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erik-even-wordier · 1 year

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I really don’t owe my Trump-supporting friends an apology. I’ve been critical of Trump these last several years, and am still exhausted from the experience.

But to be fair, Trump wasn’t that bad…………..other than when:

1. he incited an insurrection against the government,

2. mismanaged a pandemic that killed a million Americans,

3. separated children from their families, lost those children in the bureaucracy,

4. tear-gassed peaceful protesters on Lafayette Square so he could hold a photo op holding a Bible in front of a church,

5. tried to block all Muslims from entering the country,

6. got impeached,

7. got impeached again,

8. had the worst jobs record of any president in modern history,

9. pressured Ukraine to dig dirt on Joe Biden,

10. fired the FBI director for investigating his ties to Russia,

11. bragged about firing the FBI director on TV,

12. took Vladimir Putin’s word over the US intelligence community,

13. diverted military funding to build his wall,

14. caused the longest government shutdown in US history,

15. called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate,”

16. lied nearly 30,000 times,

17. banned transgender people from serving in the military,

18. ejected reporters from the White House briefing room who asked tough questions,

19. vetoed the defense funding bill because it renamed military bases named for Confederate soldiers,

20. refused to release his tax returns,

21. increased the national debt by nearly $8 trillion,

22. had three of the highest annual trade deficits in U.S. history,

23. called veterans and soldiers who died in combat losers and suckers,

24. coddled the leader of Saudi Arabia after he ordered the execution and dismembering of a US-based journalist,

25. refused to concede the 2020 election,

26. hired his unqualified daughter and son-in-law to work in the White House,

27. walked out of an interview with Lesley Stahl,

28. called neo-Nazis “very fine people,”

29. suggested that people should inject bleach into their bodies to fight COVID,

30. abandoned our allies the Kurds to Turkey,

31. pushed through massive tax cuts for the wealthiest but balked at helping working Americans,

32. incited anti-lockdown protestors in several states at the height of the pandemic,

33. withdrew the US from the Paris climate accords,

34. withdrew the US from the Iranian nuclear deal,

35. withdrew the US from the Trans Pacific Partnership which was designed to block China’s advances,

36. insulted his own Cabinet members on Twitter,

37. pushed the leader of Montenegro out of the way during a photo op,

38. failed to reiterate US commitment to defending NATO allies,

39. called Haiti and African nations “shithole” countries,

40. called the city of Baltimore the “worst in the nation,”

41. claimed that he single handedly brought back the phrase “Merry Christmas” even though it hadn’t gone anywhere,

42. forced his Cabinet members to praise him publicly like some cult leader,

43. believed he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,

44. berated and belittled his hand-picked Attorney General when he recused himself from the Russia probe,

45. suggested the US should buy Greenland,

46. colluded with Mitch McConnell to push through federal judges and two Supreme Court justices after supporting efforts to prevent his predecessor from appointing judges,

47. repeatedly called the media “enemies of the people,”

48. claimed that if we tested fewer people for COVID we’d have fewer cases,

49. violated the emoluments clause,

50. thought that Nambia was a country,

51. told Bob Woodward in private that the coronavirus was a big deal but then downplayed it in public,

52. called his exceedingly faithful vice president a “p---y” for following the Constitution,

53. nearly got us into a war with Iran after threatening them by tweet,

54. nominated a corrupt head of the EPA,

55. nominated a corrupt head of HHS,

56. nominated a corrupt head of the Interior Department,

57. nominated a corrupt head of the USDA,

58. praised dictators and authoritarians around the world while criticizing allies,

59. refused to allow the presidential transition to begin,

60. insulted war hero John McCain – even after his death,

61. spent an obscene amount of time playing golf after criticizing Barack Obama for playing (far less) golf while president,

62. falsely claimed that he won the 2016 popular vote,

63. called the Muslim mayor of London a “stone cold loser,”

64. falsely claimed that he turned down being Time’s Man of the Year,

65. considered firing special counsel Robert Mueller on several occasions,

66. mocked wearing face masks to guard against transmitting COVID,

67. locked Congress out of its constitutional duty to confirm Cabinet officials by hiring acting ones,

68. used a racist dog whistle by calling COVID the “China virus,”

69. hired and associated with numerous shady figures that were eventually convicted of federal offenses including his campaign manager and national security adviser,

70. pardoned several of his shady associates,

71. gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to two congressmen who amplified his batshit crazy conspiracy theories,

