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#and yet all i see are pieces about how Biden Has Failed
keywestlou · 1 year
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CRANBERRIES…..THE IRRELEVANT RELEVANT
CRANBERRIES…..THE IRRELEVANT RELEVANT - https://keywestlou.com/cranberries-the-irrelevant-relevant/The huge Thanksgiving meal tomorrow. Each and every part already running through my head. The anticipation part of the holiday joy for me. For many, this year's meal is plagued by its cost. Thanksgiving dinner twice as much this year as last year. With one exception. Cranberries! Buy more, eat more, enjoy more! Cranberries this Thanksgiving season are 13 percent cheaper. The reason production is up 4 percent. Cranberries normally an irrelevant part of the holiday meal. This year has relevancy. The National Catholic Reporter (NPR) calls them as it sees them when it comes to the Catholic Church. A recent article re the U.S. Bishops' Conference Annual Meeting reflects its independent position. The NPR reported "the U.S. Bishops' decline into irrelevance will continue." The U.S. Bishops' organization is not pro Rome. Nor is it pro Francis. Far from it. The group sides with U.S. evangelicals, the far right, Trump and MAGA. They are influenced by the likes of Steve Bannon and Newt Gingrich. A new president was elected at the Conference. Anti-Francis. The new President is Archbishop Timothy Broglio. He is considered a "culture warrior." In the 1990's, he lacked sympathy for victims of clergy sex. He fought efforts by U.S. bishops to confront the crisis. He failed to confront the COVID-19 pandemic. Neither the Bishops' Conference nor Broglio are friends of Biden. Biden is a practicing Catholic. Yet no plans are in the works for the group and Biden to meet. Nor is such a meeting expected to be arranged. The gulf is distinct. Neither side is interested in one. Elon Musk continues to amaze me. As does how he became a billionaire. He appears committed to destroying Twitter. Though he does not appear aware. Last week, he reinstated Trump to use Twitter. Yesterday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene is thrilled. She vowed to test "every limit of free speech on Twitter." May Musk, Trump, Greene and Twitter fail. Washington Post columnist George Will in a recent column wrote: "Now the GOP can repent for the Trump era by denying him the nomination." Will the U.S. ever really have gun control? Biden's success a few months ago the first piece of significant gun legislation in 30 years. Not enough, however. Killings continue. Massacres common place. The nation cries out for more control. Stiffer control. Effective control. A few days ago, killings and injuries were inflicted at a LGBTQ night club in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Yesterday, a Virginia Walmart shooting where 6 were killed and more injured. The last day for hurricane season is next week on November 30. Key West has a tradition. The Conch Republic conducts a hurricane flag burning ceremony on November 30. This year's will be conducted at USCGC Ingham at Truman Waterfront Park. Live music at 4, the burning at 5. Syracuse lost last night to St. John's in the Championship Game of the Empire Classic in Brooklyn. In overtime, 76-69. For me. the game a strange one. It began at 9:30. I am asleep by 9:30 most evenings. I made it last night till about 10 minutes left in the game. Syracuse winning by 10. The game an excellent one till I fell asleep. St. John's came out with a tough brutal in your face defense. Syracuse quickly adapted. Game close. Syracuse up 5-6 points at half time. Joe Girard scored 31 points the night before. Last night, he was scoreless the whole first half. I think his total was 4-5 points all night. It was not St. John's defending him that caused his low production. He just did not have it. He appeared exhausted the whole game. Always a step behind. His shots off. When I dropped off to sleep, Syracuse was ahead 50-40. When I woke, the teams were already into the overtime. What I did not see was a 16-2 run by St. John's while I slept. Turned the game around. St. John's outscored Syracuse in the overtime 11-4. What I did see clearly indicated Syracuse's ass was dragging. Sloppy ball. Poor ball handling. Forget scoring. St. John's was not affected by tiredness, though they had the same reasons as Syracuse to be. From what I saw during the game, Syracuse's defense was outstanding. Dramatically improved from the night before. I am not down on the team.....yet. They are young. Several freshman. Have the makings of a quality team. Time will tell. Enjoy your day!  
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qqueenofhades · 2 years
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Wow, every single time I (foolishly) think that Republicans can’t get more blatant about it, they uh... go and get more blatant about it. Twice in 24 hours, even! (Dishonorable mention to Mitch McConnell claiming that “African Americans” vote at the same rate as “Americans,” because the evil racist turtle couldn’t conceal the fact that [white] Americans are the only ones he considers to be Real. Thanks for the boost in Black turnout for the midterms, Mitch!)
Anyway, this completely predictable and yet totally jaw-dropping nonsense is almost on par with the (GOP-controlled, obviously) Indiana state legislature wanting to allow parents to  a) opt their child out of any part of public school curriculum they didn’t want them to learn (which lbr, is any fact, especially historical, that challenges white supremacist religious extremism, and b) force the teacher to provide a bespoke alternate lesson plan for their little racist snowflake in its place. Which is obviously even more idiotic on... many, many levels, but also, this is the terrifying level of total departure from empirical reality with which we are now dealing. And yet, the media at large is practically wetting itself with all the JOE BIDEN DOOMED, DEMOCRATS DOOMED, BIDEN FAILED TO TOTALLY FIX HUGE MESS IN FIRST YEAR, THEREFORE DOOOOOOOOMED!!!! angstpieces it wants to churn out instead, so someone’s gotta talk about the rest of it.
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Taxes are for the little people
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If you wanna do crimes, make them incredibly complicated and technical. Like the hustlers that came into the bookstore I worked at and spun these long-ass stories about why they needed money for a Greyhound ticket home.
Those guys shoulda studied the private equity sector.
Private equity's playbook is to borrow giant sums by putting up other peoples' companies as collateral (yes, really). Then they use that money to buy the company they mortgaged, and pay themselves a huge dividend.
Then they sell off the company's assets and pay themselves even more money. That leaves the company in a state of precarity - assets they once owned, like their buildings, they now rent. If the rent goes up, they have to find the money to cover it.
All of this forms a pretense for mass layoffs, defaulting on pension obligations, lowering product quality, stiffing suppliers and borrowing more money. If the company doesn't go bust, the PE looters can flip it to *another* PE company, that does it again.
Whenever you see something really terrible happening to a business that once offered useful products and services and paid decent wages, it's a safe bet that PE is behind it. Toys R Us, Sears, your local hospital - and that memestock favorite, AMC.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/12/mammon-worshippers/#silver-lake-partners
Private equity goons make their money in two ways: the first is by pocketing 20% of  these special dividends and other extractive policies that hollow out business.
This is money at PE managers get paid for spending their investors' money. It's a wage, in other words.
But thanks to the "carried interest" loophole (a hangover from 16th-century sea captains that has nothing to do with "interest" on loans), they get to treat these wages as "capital gains" and pay far less tax on them.
The fact that we give preferential tax treatment to capital gains (money derived from gambling), while taxing wages (money derived from doing useful work) at higher rates really tells you everything you need to know about our economic priorities.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest
The carried interest loophole lets PE crooks treat their salaries as capital gains, are taxed at a much lower rate than the wages of the workers whose lives they're destroying.
On top of the 20% profit-share that PE bosses get every year, they also pocket a 2% "management fee" for all the "value" they add to the companies they've taken over.
This is *definitely* a wage. The 20% profit-share at least has an element of risk, but that 2% is guaranteed.
But PE bosses have spent more than a decade booking that 2% wage as a capital gain, using a tax-fraud tactic called "fee waivers." The details of how a fee waiver don't matter because it's all bullshit, like the tale of the needful Greyhound ticket.
All that matters is that a legal fiction allows people earning *eight- or nine-figure salaries* to treat *all* of those wages as capital gains and pay lower rates of tax on them than the janitors who clean their toilets or the workers whose jobs they will annihilate.
Now, the IRS knows all about this. Whistleblowers came forward in 2011 to warn them about it. The Treasury even struck a committee to come up with new rules to fix it.
But Obama failed to make those rules stick, and then Trump put a former tax-cheat enabler in charge of redrafting them. The cheater-friendly rules became law on Jan 5, and handed PE bosses hundreds of millions in savings every year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/12/business/private-equity-taxes.html
The New York Times report on "fee waivers" goes through the rulemaking history, the technical details of the scam, and the gutting of the IRS, which can no longer afford to audit rich people and now makes its quotas by preferentially auditing low earners who can't afford lawyers.
But former securities lawyer Jerri-Lynn Scofield's breakdown of the Times piece on Naked Capitalism really connects the dots:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/06/private-inequity-nyt-examines-how-the-private-equity-industry-avoids-taxes.html
As Scofield and Yves Smith point out, if Biden wanted to do one thing for tax justice, he could abolish preferential treatment for capital gains. If we want a society of makers and doers instead of owners and gamblers, we shouldn't penalize wages and reward rents.
There's an especial urgency to this right now. As the PE bosses themselves admit, they went on a buying spree during the pandemic (they call it "saving American businesses"). Larger and larger swathes of the productive economy are going into the PE meat-grinder.
Worse still, the PE industry has revived its most destructive tactic, the "club deal," whereby PE firms collaborate to take out whole economic sectors in one go:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals
We're at an historic crossroads for tax justice. On the one hand, you have the blockbuster Propublica report on leaked IRS files that revealed that the net tax rate paid by America's billionaires is close to zero.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#eat-the-rich
This has left the Bootlicker-Industrial Complex in the bizarre position of arguing that anyone who suggests someone who amasses billions of dollars should pay more than $0 in tax is a radical socialist (so far, the go-to tactic is to make performative noises about privacy).
At the same time, the G7 has agreed to an historical tax deal that will see businesses taxed at least 15% on the revenue they make in each country, irrespective of the accounting fictions they use to claim that the profits are being earned in the middle of the Irish Sea.
That deal is historical, but the fact that it's being hailed as curbing corporate power reveals just how distorted our discourse about corporate taxes has become.
As Thomas Piketty writes, self-employed people pay 20-50% tax in countries that will tax the world's wealthiest companies a mere 15%: "For SMEs as well as for the working and middle classes, it is impossible to create a subsidiary to relocate its profits to a tax haven."
Piketty, like Gabriel Zucman, says that EU nations should charge multinationals a minimum of 25%, and like Zucman, he reminds us that the G7 deal does nothing to help the poorest countries in the Global South.
https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/2021/06/15/the-g7-legalizes-the-right-to-defraud/
These countries and the EU have something in common: they aren't "monetarily sovereign" (that is, they don't issue their own currencies *and* borrow in the currencies they issue).
Sovereign currency issuers (US, UK, Japan, Canada, Australia, etc) don't need to tax in order to pay for programs - first they spend new money into the economy and then they tax it back out again.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/10/compton-cowboys/#the-deficit-myth
These countries can run out of stuff to buy in their currency, but they can't run out of the currency itself. Monetarily sovereign countries don't tax to fund their operations.
Rather, they tax to fight inflation (if you spend money into the economy every year but don't take some of it out again through taxation, more and more money will chase the same goods and services and prices will go up).
And just as importantly, monetary sovereigns tax to reduce the spending power - and hence the political power - of the wealthy. The fact that PE bosses had billions of tax-free dollars at their disposal let them spend millions to distort tax policy to legalize fee waivers.
Taxing the money - and hence the power - of wage earners at higher rates than gamblers creates politics that value gambling above work, because gamblers get to spend the winnings they retain on political influence, including campaigns to rig the casino in their favor.
This discredits the whole system, shatters social cohesion and makes it hard to even imagine that we can build a better world - or avert the climate-wracked dystopia on the horizon.
But for Eurozone countries (whose monetary supply is controlled by technocrats at the ECB) and countries of the Global South (whom the IMF has forced into massive debts owed in US dollars, which they can only get by selling their national products), tax is even more urgent.
The US could fund its infrastructure needs just by creating money at the central bank.
EU and post-colonial lands can only fund programs with taxes, so for them, billionaires don't just distort their priorities and corrupt their system - they also starve their societies.
But that doesn't mean that monetary sovereigns can tolerate billionaires and their policy distortions. The UK is monetarily sovereign, in the G7, and its finance minister is briefing to have the City of London's banks exempted from the new tax deal.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-08/u-k-pushes-for-city-of-london-exemption-from-global-tax-deal
Now, the City of London is one of the world's great financial crime-scenes, and its banks are responsible for an appreciable portion of the planet-destabilizing frauds of the past 100 years.
During the Great Financial Crisis AIG used its London subsidiary to commit crimes its US branch couldn't get away with. The City of London was the epicenter of the LIBOR fraud, the Greensill collapse - it's the Zelig of finance crime, the heart of every fraud.
UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak claims banks are already paying high global tax and can't afford to be part of the G7 tax deal. If that was true, it wouldn't change the fact that these banks are too big to jail and anything that shrinks them is a net benefit.
But it's not true.
As the tax justice campaigner  Richard Murphy points out, the risk to banks like Barclays adds up to 0.8% of global turnover: "The big deal is that the 15% global minimum tax rate is much too low. Suinak has yet again spectacularly missed the point."
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2021/06/09/how-big-is-the-tax-hit-on-banks-from-the-g7-tax-deal-that-sunak-fears-really-going-to-be/
Image: Joshua Doubek (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IRS_Sign.JPG
CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
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septembriseur · 3 years
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I want to come back to this article, which I reblogged a post from (after seeing it reblogged by loads of people on my dash). I recommend reading the article if you haven’t done so. Its central argument revolves around the idea that “modern liberal democracy presents itself as non-ideological beyond ideology,” and that ideology itself is always presented in literature/media as unacceptably violent— villainous. (I would argue that, in fact, any sort of cultural “accretion,” in the sense that culture is perceived as "on top of” and obscuring universalized western ideology,  is tolerated only insofar as it is not really taken specifically or seriously. That’s why even characters who are presented as deeply religious (think of Matt Murdock or Rogue One’s Baze and Chirrut) are portrayed as religious in a way that is broad, universal, flexible, and vague. 
One issue that the article doesn’t really delve into is that supposedly “ideologue” villains are actually profoundly anideological, except insofar as their ideology is, like, anti- modern liberal democracy’s lack of ideology. A really interesting example of this is in Iron Man: Tony Stark gets held hostage by a group of extremists whose extreme belief is... well... even the MCU wiki seems unable to provide any detail on this beyond “destroying world peace.” The film employs a weird move where it obviously relies on the Afghan setting of the villainous Ten Rings to suggest associations with radical Islamism, yet also provides evidence that the Ten Rings are not Islamists. On the one hand, it provides a sort of generic Western specter of radical Islamists— brown men speaking foreign languages and living in Afghan caves— and on the other hand it coyly removes all potential religious, political, or cultural motivation for their actions. These guys aren’t impoverished tribesmen who’ve been subject to tumultuous centuries of imperial warfare, and they’re not religious extremists living out masculine power fantasies. They’re just a group of dudes who kind of look vaguely Middle Eastern and kind of sound vaguely Middle Eastern (since Arabic and Persian are the languages we hear the most). 
Of course, there’s a real-world explanation for this: Marvel wants to be able to tap into that specter of radical Islamism without offending Muslim consumers. But the textual effect is to create a picture of the world in which terrorism in Afghanistan is evacuated of all meaning. Don’t get me wrong: terrorism in Afghanistan is unbelievably destructive and to a large extent nihilistic, in that it benefits no one and spreads only despair and suffering. But at the same time, it arises out of a historical, political, economic, and religious-cultural context, and if you refuse to understand this context, then you will fail to understand why people make the choice to become terrorists (or how to stop them).
That’s the real problem here: the creation of a world in which the only rational choice is modern liberal democracy, and all other choices are nonsensical. 
Marvel is a great site at which to explore this, simply because there’s so much of it. (You could also easily look at Star Wars, as MacQuarrie does in that article— why does the First Order want power? New extended universe writers have fleshed this out more in their web of liminally canonical texts, but on screen the answer seems to be, in the words of the also-manifestly-guilty-of-this-and-guilty-in-other-ways Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible: “the world is a mess, and I just need to rule it.”) 
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is a wildly characteristic example of this. It has the thankless task of trying to engage with the effects of the canonically almost effect-free (cf Spider-man: Far From Home) blip, and pieces together a weirdly nonsensical storyline in which the blip enable border-free mass migration, which was revoked when the other half of the world’s population reappeared. The plot revolves around a group of super soldier refugees/displaced persons who want to stop borders from being reimposed on the world. Sam Wilson refers to the refugees as “people who have been welcomed into countries that previously kept them out with barb wire,” and indeed it's hard to imagine any version of this narrative in which the “migration” we’re talking about is the migration of Global South nationals to the Global North. There’s a really plausible specter here: the Global North does source its manual and domestic labor from the Global South while, whenever possible, keeping Global South nationals out with barbed wire. It does make sense that the Global North would import laborers and then attempt to deport them when their presence was no longer convenient. That is, in fact, literally what has happened/is happening in the UK to foreign healthcare workers during the pandemic.
However, as in Iron Man, Marvel wants to mobilize a specter while also evacuating it of all meaning. None of the displaced people we see in TFATWS bear any resemblance to real-world displaced persons. In spite of their United Colors of Benetton racial diversity, they display no marks of culture, religion, nationality, or indeed poverty. They even have British and American accents. They are completely neutral in every way.
This matters for several reasons. First of all, it allows the viewer to differentiate between the migrants on-screen— Western-looking, English-speaking, non-religious— with migrants off-screen: [perceived to be] too religious, non-English-speaking, culturally and racially “other.” Secondly (again as with Iron Man), it removes all context from the act of migration. Why did these people become migrants? Uh... because of the blip, I guess? Beyond some vague references to suffering, it’s never addressed. This allows the viewer to completely detach the question of migrants/displacement from any of its structural context. Why do people migrate in the real world? Because their countries have been completely devastated by warfare, often proxy warfare carried out by imperial states. Because climate change has completely devastated the regions where they live, with or without triggering devastating warfare. Because they belong to ethnic, political, and/or religious groups that are being systematically destroyed by state governments. Because colonialism and neoliberal capitalism have completely devastated the economies of the regions where they live. This is why the stakes of migration are high. 
If, as the show suggests, people just migrate for various personal reasons that really aren’t that important, then the stakes are not high, and we don’t have to feel bad about the behavior of our governments. This is a huge problem at a time when Denmark is shipping Syrian asylum-seekers back to Syria because it’s apparently fine now, Joe Biden is failing to make good on campaign promises about increasing refugee quotas, the UK is housing asylum seekers in situations that violate human rights law, migrant drownings in the Mediterranean Sea have become a regular feature, and the United States has systematically resisted fulfilling its promises to Iraqis and Afghans who risked their lives working for US forces in exchange for visas.
But, like, above and beyond the specific political issue of migration: what is the Flag Smasher ideology? “One world, one people.” I accept that there might be some viewers (mostly those with no knowledge or experience of immigration) who oppose this on principle, but it seems pretty obviously... good. So the bad part is... that they’re fighting for it? (According to people in my notes, this is Bad.) It’s possible to read this as another example of what the MacQuarrie article discusses: personal violence good, ideological violence bad. However, once again we have an example of an ideology that is not ideological, an ideology that is a specter cleaned out of any possible substance. The nonsensical choice here (the one beside which modern liberal democratic norms are obvious) is the choice to commit violence when there is no urgency that justifies this— none of the urgency that, in fact, exists in the real world, and explains why people regularly sacrifice their lives in desperate attempts to escape their homes. 
This is a really good example of how capitalism— a force with no real agency or subject, no evil committee planning its deeds— ends up enacting a project that systematically enforces its ideology. Attempts to render narratives apolitical are themselves profoundly political, even when justified in terms of appeal to the consumer. This is one of the most dangerous aspects of media, IMHO. 
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whitehotharlots · 4 years
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Privilege Theory is popular because it is conservative
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Privilege theory, as a formal academic thing, has been around at least since 1989, when Peggy McIntosh published the now-seminal essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Even within academic cultural studies, however, privilege theory was pretty niche until about a decade ago--it’s not what you’d call intellectually sound (McIntosh’s essay contains zero citations), and its limitations as an analytical frame are pretty obvious. I went through a cultural studies-heavy PhD program in the early twenty teens and I only heard it mentioned a handful of times. If you didn’t get a humanities degree, odds are it didn’t enter your purview until 2015 or thereabouts.
This poses an obvious question: how could an obscure and not particularly groundbreaking academic concept become so ubiquitous so quickly? How did such a niche (and, frankly, weird and alienating) understanding of racial relations become so de rigeur that companies that still utilize slave labor and still produce skin whitening cream are now all but mandated to release statements denouncing it? 
Simply put, the rapid ascent of privilege theory is due to the fact that privilege theory is fundamentally conservative. Not in cultural sense, no. But if we understand conservatism as an approach to politics that seeks first and foremost to maintain existing power structures, then privilege theory is the cultural studies equivalent of phrenology or Austrian economics. 
This realization poses a second, much darker question: how did a concept as regressive and unhelpful as privilege become the foundational worldview among people who style themselves as progressives, people whose basic self-understanding is grounded in a belief that they are working to address injustice? Let’s dig into this:
First, let’s go down a well-worn path and establish the worthlessness of privilege as an analytical lens. We’ll start with two basic observations: 1) on the whole, white people have an easier time existing within these United States than non-white people, and 2) systemic racism exists, at least to the extent that non-white people face hurdles that make it harder for them to achieve safety and material success.
I think a large majority of Americans would agree with both of these statements--somewhere in the ballpark of 80%, including many people you and I would agree are straight-up racists. They are obvious and undeniable, the equivalent to saying “politicians are corrupt” or “good things are good and bad things are bad.” Nothing about them is difficult or groundbreaking.
As simplistic as these statements may be, privilege theory attempts to make them the primary foreground of all understandings of social systems and human interaction. Hence the focus on an acknowledgement of privilege as the ends and means of social justice. We must keep admitting to privilege, keep announcing our awareness, again and again and again, vigilance is everything, there is nothing beyond awareness.
Of course, acknowledging the existence of inequities does nothing to actually address those inequities. Awareness can serve as an important (though not necessarily indispensable) precondition for change, but does not lead to change in and of itself. 
I’ve been saying this for years but the point still stands: those who advocate for privilege theory almost never articulate how awareness by itself will bring about change. Even in the most generous hypothetical situation, where all human interaction is prefaced by a formal enunciation of the raced-based power dynamics presently at play, this acknowledgement doesn’t actually change anything. There is never a Step Two. 
Now, some people have suggested Step Twos. But suggestions are usually ignored, and on the rare occasions they are addressed they are dismissed without fail, often on grounds that are incredibly specious and dishonest. To hit upon another well-worn point, let’s look at the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. The majority of Sanders’ liberal critics admit that the senator’s record on racial justice is impeccable, and that his platform would have done substantially more to materially address racial inequities than that being proffered by any of his opponents. That’s all agreed upon, yet we are told that none of that actually matters. 
Sanders dropped out of the race nearly 3 months ago, yet just this past week The New York Times published yet another hit piece explaining that while his policies would have benefitted black people, the fact that he strayed from arbitrarily invoked rhetorical standards meant he was just too problematic to support.  
The piece was written by Sidney Ember, a Wall Street hack who cites anonymous finance and health insurance lobbyists to argue that financial regulation is racist. Ember, like most other neoliberals, has been struggling to reconcile her vague support for recent protests with the fact that she is paid to lie about people who have tried to fix things. Now that people are forcefully demanding change, the Times have re-deployed her to explain why change is actually bad even though it’s good.  
How does one pivot from celebrating the fact that black people will not be receiving universal healthcare to mourning racially disproportionate COVID death rates? They equivocate. They lean even harder on rhetorical purity, dismissing a focus on policy as a priori blind to race. Bernie never said “white privilege.” Well, okay, he did, but he didn’t say it in the right tone or often enough, and that’s what the problem was. Citing Ember:
Yet amid a national movement for racial justice that took hold after high-profile killings of black men and women, there is also an acknowledgment among some progressives that their discussion of racism, including from their standard-bearer, did not seem to meet or anticipate the forcefulness of these protests.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, the legal scholar who pioneered the concept of intersectionality to describe how various forms of discrimination can overlap, said that Mr. Sanders struggled with the reality that talking forcefully about racial injustice has traditionally alienated white voters — especially the working-class white voters he was aiming to win over. But that is where thinking of class as a “colorblind experience” limits white progressives. “Class cannot help you see the specific contours of race disparity,” she said.
Many other institutions, she noted, have now gone further faster than the party that is the political base of most African-American voters. “You basically have a moment where every corporation worth its salt is saying something about structural racism and anti-blackness, and that stuff is even outdistancing what candidates in the Democratic Party were actually saying,” she said.
Crenshaw’s point here is that the empty, utterly immaterial statements of support coming from multinational corporations are more substantial and important than policy proposals that would have actually addressed racial inequities. This is astounding. A full throated embrace of entropy as praxis. 
