Our leaders at work

Rep. Jim Renacci (R-Ohio) [- running against Senator Sherrod Brown -]  wrote in Federal Election Commission filings that his campaign has spent as much as $2,500 on private travel expenses since January with Don Ksiezyk, a private pilot and owner of the Peek-A-Boos and the Bug-A-Boos strip clubs in Cleveland, according to The Columbus Dispatch.

Eric Blankenstein,  a senior Trump appointee responsible for enforcing laws against financial discrimination, once questioned in blog posts written under a pen name if using the n-word was inherently racist and claimed that the great majority of hate crimes were hoaxes, the Washington Post reports.

Brock Long, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), used government vehicles and staff on 40 trips he took for personal reasons despite warnings that those uses weren't authorized, according to The Washington Post.

As Amazon works to combat its public image as a starvation-wage employer by doling out mere pennies in pay hikes and deploying an army of workers to sing the company's praises on Twitter, a video leaked on Wednesday revealed that the trillion-dollar company is continuing to work feverishly behind the scenes to crush any attempts by workers to unionize and bargain collectively for better wages and working conditions. The 45-minute training video—which, according to Gizmodo, was sent to managers of the Amazon-owned Whole Foods last week—instructs company leaders on how to detect "early warning signs of potential organizing," which include workers "suddenly hanging out together" and using "union words" like "living wage."