72. got into telephone fight with the leader of Australia(!),

73. had a Secretary of State who called him a moron,

74. forced his press secretary to claim without merit that his was the largest inauguration crowd in history,

75. botched the COVID vaccine rollout,

76. tweeted so much dangerous propaganda that Twitter eventually banned him,

77. charged the Secret Service jacked-up rates at his properties,

78. constantly interrupted Joe Biden in their first presidential debate,

79. claimed that COVID would “magically” disappear,

80. called a U.S. Senator “Pocahontas,”

81. used his Twitter account to blast Nordstrom when it stopped selling Ivanka’s merchandise,

82. opened up millions of pristine federal lands to development and drilling,

83. got into a losing tariff war with China that forced US taxpayers to bail out farmers,

84. claimed that his losing tariff war was a win for the US,

85. ignored or didn’t even take part in daily intelligence briefings,

86. blew off honoring American war dead in France because it was raining,

87. redesigned Air Force One to look like the Trump Shuttle,

88. got played by Kim Jung Un and his “love letters,”

89. threatened to go after social media companies in clear violation of the Constitution,

90. botched the response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico,

91. threw paper towels at Puerto Ricans when he finally visited them,

92. pressured the governor and secretary of state of Georgia to “find” him votes,

93. thought that the Virgin islands had a President,

94. drew on a map with a Sharpie to justify his inaccurate tweet that Alabama was threatened by a hurricane,

95. allowed White House staff to use personal email accounts for official businesses after blasting Hillary Clinton for doing the same thing,

96. rolled back regulations that protected the public from mercury and asbestos,

97. pushed regulators to waste time studying snake-oil remedies for COVID,

98. rolled back regulations that stopped coal companies from dumping waste into rivers,

99. held blatant campaign rallies at the White House,

100. tried to take away millions of Americans’ health insurance because the law was named for a Black man,

101. refused to attend his successors’ inauguration,

102. nominated the worst Education Secretary in history,

103. threatened judges who didn’t do what he wanted,

104. attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci,

105. promised that Mexico would pay for the wall (it didn’t),

106. allowed political hacks to overrule government scientists on major reports on climate change and other issues,

107. struggled navigating a ramp after claiming his opponent was feeble,

108. called an African-American Congresswoman “low IQ,”

109. threatened to withhold federal aid from states and cities with Democratic leaders,

110. went ahead with rallies filled with maskless supporters in the middle of a pandemic,

111. claimed that legitimate investigations of his wrongdoing were “witch hunts,”

112. seemed to demonstrate a belief that there were airports during the American Revolution,

113. demanded “total loyalty” from the FBI director,

114. praised a conspiracy theory that Democrats are Satanic pedophiles,

115. completely gutted the Voice of America,

116. placed a political hack in charge of the Postal Service,

117. claimed without evidence that the Obama administration bugged Trump Tower,

118. suggested that the US should allow more people from places like Norway into the country,

119. suggested that COVID wasn’t that bad because he recovered with the help of top government doctors and treatments not available to the public,

120. overturned energy conservation standards that even industry supported,

121. reduced the number of refugees the US accepts,

122. insulted various members of Congress and the media with infantile nicknames,

123. gave Rush Limbaugh a Presidential medal of Freedom at the State of the Union address,

124. named as head of federal personnel a 29-year old who’d previously been fired from the White House for allegations of financial improprieties,

125. eliminated the White House office of pandemic response,

126. used soldiers as campaign props,

127. fired any advisor who made the mistake of disagreeing with him,

128. demanded the Pentagon throw him a Soviet-style military parade,

129. hired a shit ton of white nationalists,

130. politicized the civil service,

131. did absolutely nothing after Russia hacked the U.S. government,

132. falsely said the Boy Scouts called him to say his bizarre Jamboree speech was the best speech ever given to the Scouts,

133. claimed that Black people would overrun the suburbs if Biden won,

134. insulted reporters of color,

135. insulted women reporters,

136. insulted women reporters of color,

137. suggested he was fine with China’s oppression of the Uighurs,

138. attacked the Supreme Court when it ruled against him,

139. summoned Pennsylvania state legislative leaders to the White House to pressure them to overturn the election,

140. spent countless hours every day watching Fox News,

141. refused to allow his administration to comply with Congressional subpoenas,

142. hired Rudy Giuliani as his lawyer,

143. tried to punish Amazon because the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post wrote negative stories about him,

144. acted as if the Attorney General of the United States was his personal attorney,