Crenshaw started out the primary as a Warren supporter but threw her endorsement to Bernie once the race had narrowed to two viable candidates. This fact is not mentioned, nor does Ember feel the need to touch upon any of Biden’s dozens of rhetorical missteps regarding race (you might remember that he kicked off his presidential run with a rambling story about the time he toughed it out with a black ne'er do well named Corn Pop, or his more recent assertion that if you don’t vote for him, “you ain’t black.”). The statement here--not the implication: the direct and undeniable statement--is that tone and posturing are more important than material proposals, and that concerns regarding tone and posturing should only be raised in order to delegitimize those who have dared to proffer proposals that might actually change things for the better. 
The ascendence of privilege theory marks the triumph of selective indignation, the ruling class and their media lackeys having been granted the power to dismiss any and all proposals for material change according to standards that are too nonsensical to be enforced in any fair or consistent manner. The concept has immense utility for those who wish to perpetuate the status quo. And that, more than anything, is why it’s gotten so successful so quickly. But still… why have people fallen for something so obviously craven and regressive? Why are so few decent people able to summon even the smallest critique against it? 
We can answer this by taking a clear look at what privilege actually entails. And this is where things get really, really grim:
What are the material effects of privilege, at least as they are imagined by those who believe the concept to be something that must be sussed out and eradicated? A privileged person gets to live their life with the expectation that they will face no undue hurdles to success and fulfillment because of their identity markers, that they will not be subject to constant surveillance and/or made to suffer grave consequences for minor or arbitrary offenses, and that police will not be able to murder them at will. The effects of “privilege” are what we might have once called “freedom” or “dignity.” Until very recently, progressives regarded these effects not as problematic, but as a humane baseline, a standard that all decent people should fight to provide to all of our fellow citizens. 
Here we find the utility in the use of the specific term “privilege.” Similar to how austerity-minded politicians refer to social security as an “entitlement,” conflating dignity and privilege gives it the sense of something undeserved and unearned--things that no one, let alone members of racially advantaged groups, could expect for themselves unless they were blinded by selfishness and coddled by an insufficiently cruel social structure. The problem isn’t therefore that humans are being selectively brutalized. Brutality is the baseline, the natural order, the unavoidable constant that has not been engineered into our society but simply is what society is and will always be. The problem, instead, is that some people are being exempted from some forms of brutalization. The problem is that pain does not stretch far enough.
We are a nation that worships cruelty and authority. All Americans, regardless of gender or race, are united in being litigious tattletales who take joy in hurting one another, who will never run out of ways to rationalize their own cruelty even as they decry the cruelty of others. We are taught from birth that human life has no value, that material success is morally self-validating, and that those who suffer deserve to suffer. This is our real cultural brokenness: a deep, foundational hatred of one another and of ourselves. It transcends all identity markers. It stains us all. And it’s why we’ve all run headlong into a regressive and idiotic understanding of race at a time when we desperately need to unite and help one another. 
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catbountry · 3 years
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Glancing over some of my older essays on politics, I’m kind of struck how, despite them not being written that long ago, I feel like I come across as a dumbass, or at least like somebody who thinks they’re much smarter than they actually are. And it’s weird, because most of my views are roughly the same; rather, it’s that I feel the way that they’re articulated comes across as too... I don’t know, smarmy? Smug, maybe? Lacking nuance. Blunt. Like I’m talking down to people. Obviously, this was never my intention, but it’s weird how something that was written while in my early 30′s somehow makes me wince a little... as I rapidly approach being smack-dab in the middle of my 30′s. God, I’ve been in my 30′s for almost 5 whole years now, fuck, where does the time go?
I think being able to come out of the other side of the Trump presidency in one piece has kind of helped add some much-needed perspective, at least for myself. I think the hypothesis that a lot of people who voted for Trump were desperate for some kind of change was proven correct when he failed to be re-elected due to his bungling of COVID, which, funnily (or not) enough, he almost could have looked like he was doing the right thing when he initially wanted to close the U.S. borders... except he’d been trying to restrict travel and close borders so often that of course nobody took such a suggestion seriously. And even if they had? Rich people still would have brought it over, because as we all know, rich people can just get away with all kinds of shit. Of course, once it actually hit, Trump really couldn’t handle the idea of looking weak at all, so instead, it was downplayed, joked about, not taken seriously, even though he’d been briefed that it was going to be really, really bad. And when he got it, and in private thought he was going to die? Well, once he beat it, of course he had to say it wasn’t so bad... even though it killed almost a thousand times more people than the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Most of them were seniors. I think that, as well as a general fatigue and disappointment over the lack of swamp-draining from those who weren’t fanatical devotees, probably sealed his fate. I admit, I wasn’t very sure Biden really had much of a chance for a long time... until COVID happened. But hey, at least we got our stimmy from Trump, right lads?
I’m still fully convinced that Trump never intended to win, and that his run was done purely for ego and financial gain, but his ability to effortlessly bait the media, as well as his unexpected exposing of the sham we all knew presidential elections to be, wound up rocketing him to success. Trump will no doubt go down as one of the most successful conmen in American history, one so slick he wound up conning his way all the way into the White House. The whole thing was like if The Producers was a presidential campaign, fascism included. Granted, I don’t think Trump was ever a true fascist; I think he wanted to be a dictator, but the actual job of being President was a drag. The cult of personality he accrued, however, was the biggest source of narcissistic supply that he’d ever experienced in his entire life. Hell, just being the literal President, the most important person in the entire fucking world, is a hell of a high that I don’t think he’ll ever really be able to reclaim. Trump’s going to be chasing that dragon for the rest of his life. Having “President” in front of your name is a lot nicer than actually, you know, having to be the President. I mean, look at how quickly Obama went gray. A lot of people are convinced Trump will run again in 2024, and I don’t doubt it, but unless something happens that completely throws us for a loop, I don’t see him being able to recreate the, er, “magic” of 2016. Everyone getting to see that, not only was his fanbase capable of having embarrassing public meltdowns just like the le epic triggered snowflake lib Hilary supporters, but that their meltdowns were even more embarrassing, and that they all looked like a bunch of fucking English soccer hooligans during the Capitol siege... well, I think that’s going to put off the swing voters, as well as the moderate Republicans.
Also, that Twitter knock-off founded by Trump’s aide, Gettr, being flooded by gay furries posting Sonic the Hedgehog foot porn? Feels like classic 4chan-style raiding. I approve. It almost feels like we’re healing, even if it’s just a little bit.
But what the fuck did we even learn from all this? What did I learn from this?
I don’t know. It feels like over the time I’ve been on Tumblr, what was once SJW became woke, and being woke has become very normal; so normal, in fact, that fucking massive corporations that use slave labor overseas will change their Twitter icons to rainbow every June because The Gays have become a safe, marketable demographic. On one hand, it’s nice to know that, at least in what I guess is considered the western world, LGBT people are more accepted now than they ever have been. On the other... god, it feels so cynical, doesn’t it? This is all very stream of consciousness, here. I don’t write very much on here since, surprise surprise, Tumblr’s been kind of dead since the porn ban. I still see people post, but it used to be that I couldn’t refresh my dash without seeing dozens of new posts. Now it feels like I refresh my dash and I’d be lucky to see a new post there an hour later. This is why I’m on Discord more. It feels like I have more productive conversations than I ever could on Tumblr or Twitter. Twitter is just... god. It’s like all the worst parts of Tumblr without the parts that made it fun aside from a few memes.
Sorry, I got off track there. The point I was going to make before is that, while I am still very firmly anti-censorship, I’ve managed to put myself in a position where it no longer feels like the stakes are so high. I can relax. I don’t have to feel like I’m on the defense the whole time as somebody grills me over some slip-up. I don’t use Twitter that much. When I do post something in response to somebody, I feel like I instantly regret it. I posted in response to some dumbass spreading a rumor that 4chan’s favorite Simpson’s meme about Sneed’s Feed and Seed is secretly ableist, and I got a response from some dude with an Umaru-chan avatar telling me how he’s proudly racist because he and his friends call each other slurs? Like bro, you’re posting cringe, you’re going to lose subscriber-
I don’t know what I’ve learned yet. Maybe that social media sucks and that chatrooms with friends are the superior way to communicate online. I tried out Telnet recently to go into some random IRC, that was neat. It just feels nice to not have to get into a fucking argument every fucking day over shit that doesn’t matter as much as people thinks it does, to not have to hear about every fucking time the President sneezes or farts. It’s not that there’s no longer anything to worry about; there is. I’d really like to see fellow lefties go after the handful of massive corporations that control the majority of the online experience, who censor not just all the racist white dude grifters in suits who all look suspiciously similar to one another, but us as well. I want to see us raise a bigger stink about the web being santized, sterlized, and gentrified to be friendlier to corporations who only want your precious data and eyeballs. Maybe without the constant distraction of Bad Orange Man, we could make that happen. Maybe.
