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Donald Trump likes to pound his chest with outrage over how the United States is always losing to China. Which he should know, since one thing the United States loses to China is Donald Trump’s business. Kurt Eichenwald reports:

A Newsweek investigation has found that in at least two of Trump’s last three construction projects, Trump opted to purchase his steel and aluminum from Chinese manufacturers rather than United States corporations based in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. In other instances, he abandoned steel altogether, instead choosing the far-less-expensive option of buying concrete from various companies, including some linked to the Luchese and Genovese crime families. Trump has never been accused of engaging in any wrongdoing for his business dealings with those companies, but it’s true that the Mafia has long controlled much of the concrete industry in New York.

Throughout his campaign, Trump has maintained that some controversial decisions for his companies amounted to nothing more than taking actions that were good for business, and were therefore reflections of his financial acumen. But, with the exception of one business that collapsed into multiple bankruptcies, Trump does not operate a public company; he has no fiduciary obligation to shareholders to obtain the highest returns he can. His decisions to turn away from American producers were not driven by legal obligations to investors, but simply resulted in higher profits for himself and his family.

When companies like Trump’s buy steel from China, they cost jobs in the U.S.—in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Trump has been emphasizing his ugly brand of fake populism. And then Trump stands there yelling about how politicians fail to challenge China, yet acting as if only a fool could expect him to do any better by American manufacturing. Other people should do better at keeping jobs from moving to China, but him? That’s crazy talk, he has to make a profit.

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October is National Bullying Prevention Month, and the National Education Association is launching a campaign highlighting a new kind of bullying—the kind associated with the rise of Donald Trump.

According to [NEA President Lily] Eskelsen García, their members are reporting children threatening classmates that they might be deported by Trump or calling other classmates terrorists.

“Kids feel like they have been given permission, and they are invoking the name of Donald Trump,” she said.

The NEA—the nation’s largest union—plans ads and mailers focusing on the issue. Its three million members include many in a demographic considered pivotal in this election:

A third identify as independent and another roughly one-third of its membership identifies as Republican. Critically for Clinton, the union’s membership is composed of about 75 percent women, voters with whom Trump has struggled.

Trump certainly has made the union’s case about bullying over the past week as he has repeatedly attacked former Miss Universe Alicia Machado for her weight.

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President Obama signed an executive order last September giving paid sick leave to workers on federal contracts. Now, that’s taking the next step toward becoming a reality as the Department of Labor has finalized the rule governing the policy, which will cover new contracts starting January 1, 2017. Obama told Slate that:

Coming to work sick is bad for employees, co-workers, and customers alike. No one wants a colleague coming in and getting you sick. No one wants to be served by a waiter who’s under the weather. I’d much rather go to a restaurant knowing that if a chef or waiter is sick they have the choice to stay home without losing their paycheck.

That’s why it’s so important that this new rule becomes final today. It will give additional paid sick leave to more than 1.1 million federal contract workers in the first five years, including nearly 600,000 who currently receive no paid sick leave at all.

But just as importantly, this rule means that the federal government is putting our money where our mouth is. We know that providing at least seven paid sick days a year to our contracted workforce will give us the best value for taxpayer dollars and is good for workers and business alike. That’s the same decision that companies large and small throughout the country have made, and we hope our leading by example will convince others to do the same.

Expanding sick leave isn’t all. The Obama administration is also taking the next step toward tracking pay data that could show if employers are discriminating on the basis of gender, race, or ethnicity.

But the thing about executive actions is that the next president can undo them. Look at the date on that paid sick leave order: January 1, 2017. If Donald Trump is elected, he could quickly reverse Obama’s advance. That’s one more reason why, however unlikely it is that Trump will be elected, we have to work to be sure there’s absolutely no chance of it.