145. attempted to get the federal government to defend him in a libel lawsuit from a prominent lady who accused him of sexual assault,

146. held private meetings with Vladimir Putin without staff present,

147. didn’t disclose his private meetings with Vladimir Putin so that the US had to find out via Russian media,

148. stopped holding press briefings for months at a time,

149. “ordered” US companies to leave China even though he has no such power,

150. led a political party that couldn’t even be bothered to draft a policy platform,

151. claimed preposterously that Article II of the Constitution gave him absolute powers,

152. tried to pressure the U.K. to hold the British Open at his golf course,

153. suggested that the government nuke hurricanes,

154. suggested that wind turbines cause cancer,

155. said that he had a special aptitude for science,

156. fired the head of election cyber security after he said that the 2020 election was secure,

157. blurted out classified information to Russian officials,

158. tried to force the G7 to hold their meeting at his failing golf resort in Florida,

159. fired the acting attorney general when she refused to go along with his unconstitutional Muslim travel ban,

160. hired notorious racist Stephen Miller,

161. openly discussed national security issues in the dining room at Mar-a-Lago where everyone could hear them,

162. interfered with plans to relocate the FBI because a new development there might compete with his hotel,

163. abandoned Iraqi refugees who’d helped the U.S. during the war,

164. tried to get Russia back into the G7,

165. held a COVID super spreader event in the Rose Garden,

166. seemed to believe that Frederick Douglass is still alive,

167. lost 60 election fraud cases in court including before judges he had nominated,

168. falsely claimed that factories were reopening when they weren’t,

169. shamelessly exploited terror attacks in Europe to justify his anti-immigrant policies,

170. still hasn’t come up with a healthcare plan,

171. still hasn’t come up with an infrastructure plan despite repeated “Infrastructure Weeks,”

172. forced Secret Service agents to drive him around Walter Reed while contagious with COVID,

173. told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,”

174. fucked up the Census,

175. withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic,

176. did so few of his duties that his press staff were forced to state on his daily schedule “President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings,”

177. allowed his staff to repeatedly violate the Hatch Act,

178. seemed not to know that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican,

179. stood before sacred CIA wall of heroes and bragged about his election win,

180. constantly claimed he was treated worse than any president which presumably includes four that were assassinated and his predecessor whose legitimacy and birthplace were challenged by a racist reality TV show star named Donald Trump,

181. claimed Andrew Jackson could’ve stopped the Civil War even though he died 16 years before it happened,

182. said that any opinion poll showing him behind was fake,

183. claimed that other countries laughed at us before he became president when several world leaders were literally laughing at him,

184. claimed that the military was out of ammunition before he became President,

185. created a commission to whitewash American history,

186. retweeted anti-Islam videos from one of the most racist people in Britain,

187. claimed ludicrously that the Pulse nightclub shooting wouldn’t have happened if someone there had a gun even though there was an armed security guard there,

188. hired a senior staffer who cited the non-existent Bowling Green Massacre as a reason to ban Muslims,

189. had a press secretary who claimed that Nazi Germany never used chemical weapons even though every sane human being knows they used gas to kill millions of Jews and others,

190. bilked the Secret Service for higher than market rates when they had to stay at Trump properties,

191. apparently sold pardons on his way out of the White House,

192. stripped protective status from 59,000 Haitians,

193. falsely claimed Biden wanted to defund the police,

194. said that the head of the CDC didn’t know what he was talking about,

195. tried to rescind protection from DREAMers,

196. gave himself an A+ for his handling of the pandemic,

197. tried to start a boycott of Goodyear tires due to an Internet hoax,

198. said U.S. rates of COVID would be lower if you didn’t count blue states,

199. deported U.S. veterans who served their country but were undocumented,

200. claimed he did more for African Americans than any president since Lincoln,

201. touted a “super-duper” secret “hydrosonic” missile which may or may not be a new “hypersonic” missile or may not exist at all,

202. retweeted a gif calling Biden a pedophile,

203. forced through security clearances for his family,

204. suggested that police officers should rough up suspects,

205. suggested that Biden was on performance-enhancing drugs,

206. tried to stop transgender students from being able to use school bathrooms in line with their gender,

207. suggested the US not accept COVID patients from a cruise ship because it would make US numbers look higher,

208. nominated a climate change sceptic to chair the committee advising the White House on environmental policy,