Or maybe fucking Dream will breathe again and all the fucking children will piss their pants and clog up Twitter, fuck these kids, get off my internet, GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
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Survey #479
“war sends our sons to slaughter  /  another failed attack; there is no turning back”
Have you ever boycotted something? Yes: Chick-fil-A. Homophobic, transphobic pieces of shit. Has anyone ever borrowed something from you, and not returned it? Yes, a video game when I was little. I was so mad, lol. Do you vent a lot on social media? No. I don't want people to get annoyed with me. What was your first bill you started paying on your own? I haven't been responsible for any bills yet. What is your favorite charitable cause to donate to or volunteer for? I can't/don't do either really, but if I could, I'd probably donate to uhhhh... suicide prevention organizations. As for volunteering, definitely something with animals. Have you ever dated someone who wasn’t at all your usual type? No. What is something you have no patience for? Waiting at the doctor's office. Have you ever received a misdiagnosis? Yes. What’s that you’re listening to? I'm watching Gab play The Evil Within 2. What kind of relationship do you have with the last person you kissed? We're a couple. What is your biggest accomplishment in life? Still being alive. What is one thing that you really wish you could understand, but don’t? Political stuff. Economics. Have you ever been tutored or tutored someone yourself? I had an Algebra tutor the last time I was in college, and I had to strangle an anxiety attack down because I wasn't understanding the material AT ALL and felt so dumb and annoying. I never did it again. What was the last thing you said out loud (singing doesn’t count)? "It's really embarrassing," to Mom. It really is fucking humiliating that my ankles are swollen from walking/standing more and pushing my desk chair back against the resistance of the carpet. That's pathetic. I'm trying to focus on the fact it's good my body is even reacting to moving more, though. Is everything you have on actually yours? Yep. Do you ever just randomly drive around when you’re upset about something? I don't drive, but if I did, that would NOT be my method of de-stressing. What was the last act of creativity you displayed? Writing an RP post. What’s your favorite department in Wal-Mart? Uh, I guess where you can go see the plants and flowers. Do you find kite flying boring? I LOVED it as a kid. I'd still probably find it kinda fun. Do you have any interest in visiting Japan? Yes, but it's not a massive interest. I've heard the humidity can kill a bitch, and I am NOT into that. Have you ever run a cash register? Yes. I sucked. Have you ever worked as a server? No. Have you ever done the Bratz challenge on YouTube? No, but I saw James Charles do it and it was v unnerving, holy shit. Would you rather paint or carve a pumpkin? Carve. What was your worst experience in high school? My depression as a whole. How much did your senior prom dress cost you? I don't remember. Have you ever been in a serious romantic relationship? Three, if you include my current one. Which part of your body is the most muscular? Uh, nothing? What is the first site you check when you get online, generally? KM. Are you good at creative writing assignments? That's my forte. In elementary school, I actually won a I think county-wide creative writing short story assignment. Not to brag, but I've always been very proud of that, ha ha. Or would you rather just do an informative essay? That's easy for me too, but I prefer writing creatively. Are you more attracted to the badasses, or the goody-goody types? Definitely the goody-goodies. The "bad guys" have never appealed to me romantically. Do you raise your hand or participate in class? I did if I really wanted to ask something or was confident in an answer. What is something BIG you want to do with your life? Make a difference, somehow. What do you think of people who own wild animals? Do NOT just casually take in animals from the wild. That's selfish and just generally disgusting. If you're going to keep an animal generally described as wild and undomesticated, you'd better have a license and deserve that license. Know what you're doing and be certain that keeping the animal in captivity is in the animal's best interest for its unique case. Are you good at explaining things, in general? NOOOOOOOOO, I suck at that. Do you like visiting the mall? Why or why not? Not our mall, no. Its stores suck/are extremely limited, and SO much crime has happened there. Do you like window shopping? Why or why not? YESSSSSSS, mostly on Morph Market, a mostly reptile selling hub online. You can browse TONS of breeders and literally thousands of reptiles, especially ball pythons. They even have a tarantula section I like to look at sometimes. If you lost your job/home/etc., who would likely help you? If I'm losing my home, I'm assuming my mom is gone, so my dad. Why did you first kiss the last person you kissed? We were a couple and I felt like I was supposed to. At that time I didn't see him romantically, but I desperately wanted to. Funny how we're back together and I've no reservations against kissing him now. Feelings change, for sure. Plans for tonight? Girt and I will probably play some WoW Classic together. We've started playing that together, and it's lots of fun with him. :') Has anyone seen you kiss the last person you kissed? Actually, no. Have you ever been kissed in a car? Yeah. Do you think anyone has feelings for you? I know Girt does. Is there anyone in your life that knows right away something’s wrong with you? My mom. Who last made you smile? Girt, 'cuz he's a sweetheart. Where is your mother? She's in bed in her room. She feels like shit. Like, you would think she WASN'T vaccinated, though her long-time doctor has said she'd probably be dead without it while having Covid. Would you rather look at clouds or stars? Stars. Think about your biggest mistake, would you go back and change it? I absolutely would. Are you dating the person you last kissed? Yeup. What is the most immature item you own and actually use? Um. Idk. Do you always take a shower after you have sex? I... didn't know people did this? Like I know women are advised to pee after sex, but full-on showering? No. Do you like chocolate popsicles? Oh hell yeah. Are your parents proud of you? They claim to be. I don't see how. Are you interested in the ocean? Yeah; it's inarguably so fascinating. Hot dogs or hamburgers? I prefer burgers. Have you ever been to a Chinatown in any of the cities you’ve been to? No. Have you ever been to couple’s counseling? No. Do you have any dietary restrictions? No. Have you ever turned down a job offer? No. What’s the largest animal you’ve ever had as a pet? A dog named Cali that was a boxer mix. Do you ever pray, even if you don't believe in God? What exactly is the point if you don't believe in God...? Anyway, I don't. Have you ever been to Mexico? No. Have you ever gotten stuck in quicksand before? No. What's the shortest or longest length you've ever had your hair grow? To around the small of my back. The last nest you saw - was it a bird nest or a hornet's nest? I think a bird's? Do you enjoy Jeff Dunham? I don't know if I'd like him as a person, but I do think he's a funny comedian. Who is your favorite character from Frozen? I was never into the movies. I do think Elsa is kinda cool (no pun intended, lol), though. I like that she has her flaws. Did you finish high school? If not, do you plan on doing so? I did. Have you been in a simulator that mimicked a submarine or rollercoaster? A rollercoaster, yes. How often do you go out to eat instead of cooking for yourself? Mom and I try to avoid fast food for our health. We do a pretty good job at it, but sometimes for convenience's sake, we do eat it. What is the largest family of siblings that you know of? This is probably gonna come across as very judgmental, but... it really bothers me. I don't know how many kids she has now, but one of the dance moms from the studio has SO many children; I've completely lost count. Now if you want that many kids and can provide for them, that's cool. But that's not the case. She uses the "if God wants me to have a baby, then it will happen" mentality, and I'm just like... um, no hunny. Poor choices are leading to kids you're not adequately providing for. She uses no methods of protection and literally has twins whose room is a fucking closet. Ugh it just really bothers me. What foreign languages were offered to you at school? A whole lot. Only Spanish and I believe French were offered as in-school courses, but there were lots of online classes. If you were required to take a course right now, what would you choose? Photography. Team Biden or Team Trump? Over my dead body would I have voted for Trump. My vote went with Biden. What is an animal native to your country that may not exist in others? Bison are factually exclusive to North America. Note that bison and buffalo are different. What are some of your favorite autumn activities? Taking pictures of fall scenery. <3 What are some of your favorite winter activities? Going out in the snow. :') Especially with a camera. Do you eat a shit-ton the week before your period? uuugggghhHHHHHH yes Wendy's, McDonalds, or Burger King? Wendy's. What's the weirdest question you've ever asked Alexa? I've never asked Alexa anything. Do you prefer your apple cider to be warm or cold? I've actually never had it. Do you prefer your coffee hot or iced? Y'all know the story of me and coffee. Can you sing the alphabet backwards? I can't. Have you ever sent flowers or chocolates to yourself before? Ha ha, no. Is there any meat that you won't eat? Yeah, fish and ANYTHING that comes from a wild animal. Does your cat use anything other than it's scratching post as a scratcher? When we got him a scratcher WITH CATNIP, the lil butthead ignored it. -_- He scratches the carpet instead. Did you go through a vampire craze before? Are you still going through it? Nah. Have you ever forged your parents' signature on a poor test paper, etc? No. Has a bird ever pooped on you before? Omg, no. I'd die. Have you ever been sprayed by a skunk before? No. Are black jellybeans delicious or disgusting? I HATE them. Have you ever rolled down a grassy hill before? I have! I miss that.
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letterstomycountry · 4 years
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Manufacturing Liberal Consent
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Image via TPM
Noam Chomsky wrote a book with Edward S. Herman in 1988 called Manufacturing Consent.  It is about how media outlets are controlled and manipulated by people in positions of power to influence public opinion.  
I couldn’t help but think back to Chomsky’s message in Manufacturing Consent as I took stock of the media coverage of this year’s Democratic primaries, which has been uniformly awful.  
Take, for instance, the popular narrative that after Joe Biden won Michigan that the Bernie Sanders campaign is all but over.  Headlines include:
Sanders not dropping out but where does he go from here?
Bernie Sanders will stay in primary race despite losses in key states
Campaign Says Bernie Sanders Will Not Drop Out Immediately Despite Michigan Loss
Defiant Bernie Sanders vows to soldier on in US campaign
The bleak picture painted by these headlines suggest that the Sanders Campaign’s chances of victory is slim.  But that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.  Right now, Joe Biden has 864 delegates.  Bernie Sanders has 710.  So Bernie is roughly 150 delegates behind.  And there are still over *2000* delegates that haven't been awarded yet.  
So why are so many pundits saying Bernie Sanders' campaign is basically over and has failed to “win key states” when the Obama campaign was even further behind in 2008?  Why the slanted media coverage?
The answer seems pretty clear:
You can see that strikingly today where there is huge debate about Sanders being a socialist. “How can we have a socialist president?” In fact, Sanders is what would be called a moderate social democrat in most other societies. In other societies, the word “socialist” is not a curse word — people call themselves socialists and even communists. In the United States, there’s a stigma attached to it by massive propaganda going way back to 1917. Such huge propaganda efforts to demonize the concepts of socialism and communism (saying it means the “gulag” or whatever) is again pretty much unique to the United States. It’s a barrier to introducing even mild New Deal–style social-democratic reforms.
This stigma is largely a type of manufactured consent, however.  When you ask people if they agree with the policies Bernie Sanders is proposing, polls consistently show that the majority of people approve of his policies.
Polls also consistently show that the Bernie Sanders campaign is the best suited to defeat Donald Trump in the general election.
So why do we continue to hear how dangerous it is to nominate Bernie Sanders as the Democratic presidential candidate from media outlets?  Why are people like Chris Matthews freaking out on national television?  Why are moderate democrats calling for the primary to be “shut down” when there’s still a relatively small gap between the candidates?
This is how the rich and powerful manufacture consent.  They use their influence over media outlets to ensure that a certain narrative is reinforced.   And frankly, I have to say that this year’s coverage of the Democratic primary has been uniquely demonstrative of that fact.  Never before has it been more plain that people in charge of powerful institutions are using their large bank accounts and ability to influence media programming decisions behind the scenes to try to sway public opinion in a specific direction by making certain narratives about politics appear to be "common sense" among the intellectual class.
How else can we explain the fact that we have been bombarded with opinion pieces over the past year telling us how Bernie Sanders isn’t electable, despite poll after poll showing that Bernie Sanders does better against Trump than any other candidate?  How else can we explain the fact that nearly all the other  moderates in the Democratic primary dropped out in near-perfect synchronicity just before Super Tuesday in an effort to shore up support for a single moderate candidate?  
The DNC has made it publicly apparent that they want to stop Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination.  Some reports suggest that Barack Obama made several calls telling the other candidates it was time to drop out and get behind Joe Biden.  Whether that specific factoid is true or not, who knows.  But given the DNC’s very publicly announced bias towards Sanders, it seems probable that there was an organized effort to get the moderate candidates to coalesce around a single moderate.  
And so the DNC has now forced Joe Biden upon us.  A man who--not unlike our current President--apparently has trouble not touching women without their consent.  A man who is showing signs of deteriorating cognitive ability.  A man who is so gaffe prone that his own surrogates are trying to limit the number of public appearances he makes to avoid more media gaffes.  A man who, despite signaling support for the #metoo movement and women’s rights, once said this about Roe v. Wade:
“I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.”
And even if you ignore all this, imagine how Donald Trump--a master of verbal misdirection and appealing to the electorate’s baser instincts on the bully pulpit--will manhandle a Democratic presidential candidate who recently tried to quote a well known phrase from the Declaration of Independence and forgot it halfway.  This is to say nothing of the ammunition Trump will have during the general election given that the Republican led Senate is now proceeding with an official corruption probe into Joe and Hunter Biden’s private dealings.
Despite all this, establishment Dems are doing their best to manufacture consent for Joe Biden.  And by every indication they are doing a hell of a job.  Before Super Tuesday, Biden’s performance was abysmal.  But once he became the only moderate left in the race, and suddenly received a storm of endorsements from other establishment politicians, he was suddenly electorally competitive.  Add to this a little bit of voter suppression designed to discourage young voters from participating, along with the emotional resilience of the “problematic Bernie Bro” mythology that has been empirically demonstrated to be false, you have an excellent full court press designed to manufacture consent for Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Keep this in mind as the primary campaign continues.  And keep it in mind this Sunday when Joe Biden debates Bernie Sanders.  Better yet, think about all of this if  Joe Biden gets the nomination, because if he does, he will almost certainly lose to Donald Trump in November.  Not just because he is a weak candidate, but because nominating Joe Biden is the end of the Democratic party as we know it.  
Progressives have made it clear that they are sick of being lied to and used to support Democratic candidates who then flip the script once they are in office.  They are tired of being black-mailed into supporting candidates like Joe Biden, who told a room of wealthy donors last year that “nothing will fundamentally change” if he is elected President.  
The media has done a fantastic job of making Joe Biden seem like an electable moderate.  But  “our needs our not moderate.”  As we speak, New York City can’t close schools to prevent the Corona Virus from spreading because over 100,000 kids in the NYC school system are homeless and depend on meals from school to get enough food for the day.  But since nothing will fundamentally change if Biden is elected, it sounds like he will not show half as much determination to solve this problem as he showed in opposing federal busing to end segregation in the 1970′s. 
 Remember that Al Gore lost in 2000.  John Kerry lost in 2004.  Hillary Clinton lost in 2016.  And recall that Obama won in 2008 by appealing to young voters, who are  much more supportive of progressive policies than older voters.   Despite this, the Democratic party has once again--just like in 2000, 2004, and 2016--made it abundantly clear that it would rather run a weak establishment moderate and lose, than run a progressive change candidate and win.  Why?  Well, at least that way, wealthy democratic donors get to keep their yacht money.  
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hadenodom · 3 years
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On Last Week’s Incident in the Capitol
It isn’t often that I write a long, detailed opinion piece, but I feel like this time in particular is a time in which it is my patriotic duty to speak up.
Sometime late in 2019, I remember coming across an op-ed by a political commentator whose name I cannot remember.  This opinion piece highlighted the growth of extreme movements within the United States - namely AntiFa and The Proud Boys and related groups on both sides of the political spectrum - and how they’d become more bold in their violence in recent years.  It then dug back into the kind of messaging that was being boosted by Russian and other foreign intelligence agencies on social media during the 2016 election - and in this piece, the author discussed something that is often overlooked:  the social media messaging portion of Russia’s efforts during that election weren’t focused on boosting a single candidate’s campaign or even with reaching on side of the political aisle.  The messages they were boosting were, across the board, pushing rhetoric to inflame and provoke the extreme elements of both sides of our political divide and to widen that gap.  The author finished the op-ed by offering his analysis that these efforts had been effective, and that our country was in the process of being torn apart by divisive and hateful rhetoric - that Americans had been turned against Americans, and that this was going to have a destructive effect on our democracy. 
