pdf) to the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration—spearheaded by Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—outlines in detail the “unacceptable” conditions that hundreds of workers have reported at the warehouses operated by Amazon and its subsidiaries and contractors.

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“Amazon operates more than 100 warehouses across that country that employ more than 125,000 people, yet in the last five years OSHA has reported conducting only 150 inspections of Amazon spaces and issued just 41 violations,” the letter notes. “OSHA has previously found that Amazon fails to report worker injuries and when OSHA does investigate, your agency has found instances of egregious injuries, including fractures and amputations.”

“Hold this corporate malfeasance accountable.”
—Rep. Ilhan Omar

“Owing to the breadth and severity of past violations as well as mounting public revelations of brutal and hazardous working conditions,” the letter continues, “we request that OSHA launch a thorough and comprehensive investigation into the workplace conditions at all of Amazon’s warehouses, and that any violations uncovered in the course of such investigation be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

The letter was also signed by Democratic Reps. Debbie Dingell (Mich.), Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii), Al Green (Texas), Deb Haaland (N.M.) Ro Khanna (Calif.), Barbara Lee (Calif.), Andy Levin (Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Jan Schakowsky (Ill.), and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.).

Noting the massive fortune of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Sanders said in a statement Tuesday that “people who work for a company owned by the wealthiest person in America should not have to risk their lives, health, or well-being on the job. They must be treated with dignity and respect.”

Omar, in the statement and on Twitter, highlighted some of the conditions that workers have reported.

“Amazon workers often work in overheated facilities without air conditioning,” she said. “They fear taking bathroom and water breaks for fear of retaliation. Workplace injuries are often ignored—sometimes leaving workers homeless or bereft of income. There are multiple reports of deaths of Amazon workers on the company’s watch.”

Urging OSHA to “hold this corporate malfeasance accountable” by launching a probe, Omar declared Amazon “a 21st century sweatshop.”

The letter from lawmakers followed Amazon workers’ strikes on Monday and calls from labor advocates for consumers to boycott the internet retailer’s two-day sale.

As Common Dreams reported Monday, “protests against the company’s business practices and support for the Trump administration’s anti-immigration agenda” were held in several cities, and came as Amazon critics voiced support for employees at a fulfillment center in Shakopee, Minnesota who planned a work stoppage “to protest what they say are long working hours, insufficient breaks, and unrealistic packing quotas.”

Demonstrations targeting Amazon continued alongside Prime Day Tuesday, and included a march to Bezos’ house intended to pressure the company to cut ties with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Activists in southern Louisiana kicked off a five-day march on Thursday that aims to bring environmental justice to Cancer Alley—the 85-mile stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that’s home to poverty-stricken communities in the shadow of scores of petrochemical facilities.

The march was organized by the Coalition Against Death Alley (CADA), which formed earlier this year and began planning “non-violent protests to pressure industrial giants and governments to stop the ongoing poisoning of majority-black communities” in the region, also known as Louisiana’s Petrochemical Corridor, which runs along the Mississippi River.

Marchers began Thursday morning in St. John the Baptist Parish at an elementary school near the Ponchartrain Works facility, which the American chemical giant DuPont sold to the Japanese company Denka in 2015.

A study released by the Environmental Protection Agency that same year determined that the plant—the only one in the United States that manufactures neoprene, synthetic rubber made from chloroprene—put nearby residents at the highest risk for developing cancer from airborne pollution of anywhere in the country.

Denka reached an agreement with the state’s environmental agency in 2017 to scale back the facility’s high emissions of chloroprene, which the EPA classifies as “likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” However, readings from last year show that the company has failed to reach its reduction targets, and activists are demanding bolder action for the sake of public health.

In an interview with The Guardian Thursday outside the elementary school by the facility, local activist Robert Taylor called for the plant to be shuttered.

As the White House continues to stonewall efforts by congressional Democrats to obtain President Donald Trump’s tax returns, a confidential IRS draft memo that leaked late Tuesday appeared to completely undercut Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s justification for withholding the documents.

“Because no amount of legal advice will stop the lawlessness and lies, Congress should use all of our powers to enforce compliance, including fines and confinement.”
—Rep. Lloyd Doggett

First obtained by the Washington Post, the memo states that federal law “does not allow the secretary to exercise discretion in disclosing the information provided the statutory conditions are met.”

Mnuchin, who oversees the IRS, has refused to release the president’s tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee on multiple occasions on the grounds that “the committee’s request lacks a legitimate legislative purpose.”