209. retweeted a video doctored to look like Biden

210. had played a song called “Fuck tha Police” at a campaign event,

211. hugged a disturbingly large number of U.S. flags,

212. accused Democrats of “treason” for not applauding his State of the Union address,

213. claimed that the FBI failed to capture the Parkland school shooter because they were “spending too much time” on Russia,

214. mocked the testimony of Dr Christine Blasey Ford when she accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault,

215. obsessed over low-flow toilets,

216. ordered the rerelease of more COVID vaccines when there weren’t any to release,

217. called for the construction of a bizarre garden of heroes with statutes of famous dead Americans as well as at least one Canadian (Alex Trebek),

218. hijacked Washington’s July 4th celebrations to give a partisan speech,

219. took advice from the MyPillow guy,

220. claimed that migrants seeking a better life in the US were dangerous caravans of drug dealers and rapists,

221. said nothing when Vladimir Putin poisoned a leading opposition figure,

222. never seemed to heed the advice of his wife’s “Be Best” campaign,

223. falsely claimed that mail-in voting is fraudulent,

224. announced a precipitous withdrawal of troops from Syria which not only handed Russia and ISIS a win but also prompted his defense secretary to resign in protest,

225. insulted the leader of Canada,

226. insulted the leader of France,

227. insulted the leader of Britain,

228. insulted the leader of Germany,

229. insulted the leader of Sweden (Sweden!!),

230. falsely claimed credit for getting NATO members to increase their share of dues,

231. blew off two Asia summits even though they were held virtually,

232. continued lying about spending lots of time at Ground Zero with 9/11 responders,

233. said that the Japanese would sit back and watch their “Sony televisions” if the US were ever attacked,

234. left a NATO summit early in a huff,

235. stared directly into an eclipse even though everyone over the age of 5 knows not to do that,

236. called himself a very stable genius despite significant evidence to the contrary,

237. refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and kept his promise.

238. Don’t forget that he took many classified & top secret documents with him when he left the White House, many of which have not been recovered & may have been compromised.

I’m sure there are a whole bunch of other things I can’t remember at the moment.

Plz copy and paste. Whoever wrote this deserves credit but I don't know who it is.

#donald trump #popular #long post

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what-even-is-thiss · 1 year

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You posted about blood donation the same day as I was donating for the first time, so I was actually double careful to check if in my country there were similar rules. There aren't.

There were questions about AIDS and sex but like nothing specific like "are you a man who had sex with another man"

But are you saying there are state in the USA that keep possibile healthy donors from donating??????????????

I always hear how important donating blood is and it's like if the USA are saying "you know, I think having prejudice is mode important than everyone's life"

I'm not saying the USA are the worst place to live but this is pretty basic stuff

The US is like… fine. Just like any other place with problems.

Also a lot of countries worldwide have some sort of extra barrier in place for msm. The UK and Ireland only updated their policies a couple of years ago to be more equal. There’s been a slow amount of change over the past decade. I’m personally hoping the US follows soon and updates the National recommendations to be more inclusive.

It’s not “pretty basic stuff” though. Wording it like that makes this seem like a US exclusive problem. It’s not. France only began to ease up its lifetime restrictions on msm in 2019. Norway still has a one year wait time. In India there’s still a lifetime ban in place.

Progress on this is slow going and a lot of countries seemingly changed their policies in response to a shortage of blood donations during coronavirus and not as a sign of social progressiveness.

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 1 year

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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's (R-Ga.) personal Twitter account was reinstated on the platform on Monday, more than 10 months after being permanently suspended for "repeated violations" of the platform's COVID misinformation policy.

DRIVING THE NEWS: The move comes days after Twitter reinstated the account of former President Trump and amid a season of upheaval at the platform that has accompanied Elon Musk's takeover of the company.

THE BIG PICTURE: Greene's account had also been suspended in July 2021 for publishing incorrect information on COVID vaccinations and wearing face masks during the pandemic.

• While Greene had lost access to her more frequently used personal account, she had maintained access to her official congressional account.

WHAT THEY'RE SAYING: "I'm the only Member of Congress the unelected big tech oligarchs permanently banned. On January 2, 2022, they violated my freedom of speech and ability to campaign & fundraise crying 'covid misinformation,'" Greene tweeted on Monday from her congressional account.

• "My account is back. Go follow @mtgreenee for MTG unfiltered ;)" she added.

• Greene has not yet tweeted from her reinstated personal account.