I remember reading that op-ed and being skeptical.  Sure, things had reached a fever pitch in 2016, but in 2019 it seemed like everything was calming down.  The economy was doing alright, there hadn’t been as much chaos or violence in the news, and the doomsday of Americans turning on each other over political differences seemed far-fetched.  I came away thinking that the Russians’ efforts to divide us had been in vain, and that our country was past the pains of that particularly fraught period.  We would elect someone other than Trump in 2020, and our troubles would pass.
I didn’t have 2020 vision.  I didn’t forsee the economy tanking due to a virus, streets erupting in protests over racial disparities once again, AntiFa and Anarchist elements openly looting and rioting in the unrest, and then, following a chaotic election, Trump’s supporters taking to the streets and getting violent, and then eventually descending on the capitol, fully invested in a conspiracy theory that the election had been rigged.  I didn’t forsee QAnon getting an outsize following and inserting themselves into this whole storyline.  I didn’t forsee a large portion of our society swallowing an outright lie about election fraud and refusing to believe that our democratic system worked.  I didn’t forsee any of this, and I feel like I’ve awakened in the midst of a national nightmare.  
Put simply, the situation is dire.  The potential consequences are dire.  Our nation’s population has large factions that actively believe that their opponents are *Un*-American.  The diehard Trump supporters believe that Democrats do not have the best interests of the country at heart, and most Democrats (and most Independents that aren’t leaning right) believe that Trump supporters are fascists, Nazis, traitors, and bigots.  The political rhetoric coming from both the White House and from those with large media followings has stoked these tensions and gotten them to where they are today - with a little help from Russian Social Media operations way back in 2016, which seems like a distant memory now. 
Making matters worse, these factions seem to have adopted separate realities with separate sets of facts- in one reality, the election was rigged: Covid-19 was either fake or not a serious threat: there’s a cabal of pedophiles orchestrating our government, and some guy named Q is an inside guy telling us the truth when the media won’t; Trump is either not a racist, or is only as racist as their lovely grandparents and their grandparents can’t be *that* bad.   In the other reality, the election was thoroughly secured, had a verifiable paper trail, and has been investigated to death -- and Joe Biden won by a large margin; Covid had the capacity to overwhelm hospitals and cause hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths if we didn’t take the proposed measures seriously; A Pedophile ring running our government is as patently ridiculous as the day is long; And Q is an obvious bullshitter who moves the goalposts every time his predictions and ‘insights’ fall flat; and finally, that Donald Trump is demonstrably racist and bigoted. 
Working on these separate sets of facts, both of these factions have come to believe that the other is everything wrong with their country - that their opponents (including everyday working-class people who support their opponents) are not patriots, are against what America stands for, and are worth lashing out at violently in the streets. 
These factions aren’t leaving with Trump, and they proved it in the Capitol last week.  They threatened for weeks to unleash violence on the Capitol.  They posted detailed plans about how they were going to intimidate our representatives - our elected voice in Congress - with violence, well in advance.  They repeatedly used phrases on social media before the attack, and shouted these kinds of phrases during the attack:  “We will not go quietly”  - phrases that all but indicated that they weren’t done just because pesky Democracy had denied their candidate a victory.  
What, then, is our course as a country as Trump leaves office in a couple of short weeks?  How will our leaders unite us?  Personally, after much reflection, I believe our elected leaders do have a duty to attempt to unite us - or to at least refrain from provoking these tensions - but I believe the real duty is upon all of us. 
It is incumbent upon all of us to remember that our fellow Americans are not our enemies - they are our neighbors, and most of us all share the same kinds problems and burdens in life.  We all look to some political philosophy that tries to meet these challenges and address them, and seek political leaders who espouse these pet philosophies.  If someone’s going through the same struggles as you and has a different idea of how to fix those problems for his or her country, they are not your enemy.  Sure, certain things aren’t up for good-natured debate - racism, xenophobia, and bigotry can be excluded.  But we should be able to discuss our problems as a country with our neighbors, and discuss differing ideas of how to solve them, without descending into vitriol and animosity.  We should be able to understand each other.  I feel that the only way to fix that is to make the effort to reach out and talk to those we disagree with.  I have neighbors, family members, and coworkers who hold vastly different political ideologies from me, and for too long, when I hear them discussing politics, I shy away from joining the conversation, because I feel like I’d be inviting that kind of vitriol and bickering into my life.  It can be uncomfortable and awkward to arrive at that stage of a conversation, where someone things you a radical leftist or a bigot simply because you dared to offer a slightly differing opinion from theirs.  Social media amplifies this, because that’s the kind of response it has conditioned us to expect - the kind of response that would come from anonymous shitpostsers on the other side of a keyboard.  But I’ve found that when I do, in good faith, step in and have those difficult conversations - and really have a conversation, rather then try to insert my opinion over their - when I sit down and listen to my friends, family, coworkers, or neighbors tell me about their issues and what they care about politically, and I then carefully consider their ideas and offer my own - I’ve found that experience vastly rewarding.  I’ve found myself able to identify with people who I’d otherwise completely disagree with, and I’ve even found that those conversations can end with a mutual understanding and even a slight change of heart on one side or the other, or simply a mutual respect.  It turns out, we’re all (the vast majority of us) interested in seeing our country and all of its people flourish and thrive, safe and secure, and passing on a better country to the next generation of Americans. 
Therefore I’m making an effort to get out of my shell and have those awkward conversations again.  We’ve all allowed ourselves to wallow in echo chambers, neither exposing ourselves to differing opinions or exposing our opinions to others.  This pandemic, combined with social media’s tendency to be a “build-your-own-echo-chamber” kit, has amplified this in 2020.  But in 2021, let’s all resolve to have those difficult conversations and to really listen to each other.  If you do it for no other reason, do it to save our Republic from being destroyed from within. 
I’ll finish this opinion piece with a quote you may be familiar with, one that I heard repeated on the radio recently and that has resounded infinitely with my soul in recent days: 
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature”
-- Abraham Lincoln
That is from Lincoln’s inaugural address in 1861.  We, as a country, failed to listen to Lincoln then.  The Civil War occurred, and it took our country centuries to recover.  You might argue that it was necessary to eradicate the institution of slavery and that slavery, as an institution, could not have been eradicated as quickly without the civil war.  I will not disagree.  But I will disagree on the idea that a coming civil war is necessary or beneficial - if we come to that point now, History will remember us as violent and shortsighted fools who destroyed their country, the global bastion of liberty and human rights, from the inside out.
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go-redgirl · 3 years
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Ron Johnson, Mitt Romney, Donald Trump and Joe Biden Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images
People tend to think of "activists" as left-wingers who march in the streets against wars or organize rallies for civil rights and social justice. And there is a great tradition in America and around the world for such liberal activism. But it's not just the left that has an activist tradition. The right has one too — and it's often extremely effective.
In the post-WWII years, the right in the U.S. was focused on anti-communism and far-right groups like the John Birch Society attracted middle-class men and women to join clubs and meet to discuss how to fight the onslaught from inside their suburban cul de sacs. In the New Republic some years back, historian Rick Perlstein recounted a hilarious quote from a Dallas housewife in Time Magazine in 1961 saying, "I just don't have time for anything. I'm fighting Communism three nights a week." From the Goldwater campaign in 1964 on, right-wing activists focused much of their energy on getting Republicans elected to office, from school boards to the presidency, and were quite successful at it.
The right-wing grassroots has always organized itself around the idea that they are under siege and unless they pull together to defend themselves, everything they value will be destroyed. Whether it was fighting communism, secularism, terrorism, civil rights or whatever social justice movement that was supposedly threatening their way of life, the right has always been convinced that they are in imminent danger. And when they find themselves at odds with their own fellow Americans, as they so often do, this sense of victimization and martyrdom is what fuels the culture war at the heart of their complaints. As Perlstein wrote in that 2006 piece:
Conservative culture itself is radically diverse, infinitely resourceful in uniting opposites: highbrow and lowbrow; sacred and profane; sublime and, of course, ridiculous. It is the core cultural dynamic--the constant staging and re-staging of acts of "courage" in the face of liberal "marginalization"--that manages to unite all the opposites. It keeps conservatives from one another's throats--and keeps them more or less always pulling in the same political direction.
Donald Trump, however, has upended that longstanding dynamic — and the party establishment has no idea what to do about it.
Igor Bobick of the Huffington Post recently reported that Republican officials are anxiously awaiting a resurgence of the Tea Party, which they have been expecting to reconstitute in the face of Joe Biden's ambitious agenda. It was, after all, a smashing success back in 2009 and 2010 in opposing President Barack Obama's health care plan. You'd certainly assume that they'd be getting the band back together. But so far, it isn't happening. And there's a reason for it: people like what they are seeing.
Bobic quotes deficit hawk Republican Sen. Mike Braun saying, "even my counties back in Indiana are happy, which is a very conservative area. They're asking, 'How can I spend $15 million in a rural county?'" Braun ruefully admits that Biden's agenda is a smart political move and he's right. Biden and the Democrats are betting that people are hungry for some positive government action and they are determined to deliver it.
But there's more to it than that.
The Tea Party was a grassroots movement but it was also heavily subsidized by some of the wealthiest activists in the country. The Koch brothers' operation and other wealthy interests spent quite a bit of money to make the Tea Party a reality because their libertarian ideology really was on the line. But when you think about it, it was a bizarre set of issues for grassroots activists who usually organize themselves around a sense of victimization. And it didn't really fit their usual modus operandi. The "threat" was a total abstraction. How were they "victims" of other people getting health care?
Sure, the right has always opposed government programs if it would benefit those they believe don't deserve them (and I think you know who those people might be). But the outrage against Obamacare was really all about Obama. They had to sublimate their racist backlash into something and that was on the menu but the war the Tea Party was really fighting was against the election of America's first Black president.
Yet some Republicans in Congress are still operating under the illusion that their voters really did care about deficits and will be moved to protest despite the fact that they still adore Donald Trump, a man who didn't care about any of that. In fact, right-wing grassroots activists are already engaged in a battle that is far more energizing and interesting to them than any of that egghead economic stuff ever was: Donald Trump's Big Lie.
According to a new CNN poll, 70% of Republicans believe the election was stolen. And they are taking action. We all know about the flurry of restrictive voting laws that are quickly being enacted all over the country and the preposterous "audit" taking place down in Arizona by a bunch of Trump fanatics and conspiracy theorists is probably just the beginning. The explosion of GOP grassroots activity in the states isn't just about Joe Biden or the events happening in Washington. They are also working night and day to punish Republicans who dared to disagree with Trump's version of events and ensure that Trump will be able to win the next election.
The Washington Post took a look at some of the grassroots action taking place around the country. They interviewed one Michigan organizer who is trying to censure and remove a Republican Party executive who accepted the results of the election. She said, "I think I speak for many people in that Trump has never actually been wrong, and so we've learned to trust when he says something, that he's not just going to spew something out there that's wrong and not verified." That sort of cultish delusion is forcing official rebukes and purges of Trump apostates all across the country.
The motion to censure the former GOP presidential nominee failed 711-798, which I'm sure softened the humiliating blow. But it's bubbling up to Washington as well. The House GOP caucus thought they had successfully managed the "Liz Cheney problem" but it's coming back. Axios reported that there may be another vote to remove her and from the behavior of the leadership, it seems as though the worm has turned, no doubt because these Representatives are getting an earful from their activist base. The party is now eating its own.
Republicans counting on the Tea Party zombie to rise again had better come up with a Plan B. The activists the GOP in Washington wants to organize against Joe Biden's program are already booked. They're busy fighting other Republicans three nights a week.  
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kainumbernine009 · 3 years
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I literally cannot do anything else until I get this out.
I’m... really not okay.
And when I say that, I’m not mentally unstable. I say that because I’m tired of waiting on empty promises, I’m tired of never having money in our account, I’m tired of living in a fucking city where half of the white people fucking worship the ground Trump walks on, and where most of the gay community has so much messy drama that it’s worse than middle school. And I went to a rough middle school.
I never talk about my past, because I don’t like to. It sucked. HARD. Being and only child in my family was nothing less than torture, especially as a closeted queer person. We grew up in the white Christian part of Nashville that dominated Music Row in the 90′s and early 2000′s. I played basketball with Alan Jackson’s daughter, and being around famous people was just no big deal. But, my parents decided to leave Nashville after my dad lost his job at TPAC, and we moved down south an hour to the town where the KKK got started (Pulaski, TN).