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Donald Trump is still talking about former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, and what he’s saying is still not “I’m sorry.” Trump talked to Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly Wednesday night, and tried to make himself out to be the hero who stepped in to defend Machado, despite barely even having met her:

"I’ll bet you if you put up and added up all the time I spoke to her, it was probably less than five minutes," he said. “I had nothing to do with this person, but they wanted to fire her. I saved her job because I said, 'That’s gonna be ruinous.' And I’ve done that with a number of the young ladies, where I saved their job."

“I had nothing to do with” the young woman I forced to work out in front of a room full of reporters. “All the time I spoke to her, it was probably less than five minutes”—against the series of detailed stories Machado has told about her interactions with Trump.

But about Trump’s claim that “I’ve done that with a number of the young ladies, where I saved their job." The Los Angeles Times has an interesting story about the Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, and specifically about allegations in a labor lawsuit.

"I had witnessed Donald Trump tell managers many times while he was visiting the club that restaurant hostesses were 'not pretty enough' and that they should be fired and replaced with more attractive women,” Hayley Strozier, who was director of catering at the club until 2008, said in a sworn declaration. 

Initially, Trump gave this command “almost every time” he visited, Strozier said. Managers eventually changed employee schedules “so that the most attractive women were scheduled to work when Mr. Trump was scheduled to be at the club," she said.

Doesn’t that sound a little more like Donald Trump than “I saved her job”? Also, women who served Trump got creeped on, with one woman saying he made her “uncomfortable” with “inappropriate” behavior. And this is all from a lawsuit about meal and rest breaks, not harassment or discrimination!

So, yeah. Trump’s treatment of Alicia Machado—as she reports it—is well in line with how he’s treated other women who work for him. Like the creeping misogynist boor he is.

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Workers at the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas voted to unionize last December, but management has been waging a fierce battle against them, retaliating against workers who exercised their legal rights, trying to get the union vote thrown out, and now, refusing to negotiate a contract with the union. That’s pushed the Culinary Workers Union, which represents the Trump workers, to call for a boycott of Trump's properties, including hotels, restaurants, and golf courses:

The boycott will be supported by the AFL-CIO, a federation of 56 unions that represent some 12 million workers around the country, according to Bethany Khan, a Culinary Workers Union spokeswoman. She said it will involve properties that Trump “owns, has invested in, or has partnered with.”

“Other unions can respect [the] boycott and not deliver goods or pass the picket line,” Khan told HuffPost in an email.

Boycotts are never a strategy of first resort—they take serious effort and planning, and these are people’s livelihoods we’re talking about. But the union feels that in this case it’s merited. 

Interesting, isn’t it, how the candidate who keeps talking about how great he is at making deals won’t even (have his people) sit down at the table to bargain with these workers? It says something about the contempt Trump has for actual working people, all his faux populism notwithstanding.

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A little reminder of one of the things that’s changed in the American economy in recent decades, from a great Economic Policy Institute roundup of information on corporate taxes:

Federal revenue contributed by corporate taxes has dropped by two-thirds over the last six decades—from 32.1 percent in 1952 to 10.8 percent in 2015. Corporations used to contribute $1 out of every $3 in federal revenue. Today, they contribute just $1 out of every $9—at a time when they have never been more profitable.

Headlines about the millions of unauthorized accounts created by Wells Fargo employees have focused on the wrongdoing by the workers. But you don’t end up with thousands of workers doing the same thing wrong millions of times without the employer bearing some responsibility. And Wells Fargo was definitely responsible, not only pressuring workers with unreasonable sales goals, but retaliating against whistleblowers:

"They ruined my life," Bill Bado, a former Wells Fargo banker in Pennsylvania, told CNNMoney.

Bado not only refused orders to open phony bank and credit accounts. The New Jersey man called an ethics hotline and sent an email to human resources in September 2013, flagging unethical sales activities he was being instructed to do.

Eight days after that email, a copy of which CNNMoney obtained, Bado was terminated. The stated reason? Tardiness.