#us politics #news #axios #tweet #twitter #rep. marjorie taylor greene #georgia #Republicans #gop #conservatives #elon musk #temporary ban #banned #coronavirus misinformation #2022

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dontmean2bepoliticalbut · 2 years

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sky2starstravel · 2 years

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Breaking News: PM announces new coronavirus health plan, travel ban | Nine News Australia

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced that the government will invest $ 2.4 billion in health care, information and research coronavirus health care. Morrison also announced that Australia will issue a travel ban to Italy. Subscribe: Get the latest news: Join Nine News to get the latest news and events that affect you in your local city, news from all over Australia and around the world.…

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#Announces #Australia #ban #BREAKING #breaking travel news #Coronavirus #health #News #plan

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years

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A TRAP for workers

One of the weirdest parts of conspiratorialism is the hunt for anagrams as secret expressions of guilt. Ken Cheng’s recent BBC Comedy of the Week show, he has a great bit on this, pointing out how weird it is that someone figured out that “delta” and “omicron” are an anagram for “media control.”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ckq7pb

As Cheng says, “do they think the coronavirus was invented by Tom Marvolo Riddle?” And yet, sometimes, villains really do use word-games to tip their hands. How else to explain that Petsmart’s predatory “job training” scheme for new hires is called TRAP?

https://www.wired.com/story/contract-clause-loading-us-workers-with-debt/

TRAP — “training repayment agreement provision” — was billed as a free job training scheme for new Petsmart hires, a 4-week program to teach you to groom cats and dogs. But this “free” program actually loaded new hires up with $5500 in debt that they owed to the company if they quit, got fired, or were laid off within two years.

https://twitter.com/LifeatPetSmart/status/1148626627389267969

In a darkly hilarious turn, TRAP didn’t even train you to groom pets. As a new class action suit led by ex-Petsmart employee BreAnn Scally reveals, most of the “training” was just sweeping floors, and the “four-week” course ended after three weeks.

https://protectborrowers.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/PetSmart-complaint_file.pdf

As Caitlin Harrington writes for Wired, California law actually prohibits these schemes, barring employers from clawing back training expenses unless they “primarily benefit the worker.” Additionally, California employers are prohibited from “operating as an unlicensed post-secondary school.”

But employers know that workers are at a disadvantage when it comes to enforcing these laws. Indeed, it’s hard to know how Scally — who was making $15/hour and relying on family members to cover her monthly shortfall — could have sought justice against the private equity backed Petsmart except through class-action suits.

It’s easy for employers to bar their workers from participating in class-action suits: all they need to do is subject those workers to “binding arbitration” agreements where they surrender their right to seek justice in courtrooms, and instead must plead their case to a fake corporate judge (an “arbitrator”) who is paid by the employer who wronged them.

Some clever lawyers have developed a fantastic countermove to this, the “mass arbitration” action, where hundreds or thousands of workers or customers bulk-file arbitration claims, forcing the company that harmed them to pay thousands of dollars for arbitrators to hear each claim:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico

But convicted monopolist Microsoft continues to lead the corporate world in innovative fuckery. They’ve just updated their terms and conditions to ban mass arbitration:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement/upcoming-updates.aspx?tduid=(e6d11a05aa8500a3b4be6d4c42131db4)(266696)(1503186)(33330X911642Xf7acc8227d2c85bbb5b31c0b2833ea5b)()

For customers in the United States, in the Binding Arbitration and Class Action Waiver section, we’ve added procedures if 25 or more customers file coordinated arbitrations. These arbitrations would be resolved in batches of up to 50 individual arbitrations. After each batch of up to 50 is resolved, the next batch of up to 50 individual arbitrations could be filed. We’ve clarified that arbitrators may award injunctions that would affect you and us only. We’ve also clarified that if a court finds part of this section unenforceable, an arbitrator would resolve all arbitrable claims and remedies before any court proceeding begins on remaining ones. We’ve given courts rather than arbitrators authority to decide more issues, including whether this section is enforceable and what it covers, and to enjoin arbitrations that don’t comply with it. We’ve also provided that small claims court cases may be filed in your home county only.

It’s only a matter of time until this evil fuckery proliferates into every binding arbitration agreement, which would allow companies using TRAP clauses to get away with it, free from the risk of either class action or mass arbitration.

What’s that? “Companies using TRAP clauses?” Yes, companies. Petsmart is by no means alone in creating a modern system of indenture, where your employer can fine you for quitting your job, and mire you in debt even if they lay you off.