I had maybe two non-white people in my private Christian school growing up. I was never afraid of Black people, but my parents showed their racist asses quick when we moved there. The KKK has never left America, guys, no matter how many articles you read or studies you do. From 2005 to 2009 I saw a white town show its very worst to the Black community. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a march for “White Christians for Purity” the summer before Obama got elected. The disgust I felt inside was palpable. I had all kinds of friends in school, and I didn’t give TWO SHITS who they were or what they looked like... but I saw children my age, being brainwashed by their parents, that “white” is “right.”
Ever since then, I have been learning and growing about the issues of race. I remember my white classmates using the N word and getting away with it. I remember hearing about the principal at the high school punishing all the Black kids but not the white kids. I remember being invited to a church south of town that was a historically Black church, and how nice the ladies were to me for coming.
But I’ll never forget the racism that the religious groups promoted there, especially First Baptist Church and the 12 Tribes. I’ll never forget how FBC told me that my friend was going to Hell because she killed herself. I’ll never forget my mom telling me not to marry a Black man because of “impure genes.” I WILL NEVER FORGET THE INJUSTICES I SAW WHITE PEOPLE DOING TO BLACK PEOPLE THERE. NEVER.
And thank God, I have shaken the burden of religious guilt, but I still fight against this mentality. I live in a place that’s usually not even 10 minutes away from Trump-humping, sister-fucking, meth-addicted Confederate cunts in any direction. And we’re even closer to the rich white people who silently supported him, upset that their taxes would go up because of Biden.
And in the past four years since Trump got elected, I’ve gotten married, graduated college with honors, started my own photography business, and was making more than my husband there for a minute. I did my own taxes, marketing, editing, and everything. And then I came out as trans.
I lost everything.
I lost my studio. I lost friends. I had rumors started about me. I had people post hate messages on my wall. I had people at my drag shows tell others not to tip me, for whatever fucking reasons. I’ve had bosses give cis people jobs over me, and I’ve had government workers give me second looks when I hand them my license.
It. Fucking. Sucks. To. Live. Here. Like. This.
Oh yeah, did I mention I’m also a witch/medium? I’ve talked to dead people before and have told their relatives things I shouldn’t have known otherwise about their grandparents. Like, this information doesn’t even exist on Google. And I’m attuned to reiki. I’m always aware of what’s happening on at least SOME metaphysical level. This is a gift that I’ve had to go through life developing and learning about myself, with no one’s help but me.
I didn’t even know until I was an adult that I have autism and ADHD.
I’ve taken bullets from people who were about to kill themselves. I’ve yelled at 5th grade music classrooms for doing racist dance moves and appropriating Native Americans (I have a degree in Music Education K-12). I’ve consoled kids in classrooms who suddenly have panic attacks. AND I’ve told horny teenagers to stay in their fucking lane and respect the girls around them. I’ve apparently been an inspiration to those around me, but inspiration NOR exposure pays the bills. I’ve already had COVID, and so has my husband, but I knew that after graduating college that I would never have a fulfilling life being a music teacher in Tennessee’s public schools.
And now that we have COVID, and an orange, small-dicked, pedophilic, rape apologizing, dirty, crusty white president who STILL REFUSES TO CONCEDE, who is DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR HAVING HIS FOLLOWERS SEND DEATH THREATS TO MY FAMILY, I really don’t know what the fuck else to do other than go burn down all the houses I know of in North Georgia that belong to these Christian sex cult pedophiles and call it a day. My girlfriend unfortunately was born into one of those families, and I know just how bad it can get. In fact, her dad’s lawyer threatened me with blackmail earlier in November, so that was fun!
And now, on December 11, 2020, I’m still sitting here in the same fucking house, doing the same fucking things I’ve been doing all year - trying to get a job and failing horribly. I’M SICK AND TIRED OF THIS COVID BULLSHIT AND OUR INCOMPOTENT CUNT OF A PRESIDENT! And there’s only ever one other person I’ve ever called a cunt... my own mother.
I’ve lived in many places. I’ve met many different people. I’ve made mistakes, and have grown, but there’s one thing for damn sure that I always make sure to do, every single fucking day.
I ALWAYS try to do better.
In addition to this, I treat everyone with the same amount of respect, unless they have done something directly to me to negate that. If I know that someone believes in something that directly harms me or my family, I don’t even associate with them. I don’t spend my energy on things that don’t need it. And everyone else should, too.
The problem with some of y’all is that you care about the wrong things. Like will Becky text me back or did I get front row seats to that concert, or did I slave my life away to capitalism just so that I can own a Mercedes and have my friends jealous. I’ve had way too many dear death experiences to know that EVERY single fucking day is a gift. EVERY day.
I don’t want to be remembered first for the art I create. I want to be remembered for my character. I want to be remembered as the courageous person who never backed down in the face of adversity. But when you live in a place that already hates you and that is against you, that’s really fucking hard. Trust me. My marriage went from a cis straight passing couple to a white gay passing couple. I’ve seen how people’s attitudes changed around me as I transitioned. I know what it feels like to slowly lose a piece of your privilege you were born with.
So yeah, I kinda get a little fucking upset when I see people saying All Lives Matter, or when I see doctors refusing to treat trans patients in pandemics, or when I see cops YET AGAIN harassing Black people only a few blocks away from my house for no other reason than racism. And at this point, anyone who thinks they know me but only knows what people think they know about me can suck my entire ass and eat ten dicks. I don’t give a FUCK about who you are or what you’ve done. If you treat me or other people with no respect for no reason other than to be an asshole, you’re just plain shit. If you SERIOUSLY believe every little rumor and lie that someone tells about me before meeting me, fuck you AND the horse you rode in on.
What I can’t stand is people doing or saying things just to get a rise out of me or others. I thought we left petty shit in high school. Some of the people that “know” me really need to fucking grow up and grow a pair and either say what they want to my face, or stay mad. I’m tired of playing fucking petty games with y’all. We have a whole ass pandemic to solve.
So here’s the ultimatum... if you agree that Black Lives Matter and that queer people deserve basic human rights, EVEN THE ONES YOU HATE, then that’s the bare minimum to even be a decent person. If you can’t even do those things, then I don’t fucking know what else to say to you.
So NBC, maybe not have John Mulaney joke about my license debacle with my gold van on SNL, and Seth Meyers... maybe HIRE ME INSTEAD of Mulaney because clearly y’all don’t know about the south as much as I do? Oh, and that gazeebo joke with Lee University... I caught that. I may have autism, but I’m not a fucking idiot. I mean. I’m funny when I’m given the chance. And yeah, I’m on a watchlist, but who the fuck isn’t these days? At least all my secrets are out for the world to see, and I have a bangin’ tattoo.
I’m tired of everyone being like “omg, I’ve seen what he can do, it’s fantastic!” or “omg you’re so funny haha” and bragging on me and then NOT FUCKING HIRING ME. I’m TIRED of waiting on something that’s clearly at this point never coming.
I don’t even have testicles, and my balls are bigger than most of the cis men I have EVER met.
So, if you want to help me, or hire me, or get me out to an audition... I’ll be there. But until then, I’m so fucking MAD at some of these producers. Yeah, my mom is a cunt, but she worked in various forms of digital production from the 1980′s until she retired this year. She taught me SO MUCH about directing, writing, shooting, and more. I know how these things are supposed to run behind the scenes. I know what the fuck I’m doing, and I don’t take constructive criticism like a bitch. I actually WANT to be criticized, so I can do even better.
So PLEASE, for the love of Christ... y’all need to get your priorities together AND PLEASE STOP LEAVING ME OUT OF THE LOOP WITH THIS BULLSHIT. Grow a fucking pair and either call me, email me, or leave me alone. It’s really not that fucking hard. Looking at you, Lorne Michaels.
Oh and someone tell my husband what the fuck’s been going on because I’m tired of him gaslighting me about it.
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How one of America's most abusive employers gets away with it
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I spend a lot of time looking in detail at abusive situations where tech plays a starring role: stalkerware, bossware, remote proctoring, etc. But nothing I'd read really prepared me for the tale of Arise Virtual Solutions, an abuser without parallel.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#arise
Arise sells itself as a "virtual call center" and boasts of blue-chip clients like Disney, Carnival Cruises, Comcast, Airbnb, Intuit etc. If you've ever called one of these companies, you may have spoken to an Arise worker.
But that "worker" was not an employee. Arise is a pioneer in worker misclassification, and treats all the people who work for it as "independent contractors." So even though these workers are more tightly supervised and managed than any regular employee, they have no rights.
You have to pay Arise for the privilege of working for them. Not just buying your own computer, but also paying to be trained in how to pretend to be an employee of Disney or Airbnb and Arise's other customers.
Execs at these giant corps listen in on your calls while they are in progress or after the fact - and if they detect so much as a squeak from a child, or a noisy neighbor, they can terminate your contract and you lose the money and unpaid labor you spent on training.
Likewise, you can be summarily fired for hanging up on - or mildly chastising - a caller, even in the face of sexual harassment, racist abuse, or threats of violence. Being fired means losing your training "investment."
The company will not assign a regular working schedule: rather, you are assigned 30-minute shifts, scattered through the day. Turning down a shift can mean losing access to future shifts.
Why would anyone work for this shitty, shitty company? Put simply: it's a pyramid scheme that preys on women, especially Black women. The company deceives the workers it recruits, then rewards them for roping their friends into the job.
These workers are the most precarious, desperate part of the US labor force, and Arise brutalizes them by remote control. Workers talk about the terror that they'll lose thousands of dollars and their income if their children cry or laugh too loud.
The whole family goes into lockdown like Anne Frank in the attic as soon as Mom dials into her terrible job. They have to sit in silence while Mom smiles through calls where she can receive death and rape threats, racist abuse, and sexual harassment.
And here's the kicker: if this all gets too much for Mom and she quits her job, *she has to pay Arise an "early termination" penalty*. This is the kind of thing that happens under worker misclassification: you have to pay to get a job, and you have to pay to quit it.
Now, Arise are pioneers in worker misclassification and their abuse stretches all the way back to the Obama administration. They were dirty from the start. In 2008, the US Department of Labor launched an in-depth investigation into rampant wage-theft at Arise.
The investigation took two years and involved interviews with at least 56 workers. It concluded that Arise had stolen $14.2 million from its workers, and that it owed double that in damages to be paid to those same workers.
But Arise didn't pay a cent.
What nefarious legal trick did Arise use to avoid $28.4m in liability? How did it wriggle free of the Department of Labor's airtight case?
Well, it's like this. When Arise's lawyers met with the DoL's lawyers in 2010, they "politely disagreed" with the DoL's conclusions, so the DoL walked away from the case.
https://www.propublica.org/article/arise-department-of-labor-2010
In yet another landmark piece of reporting, Propublica's Ken Armstrong, Justin Elliott and Ariana Tobin document how the DoL lawyers dutifully noted that Arise disputed the report and would not be changing its labor practices and then washed their hands of the matter.
They even have an official notation for when this happens: they mark the file as "RTP/RTC," which stands for "Refused to pay, refused to comply." In the years that followed, top Obama DoL officials narrowed the complaint from $14m to $40k.
Why did the DoL do this? According to DoL insiders quoted in the Propublica article, the DoL won't take on cases with big firms that can afford to drag out the proceedings and tie up department resources.
The circular reasoning goes: we need our lawyers and investigators to protect workers. But if we discover a bunch of workers in harm's way, we can't afford to protect them, because then we won't have those resources to protect workers.
The DoL was a known problem in 2010. The Government Accountability Office had already identified its inability to fulfill its mission, and they tested the Department with 10 fictitious complaints to see how they'd be handled. Only half of those were even entered into the DoL's database.
DoL intake staff tried to convince people who filed complaints to drop them, told them that the DoL had no power, lied about what they were doing to address the issue, and failed to investigate a claim of child labor in a meat-packing plant.
In the years since Obama's DoL walked away from Arise, its misclassifed workforce has grown from 20,000 to 70,000.
The factors that allowed it to flip off the DoL in 2010 are far stronger today, and the company has more than tripled the number of workers it has ensnared.
Worker misclassification didn't start with Uber, or even with Arise. It really began in the poultry industry, which is why labor economists call it "chickenization." The US has only three monopolist chicken processors.
These monopolists have carved up the country so that chicken farmers only have one company that can process their chickens and get them to market. That company calls farmers independent contractors, even as it treats them like employees with no labor rights.
A chicken farmer gets their chicks from the packer, which owns them, tells the farmer what to feed them and when, which meds and vets can be used on 'em, when the lights go on and when they go off.