Bado wasn’t alone. CNNMoney talked to another three former Wells Fargo workers who say they were fired under similar circumstances, and six others who say they witnessed such retaliation.

One former Wells Fargo human resources official even said the bank had a method in place to retaliate against tipsters. He said that Wells Fargo would find ways to fire employees "in retaliation for shining light" on sales issues. It could be as simple as monitoring the employee to find a fault, like showing up a few minutes late on several occasions.

"If this person was supposed to be at the branch at 8:30 a.m. and they showed up at 8:32 a.m, they would fire them," the former human resources official told CNNMoney, on the condition he remain anonymous out of fear for his career.

The statistics on poverty in America are stark—“Nearly 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 will experience a year in poverty at some point” and extreme poverty is on the rise—but there are positive signs, too—the number of people living in poverty dropped by 3.5 million in 2015. Hillary Clinton cites these numbers in a New York Times op-ed introducing her plans for tackling poverty, and as she points out, that last number makes clear that policy can make a difference.

And this is Hillary Clinton. She has policy ideas. Good jobs are first, of course—there’s no better way to make people not poor than to create jobs that pay above-poverty wages. Which also means raising the minimum wage, and making equal pay for women a reality. But there’s more. Affordable housing:

My plan would expand Low Income Housing Tax Credits in high-cost areas to increase our affordable housing supply, and fuel broader community development. So if you are a family living in an expensive city, you would be able to find an affordable place to call home and have access to the transportation you need to get to good jobs and quality schools.

The childcare program Clinton already unveiled, guaranteeing that no family will spend more than 10 percent of its income on childcare, is an important anti-poverty program. Paid family leave is on the list, too. But while those proposals would help a broad swath of American workers, from poor to upper middle class, Clinton also has proposals targeted more specifically at poverty:

Tim Kaine and I will model our anti-poverty strategy on Congressman Jim Clyburn’s 10-20-30 plan, directing 10 percent of federal investments to communities where 20 percent of the population has been living below the poverty line for 30 years. And we’ll put special emphasis on minority communities that have been held back for too long by barriers of systemic racism.

Donald Trump? Well, even if he wanted to take on poverty, he wouldn’t have a plan beyond making America great again and building a wall, because Trump does not do policy. But safe to say Donald Trump doesn’t give a damn about poor people.

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● Good news from the AFL-CIO:

One of our latest internal polls shows Trump has plummeted 12 points among union members in Ohio.  From June to early September, he is now down from 44 to 32 percent. How bad is that? Trump is performing 5 points worse than Mitt Romney who received 37 percent of the union vote in Ohio. 

● Interesting: the AFL-CIO is backing the Dakota Access Pipeline, because jobs, while AFL-CIO constituency groups including the A. Phillip Randolph Institute, the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, and Pride at Work are opposing it.

● The invaluable Charles Pierce.

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● Workers Independent News report for September 20, 2016:

More than 100 local school committees have voted to oppose Question 2 on the Massachusetts ballot, which would lift the state’s cap on the number of charter schools allowed. Local, elected school committees have good reason to oppose lifting the cap—not only are charters a drain on the budgets of public schools, but backers of Question 2 explicitly say that one of their goals is moving away from local control of schools.

Mercedes Schneider reports that, at a debate on the issue, the voice of charter expansion:

[Former state Rep. Marty] Walz maintains that “local control …got us into this situation,” and by “this situation,” Walz means, “thousands of students are being left behind by their school districts.”

Got us into what, exactly? Schneider cites Massachusetts results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress:

Massachusetts outperformed all of the other states in grade 4 and tied for grade 8. [...]

Overall Performance for Mathematics Massachusetts tied for first with three other states on both the grade 4 and grade 8 mathematics assessments.

Heavens, yes, local control got us into this terrible, terrible situation. We need to turn education over to unelected, nontransparent entities! Meanwhile, not a single school committee—again, we’re talking locally, democratically elected school committees—has voted to support Question 2.