A report called “Trapped at Work” from The Student Borrower Protection Center shows how TRAP clauses have found their way into “hair salons, hospital chains, IT firms, and trucking companies,” sectors that together account for a third of all US workers:

https://protectborrowers.org/trapped-at-work-how-big-business-uses-student-debt-to-restrict-worker-mobility/

As the report notes, these employers TRAP their workers with bills in the “tens of thousands of dollars” and charge extremely high interest rates. Harrington points out that Petsmart’s contracts promise “the highest rate permitted by law of the state in which this agreement was executed.”

Like binding arbitration, TRAP clauses started out as a way to simplify negotiations between extremely powerful entities, but quickly became a means to extinguish any hope of justice in dealings between the wealthy and the poor. The first TRAP clauses were introduced in the 1980s for high-paid professionals such as “engineers, security brokers, and airline pilots.”

But the erosion of labor law and the disappearance of unions freed up employers to TRAP all kinds of low-waged workers. Harrington points to the scholarship of Loyola Law’s’ Jonathan F Harris, who has documented this in detail:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3642017

TRAPs are ways for employers to get around the few remaining labor protection laws, like California’s ban on noncompete agreements and the antitrust laws than ban employers for forming secret “no poach” deals that suppress wages. But they’re also a way to head off the Great Resignation, by fining low-waged workers several months’ pay for having the temerity to quit, and then smacking them with usurious interest rates.

TRAPs mean that workers who speak up about unfair or unsafe conditions. Carmen Comsti from National Nurses United told Harrington that the $10,000 TRAPs the monopolist HCA Health burdens nurses with mean that nurses are unwilling to speak out practices that harm patients — because if they get fired, they’ll owe HCA $10k. And, as with Petsmart, the $10k “training” that HCA charges its nurses for is “regular old orientation that you would get on the job no matter what.”

TRAPping workers requires a mix of desperation and deception. Workers who have the power to negotiate the terms of their employment will obviously try to eliminate TRAP clauses, so their new bosses lie about the enforceability of TRAPs. Scally was told that Petsmart wouldn’t hit her for TRAP recoupment even if she quit early, provided they’d already made enough to cover the cost of her training. That was a lie.

California banned TRAPs for healthcare workers in 2020, and Colorado is poised to make it harder to TRAP workers, banning employers from forcing workers to repay standard on-the-job training expenses. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is considering a nationwide ban on TRAPs:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-launches-inquiry-into-practices-that-leave-workers-indebted-to-employers/

But TRAP clauses aren’t the only form of corporate indenture. Worker misclassification — where employees are falsely classed as ‘independent contractors’ — opens all kind of avenues for indenture. The workforce at Arise — predominantly Black women — are forced to pay cash for their own training, and fined if they quit their terrible, humiliating jobs: https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#arise

Corporate America has an infinite appetite for dreaming up new schemes to reduce worker pay and security, offloading as many business risks as possible onto workers who can be dismissed without notice or compensation. It’s going to take unions — mass movements of workers — to provide the countervailing power needed to check the business lobby.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/07/collectivism/#ruling-class-solidarity Image: Nightscream (modified) https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:11.28.07PetSmartByLuigiNovi.JPG

[Image ID: A blurred Petsmart mall store. In the foreground is a giant mousetrap baited with a glittering pet-trimming clipper.]

#pluralistic

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 1 month

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Stephen Brodner

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 18, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 19, 2024

It seems to me that the news tends to be slow on weekends during the Biden administration, while Mondays are a firehose. (In contrast, Trump’s people tended to dump news in the middle of the night, after Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity’s show was over, which may or may not have been a coincidence.)

So, lots going on today as the Biden administration continues to make the case that a democratic government can work for ordinary Americans while Trump and his supporters insist that a country run by such an administration is an apocalyptic nightmare.

First, economic analyst Steven Rattner reported today that according to The Economist, since the end of 2019 the American economy has grown about 8%, while the European Union has grown about 3%, Japan 1%, and Britain not at all. Rattner and economist Brendan Duke reported that entrepreneurship in the U.S. is booming, with 5.2 million “likely employer” business applications filed between January 2021 and December 2023, more than a 33% increase over those filed between 2017 and 2019.

Economists Justin Wolfers and Arin Dube noted that, as Wolfers wrote, “[f]or the first time in forever, real wage gains are going to those who need them most.” Wages have gone up for all but the top 20% of Americans, whose wages have fallen, reducing inequality.