Packers design the chicken coops and then order the farmers to borrow the money to build them. Farmers sign nondisclosure agreements so they can't complain, and arbitration agreements so they can't sue.
Packers tell the farmers what they must and must not do, but there's one thing they NEVER tell farmers: how much they'll be paid. It's only when chickens are sent to market that packers declare a price for them, just enough to service farmers' debt, but not to get ahead.
Of all US occupations, "farmer" is presents one of the highest risks of dying on the job. But their leading cause of death isn't falling into a threshing machine: it's suicide. And chicken farmers lead farmers in these deaths of despair.
Arise has chickenized a 70,000 person workforce of call-center workers whose homes are rent-free office space for a wildly profitable company that serves other wildly profitable companies. Most of those workers are women, and most of the women are Black women.
Biden faces an immediate, urgent test of his willingness to tackle worker misclassification. One of Trump's last-minute regulations was a rollback that protected workers from being misclassified as contractors. The Biden admin could reverse that regulation.
Then there's the matter of what he does with his DoL, which has shed 25% of its investigators over the past decade, even as labor abuses have skyrocketed.
The Biden admin's actions here will speak far louder than any soaring inaugural rhetoric.
If Biden cares about gender justice, racial justice, inequality, fairness and corruption, he will immediately reverse the Trump rollback and massively staff up the DoL's investigative division.
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“Solomon the Wise, the heir of King David of Israel, was renowned for his probity, honor, and good sense in adjudicating other people’s disputes (sadly his wisdom abandoned him in his own family affairs, which were a mess, but we can talk about that later if at all). Anyway, two women came to Kind Solomon with a seemingly insoluble dispute about an infant...
The real mother was the woman who actually cared about the child and would rather see him given to a lying stranger than be destroyed. Again and again this year, similar choices have been put before America’s two different parties and their answers have revealed exactly which party is concerned with the national well-being and which party does not care if the nation is destroyed so long as they can cling to power and appoint incompetent judges (no matter how little of a national mandate they have).
The most telling of these incidents involved the second round of stimulus money, which is necessary to forestall a ruinous recession on Main Street. The Democratic House passed a generous second stimulus bill back at the end of spring. The Republican senate keeps tearing it to pieces and filling it with poisonous pills so that it cannot pass. Even if the stimulus money would help the entire nation (and help Donald Trump get re-elected) it is unacceptable to Mitch McConnell if it gives anything to needy Americans or gives the Democrats the appearance of a win. A truly cynical (but probably correct) interpretation is that McConnell has decided that Biden will win the election and he wants the nation to fail as precipitously and absolutely as possible during a Biden administration. (McConnell, one of American history’s greatest villains, is like the harlot who does not care if the child is killed…if that harlot were 300 million times more vindictive, spiteful, & murderous and somehow also looked like a melted turtle).
Other similar “Go ahead and cut him in half” moments include the Trumpist stance in the national argument over face masks & lockdowns, the acquittal of Donald Trump in the Senate despite overwhelming evidence of guilt, the grotesque mischaracterization of the Muller report, the abandonment of longstanding national allies, the jettisoning of the emoluments clause etc etc etc…
So, to be nakedly blunt about my political endorsements, every Republican other than Mitt Romney should be voted out of office as quickly as possible (if you are in Utah, Massachusetts, Michigan or France…or wherever it is the plutocratic-yet-honest Romney calls home these days, you can judge him on his own merits). The GOP is now a party of Quislings, liars, extortionists, criminals, and outright white supremacists who are not worthy of holding public office. When Solomon said “cut the United States of America in half” Republicans happily got out their saws, scalpels, lasers, calipers, and scales to ensure that they have exactly enough of the corpse to claim complete control in accordance with the rigged anti-Democratic rules they have been foisting upon us. The health of the child in this endeavor has never entered GOP calculations at all.
I have traditionally been in sympathy with Republican’s stated platform of strong national defense and sufficient R&D to keep the nation competitive in the future (and you know…find solve problems and make life better). Their actions have revealed that their true motivation is naked love of power and all other items are pretexts which will be abandoned.
Of course intelligent people will recognize there is a problem for all of us within the parameters of my metaphor. The Republicans do not care in any way about the nation but are happy to threaten our collective well-being in order to take what they and their billionaire masters want. Our current crisis arguably stems from past episodes where Democrats sighed heavily and let the Republicans walk away with the living child instead of cutting him in half (the controversial Bush/Gore election of 2000, the terms of the financial bailout of 2008, and the Obama administration’s capitulation to government shutdown theatrics all spring to mind). What if there were no Solomon? What if the loud and aggressive bad harlot had walked off with the baby because its true mother was afraid of hurting it by fighting? How can we save a hostage which the Republican party is perfectly happy to kill?”
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thenervereport · 3 years
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AOC and Progressives Should Take Jimmy Dore’s Strategy for concessions on a M4All Vote.
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So, this debate inside the Left went viral and trended for three whole days on Twitter. It all started with Political Commentator, Jimmy Dore, proposed a political strategy that called for AOC and the rest of the Progressive Caucus to use the leverage that is available, right now, withhold their vote for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, in exchange for concessions to floor a Congressional House Vote on Medicare For All. If you been paying attention, AOC rejected Jimmy’s plan and tweeted the following, while the time of me writing this piece of mine has offered NO strategy or plan of her own, alongside other critics of this plan like Ana Kasparian and Benjamin Dixon:
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I don’t buy AOC’s nonsense, this time. And Kyle Kulinski, Secular Talk made this point that Kamala was, also, a Cosponsor for Bernie’s plan, but we all know where her allegiance stands, right now. So, I find this very misleading on AOC’s part, IMO. And this was my series of responses to some of the critical, “Progressive” clowns in the whole debate for the next two days:
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They didn’t even try to leverage any power against Joe. And when they tried, it was too late and they did it in the most useless way possible: Writing “StRONg” letters like Nancy Pelosi. 
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Her argument is stupid. This gives no substantive reason as to why Jimmy strategy is wrong. OK, you agree with Kyle and the strategy, itself, but you’re still advocating against the whole idea just because of the messenger?
Note: She continues on, giving more strawman arguments that don’t deal whatsoever substance-wise, and I respond to her with this, which is true:
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Like the fact that she’s a well-known progressive that fights tooth and nail for the Left’s policies, but goes down this route of critiquing a very a good strategy, just because of the messenger. It really does disgust me in a way, because this is in a way similar to how people shitted on Joe Rogan for semi-endorsing Bernie, when, in reality, Bernie did nothing or didn’t even compromise his beliefs to get Rogan on his side.
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Then she goes on to talk about organizing General Strikes, protests, basically,  and I responded to her and Nomiki Konst as you can see from above. Yeah, protests doesn’t mean shit when the party you’re fighting against has a detailed record of not listening to us when they got what they wanted from. This is part of the DUMB notion that we can push Biden left, which is beyond an empty dream.
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Now, to think the day would exist where a portion of the Left would argue that having a vote on Medicare for All in the House is going to hurt the Left or we can’t act upon this plan since I don’t like the messenger. This does not make you politically intelligent. You’re unintentionally doing the establishment’s bidding. Medicare for All has a 69% or 70% approval rating, and other polls find that most Republican voters, also, support Medicare for All.
To the AOC defenders, here are three Reasons as to why she needs to be criticized, and why we should demand better from her and our elected, Progressive Politicians: 1) This wasn’t her first time not using her power or leverage. The election between Biden and Trump is the perfect example, as I mentioned in one of my tweets above. 2) If you don’t have the votes, stop sitting on your ass and get to work on it. Play politics and take a no prisoners approach for once in your career. 3) For once, hold Nancy Pelosi accountable. Mama Bear has no reason at all to be politically OP as she is, right now. As we all know and heard, Nancy Pelosi accepted a 908 or  billion stimulate bill, that has no stimulus for the people, contains temporary liability shield for corporations, and is half of what Trump and Mnuchin offered her in the beginning of November. By the way, that plan was bill was a very good stimulate bill, and Ro Khanna was the ONLY one to call for her to take the deal. Yes, the bill did contain a liability shield, which was Pelosi’s scapegoat for rejecting it, obviously, for political reasons and advantage, in my opinion, but what in the world was the point of rejecting it if you’re still going to take it, later on, for half the price?  Where was AOC and the rest? Nowhere, doughnut, zero criticism from them. 
I replied and made this point in one of Fiorella Isabel’s tweets regarding the Left’s inaction against the establishment: (BTW, apologies for Conservationism. Wanted to Write Conservatism, but auto-correction f*cked me over)
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Seriously, it’s beyond past due to simply simply sit on your ass, virtue tweet as the classical Twitter warrior we all know, and do nothing as you shine your ‘guiding’ light as the moral high ground. I’m like, no. The Democratic Party played that route and got steamrolled by the Republican Party multiple times. 
And this goes back to my argument regarding Republicans and Obamacare. As I mentioned, No Republican voted for Obamacare, which was the Shitty, Conservative Healthcare Plan, and it was a very, politically smart move of them. This gave them in the ability to paint the narrative that Obama and the Democratic Party can’t deliver on healthcare to the American People since we all know Obamacare is so bad. Even if the Medicare for All vote fails, which we all would expect, this would help shape the narrative for the Left in both the short and long term for the better. The reason for that is because it will expose the politicians for who they truly are to the masses; thus, it would make it easier to primary these f*ckers in the future. 
Do you have any idea how bad it would look if Democrats and Republicans vote against Medicare for All, which is denying people healthcare DURING A PANDEMIC? 14.5 million have been reported to have lost their healthcare thanks to Covid. People won’t forget that, obviously. Someone on Twitter made this really good point. If flooring a Medicare For All vote is going to hurt the Left and Medicare for All as a whole, you don’t think that Pelosi, Democrats, and Republicans wouldn’t gladly jump to the idea and floor a vote if it were to hurt the Left? But here’s the reality. Progressives like AOC are more cowardly against the party, than they actually care about fighting for and representing us. We voted you in to stand against the party, not bend the knee out of fear of Mama Bear.
 Also, all this talk about organizing, which is being used as a scapegoat to deflect and damage control when it comes to rejecting Jimmy’s idea, does not always work, and half of the time, it fails. You know why? It’s one-sided. You’re fighting with a shield, without a sword, which is Progressives using their power and playing politics. That’s what is. And AOC’s entire notion regarding using leverage for the $15 minimum wage increase is pointless, because it’s already in the Democratic agenda, even though I have my doubts they’ll do it. Yet, IMO, she’s using this argument to deflect and damage control for not wanting to leverage Pelosi for a Medicare for All floor vote. 
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Since she rejects Jimmy’s plan, you would expect her and her defenders to come up with a better strategy than the one proposed, but, even that, they don’t or even care to do. AOC has no strategy. She won’t do jack like how she and Bernie didn’t do anything during the primaries or in the general. At least, Bernie, right now, is fighting to get us Stimulus checks alongside Josh Hawley. What is AOC doing? Oh yeah, virtue tweeting. Basically, being All-Talk-No-Spine as many of her critics have been pointing out. Now, when is it going to be the right time to use leverage? Martin Luther King Jr. stated this and I quote,
"The Time is Always Right to do what is Right.”
Now, I’ve been thinking for a bit and I actually thought of another strategy to get both a Medicare for All floor vote and Stimulus Checks. And this is my, unless someone thought of it before me without me knowing, strategy, which is also VERY EXTREME: The Elected Progressives in Congress should boycott and threaten renounce their support of the Democrats’ support for Ossoff and Warnock in the Georgia Runoffs, offering to advocate their support for Perdue and Loeffler, unless the Democratic Party and Republican Party agrees to implement Stimulus checks and a Medicare for All floor vote in the House. This would force the party to ACTUALLY listen to us, unless they want to lose more power than they dread and the Senate. Because there’s one thing about the Democratic Party besides being the Republican Party’s bitch, they adore power more than anything else.
Threatening to go and support the Far-Right to force the Center-Right to go Left and do our bidding. That’s how you play politics. 
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Is it extreme and radical? Yes, but would it work? IMO, Yes, as well. And honestly, who cares if it’s extreme? People need this money and healthcare. That’s all that should matter. Don’t worry about Democratic Smears. These people are out of touch, elitist assholes, who don’t have the political or populist wisdom to come up with strong arguments that would land against this, IMO.
Well, I’m done. Please Like, Comment, and Share, because I really to hear your opinion.
Rei Urameshi, Nerving Off.