But the 10-page IRS memo (pdf)—reportedly prepared last fall “by a lawyer in the Office of Chief Counsel”—makes clear that the “secretary’s obligation to disclose return and return information would not be affected by the failure of a tax writing committee… to state a reason for the request.”

“The memo writer’s interpretation is that the IRS has no wiggle room on this,” Daniel Hemel, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, told the Post. “Mnuchin is saying the House Ways and Means Committee has not asserted a legitimate legislative purpose. The memo says they don’t have to assert a legitimate legislative purpose—or any purpose at all.”

The draft memo points to one possible way in which the White House could justify withholding Trump’s tax returns: executive privilege.

The anti-war group CodePink is hoping that it can host the now famous ‘Baby Trump’ blimp—which first garnered international attention during protests against the U.S. president in the United Kingdom—during July 4th demonstrations scheduled for this summer in the nation’s capitol.

According to the Washington Post:

The United Nations’ top health envoy warned Monday that inequality and austerity are fueling a global mental health crisis that can only be solved by government interventions to reduce economic insecurity and increase funding for crucial public services.

Dr. Dainius Pūrasa, a Lithuanian psychiatrist and the U.N.’s special rapporteur on health, said in an interview with The Guardian that purely “biomedical” approaches to treating mental illness are not sufficient because they ignore the social and economic conditions that exacerbate depression, anxiety, and other conditions.

“At this point, there’s no denying what a complete catastrophe austerity has been for the poor and vulnerable in our society.”
—Momentum

Measures to redress inequality, poverty, and discrimination, Pūrasa said, “would be the best ‘vaccine’ against mental illness and would be much better than the excessive use of psychotropic medication which is happening.”

“The best way to invest in the mental health of individuals is to create a supportive environment in all settings, family, the workplace,” said Pūrasa. “Then of course [therapeutic] services are needed, but they should not be based on an excessive biomedical model.”

Pūrasa’s interview with The Guardian came just before he delivered a major new report (pdf) on mental health to the U.N. General Assembly on Monday.

While it does not single out any country in particular, the report slams as damaging to mental health “[c]uts to social welfare, laws, and policies that restrict access to sexual and reproductive health information, and services, the criminalization of drug possession or cultivation for personal use, laws that restrict civil society space, and corporal punishment of children and adults.”

The report describes inequality as “a key obstacle to mental health globally” and states that action to curb inequities should be considered “a human rights issue.”

“Given the deep connections between inequality and poor health,” the report says, “states are required to act on structural interventions far upstream, including in the political arrangements that allocate resources.”

Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg turned to Twitter Thursday to thank a key fossil fuel leader for suggesting that climate campaigners—including youth who have joined the global “Fridays for Future” movement Thunberg inspired with her school strikes outside Sweden’s parliament last year—greatly threaten the oil sector.

“Thank you!” tweeted Thunberg, whose climate leadership earned her a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize this year. “Our biggest compliment yet!”

Earlier this week, after a meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in Vienna, the organization’s Secretary-General Mohammed Barkindo reportedly claimed that “unscientific” attacks by climate activists are “perhaps the greatest threat to our industry going forward.”

According to the Agence France-Presse report which Thunberg linked to on Twitter:

Although he did not mention any specifics, Barkindo also said that “we believe this industry is part of the solution to the scourge of climate change.”

OPEC’s mission “is to coordinate and unify the petroleum policies of its member countries and ensure the stabilization of oil markets in order to secure an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consumers, a steady income to producers, and a fair return on capital for those investing in the petroleum industry.”

The energy organization’s 14 member nations are Algeria, Angola, Congo, Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela.

Bill McKibben, co-founder of the advocacy group 350.org, tweeted a message to activists Thursday in response to the OPEC chief’s remarks: “Wow! Wow! Wow! …Thanks everyone for your good work!”

Barkindo’s comments come as the youth movement—also commonly called #SchoolStrikeForClimate—is planning a worldwide strike for September, and amid mounting research on how the fossil fuel industry endangers the planet. A study published in the journal Nature on Monday warned that existing dirty energy infrastructure jeopardizes the Paris climate agreement target of limiting warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

“The new study reiterates that visionary climate solutions must justly transition away from fossil fuels, starting with an acknowledgement that 1.5°C carbon budgets must account for planned and new emitting projects,” Tamara Toles O’Laughlin, North America director for 350.org, said in a statement Wednesday.

“This report reinforces the need for complete economic restructuring by way of a Green New Deal that creates millions of jobs for workers in a 100 percent renewable economy and actively keeps fossil fuels in the ground,” she added. “We stand by the science, and furthermore demand that fossil fuel billionaires pay for the damage they have caused to people and planet.”

This post has been updated with comment from Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org.