Federal Trade Commission (FTC) head Lina Khan announced that after the FTC challenged a set of AstraZeneca inhaler patents last September as being improperly listed, today AstraZeneca said it would cap patients’ out-of-pocket costs for its inhalers at $35, down from hundreds. Earlier this month, Boehringer Ingelheim did the same.

The Environmental Protection Agency today announced it was banning asbestos, which is linked to more than 40,000 deaths a year in the U.S. and was already partly banned, but which is still used in a few products. More than 50 other countries already ban it.

Also today, President Joe Biden issued an executive order to advance women’s health research to integrate women’s health into federal research initiatives, strengthening data collection and making funding available for research in a comprehensive effort to equalize attention to men’s and women’s health across their lifespans. The federal government did not require women’s health to be included in federally funded medical research until 1993. In a speech today, First Lady Jill Biden recalled that in the early 1970s, researchers studying estrogen’s effect in preventing heart attacks selected 8,341 people for the study. All of them were men.

Last month, First Lady Biden announced $100 million in funding for research into women’s health, and last Thursday Vice President Kamala Harris visited a Planned Parenthood clinic that provides abortion care in addition to breast cancer screening, fibroid care, and contraceptive care. She noted that women’s reproductive health has been in crisis since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, with women in some states unable to access the care they need.

Former president Trump, who is now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, prompted some of the economic reporting I noted above when he tried to spark attacks on President Joe Biden by asking on social media if people feel better off now than they were four years ago. This was perhaps a mistaken message, since four years ago we were in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Supermarket shelves were empty, toilet paper was hard to find, healthcare professionals were wearing garbage bags and reusing masks because the Trump administration had permitted the strategic stockpile to run low, deaths were mounting, the stock market had crashed, and the economy had ground to a halt.

On this day four years ago, I recorded that “more than 80 national security professionals broke with their tradition of non-partisanship to endorse former Vice President Joe Biden for president, saying that while they were from all parties and disagreed with each other about pretty much everything else, they had come together to stand against Trump.”

Here in the present, Trump appears to be getting more desperate as his problems, including his apparent growing difficulty speaking and connecting with his audience, mount. Last week, in an interview, he echoed Republican lawmakers and pundits when he suggested he was open to cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, something Republican lawmakers try to avoid saying to general audiences because it is hugely unpopular. Trump has since tried to repair that damage, for example, when he insisted on Saturday that it was he, rather than Biden, who would protect those programs. (In fact, Biden has called for expanding the social safety net, not contracting it, and last year forced Republicans to back off from proposed cuts.)

Saturday’s speech illustrated the degree to which Trump’s rhetoric has become more profane and apocalyptic as he vows revenge on those he sees as his enemies. Campaigning in Vandalia, Ohio, for his chosen Senate candidate, Trump suggested that certain migrants “are not people.” Then he said he would put tariffs of 100% on cars manufactured in Mexico by Chinese companies for sale in the U.S., “if I get elected. Now, if I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that's going to be the least of it. It's going to be a bloodbath for the country.”

By Sunday, Trump’s embrace of the word “bloodbath” had created a firestorm. Surrogates insisted that he was talking about the auto industry alone, but as scholar of rhetoric Jen Mercieca and legal commentator Asha Rangappa note, Trump is a master at giving himself enough plausible deniability for his supporters to claim that, as Rangappa put it, “he wasn’t saying what he was saying. I know what he meant. He knows what he meant. You know what he meant.” In the same speech Saturday, Trump called those convicted of violence on January 6, 2021, “hostages” and “patriots,” and has said he would pardon them, appearing to endorse violence to return him to power.

This morning, Trump’s lawyers told a court that Trump cannot come up with either the money or a bond for the $454 million plus interest he owes in penalties and disgorgement after he and the Trump Organization were found guilty of fraud in a Manhattan court earlier this year. The lawyers say they have approached 30 different companies to back the bond, and they have all declined. They will not issue a bond without cash or stock behind it. Trump's real estate holdings, which are likely highly leveraged, aren’t enough.

Last year, Trump said under oath that he had “substantially in excess of 400 million in cash,” and that amount was “going up very substantially every month.” Apparently, that statement was a lie, or the money has evaporated, or Trump doesn’t want to use it to pay this court-ordered judgment on top of the $91.6 million bond he posted earlier this month in the second E. Jean Carroll case.