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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
October 5, 2020
Heather Cox Richardson
It appears that the closing argument from the Trump campaign for his reelection was supposed to be that the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, was overreacting to coronavirus, making fun, for example, of his insistence on wearing a mask and staying distant from others.
Trump was supposed to project strength in the face of the pandemic, suggesting that it has been way overblown by Democrats who oppose his administration and who are thus responsible for the faltering economy.
Then, of course, coronavirus began to spread like wildfire through Trump’s own inner circle after last Sunday’s Rose Garden celebration of Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court seat formerly held by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. As Trump and increasing numbers of people in his inner circle began to test positive for the infection, the campaign first floundered, and now appears to be trying to brazen out the idea that the disease is not a big deal, and that Trump has conquered it.
This is insane. Covid-19 has currently infected more than 7 million Americans, and killed more than 210,000 of us, close to the number of Union soldiers—224,097-- who died in our bloody four-year Civil War.
Apparently, it is frustrating Trump that he cannot campaign. Last night, he traveled in a motorcade around Walter Reed Hospital, waving to supporters. The trip horrified medical personnel, who noted that the presidential vehicle is sealed against chemical attack, meaning that the secret service professionals traveling with the president were exposed to a deadly disease for no apparent reason. One of the agents assigned to the First Family told CNN “That never should have happened… The frustration with how we’re treated when it comes to decisions on this illness goes back before this though. We’re not disposable.”
Dr. James P. Phillips, from the Walter Reed Hospital, took to Twitter: “Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential “drive-by” just now has to be quarantined for 14 days. They might get sick. They may die. For political theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater. This is insanity.”
Even staffers were complaining about the disorganization in the West Wing after Trump’s drive. But things did not get more anchored this morning.
Early on, the president began to tweet at a great pace, in all caps, campaign slogans followed by the word “VOTE!” His promises were random and unanchored in reality, with words like “BIGGEST TAX CUT EVER, AND ANOTHER ONE COMING. VOTE!” According to Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair, the Trump family is divided over Trump’s performance. According to two Republicans close to the family, Don Jr. was worried by the drive around the hospital. “Don Jr. thinks Trump is acting crazy,” said one of the sources. But Ivanka, Eric, and Jared Kushner “keep telling Trump how great he’s doing.” All of them, though, worried about the morning’s tweet storm.
The infection continues to spread through the White House. This morning, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany announced that she, too, has tested positive for coronavirus, a day after she briefed reporters without a mask. Two sources told CNN that two of McEnany’s deputies, Chad Gilmartin and Karoline Leavitt, have also tested positive, along with two members of the White House staff. McEnany said at first the White House was planning to put out the number of staffers infected, but then said it could not, out of “privacy concerns.” But of course there’s no privacy at stake in the raw numbers.
Today we learned that another person who attended the Rose Garden event, Pastor Greg Laurie of the Harvest Christian Fellowship megachurches in California and Hawaii, has tested positive for coronavirus. In addition, thirteen workers who helped to cater a private Trump fundraiser last Thursday in Minnesota are all quarantining.
Although doctors expressed surprise and concern at the idea Trump might leave Walter Reed Hospital today, the president tweeted: “I will be leaving the great Walter Reed Medical Center today at 6:30 P.M. Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!”
Doctors noted that he is in a dangerous period for the progression of Covid-19, and that anyone who had required the sorts of treatments Trump has had is too sick to leave the hospital. “I will bet dollars to doughnuts it’s the president and his political aides who are talking about discharge, not his doctors,” William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University’s medical school, told the Washington Post.
A briefing by Trump’s doctors obscured more than it revealed. The White House physician, Sean Conley, has refused to tell reporters when Trump last tested negative for coronavirus, a piece of information that would tell us when he knew he was infected. He also refused to explain why the president is being treated with a steroid usually reserved for seriously ill patients, or to discuss the state of Trump’s lungs. He did say that the president is “not out of the woods yet.”
Nonetheless, Trump left Walter Reed Hospital tonight, after lights had been installed to enable him to make a triumphant exit. Still infectious, he went back to the White House and climbed a flight of stairs to a balcony, where he dramatically removed his face mask and saluted well-wishers from a balcony. Although the moment was clearly designed to make Trump look strong, it was obvious he was struggling to breathe.
Vox’s Aaron Rupar noted that “Trump has no choice but to continue to downplay coronavirus (despite 210,000 dead and record new case numbers) because if he changed course, it would be an admission that he was wrong about the defining issue of his presidency -- at the cost of tens of thousands of lives.”
This evening, Trump released a video telling people not to let the coronavirus “dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it…. Don’t let it take over your lives.” CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta dubbed him “Coronavirus in Chief.”
Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden held a town hall tonight in Miami, Florida, where he gave detailed answers to questions about police reform (more money, ban chokeholds and no knock warrants); socialism (“I’ve taken on the Castros of the world. I didn’t cozy up to them”); a mask mandate (the president can only mandate masks on federal property, but he would call on governors and mayors to do the same); and reopening schools (PPE, small classes, ventilation). Watchers noted that it was a treat both to see a normal conversation and to hear detailed, informed answers.
To stay in touch with voters, Biden today began “Notes from Joe,” a daily newsletter.
Bloomberg is reporting that the contrast between the recent craziness of the White House and Biden’s calm detail has led the stock market to stabilize. Strategists are coming to think there will not be a contested election after all. Biden’s lead over Trump increased again after Trump’s debate performance, which apparently was designed to try to bully Biden by hitting triggers until he began to stutter, thus enabling the Trump campaign to portray him as mentally incapacitated. That strategy failed as Biden parried the triggers, and Americans were repelled by Trump’s behavior. Peter Rosenstreich, head of market strategy at Swissquote Bank SA, told Bloomberg, “Polls are shifting from a close election and prolonged uncertainty to more a dominant Biden and clean succession…. That is reducing uncertainty and increasing risk appetite.”
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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
Heather Cox Richardson
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gdwessel · 3 years
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Power Struggle 2020 - 11/7/2020; Cards For BOSJ27 Revealed; NJPW Strong Episode 14 - 11/6/2020; Super J-Cup 12/12/2020 Card Announced: Ren Narita Returns
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The last megacard of the NJPW calendar, Power Struggle, took place today, and you can see it now on NJPWWorld. A legitimate first happened on this show!
Power Struggle 2020 - 11/7/2020, Osaka EDION Arena (NJPWWorld)
Provisional KOPW2020 Championship No Corner Pads Match: Toru Yano [CHAOS] © d. Zack Sabre Jr. [SZKG] (Countout, 12:11) - Yano remains Provisional KOPW2020 Champion
NEVER Openweight Championship: Shingo Takagi [Los Ingobernables] d. Minoru Suzuki [SZKG] © (Last Of The Dragon, 18:56) - Suzuki fails his 1st defense - Takagi becomes the 31st champion
Kazuchika Okada [CHAOS] d. Great O-Khan [The Empire] (Referee Stoppage, 12:58)
IWGP US Heavyweight Challenge Rights: KENTA [Bullet Club] d. Hiroshi Tanahashi (Game Over, 19:57) - KENTA retains IWGP US Heavyweight Challenge Rights
WK15 IWGP Heavyweight/Intercontinental Challenge Rights: Jay White [Bullet Club] d. Kota Ibushi (Backslide, 18:47) - White wins the WK15 IWGP Hevayweight/Intercontinental Challenge Rights
IWGP Heavyweight & Intercontinental Championships: Tetsuya Naito [Los Ingobernables] ©© d. EVIL [Bullet Club] (Destino, 33:08) - Naito succeeds his 1st IWGP Heavyweight defense - Naito succeeds his 1st IWGP Intercontinental defense
For the first time ever since “the briefcase” was introduced to NJPW in 2012, the challenge rights for Wrestle Kingdom have changed hands, as Jay White cheated to win by putting his feet on the ropes without Red Shoes catching it. This puts the number of times the briefcase OR title have changed hands between G1 Climax and Wrestle Kingdom in this era at one a piece, as Hiroshi Tanahashi defeated AJ Styles for the IWGP Heavyweight title at King Of Pro Wrestling 2014, in the run-up to WK9. 
After the main event, Jay came to taunt and challenge Tetsuya Naito, before being run off by Kota Ibushi. So I am pretty sure this is not the end of that storyline. Naito v. Jay White, could sell out the Tokyo Dome (such as it will be in the COVID-19 era). Naito v. Ibushi, definitely would sell out the Dome. Fairly confident we will still get Naito v. Ibushi, one way or another. Stay tuned for that.
KENTA retained his own briefcase, so the elephant in the room of when KENTA will actually face Jon Moxley is still pretty much right there, not being answered. WK15 seems the most likely answer at this point, although, if Mox loses to Eddie Kingston tonight at AEW Full Gear (he won’t), there is a window of opportunity there. Okada beats O-Khan, in the battle over Suzuko Mimori (I kid, I kid). Afterwards, Will Ospreay challenged Okada for a match at WK15, which Okada accepted. 
Shingo Takagi regains the NEVER Openweight title, so he can be the loser in the Annual Hirooki Goto NEVER Openweight Invitational Match at WK15. There are rumblings once more that Minoru Suzuki is not long for NJPW, with the new GLEAT shoot-style promotion headed by Kiyoshi Tamura, and run by LIDET (the now-former owners of Pro Wrestling NOAH, before selling to CyberAgent). That promotion has only run 1 show so far, and Suzuki’s BFF Nosawa Rongai has since left GLEAT. (Btw GLEAT is an actual word, and don’t look up what it means if you don’t have a strong stomach.) Suzuki was almost assuredly showing up in NOAH on 1/5/2020 and then appeared to challenge Jon Moxley instead. So who knows how this will go, if at all.
The cards for the Best of the Super Juniors 27 portion of the next tour have all been announced. I won’t be writing them here now, but in a future Upcoming NJPW Events post. Yoshinobu Kanemaru is still listed on the cards, so that knee injury must not have been serious. The World Tag League portions of the tour have yet to be announced, hoping that comes about soon, otherwise it’s going to be a mighty incomplete Events post (like the last one, bleagh).
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Last night’s NJPW Strong episode was the second of their Road to Showdown series. I assume Showdown is next week, but they haven’t announced that yet. Indie wrestler JR Kratos made his NJPW debut on this show.
Fred Rosser d. Jordan Clearwater (Seated Dropkick, 5:29)
Chase Owens [Bullet Club] d. Danny Limelight (Package Driver, 8:25)
JR Kratos & Rust Taylor d. Jeff Cobb [FREE] & Rocky Romero [CHAOS] (Kratos > Romero, Game Changer, 13:20)
With a finisher like that, you’d think Kratos came from GCW, but actually, he is unsigned, and had done a tour with All Japan Pro Wrestling in the earlier, pre-lockdown parts of 2020. Mostly, I am just looking forward to some matches taped after G1 Climax, not before, at this point.
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In more NJoA news, the full card and bracket for the Super J-Cup 2020 show being done on 12/12/2020 has been announced. One of the bigger announcements is this will see the first match from Young Lion excursionee Ren Narita on NJPWWorld in quite some time. Indeed, it’ll be his first official match since beating Aaron Williams in Black Label Pro on 2/29/2020. A bit surprising he hasn’t featured on NJPW Strong or Lion’s Break Collision at all since he’s been at the LA Dojo. In any event, here’s the card breakdown:
Super J-Cup 2020 - NJPW LA Dojo, 12/12/2020 (NJPWWorld, Fite TV)
Super J-Cup 2020 1st Round: Clark Connors v. Chris Bey [Impact]
Super J-Cup 2020 1st Round: ACH [FREE] v. TJP [FREE]
Super J-Cup 2020 1st Round: Rey Horus [ROH] v. Blake Christian [GCW]
Super J-Cup 2020 1st Round: Lio Rush [FREE] v. El Phantasmo [Bullet Club]
Super J-Cup 2020 Semifinal: TBA
Super J-Cup 2020 Semifinal: TBA
Ren Narita & Karl Fredericks v. KENTA & Hikuleo [Bullet Club]
Super J-Cup 2020 Final: TBA
That’s it for this one. Took me a while to get here, as in the middle of writing this, Joe Biden was declared the next President of the United States, so I was a little distracted for a bit. The next show is a week from tomorrow, 11/15/2020, the first night of the combined World Tag League 2020 + Best of the Super Juniors 27 tour. Hopefully there will be announcements of the WTL cards/participants soon. There will be an NJPW Strong on Friday too. We’re also planning a podcast in the next week in prep for the new tour. And hey, AEW Full Gear tonight too, if you are into that.
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