Timothy O’Brien of Bloomberg notes that Trump’s desperate need for cash makes him even more of a national security threat than his retention of classified documents made it clear he already was. “[T]he going is likely to get rough for Trump as this plays out,” O’Brien writes, “and he’s likely to become more financially desperate with each passing day,” making him “easy prey for interested lenders—and an easy mark for overseas interests eager to influence US policy.”

This morning, Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump is turning to his 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort to advise him in 2024. Dawsey notes that the campaign’s focus appears to be on the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July, which suggests Trump’s people are concerned that his nomination will be contested. Manafort has been known as a “convention fixer” since 1976.

Manafort is also the key link between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives. Manafort worked for many years for Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovich, who was closely tied to Russian president Vladimir Putin. When Ukrainians threw Yanukovich out of office in 2014, Manafort was left with large debts to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. In 2016, Manafort began to work for Trump’s campaign. An investigation by a Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee into the links between Trump’s campaign and Russia determined that Manafort had shared polling data from the Trump camp with his partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, who the senators assessed was a Russian operative.

In 2018, as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, Manafort was found guilty of hiding millions of dollars he had received for lobbying on behalf of Yanukovych and his pro-Russian political party, then getting loans through false financial records when Yanukovych lost power. A judge sentenced him to more than seven years in prison.

Trump pardoned Manafort in December 2020, shortly after losing the presidential election.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters from An American #Heather Cox Richardson #normalizing pathology #Election 2024 #Manafort #Stephen Brodner #bloodbath #economic news #social safety net #american foreign policy #TFG's money woes

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therealtruthalways · 9 months

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🚨The former head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) has warned the public that Covid was engineered by scientists in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to “depopulate the planet.”

Sir Richard Dearlove claims there was evidence to indicate that the coronavirus had been “tailored” to spread rapidly around the world before being deliberately leaked from the Wuhan lab.

Dearlove, who headed MI6 between 1999 and 2004, admitted that analysis of Covid shows that it had been “mucked around with” by virologists to be “highly infectious” among humans.

“All right, put it like this…” Dearlove explains.

“It’s a natural virus that’s been, as it were, mucked around with and the characteristics of things like the spike protein, which make it so highly infectious, also point in the direction of it being somewhat tailored,” he said.

Slaynews.com reports: Dearlove also slammed the cover-up of relevant data by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

He argues that any evidence from the Wuhan lab that proves the origins of the virus has already been destroyed by China’s communist regime.

The ex-spy chief blasted the recent investigation by the CCP-linked World Health Organization as “farcical.”

“I think there’s a balance of probability,” Dearlove asserts.

“Obviously, if it cannot be proven, and I don’t think it can because the evidence that could have proved it one way or another has been destroyed, because of the extent of the Chinese cleanup.”

While unlikely, he concedes that “it’s possible” the virus jumped to humans from nature.

However, the former intelligence chief argues that “it’s far more likely, if you’re a scientist, that it was put together.”

“I think the onus is on the Chinese to prove that it’s zoonotic because the evidence strongly suggests to me and a number of eminent scientists that the greater probability is that it’s a lab escapee,” he adds.

Dearlove is now calling for an “open debate” on the origins of COVID-19.

“I think that there is a significant Chinese influence active in this specific area,” he warns.

“China has worked very, very hard in terms of influence in finance to make sure their narrative is dominant,” he emphasizes.

Dearlove told LBC’s Tom Swarbrick that the truth about Covid’s origin will soon be exposed.

He said he expects forthcoming books to further outline the argument for coronavirus’ lab origin.

Meanwhile, in America, the lab leak theory was initially discredited by scientific authorities and government officials.

Recently, however, some agencies have endorsed the theory that the virus may have originated in a laboratory.

According to FBI Director Christopher Wray back in March, the agency has for quite some time assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident.

In February, the Department of Energy took back its initial assessment and now admitted that its stand was no longer “undecided” but rather “low confidence” in a lab leak being the origin.

In 2021, Democrat President Joe Biden revealed that the intelligence committee had “coalesced around two scenarios” of Covid’s origin.

One of which was the lab leak theory.

The news comes after Republican officials in Florida have just officially designated Covid and the mRNA vaccines as “bioweapons,” as Slay News reported.

The Brevard County Republican Executive Committee (BREC) passed a resolution in a landslide vote to ban the vaccines.

The resolution also declares that the COVID-19 virus itself is a “bioweapon.”

The committee is now soliciting support from registered Republicans in the county, state lawmakers, Florida’s Congressional delegation, and Governor Ron DeSantis.

thepeoplesvoice.tv/british-spy-ch…

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